Global Warming's Terrifying New Math

oh and also he linked to this bullshit article http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/earth-insight/2013/jun/14/climate-change-energy-shocks-nsa-prism
which didn't seem too credible either for a serious guy?

CV: Its a touch dramatic.

Predictions of average temperature change for a given emissions scenario haven't changed that much in the past decade. Svante Arrhenius wasn't that far off in 1896. There have been surprises in the speed of positive feedbacks like sea ice loss.

Its not a extinction scenario, just a dieoff/bottleneck of the sort humanity has survived before. I suspect we're reducing agricultural yields (via drought, high temps and loss of deltas) to that which might sustainably support 1-2 billion, which was the world population in the 19th century. If we're lucky, we'll reallocate resources with only moderate amounts of thermonuclear war. But, there don't seem to be enough exploitable fossil carbon reserves to send us into Venus like runway greenhouse. Whoever dominates the planet in a few hundred million years (as solar output inexorably increases) can face that disaster scenario.

see that's the comforting rebuttal I was looking for

lol

Whoever dominates the planet in a few hundred million years

some kind of dinosaur, robot, or squidlike/buglike alien, if my research has been at all sound

did your research involve the film 'pacific rim'

http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/2013/07/16/19504184-nervous-gop-staffer-climate-change-is-real?lite

Admits it but uses an alias to say so!

oh and also he linked to this bullshit article http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/earth-insight/2013/jun/14/climate-change-energy-shocks-nsa-prism
which didn't seem too credible either for a serious guy?

If you've read Six Degrees, I don't see how you could find this far-fetched. Since I read it, a few years ago now, I've just been watching for signs of the coming Armageddon. Plenty of 'em, too.

I guess what I'm saying is that it all makes perfect, horrible sense, and if you think it's BS I'd like to know why; I could do with feeling a bit less doomed.

i wish someone would come up with a year when it's all over so i can budget out living it up till then

xpost the military's concerns about climate change aren't in doubt - there are plenty of signs that they take it very seriously and are preparing for the future with it in mind. the connections between that and the PRISM stuff seemed a little more thin. It wouldn't surprise me in the least if it were true, but the article didn't really present any rock solid evidence.

As Joe Romm noted, "Eric Bradenson" isn't the writer's real name; it's a pseudonym. In fact, the author needed to use a nom de plume, he said, "to protect his boss and himself."

Got that? In 2013, with the threats posed by the climate crisis intensifying, a Republican staffer on Capitol Hill is only willing to acknowledge reality if he can do so pseudonymously.

Romm added that article "was awarded second place in the 'Young Conservative Thought Leaders' contest from the Energy & Enterprise Initiative at George Mason University." The organizers at the Initiative agreed not to publish the author's real name "for job security reasons."

first place? a bold declaration that evolution is....REAL

Whoever dominates the planet in a few hundred million years

some kind of dinosaur, robot, or squidlike/buglike alien, if my research has been at all sound

super intelligent cockroaches

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-G7oBEg7SGZs/TsPzzF57yRI/AAAAAAAACpQ/QUwsTPNHzSo/s400/kafka-da-da.JPG

yeah what ZS said.
I'm not surprised that major institutions, including the military, would consider the threats that climate change present to, say, civil order, but that article was just a list of quotes from documents from a number of agencies over a long period of time with a half-assed attempt to link it to the issue of the moment, PRISM.

it was kinda like splicing together sentences from 10 documents to form a new paragraph that said what he wanted

yep

Yeah, I get that, it was a terribly constructed article. I'm still inclined to accept the thrust of it though. I have never been convinced that the climate change deniers amongst the right-wing elites actually don't believe in climate change. I think they believe all right, and are making sure that they've got their fortresses ready.

This, though, is the problem with having a strong belief. It makes you a lazy reader (or perhaps I'm just knackered).

The US Navy stirred a furious pot among the right when it started released climate change-related reports a couple years ago. There may still be a furious fight going on between all the military/legislative special interests. The recent fight over the Navy biofuels program may be related.

There's also the intense security/economic interest and posturing in the Arctic area among US, Canada, Russia, Denmark and Norway. While Americans at home are busy plugging their ears whenever they hear anything factual about global warming and eagerly gobbling up any sort of bogus disinformation promulgated by the worst people in the entire universe, the military is like "uh yeah, the arctic is melting. it's been melting. duh. we better go dominate the opening sea passages there" and megaoilcorps are like "uh yeah, the arctic is obviously melting and there's so much oil down there, $$$$$, teehee"

more on that here if anyone's interested: http://csis.org/files/publication/100426_Conley_USStrategicInterests_Web.pdf

Well, less "teehee" than, shit, its the last unexplored basin that isn't owned by a national oil company (now 90% of reserves and 75% of production). Its their last chance to work the upstream as something other than contractors.

it was a very power-hungry, maniacal "teehee"

The new megalomaniacal evil masterminds in a post-Bieber world.

peak food. yum!

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/22/opinion/our-coming-food-crisis.html?hp&_r=1&

Hey everybody... the north pole is a lake right now!

http://psc.apl.washington.edu/northpole/NPEO2013/WEBCAM2/ARCHIVE/npeo_cam2_20130724132439.jpg

That's the webcam on the NPEO PAWS Buoy 819920, currently at 84.773°N 5.415°W, 581.2 km away from the pole.

As far as I can tell, there are no current instruments on the surface at the North Pole, as the ice shifts away (and generally towards the Atlantic). There were some bottom moored instruments at the pole looking at the ice from underneath, but it seems the one recovered in 2010 hasn't been replaced.

As we wait for more grim reading, here's some world's wildest weather. A freak hailstorm in Germany last weekend...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hn_Te9urt1g

from http://io9.com/watch-this-german-village-get-trounced-by-a-freak-hail-979917221

For francophile oenophiles, the stories of hail stroms ravaging Vouvray (mid-June) and parts of Burgundy (July!!) are troubling.

Seguin, Bernard, and Inaki Garcia de Cortazar. Climate warming: consequences for viticulture and the notion of ‘terroirs’ in Europe. Acta Horticulturae 689.1 (2005): 61-69.

Jones, Gregory V., et al. Climate change and global wine quality. Climatic change 73.3 (2005): 319-343.

Drink up. Now.

On the bright side, its remarkable how viticulture is marching into the foothills of the Canadian Rockies. Shuswap? Thompson?

when i'm internet-arguing with total assholes i often bring up the military and insurance industry's very evident concerns about climate change so that i don't have to listen to garbage about the decades-long international envirofascist/science conspiracy. there's been some more movement on the insurance front lately.

The Geneva Association, a leading think tank of the insurance industry, recently issued a report highlighting evidence for climate change, rising oceans, risks to property owners, etc etc.

Salon.com, the greatest source for news in the entire planet, ran ran a decent commentary on the disconnect between the insurance industry's assessment of climate change as compared to the right wing:

Stripped down to its fundamentals, the insurance business is the business of assessing risk. Regardless of what is being insured, a successful insurer is one that analyzes the risk of having to pay out benefits, and then adjusts coverage rates to make sure more money is coming in than is going out. The more accurate the assessment of risk, the more financially successful an insurance company tends to be.

Because of this model, private insurance is the conservative ideologue’s favored method of assessing danger and managing risk, for it is a purely free-market instrument. Indeed, as a right-wing activist would readily admit, private insurance focuses exclusively on the dollars and cents of actuarial analyses, and it bases prices on data and empiricism, not on fact-free political ideology and poll-tested platitudes.

...In both cases, the insurance industry’s free-market analysis of risk — not a fact-free declaration of political ideology — ended up rebuking the conservative talking points of the day. In the climate-change case, for instance, an organization composed of buttoned-down insurance CEOs rejected the right’s campaign of do-nothingism and denialism.

...The conservative response to this kind of news is usually a temper tantrum. You know how it goes — Stephen Colbert-like declarations that “reality has a well-known liberal bias” and then claims that it is all a left-wing conspiracy (no doubt, some will cite the insurance industry’s reports as proof that the insurance companies are in on the conspiracy!).

But maybe that’s not how it will all play out this time around. With the broadsides against the conservative movement now coming from the very private insurance industry that the movement so adores, maybe this can be a moment of change on the right. Maybe — just maybe — conservatives can see that what’s really at work here is their own sacred free-market principle of “creative destruction.”

Only this time around, it is the right’s misguided ideology that is being destroyed.

ho ho HO, ZINGER, mr Sirota, ZINGER!

(btw the same article references an insurance company that dropped coverage for Kansas schools after the passage of a new law permitting people to carry guns in schools. just in case you have to internet-argue with gun assholes)

For quite some time I have suggested that ideological rigidity and the ruthless desire for orthodoxy have rendered the anti-communists as stupid as Stalinists.

internet-argue

We need to coin the new verb for this. Something pithier.

world wide wars of words?

hmm might not be pithier

wargue

wargue sounds a little bloody.

browser brawling

commentversy

Weblemics

Netbate

spewwwing

ha!

yeah, but do any of these have the same easy ring as internet-argue?

hahaha, sorry

webate, coming soon from the marketing geniuses who gave you webinars

I forgot an old favorite prefix. I like the ring of:

cybersquabble

Webating webholes.

http://usscouts.org/advance/Images/Cubscout/webelos.gif