Global Warming's Terrifying New Math

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

where rich people are literally walling themselves off from the fucked over masses.

xp upthread, tbf this is already happening in most of the world, where rich people literally live in walled-off compounds with broken glass, barbed wire, or metal spikes on top of the walls.

in Peru that describes how the middle class lives, let alone the rich

most of latin america for sure

south africa, too

http://chronicle.com/article/The-Great-Extinction/146275/

justin e.h. smith

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.

Just over a week ago, I was twenty miles from Pecos, TX and can confirm that the air in that part of the state smells like a large natural gas leak. I feared that if you lit a match, the entire atmosphere would catch fire.

anyone (Sanpaku?) wanna weigh in on the potential of this?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bio-energy_with_carbon_capture_and_storage

I'm on the efficiency side of things, the engineering involved here is kinda outside my usual points of reference

eh never mind I get how biomass energy production works I was more curious about ways to actually remove CO2 from the atmosphere, which this is only partly related to

just an aside am i only the only person who hears the work "fracking" and thinks it some kind of sex act and/or lewd dance move?

battlestar galactica has taken over that word for many us i'd bet

lol otm

who are these fucking people
http://dailycaller.com/2014/05/16/skeptical-scientists-debunk-white-house-global-warming-report/

probably on the koch payroll?

"...and the Antarctic cooled slightly." Is that true? What about the western ice shelf of Antarctica collapsing?

I'm gonna go ahead and guess that every single "fact" those guys cite is some kind of distortion but idk

like what part of the Antarctic are they referring to? the land mass? the ocean? the ice shelf?

gotta step away, such infuriating bullshit