Global Warming's Terrifying New Math

i quite like richard muller on climate change, his BEST project is a nice resource

http://berkeleyearth.org/

and there's loads of stuff on youtube where he explains things very simply so idiots like me can understand

lots of interesting things discussed here too

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOfsSYsvQnI

It's nice that Richard Muller apparently had a come to jesus moment. A few years ago he was chiefly known as a climate change skeptic. In fact, when his BEST project showed that climate change was real and overwhelmingly caused by human beings - to the surprise of no one except for the Koch Brothers, who were the single largest funders of the project - he even published an op-ed in the NYT called The Conversion of a Climate Change Skeptic.

In that same op-ed, he also attacks a bunch of strawmen and tosses out a bunch of red herrings. e.g., "Hurricane Katrina cannot be attributed to global warming." - yeah, no kdding! No single storm can be attributed to global warming. That's why no one who knows what they're talking about says that. He also refers to the possibility that global temperatures were higher during the "medieval warm period", which is a common skeptic argument that 1)isn't true) and 2)wouldn't even matter if it was true, because while of course the earth has warmed in the past for "natural" reasons, the crisis of climate change today is that it's happening so quickly and that humans are clearly causing it rather than natural forces. it's kind of like as if you accidentally started a fire that was quickly spreading, and a friend walks by and says "it's ok! last summer it was 106 degrees!" well...yeah...

anyway, sorry to trash muller, and i'm not trying to squash discussion! i'm just still a little..."skeptical" of his motives. *rim shot*

Ah, that's interesting. No, trash away, I really enjoy his lectures/books so I prob give what he says too much credibility. I didn't ever get the impression that he was a full-on sceptic. He just seemed rigorously scientific in his approach. And if you watch his lectures his line is "as a scientist I really don't know" but there are always asides: "but if I was a betting man...”, “it’s obvious much change can be attributed to humans, we need to understand how, and how much…” etc.

I think this attitude can be helpful, the better we understand the causes of CC the better equipped we’ll be to focus our energies on trying to prevent/reverse the damage done. I know the flipside, if you’re a well known scientist, is that you have to be very careful with what you say and how you say it. There’s a great bit in one of his lectures where he admits how bad he (or scientists are in general) are at that.

That sceptical science website looks great btw. Cheers.

handy thing to keep in mind every time some blowhard starts talking about how addressing climate change would damage the economy: in 2011-12 alone, the economic damage from extreme weather events in the US was 188 BILLION DOLLARS

http://www.americanprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/ExtremeWeather_table2_021113-1.png

"we can't bring in a fire truck to put out a fire in the apartment complex; bringing in the fire department would cost over $5,000!"

and yes, i realize some of those are tornadoes. but the biggest, highest costing extreme weather events are the 2012 drought/heat wave ($78 billion), hurricane sandy ($30 billion) and the 2011 drought/heat wave ($12 billion). that's $120 billion of the damage, right there.

and yes, i realize that not every drought and hurricane can or should be blamed on climate change. but climate change increases the frequency of these events, and makes once-rare super-events much more likely. it's like rolling two dice. climate change modifies the dice so that they go up to 7 instead of just 6. rolling a 13 or a 14 becomes a legitimate possibility, and 11s and 12s, which were once very rare, now become more common.

sigh. no one's going to do anything.

maybe insurance companies will step up to the plate and force policy change.

Obama did some of his toughest talking yet re:climate last night during SOTU. Not holding my breath for him to follow through, but you never know.

The right people are crying, at least

ewwww....why does the christian science monitor have "featured content" directly from the coal lobby? seriously, i mistakenly thought that they were a respected source of journalism! i realize that every newspaper is in deep shit right now, but "featuring" content straight from industry groups seems to break at least 3000 different journalistic codes simultaneously!

they want to provide insights on the future of fuel and power, ZS

At least Boxer and Sanders are trying toraise the issue.

It's James Hansen's tax and dividend scheme. I think it would be more politically palatable if instead of a per-capita dividend the bill just incrementally decreased the payroll tax (both employee and employer shares) - same general effect, except for the unemployed/retired, more closely matches the consumer burden of an increased carbon tax, and gets employers (and hopefully science literate Republicans) on board. Toss in a retiree heating oil subsidy if you're worried about Granny freezing.

great timing

http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/01/a-blogs-adieu/

yep. it's the result of the NYT's announcement in January that it was disbanding it's environment desk. took a few months, but here we are. it's ok, though, fox news will continue covering the environment.

1) White House officials have indicated that Obama will approve Keystone XL. here's the line of reasoning:

The official dismissed environmental groups’ contention that building the pipeline would open up vast deposits of the Alberta tar sands, and so increase the emissions that cause climate change. “There have been thousands of miles of pipelines that have been built while President Obama has been in office, and I think the point is, is that it hasn’t necessarily had a significant impact one way or the other on addressing climate change,” the official said.

wow.

2) the long-awaited proposed rule from EPA to limit greenhouse gas emissions from new power plants is going to be delayed. there's some concern that the proposal, as it was written, was not going to be defensible during the inevitable lawsuits. also obama and his administration doesn't really care about climate change. so it's a combo. shit sandwich on rye.

http://thinkprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Carbon-Final.jpg

Lovely news to wake up to.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7Y8w1BOFnI

gotta love the guy at 0:30 and 1:00 in who argues

i read that X is not happening. in order to solve X, we need to rely on market solutions.

listen people, global warming is NOT HAPPENING. but if we're going to solve it, you bet your ass it would be best to let industry develop technology to get us out of this mess!

2:04 in, same thing

"i definitely think there's a free market solution that won't require any government intervention to solve this"

ok great i'm all ears lay it on me

this is a pretty sweet graphic imo:

http://infobeautiful3.s3.amazonaws.com/2013/01/1276_gigatons_CO2.png

(open it in a new tab if it's too small for you)

Still small. :\

Link to the original?

Also, wtf, guy at 2:55 is all, climate change is real, we should do something about it???

http://infobeautiful3.s3.amazonaws.com/2013/01/1276_gigatons_CO2.png

http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/how-many-gigatons-of-co2/

sorry if that image link isn't working! it shows up perfectly on my computer at work and also at home

Honestly I think IiB could have done a better job with the material. At the very least run the C02 injections vertically, with the predicted consequences arranged accordingly, and run the Mauna Kea CO2 measurements as a layer underneath.

Tar Sands Pipeline oil spill today: http://gawker.com/5993053/tar-sands-pipeline-ruptures-spreading-oil-across-arkansas-town?post=58657647

Pegasus is a fairly small (20 in) pipe that transported Gulf coast crude and imports to Illinois for decades, until the midwest market was swamped by Canadian imports and the flow was reversed in 2006. The break likely has nothing to do with the direction in flow, just age. Exxon's actually one of the better operators in terms of maintenance investment (certainly compared to the former Amoco cowboys responsible for Alaska spills and Deepwater Horizon - bet BP regrets that merger).

haven't read it yet, but bill mckibben (author of the article that prompted this thread) has a new long piece in rolling stone: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-fossil-fuel-resistance-20130411/

Thanks ZS. I'll have to save reading it for the morning though, lest it induces sleep-preventing angst.

http://cloudfront.mediamatters.org/static/images/item/chart4.png

notice the slight partisan leaning of the "politicians" chunk

Global warming can't be real because if it was, we'd have to change the way we do things, which could affect our economy.

Has Obama Already Given up on Climate Change? (Ryan Lizza, New Yorker):

...But the budget released this week makes it clear that Obama’s surprising appeal to Congress was an empty piece of rhetoric. The phrase “climate change” appears twenty-nine times in the new budget, but there is no new plan for Congress to take up in Obama’s otherwise ambitious legislative blueprint. There are some worthy energy initiatives that could achieve modest reductions in emissions, but the budget is silent on what Obama will do to aggressively reduce carbon pollution by the biggest emitters, like power plants and automobiles.

It is not as if Obama doesn’t have the power to act. On many issues the President is at the mercy of Congress. He can’t reform gun laws or the immigration system, or rewrite the tax code, without coöperation from the House and Senate. Climate change is different. Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency, backed by the force of a Supreme Court ruling, has the authority to reduce carbon pollution through regulation. In 2010, when White House negotiators were trying to pass cap and trade, they presented reluctant senators with a promise (some called it a threat): pass a comprehensive bill to deal with the problem or the E.P.A. would move forward on its own. Three years later, the Administration has still not acted on that ultimatum. And, ominously for those who care about tackling climate change, Obama’s new budget proposes to reduce funding for the E.P.A. by 3.5 per cent compared to the current year.

Yeah, but if he pushes too hard at that, how's he going to get a second term?

Millions of people could become destitute in Africa and Asia as staple foods more than double in price by 2050 as a result of extreme temperatures, floods and droughts that will transform the way the world farms.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/2013/apr/13/climate-change-millions-starvation-scientists?CMP=twt_fd

"Food production will have to rise 60% by 2050 just to keep pace with expected global population increase and changing demand. Climate change comes on top of that. The annual production gains we have come to expect … will be taken away by climate change. We are not so worried about the total amount of food produced so much as the vulnerability of the one billion people who are without food already and who will be hit hardest by climate change. They have no capacity to adapt."

This is an interesting analysis of our world economy in relation to the natural resources it consumes. Interested to hear Sanpaku's thoughts on it.

In 100 years (after most of the non-renewable resources are depleted), I think (or perhaps hope) Herman Daly will be more important than Paul Samuelson in the economics curriculum.

I haven't gotten to reading Ecological Economics, but went fairly deep into parallel books from outside the insular economics discipline (A Prosperous Way Down, Overshoot, practically everything referenced by Jay Hanson) when I was learning about peak oil a dozen years ago.

There are expensive but plausible replacements for most non-renewables; I think phosphorus may present the biggest challenge for humanity this century.

Also:

It is, in fact, the fate of all kinds of energy of position to be ultimately converted into energy of motion. The former may be compared to money in a bank, or capital, the latter to money which we are in the act of spending … If we pursue the analogy a step further, we shall see that the great capitalist is respected because he has the disposal of a great quantity of energy; and that whether he be nobleman or sovereign, or a general in command, he is powerful only from having something which enables him to make use of the services of others. When a man of wealth pays a labouring man to work for him, he is in truth converting so much of his energy of position into actual energy… The world of mechanism is not a manufactory, in which energy is created, but rather a mart, into which we may bring energy of one kind and change or barter it for an equivalent of another kind, that suits us better—but if we come with nothing in hand, with nothing we will most assuredly return.

- Balfour Stewart, 1883

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uneconomic_growth

god i fuckin love this kind of econ shit, its been too long since college

Weird weather on the march: snow in Saudi Arabia

Congratulations folks, we finally did it!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/apr/29/global-carbon-dioxide-levels

great article at tomdispatch about the epic fail of journalism, focusing on the failures of reporting leading up to and during the financial meltdown, and the continuous failure of global warming coverage. here's a bit from the global warming part:

Is the Press Too Big to Fail?

Now, on the great subject of our moment, the press repeatedly clutches for the rituals of detachment. Two British scholars studying climate coverage surveyed 636 articles from four top United States newspapers between 1988 and 2002 and found that most of them gave as much attention to the tiny group of climate-change doubters as to the consensus of scientists.

And if the press has, until very recently, largely failed us on the subject, the TV news is a disgrace. Despite the record temperatures of 2012, the intensifying storms, droughts, wildfires and other wild weather events, the disappearing Arctic ice cap, and the greatest meltdown of the Greenland ice shield in recorded history, their news divisions went dumb and mute. The Sunday talk shows, which supposedly offer long chews and not just sound bites -- those high-minded talking-head episodes that set a lot of the agenda in Washington and for the attuned public -- were otherwise occupied.

All last year, according to the liberal research group Media Matters,

“The Sunday shows spent less than 8 minutes on climate change... ABC's This Week covered it the most, at just over 5 minutes… NBC's Meet the Press covered it the least, in just one 6 second mention… Most of the politicians quoted were Republican presidential candidates, including Rick Santorum, who went unchallenged when he called global warming ‘junk science’ on ABC's This Week. More than half of climate mentions on the Sunday shows were Republicans criticizing those who support efforts to address climate change… In four years, Sunday shows have not quoted a single scientist on climate change.”

George Will knows better:

Although electric cars are 40 percent powered by coal, that being the percentage of U.S. electricity generated by coal, Fisker was supposed to combat global warming, of which there has been essentially none for 15 years. As adult supervision returns, Washington may take seriously the bad news about its harebrained green investments and the good news that refutes the argument for more of them.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/george-will-courts-finance-committee-give-obama-adult-supervision/2013/03/29/026c8190-add4-11e2-8bf6-e70cb6ae066e_story.html

i would wager that george will has talked more about climate change on the sunday morning shows than all scientists put together.