Global Warming's Terrifying New Math

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

I read a fair amount of popular science stuff (Discover, Nat'l Geo etc.) and I'm in the middle of the tech industry and sometimes I just feel like jesus christ the shit people waste their time working on instead of like, CIVILIZATION NEEDS SAVING I dunno people's priorities are so fucked up. I have a (soon to be ex)-friend whose returning from China later this year where he was doing construction on a coal plant and I feel like there's no way I can even be around him, I feel like he did the equivalent of murdering a bunch of children

yea it really sucks, so many immense problems in this world that we as individuals are virtually powerless to prevent. i say "virtually" b/c yes there are some individual practices that if done on a large scale might help, but they aren't happening on a large scale. at the institutional/governmental and national levels frankly nobody gives a shit about this. some tepid comments from obama bla bla but what the fuck is that gonna do?

the evil part of me thinks "huh if we just murdered a few million of the right people that would probably solve some of the problem"

humans are terrible at long-range planning, we're born procrastinators. this will be soon be our doom.

i understand the urge to condemn (and i'm certainly prone to doing that at times as well) but it's not a productive way to react. you're not going to change your coal plant construction friend's opinion on anything by being combative and defriending them irl. i understand that's probably not even your intention - you might just feel better personally if you had nothing to do with them and didn't have to have the underlying dread feeling whenever you talk to them. but i feel like the most important that people can do on an individual level is be realistic about the challenges ahead and try to stay energetic and helpful. i was at a conference last week where a younger guy (haha, wow i'm getting older. shit) introduced himself by saying "i used to hate people. i no longer hate people" and then described how he used to really look down on a lot of segments of society for being so willingly ignorant of what's going on, but gradually took a more constructive perspective and got involved in organizations doing good work. i came away thinking that if there are even just a decent proportion of people like him, we're going to figure it out. that doesn't mean there won't be agony and terrible things along the way, but despite how it looks on the surface, there are many, MANY wonderful people who will never give up on this.

I think my wife wants suggestions about what organizations doing good work, as you say, she/we can join. For my part, I already have dedicated my professional life to this and am surrounded by smart, well-intentioned people working hard on these issues but it's just ... ugh we are also accutely aware of the obstacles

i came away thinking that if there are even just a decent proportion of people like him, we're going to figure it out.

there is very little reason to think this IMO.

unless you think "people like him" can convince everyone in the West to make a sudden, irreversible change in their lifestyles AND convince the politicians and business leaders in poorer countries to forgo significant industrial development.

and we'd still be mostly fucked.

i have hope karl's right, but his other point -- "that doesn't mean there won't be agony and terrible things along the way" -- is the real "meat of the coconut." that is, we're probably going to have to come very close to a very-visible, overwhelming crisis before collective-consciousness can possibly shift the way it needs to.

collective consciousness won't be collective anything, we'll be struggling for survival and revert (as we so often do even in times of not-crisis) to clannishness and self-interest

i hope i'm wrong but human history doesn't give us many or any hopeful precedents

our future:

http://images2.alphacoders.com/839/83970.jpg

maybe 20 years, idk.

perhaps this was the wrong thread to come to for encouragement/helpful tips

just keep it bouncy with a chorus

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

another jew weighs in:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQTRX23EMNk

Karl, does your strategy for being an enthusiastic proponent (as opposed to an accusatory Cassandra) involve avoiding moronic "What global warming?" dead-enders?

i should say my guarded optimism from above ("i came away thinking that if there are even just a decent proportion of people like him, we're going to figure it out.") is probably overstated. i was rushtyping that as i was late for a meeting and it came out sounding like a commercial with ukuleles and a xylophone. by "we're going to figure it out" i don't mean rosy outcome where everything is great, but rather one where we somehow avoid the dark ages, or a dystopic scenario where rich people are literally walling themselves off from the fucked over masses. and by "we're going to" i really meant "we have a better chance of"

so basically, sorry for writing a shitty paragraph. i'll never do it again! (*cue laugh track*)

i still don't know what the best strategy is for dealing with incredibly misinformed people, or people who know better but are lying for short-term political gain. taking a cue from john oliver, i think it would be interesting to stage a series of high-profile "climate change debates" across the country, particularly in red states and rural areas. these debates would be billed in a somewhat generic way - scientists will debate the expected impacts of climate change - which, sadly, would probably lead most people to believe that there would be a climate-denier representing one side of the debate. but in fact, they'd show up and witness an actual debate about climate change - are we on track for the worst-case emissions scenario in the IPCC reports, or are we actually exceeding that? do climate models properly account for feedback loops like the melting of permafrost, or don't they? are we this fucked, or are we THIS fucked?

eh. i'm at a loss.

It's weird, a few months ago I was reading this thread and although I already knew about all this stuff vaguely, I just started to realise how horrific it could be and I felt like my life was quietly but devastatingly changed and there was no way I'd go back to being a lazy complacent ass; but sure enough within days I go back to all the bad habits as if I had all the time in the world to achieve my goals.

Think I've mentioned this before but in a weird way I'm glad -- very glad -- that I had my total ecoparanoia moment in spring 1992. I've been feeling a little resigned more lately but not anywhere near as bad as I felt before. In that case, I'm counting my luck more than anything else. I've lived this long, could/should be able to live some more, but by default the odds keep shortening on my living the same amount of time I already have, so in many ways it comes down to timing. The closer you get to an inevitable end the less you fear for yourself, I suppose. So you have to look -- as dispassionately as you can -- outside yourself and those you love to consider what can happen for the whole.

And as I've also muttered, not having kids all this time...I think it's been a factor, my concerns, in that decision. It wasn't philosophical, nor religious, nor specific. More of a softly looming sense over time that it'll get uglier and uglier as time progresses. Right now a friend is posting down in San Diego about having to get their kids from school due to yet another set of wildfires thanks to the heat and wind this week, and I have a feeling they're going to get used to that more and more.

The big thing to avoid in all this is some sort of patting myself on the back. "What do you want, a medal?" is a more than appropriate response to my thoughts over time. Maybe I'll just end up having to sigh and shrug and think Eliot was right, if we all go out with a whimper.

Robert, that sounds like how I deal with climactic despair.

I took a class recently on, grossly speaking, climate justice, and while we could all die of natural causes before the worst of climate change hits, the actions we're taking now are defining the parameters of life and civilization to future generations who, of course, have no say in the matter. (This line of reasoning is why I've toyed with the idea of framing this as a pro-life matter.) So the ethical decision remains for us: giving into despair would be an immoral stance.

My wife and I are at the stage where we'll need to make a final decision on whether we want to have kids in the next couple of years, before biology makes the decision for us. I sometimes look at our friends' kids and have a dreadful sense of guilt/relief/hope/fear that my wife and I will likely both be dead before they have to deal with the fallout of the various climate disasters that are coming down the pipe.

guys kids currently alive are dealing with it now. we are dealing with it now.

life has been hard and miserable for most of humankind and history. babies are guilt free. make babies if u wanna.

xp Yes, I know. However, sometimes I feel so overwhelmed, powerless and frightened by the prospect of, essentially, global climate apocalypse that it's possible to look at truly terrible news like the warning that sea levels are going to rise 10 feet in 100 years as a weird kind of relief: hey, I live more than 10 feet above sea level and I'll be dead by then so it doesn't affect me! On the other hand, I'm all too aware that it's thinking like that which ensures that destructive behaviour remains unchanged and essentially guarantees that the world is fucked

the prospect of NY, Hong Kong, SF, LA, Mumbai, etc all being underwater = no bother eh

I'm all too aware that it's thinking like that which ensures that destructive behaviour remains unchanged and essentially guarantees that the world is fucked

When I heard that the air is toxic in Pecos, TX because all of the "sour gas" being released from the earth due to all the holes being made from fracking...that's the moment I felt an irreversible hopeless dread.

There is no going back. The men working there have to carry these h2 monitors at all times:
http://www.gassniffer.com/bw-gas-alert-clip-extreme-h2s-monitor.html?gclid=CIaWi4O0rL4CFXQiMgodigEAVg

Wouldn't everything have to stop today? All manufacturing, all cars, jets, ships, oil rigs, no more gas, no more oil, coal, nothing....

Meanwhile:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dK99dvJO5PY
What is not dangerous to a door mouse or wolf, would kill us. Don't know how legit this is but it was interesting. Note: there are no grossly mutated animals in this doc.

Wouldn't everything have to stop today? All manufacturing, all cars, jets, ships, oil rigs, no more gas, no more oil, coal, nothing....

it would depend on how far down the road toward real planetary damage we've gone. something i read recently says that we could transition to more sustainable, cleaner power-sources without the hard-stop you fear. in fact, while there would be terrible economic consequences to really weaning-off coal and gas and so forth, it would also open up vast economic opportunities (just for new businesses). if, for instance, you could seed the market to make new hybrids more affordable, or mandate their use, it would greatly improve that sector. cap-and-trade would create a whole new industry for emissions-trading, and would create other new opportunities. it will all come at a cost, but everything does.

I don't fear that.

And it bears repeating that the costs to not mitigating climate change are going to far exceed things like a cap-and-trade system.

people will have to stop driving their cars very much, even though a lot of folks live in communities that assume the use of cars.

but above all the rate of industrial growth in countries like china, russia, and india will have to flatten or decline. and i think the rate of income growth will have to decline to zero too, otherwise they are just all going to imitate the longstanding consumption habits of westerners like us and there is no surer way to wrecking the planet.

in fact, while there would be terrible economic consequences to really weaning-off coal and gas and so forth, it would also open up vast economic opportunities (just for new businesses).

this is a fact and it is what needs to happen. we subsidized the carbon industry to a ridiculous degree, now it's time to strangle that industry and subsidize something else.

all the rate of industrial growth in countries like china, russia, and india will have to flatten or decline.

there's no reason to expect them to continue growing at current rates. you know who gets hit by monsoons every year, for ex?

I think that is the wrong approach. I think China is beginning to realise that they need to grow in much more sustainable ways to give people the living standards they have come to expect. It is possible to have high living standards without the needlessly wasteful consumption that has gone with them in the west. Growth is not incompatible with sustainability and it somewhat patronising to the merging world to deny high standards of living because the western world has fucked things up.

One of the things that goes along with growth is an emerging middle class and increasing environmental concern. In china right now, the focus is, quite rightly, on air and water quality (as it was in the historical west) but I feel climate change is rising up the agenda.

that is also true. funnily enough, China's command economy is one of the few existing political environments where top-down decrees re: sustainability could actually be effectively and quickly implemented. not like our stupid democracy.

That would be a great way for the CPC to lose power.

how so

CPC isn't really into rapid changes, they've worked out that gradual works much better for them.

Also, China is willing to remain communist as long as the CPC keeps growing the economy. I's essentially a facist set-up, now, and if the party decided to mess with the country's economic growth they would run into a LOT of unrest.

It is possible to have high living standards without the needlessly wasteful consumption that has gone with them in the west.

i think such a thing would presume a degree of income equality that is the opposite of contemporary china

xpost dunno if it's "fascist," it's basically just crony capitalism to the nth degree