Global Warming's Terrifying New Math

Maybe global warming is just Earth's way of burning off pests that are effing it up for everything else. Like the Weapons in Final Fantasy VII.

tardigrades are so incredible, can't believe I'd never heard of them before Cosmos

This is a completely random personal note, but I'm in a depressive state right now, and it's weirdly comforting to think about the extinction of humanity.

― :wq (Leee), Thursday, July 9, 2015 1:02 PM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

take it to the depression thread.

feel like a few rules for this thread are in order, 1) no saying 'i don't care about global warming', 2) no jacking off to tech magic bullets unrelated to how reality works, 3) no telling us how much the thought of mass extinction soothes your mood disorder. ta!

While I'm certainly no misanthrope and I have a lot of affection for many of its individual members, it's hard for me to deny that homosapiens are kind of a garbage species. I'm sure the entirety of earth's other species would also find that hard to deny, had they an anthropomorphic ambassador through whom they could share their collective feelings.

remember what this guy said that time!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjmtSkl53h4

"The planet is fine, the people are fucked."

the earth + plastic. love that part.

Yeah if anything this thread is an antidote to warm (sorry) feelings about the human race.

One can't help watching the whole overpopulation/unsustainable growth/resource shortage/greenhouse emissions story for several decades of adult life without some misanthropy seeping in.

Hern WM. 1993. Has the Human Species Become a Cancer on the Planet? A Theoretical View of Population Growth as a Sign of Pathology. Current world leaders, 36(6), 1089-1124.

http://i.imgur.com/1KEJu12.gif

Etc.
Hern WM. 1999. How many times has the human population doubled? Comparisons with cancer. Population and Environment, 21(1), 59-80.
Hern WM. 2008. Urban malignancy: similarity in the fractal dimensions of urban morphology and malignant neoplasms. International journal of anthropology, 23(1-2), 1-19.

take it to the depression thread.

feel like a few rules for this thread are in order, 1) no saying 'i don't care about global warming', 2) no jacking off to tech magic bullets unrelated to how reality works, 3) no telling us how much the thought of mass extinction soothes your mood disorder. ta!

― e-bouquet (mattresslessness), Thursday, July 9, 2015 3:18 PM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

fuck off

http://www.buzzfeed.com/danvergano/my-global-warming-epiphany#.dsgyXRNg1

Wise words:

A simple trick one of my bosses at the Pentagon had taught me: He called it the nut test. I have tried it a dozen times or so in interviews, on scientists and skeptics of all sorts, and it quickly reveals whether you are getting a straight argument.

I was interviewing a chronic critic of global warming studies, particularly the 1998 “hockey stick” one that found temperatures in our century racing upward on a slope that mirrored a hockey blade pointed skyward. He argued vociferously that the study’s math was all messed up, and that this meant all of climate science was a sham.

I listened, and at the end of the interview, I gave him the nut test.

“What are the odds that you are wrong?” I asked, or so I remember.

“I’d say zero,” the critic replied. “No chance.”

That’s how you fail the nut test.

I had asked a climate scientist the same question on the phone an hour before.

“I could always be wrong,” the scientist said. Statistically, he added, it could be about a 20% to 5% chance, depending on what he might be wrong about.

That’s how you pass the nut test: by admitting you could be wrong.

Indeed

better buy a boat soon

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/07/20/climate-seer-james-hansen-issues-his-direst-forecast-yet.html?utm_content=buffer1b0f4&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

There's so much carbon in the atmosphere that radiocarbon dating will soon be unreliable

The aging of the atmosphere predicted by these simulations has the potential to severely impact the use of radiocarbon dating. Within the next 85 y, the atmosphere may experience Δ14CO2 corresponding to conventional ages from within the historical period encompassing the Roman, Medieval and Imperial Eras. For archaeological or other items that are found without sufficient context to rule out a modern origin, radiocarbon dating will give ambiguous results.

Record Ocean Temperatures Threaten Hawaii's Coral Reefs

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/environment/globalwarming/11762680/Three-scientists-investigating-melting-Arctic-ice-may-have-been-assassinated-professor-claims.html

Assassination? Is this real?

people can be assassinated by lightning bolt now huh

yikes, it's a shame this got published

if there is any conspiracy afoot here i'd say it was more likely to be an attempt to discredit climate scientists as a group by allowing one of them to go off on one in the media rather than big climate's efforts to bump them off one-by-one with flights of stairs and blots of lightning

No Foreseeable Relief After Iran City Feels Like Exceptional 163° F.

(that's 67.8° C for those in scientifically literate countries)

what the shit :O

terrifying

what is this "apparent temperature"? like in actuality it's not 68 degrees as such?

it includes measures of humidity in addition to air temp, i think? so it feels like 68 degrees on the ground, your sweat evapirates at the same rate it would in the apparent temp, that kind of thing

ah so factors like a breeze or whatever

yeah, i think so. can't imagine what standing outdoors in 68 degrees would feel like, jesus christ

it's terrifying - i was in seville last year and it was 42 and felt like a particularly hot 42 as it's inland, and that was unbearable, like you feel kind of ill. it must be really dangerous.

maybe the oligarchs will start caring about global warming because it will decrease worker productivity

I've been in 45 degrees in summer in Rome and it was close to unbearable, could hardly walk a couple blocks without stopping in the shade for a drink of (warmed by the sun) bottled water.

dead workers just harder to motivate

Over summer here in adelaide we regularly now get 2 weeks of 42-46 degree heat and its hell

Worker productivity meaningless when robots replace them.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/08/03/my-town-calls-my-lawn-a-nuisance-but-i-still-refuse-to-mow-it/

Lovely garden picture.

“Players like the Saudis, like the Chinese right now, to be honest with you, are trying to water it down so you don’t have a cycle of improvement,” Jennifer Morgan, the global director of the climate program at the World Resources Institute, a research group, told me from her office in Berlin. “And that, I think, is the fight that’s going to be the next three months. Do we get those kernels of integrity in the international agreement or not?”

fascinating (and inevitably depressing) new yorker article about the political manuevring behing climate change negotiations: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/08/24/the-weight-of-the-world

wow - figueres sounds like a great person

great article. i can't imagine how figueres manages to stay sane with that kind of task

elizabeth kolbert is a saint

Except that time she wrote about how Western kids were too spoiled, but that's a different thread.

luckily i missed that one but in general her writing on climate, extinction, environmental degradation is so good, so accessible

RM Fanney leans a bit alarmist, but the North Atlantic cold temperature anomaly, combined with the U.S. East coast sea height anomaly, suggests something may be afoot with the Gulf Stream.

Good luck, Europe.

^ If that article is even 80% correct, it's about time to become terrified for real. If the rapid melting off of the world's ice caps is fucking up the ocean currents as much as he indicates, I need to start rethinking our family's contingency plans and our resiliency in the face of a rapidly growing global crisis.

i'm reading too much into this, but for some reason these two stories seemed connected when i saw them on my facebook today. and then i just got depressed.

http://blog.sfgate.com/morford/2015/08/24/everything-is-on-fire-and-no-one-cares/

http://screencrush.com/netflix-evolution-of-binge-watching/

i just don't watch my netflix like i used to!

http://assets.climatecentral.org/images/made/8_26_13_Andrew_Rim_Fire_1050_701_s_c1_c_c.jpg

my second thought after reading something like fire story is: i really have to sell my record collection! japan could be underwater in five years! self-preservation rules the day....

OTM, and that was a great article, a friend sent it to me a couple of days ago

This is maybe a weird connection to make, but, there's a scene I often think of by Stephen King, in the early books of the Dark Tower series. One of King's strengths in general, which is key to the success of so much of his creepy New England fiction, is capturing a certain sense of wrongness in familiar landscapes, especially the banal woodsy landscape of temperate North America. He has a real knack for what it is to turn a corner into a particular clearing and it just to feel all wrenched up and unsettled under the surface, somewhere in the dead leaves and the shape of a hollow log. The wildfire story reminds me of that, and particularly this bit in Dark Tower where our heroes, roaming the post-apocalyptic wilderness, come upon a beehive and entertain the notion of some honeycomb with dinner. But:

It was cooler in the shade. The buzzing of the bees was a steady, hypnotic drone. “There are too many,” Roland murmured. “This is late summer; they should be out working. I don’t—“

He caught sight of the hive, bulging tumorously from the hollow of a tree in the center of the clearing, and broke off.

“What’s the matter with them?” Susannah asked in a soft, horrified voice. “Roland, what’s the matter with them?”

A bee, as plump and slow-moving as a horsefly in October, droned past her head. Susannah flinched away from it.

Roland motioned for the others to join them. They did, and stood looking at the hive without speaking. The chambers weren’t neat hexa-gons but random holes of all shapes and sizes; the beehive itself looked queerly melted, as if someone had turned a blowtorch on it. The bees which crawled sluggishly over it were as white as snow.

That scene always gave me the absolute jibblies for reasons that are hard to articulate. But the wildfire article, with the dead flies, the ecosystem palpably out of whack, gets at it I think. While the text of the article might essentialize this a bit, where you can feel it in your bones and so on, but I get why. I posted this last summer: "...things are changing, things have already changed, (and) I better not wait til my golden years to visit the places I grew up, as the landscape I knew will probably be pretty much burned to a crisp and not really trigger the cornucopia of ineffable sense memories one might expect." Feeling wrong-footed in familiar places is not in fact the most serious reason why climate change is a crisis, but it might be the symptom that actually mobilizes wider constituencies, emotionally.

it might just be gradual enough for people to grow accustomed to the changes though. juuuuuuust a little hotter every year for decades until people don't know anything else. though raging wildfires all around might not be the most gradual of changes...

but people are already getting used to the ubiquity of "cooling centers" everywhere. not something i grew up with...

http://www.masslive.com/news/index.ssf/2015/07/heat_wave_springfield_repeats.html

it doesn't take long for things to seem normal. is what i'm trying to say. adaptable motherfuckers that we are...