Global Warming's Terrifying New Math

it's an interesting article in lots of ways but there's a painful cognitive dissonance here- it's really about our changing climate and the fate of the Earth and framing it so insistently as a biographical essay about one person and his lifestory (his dad, his oxford years, his journo past, etc.) kind of ignores the real scale at which we all ought to be thinking if we're paying attention. (maybe the author gets this dissonance and it's a Trojan Horse thing, like "hey look at this funny guy, oh and while you're at it, think about this . . . " bait-n-switch. In any case it's weirder still that it never mentions all the other conversations that are happening around these same issues (i can't be exhaustive but off the top of my head: there's Timothy Morton and the entire "dark ecology" conversation taking place in the wake of his book "Hyperobjects, or Philosophy After the End of the World" ["we are always wrong with respect to global warming", it is simply Too Big for any tiny solution to work to reverse things, driving a Prius is not enough, etc.], and there's the Stephen Emmott book "Ten Billion" which discusses in absolutely fucking chilling detail the inter-link of overpopulation and climate change and coming global famines, and there's the David Benatar book "Better Never to Have Been" which is making an argument for why we should encourage a slow but steady rampdown of human population as we all head towards extinction, and there's Ray Brassier arguments about the meaning of extinction in "Nihil Unbound", and there's Larry Buell on "planetary feeling", and . . . so on and so on and so on). These ideas are definitely not original to one dude in a field, or 200 people in a field, that we can shrug off, and so the importance of these issues ought to go beyond liking or dis-liking this one guy, his zine, his festival, etc. The issue is not this one guy. It's all of us. There's a crisis. The crisis is that lots and lots and lots of human beings are going to starve to death because our industrial and economic practices have already altered this planet's ecosystem irreparably, and/or they will drown as seas rise, and/or they will choke to death on methane as Siberian permafrost releases trapped methane (pick your scenario). There's very little evidence that a technological solution is going to emerge in time to stop that crisis from coming, still less evidence that short-term election driven political cycles will permit the risky re-jiggering of economics which it would take in order to actually do something about this. Doomy feelings of despair aka "depressive realism" are legitimate and justified. We can still talk about the utility of hope as a motivating tool to get people to legislate one way or another in order to manage our slide towards these coming conditions. But that might also contribute to false attitudes of being in control over a situation that we are responsible for but no longer really in control of, if indeed we ever were.

there's the David Benatar book "Better Never to Have Been" which is making an argument for why we should encourage a slow but steady rampdown of human population as we all head towards extinction

I don't think I've thought about it in anything so extreme of a way but this is essentially been a bit of an operating principle of mine for something like twenty years now. Unconscious perhaps but my own great eco-scare period was spring 1992. That feeling never quite left, and I think I've been going "I...probably don't want a kid" ever since.

Doomy feelings of despair aka "depressive realism" are legitimate and justified. We can still talk about the utility of hope as a motivating tool to get people to legislate one way or another in order to manage our slide towards these coming conditions. But that might also contribute to false attitudes of being in control over a situation that we are responsible for but no longer really in control of, if indeed we ever were.

I'll be interested to see what the final episode of the new Cosmos has to say. I remember that in the original it was the big "You know, we really could be this fucked" conclusion, which I thought was remarkably clear eyed of Sagan. Will Tyson go similarly?

Yeah, to be honest, the last few books on the subject that I've read have rattled me to the point that I'm genuinely sad for my friends who are parents, because their children are going to inherit a situation that they did not create but which they're going to have to resolve if humanity's going to survive. I'll probably be dead by 2050, but my friend's children will be seeing what happens when our endlessly spiking human population growth, water-use, and energy needs slam into basic limitations on global resources. Perhaps the scariest moment in the Emmott book --which is this:

http://www.amazon.com/Ten-Billion-Vintage-Stephen-Emmott/dp/0345806476/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1397065896&sr=1-1&keywords=ten+billion+by+stephen+emmott

---occurs when he notices that lately a new demographic has started anxiously attending climate change conferences: the military. What is happening is that the writing is on the wall and now people have realized that climate change and scarcity are going to lead to massive refugee populations. Borders are going to be contested as equatorial zones become gradually less and less habitable. The militarization of climate change is likely and a new geopolitics will result (as tundra melts, Russia becomes more of a global grain belt than ever and gets more powerful as a result in these scenarios). The capitalist extraction machine fucked up the world's climate on behalf of a small crew of developed nations. The rest of the world has a rising population and an ever rising desire to live like the completely unsustainable West (look at the rising numbers of cars on this planet- if the cars-to-people ratio that is "normal" for the USA shows up in India and China then you can bet that our climate change situation is going to get much, much worse).

Yeah, it's amazing how the media rarely reports on the insurance industry and pentagon's intense interest in climate change.

Rather. At some point the penny will drop among the more willfully blind.

"ExxonMobil did not grant a request for comment." Indeed.

http://www.climatecentral.org/news/investors-will-oil-coal-companies-will-thrive-in-warming-world-16653

The military has been paying attention to climate change for years...

Rather. At some point the penny will drop among the more willfully blind.

I've seen conservatives:
- dismiss funding for the Navy research into algal biofuels as more earmark nonsense, and
- point to Warren Buffet's recent remarks saying that he didn't notice any climate disruption to rebuff the insurance industry taking CC into account

... so I'm more than happy to try to live to see the cataclysm so I can get the last laugh not sure that penny will ever drop for some people.

Some ppl's identity and self-esteem are so invested in a certain narative that they'd deny the law of gravity before they'd actually engage w/reality.

Some ppl's humanity's identity and self-esteem are so invested in a certain narative that they'd deny the law of gravity before they'd actually engage w/reality.

in fact this is humanity's defining achievement.

sadly I think we've lost the ability to identify as a species- nationalism and racism have become so ingrained that it's very tricky to get people to see things as "species wide problems". Worse, given the drastic inequities with respect to which nations caused this problem and which nations will need help to deal with its consequences first, there's a structural asymmetry in place that actively militates against such thinking from both directions. And the instinct to disavow responsibility or locate it elsewhere is strong, since the problem is so intractable that it would be great if it was someone else's job to fix. Also: the political process is mostly framed around nation states- but when the issue is "global capitalism is going to keep going for short-term profits, nobody's going to sacrifice today's profits for the interests of virtual children 100 years from now, and this involves technologies and industries that are already globally extended", there's no way to vote within a single state against a process that has already moved way beyond single states. So our own ideas about what political agency even is in the first place are seemingly irrevocably tied to the very formations that constrain and divide us and tend to work to damp down the capacity to address a systemic, planetary problem. I sometimes think it would be easier if the problem was, say, a Martian invasion- then you'd see humans banding together qua "the human" as a meaningful category. But alas, no Martians.

I do think that there are limits to political gridlock on the level of nation-states and that eventually some movement towards mitigation will take place, but I also think that that point is located pretty far into the positive feedback loops we're fueling now. Also, nationalism/racist tribalism isn't a contemporary phenomenon, and as a species, we've never really had an instinctive ability to empathize with each other on a species-wide scale; a notion of global humanity is the contemporary phenomenon, rather.

Re: the Paul Kingsnorth profile, John Grey's review/critique of Uncivilization is worth a read. Abandoning civilization en masse isn't much of an option. Plus the epigraph chosen, as with some of Jeffer's other poems, cuts too close to Nazi aesthetics for comfort.

Short version; This is what Swampy would have become if he had moved to the suburbs and got a job.

― xelab, Thursday, 17 April 2014 20:34 (Yesterday)

yeah fuck the nyt for devoting so much attention to this waste cunt, latterday william morris types are the worst possible avocates for environmental realism

this linked article is more noteworthy

Those who were initially most resistant to the project — residents of Lent, the community that was to be trimmed to make way for the river — started to clap. “The Applause of Lent,” as the local newspaper called it, signaled what Ovink and other Dutch planners had been working toward: the acceptance of climate change as a way of life, and the dawn of a 21st-century approach to living with nature.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/13/magazine/how-to-think-like-the-dutch-in-a-post-sandy-world.html

This book offers a rousing and inclusive call to arms for anyone who would identify themselves as "English" against the forces of globalisation.We see the signs around us every day: the chain cafes and mobile phone outlets that dominate our high streets; the disappearance of knobbly carrots from our supermarket shelves; and the headlines about yet another traditional industry going to the wall. For the first time, here is a book that makes the connection between these isolated, incremental, local changes and the bigger picture of a nation whose identity is being eroded. As he travels around the country meeting farmers, fishermen, and the inhabitants of Chinatown, Paul Kingsnorth will refract the kind of conversations that are taking place in country pubs and corner shops across the land - while reminding us that these quintessentially English institutions may soon cease to exist.

<<<<<

"yeah fuck the nyt for devoting so much attention to this waste cunt, latterday william morris types are the worst possible avocates for environmental realism"

He reminds me of that hypocritical arsehole from The Age of Stupid, the terrible environmental doc that Postlethwaite sadly got mixed up with before cancer took him. The self absorbed prick with a shitload of kids, a land rover and a farmhouse who seemed convinced that as a wind farm project manager he was smugly beyond criticism. What a vile, delusional cunt.

the retreat into doomy ersatz pre-norman "englishness" is kind of a non-sequitir for me, we might as well say "global warming isn't going to go away, we're all doomed, so i'm going to play-act the wandering tribes of israel." i mean, good on him if that's his thing, but it doesn't seem like a particularly universal or compelling response to environmental calamity.

that said, i recognize my own despair in his and i'm not going to attack him for sort of retreating into himself.

it's not supposed to be a practical response though, half their argument seems to be that there is little of much consequence to be done in the face of impending catastrophe. and i don't think it's necessarily about retreating into some historical englishness either, afaiu it's more of a letting-go of anthropocentrism and using naturistic quasi-mythological cultural practices to do this. it is a bit twattish though.

i didn't write "practical"--I wrote "universal or compelling"

also it just makes me think that this dude can't think of any response that isn't an species of lifestylism, even as he decries lifestylism.

what they do sounds very much bound up with having a strong sense of place, so i guess the specific content isn't intended to be of universal appeal

yeah. but why then is it being covered in the NYT as though he's some kind of seer?

i should repeat my main thought which is that what this guy and his cadre have come up with in response to global catastrophe seems like replacing one fantasy with another. and above all it just seems like a non-sequitir.

it is all a bit survivalist lord summerisle

why is his pessimism so wan and so shit? even disgregarding the assumption that there is no possible instrumental response to life in a drowning world (unproven, largely and the uk given its latitude and means is not going to be among the primary victims) then millenarianism should be a lot more dionysian or compelling than his twee blood and soil dogshit

The state government of Rhineland-Palatinate has published a booklet titled Nature Conservation vs Rightwing Extremism in an effort to assist organic farmers who may encounter rightwing extremists. Gudrun Heinrich of the University of Rostock has published a study, Brown Ecologists, in reference to both the current movement and the Nazi Brownshirts. The politically extreme rightwing environmental magazine Umwelt und Aktiv (Environment and Active), is believed to receive support from Germany's far-right National Democratic party (NPD).[13] Der Spiegel has covered the “organic brown fellowship” (“Braune Bio-Kameradschaft”),[14] and Süddeutsche Zeitung has published an article on and the “infiltration [Unterwanderung] of organic farming by rightwing extremists,[15] noting the lineage to Nazi doctrines of Aryan supremacy and ecological harmony.

I am often suspicious that in hard times these new-age narcissistic types with their wicker sculpture dogshit would be about the third in line to break nazi, after the farmers and 80% of the population of course.

“Climate Change War” Is Not a Metaphor: The U.S. military is preparing for conflict, retired Navy Rear Adm. David Titley says in an interview.

The New Abolitionism: Averting planetary disaster will mean forcing fossil fuel companies to give up at least http://www.thenation.com/article/179461/new-abolitionism0 trillion in wealth

Given the fluctuations of fuel prices, it’s a bit tricky to put an exact price tag on how much money all that unexcavated carbon would be worth, but one financial analyst puts the price at somewhere in the ballpark of $20 trillion. So in order to preserve a roughly habitable planet, we somehow need to convince or coerce the world’s most profitable corporations and the nations that partner with them to walk away from $20 trillion of wealth. Since all of these numbers are fairly complex estimates, let’s just say, for the sake of argument, that we’ve overestimated the total amount of carbon and attendant cost by a factor of 2. Let’s say that it’s just $10 trillion.

The last time in American history that some powerful set of interests relinquished its claim on $10 trillion of wealth was in 1865—and then only after four years and more than 600,000 lives lost in the bloodiest, most horrific war we’ve ever fought.

It is almost always foolish to compare a modern political issue to slavery, because there’s nothing in American history that is slavery’s proper analogue. So before anyone misunderstands my point, let me be clear and state the obvious: there is absolutely no conceivable moral comparison between the enslavement of Africans and African-Americans and the burning of carbon to power our devices. Humans are humans; molecules are molecules. The comparison I’m making is a comparison between the political economy of slavery and the political economy of fossil fuel.

More acutely, when you consider the math that McKibben, the Carbon Tracker Initiative and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) all lay out, you must confront the fact that the climate justice movement is demanding that an existing set of political and economic interests be forced to say goodbye to trillions of dollars of wealth. It is impossible to point to any precedent other than abolition.

ugh link fail, sorry:

http://www.thenation.com/article/179461/new-abolitionism

also,

In fact, in certain climate and investment circles, people have begun to talk about “stranded assets”—that is, the risk that either national or global carbon-pricing regimes will make the extraction of some of the current reserves uneconomical. Recently, shareholders pushed ExxonMobil to start reporting on its exposure to the risk of stranded assets, which was a crucial first step, though the report itself was best summarized by McKibben as saying, basically, “We plan on overheating the planet, we don’t think any government will stop us, we dare you to try.”

That is the current stance of the fossil fuel companies: “It’s our property, and we’re gonna extract, sell and burn all of it. What are you gonna do about it?”

Those people you see getting arrested outside the White House protesting Keystone XL, showing up at shareholder meetings and sitting in on campuses to get their schools to divest are doing something about it. They are attacking the one weak link in the chain of doom that is our fossil fuel economy.

something to keep in mind for well-intentioned believers in science who thinks that opposing keystone xl is pointless.

Not pointless. But just as ineffectual as supply-side approaches to curtailing drug addiction. It makes activists feel good about doing something, when more plausibly effective solutions, like: "make carbon taxes palatable to Republicans" have gone largely ignored. I suspect a congressional coalition for a revenue neutral carbon tax (ie, matched with income tax reductions) would have been very possible earlier in the 2000s (before the tea-party no nothings arrived), and will be possible again in the future as climate change outcomes mount.

Without pipelines, the petroleum will move by rail, even if that means more spills, booms, and leaving the grain harvest to rot. There's also some peculiar naivete regarding the carbon intensity of the Keystone crudes. Hint: all crudes with finding, development, and lifting costs in the $60-80/bbl range (whether from deep offshore, shale fracking, or mining/steaming of bitumen) have huge and comparable embedded energy inputs. Ie, pretty much all oil discovered in North America since 2000 or so is comparably 'dirty'.

Regarding that 10 trillion quote, generally, it isn't the total future revenue stream that matters for the value of the carbon reservoirs, but the discounted present value of future net profits, which is a lot less. The top 4 U.S. coal producers responsible for over 50% of production have a combined market cap of just $7.9 billion. The government could just buy the shareholders' stake of the US coal industry at market prices for perhaps around 16 billion, if it wanted. Even lifetime pensions for all existing coal mining employees would be dirt cheap compared to the environmental extenalities of coal mining or costs of eventually scrubbing the carbon from the atmosphere.

What we in the U.S. have little control over is the national oil companies, which control 75% of global oil production and 90% of reserves. Even Exxon-Mobil is becoming an engineering firm contracting for the real asset holders.

"make carbon taxes palatable to Republicans"

--how would you do this if so many of them refuse to believe that climate change is happening?

(or think it is god's work?)

The government could just buy the shareholders' stake of the US coal industry at market prices for perhaps around 16 billion, if it wanted. Even lifetime pensions for all existing coal mining employees would be dirt cheap compared to the environmental externalities of coal mining or costs of eventually scrubbing the carbon from the atmosphere.

This kind of thinking is U&K. If the government owned these industries, it could ramp them down on its own schedule and not have to fight with investors. Fox News would howl it down, but it's a direction we haven't tried, yet. \

A much bigger cost would be abandoning the oil/coal infrastructure we have and replacing it with functional, but fossil-fuel-less, equivalents.

xp:

Pre-2008, there were a lot of Republican thought leaders (McCain, GWB's economic advisor Mankiw) that voiced climate concerns and were open to carbon taxes, so long as they didn't violate their principle of limited government. If there was to be a carbon tax, they' have to come home with something for their constituents in return. The post-2008 prominence of Tea Party primary challenges with heavy funding by the Kochs etc makes touching the issue politically dangerous for them now, even for those who privately agree with climate concerns.

Pushing carbon emissions credit trading instead (based on the EU example, pretty ineffectual, but at least Goldman Sachs et al. would have benefited) during that period just seems a horrible lost opportunity.

yeah that stuff always seemed like it would make only a token difference (at best)--it also trusts that market mechanisms will behave predictably far too much.

'Stranded Asset Risk' is big news right now, I am doing some work for an industry body who are bricking it about SAR. It's a big lever to pull because these industries (fossil fuels, electricity, etc.) have 20-30-40 year capital recovery periods, often baked into the regulatory framework, and they are almost universally dependant on rising consumption. Falling energy consumption, changes in consumption patterns and distributed generation are disrupting these models. For once regulatory stagnation is helping us because no-one can decide what to do about this, in the sector i'm working with pretty much any pricing change short of general taxation to fund the assets incentivises people to use the assets less.

I'm trying to come up with some policy recommendations to deal with SAR and I really want to conclude 20,000 words of report with 'Write it down, shut it down, go to the beach'

So much wisdom in ten words.

'Write it down, shut it down, go to the beach'

wow, how lovely to see Environmental Defense Fund president Fred Krupp team up with Michael Bloomberg to write this NYT op-ed:

The Right Way to Develop Shale Gas:

So here’s a reality check. The shale gas boom is indeed lowering energy costs, creating new jobs, boosting domestic manufacturing and delivering some measurable environmental benefits as well. Unlike coal, natural gas produces minuscule amounts of such toxic air pollutants as sulfur dioxide and mercury when burned — so the transition from coal- to natural-gas-fired electricity generation is improving overall air quality, which improves public health. There’s also a potential climate benefit, since natural-gas-fired plants emit roughly half the carbon dioxide of coal-fired ones.

jesus fucking christ. bloomberg's certainly no surprise but it's really sad to see krupp sign onto this bullshit. natural gas is better for the climate - IF you use the rosiest of assumptions about methane leakage from fracking. joe romm has a typically subtle summary of the most recent research on methane leakage - By The Time Natural Gas Has A Net Climate Benefit You’ll Likely Be Dead And The Climate Ruined.

http://ncadac.globalchange.gov/download/NCAJan11-2013-publicreviewdraft-chap2-climate.pdf

Box: Societal System Failures During Extreme Events
23 We have already seen multiple system failures during an extreme weather event in the U.S., as
24 Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans (Lister 2005). Infrastructure and evacuation failures
25 and collapse of critical response services during a storm is one example. Another example is a
26 loss of electrical power during a heat wave (Anderson and Bell 2012). Air conditioning has
27 helped reduce illness and death due to extreme heat (Ostro et al. 2010), but if power is lost,
28 everyone is vulnerable. By their nature, such events can exceed our capacity to respond (Hess et
29 al. 2012). In succession, these events severely deplete our reserves from the personal to the
30 national scale, but disproportionately affect the most vulnerable populations (Shonkoff et al.
31 2011).

dear amurika, yer on yer own. luv, yur gov

32 GOTO APOCALYPSE
33 END

Scientists Warn of Rising Oceans as Antarctic Ice Melts

The collapse of large parts of the ice sheet in West Antarctica appears to have begun and is almost certainly unstoppable, with global warming accelerating the pace of the disintegration, two groups of scientists reported Monday.

The finding, which had been feared by some scientists for decades, means that a rise in global sea level of at least 10 feet may now be inevitable. The rise may continue to be relatively slow for at least the next century or so, the scientists said, but sometime after that it will probably speed up so sharply as to become a crisis.

“This is really happening,” said Thomas P. Wagner, who runs NASA’s programs on polar ice and helped oversee some of the research. “There’s nothing to stop it now. But you are still limited by the physics of how fast the ice can flow.”

My wife had a total freakout about this last night, about how there won't be any beaches when our kids are older, literally sobbing about feeling helpless, what kind of world have we brought our kids into etc. I did not feel like I had any adequate words of encouragement :( She wants some answers about what we can personally do and I already feel like we're trying pretty hard it's just so fucking grim.

yeah i ain't gonna have any kids b/c i can barely imagine a future for myself