Global Warming's Terrifying New Math

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...

i'm kinda fascinated in how the changing atmosphere is effecting people subconsciously. on a daily basis. what kind of alarm bells are going off in people that we can't see. other than a world-wide obsession with zombies and the end of the world. millenarianism kinda as old as the hills anyway, so, i don't even know how much the zombies and disaster movies mean.

Yeah, fair point re: gradual change - - - but on the other hand that may just be waiting for someone to hit on the right metaphor/example/rhetorical flourish to snap the timeline back together and heighten the contrast. I'm thinking of Rachel Carson with the idea of a "silent spring," somehow able to make people realize, say, I have heard less birds than when I was a kid, and shit, imagine if you heard no birds at all?!

Maybe we're sort of inured to that type of thing now, or maybe it just seems that way until something happens that crystallizes these feelings. It may be that wholesome nature stuff isn't as central to the American psyche as it once was, given generations of people reared entirely in cul-de-sac conditions. But maybe it's part of the picture. I can imagine that for people who grew up in four-season regions of the country, realizing they might not get snow, or might get an unsettlingly large amount of snow but no fall leaves, could produce a real abiding anxiety where "1-3 inches of sea level rise" or "a winter that lasts a week longer" can't, just sitting there on paper.

Presidential candidate and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) sent a letter to President Barack Obama this week asking him to avoid "inserting the divisive political agenda of liberal environmental activism" while commemorating the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.

Obama was visiting New Orleans on Thursday to mark 10 years after the disaster.

The letter from Jindal, dated Wednesday, read:

While you and others may be of the opinion that we can legislate away hurricanes with higher taxes, business regulations and EPA power grabs, that is not a view shared by many Louisianians.
I would ask you to respect this important time of remembrance by not inserting the divisive political agenda of liberal environmental activism.

Furthermore, the people of Louisiana have already agreed upon a pragmatic and bipartisan approach to preventing and mitigating the damage of future weather systems.

Jindal, who was a congressman during the storm, wrote a "lecture on climate change" would not improve New Orleans — something residents did themselves.

I live here. Every thing south of I-12 is doomed to become, at best, a scuba destination. Alas, his base was in the bible thumping north of the state.

There's are many reasons Grover Norquist's governor has [a 27% approval](http://www.bestofneworleans.com/gambit/next-to-nothing/Content?oid=2598599) rating in Louisiana. But I reserve a special hatred for just how willfully he has obstructed attempts to save his own state.

landrieu deserves eternal damnation as well

i think i posted this a few years back but i saw it again today and remembered how much i liked it:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CNb8m9vUkAAAu1A.png:large

i don't like it :c

hehe, also there's the fact that it's not based off of any data, but i think it illustrates reality pretty accurately

sickening:

http://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/welcome-to-beautiful-parkersburg/

god damn. thank you for sharing that. just sat and read the whole thing, watched all the videos. fucking devastating.

also incredible journalism. not directly global warming related but probably a must-read, and a reminder just how flagrant and bone-chillingly corporate cover-ups are, still are, like all this happened very recently, is still happening now. not some long-dead villains burying some toxic waste drums in the 50s and 60s. fucking horrifying.

2015's El Niño will rival the strongest on record.

Every El Niño brings Sep-Jan drought and forest and peat fires to Indonesia. These have been exacerbated by draining of lands for palm plantations, over peat deposits up to 20 m thick.

During the last big El Niño in 1997, Indonesian peat fires were responsible for 13–40% of global carbon emissions, and were responsible for the largest annual increase in atmospheric CO2 on record. They're the main reason Indonesia is third to China and America in total carbon emissions.

When one considers peatlands

account for 550 Gt carbon worldwide. The majority of the carbon stored in peatlands is in the saturated peat soil that has been sequestered over millennia. In the sub (polar) zone, peatlands contain on average 3.5 times more carbon per hectare than the above-ground ecosystems on mineral soil; in the boreal zone they contain 7 times more and in the humid tropics over 10 times more carbon.

tropical peatlands, and their climatically driven burning, look a lot like the most plausible positive carbon feedback during past interglacials. Delving into this, they're more scary short term than permafrost outgassing and seabed methane hydrates.

And for those awaiting the rotten egg scent of past oceanic anoxia / euxinia extinction events:

Purple Waves Puzzle Oregon Coast Scientists, Officials

She photographed these examples of the stuff in Neskowin on August 15.

I was in Neskowin, Oregon on August 18-21 and saw nothing like this. Not sure if I should be sad or happy about that.

Given no one was falling over dead from hydrogen sulfide, you missed an opportunity to witness a purple sulfur bacteria bloom, of the sort which played a major role during the late-Devonian, end-Permian, and end-Triassic mass extinctions, as well as the Cenomanian–Turonian, Aptian and Toarcian ocean anoxic events.

Usually, purple sulfur bacteria blooms are only visible in the Black Sea and off Namibia, so its pretty cool (horrific!) that it only took one year's warm blob to see photic zone euxinia off American shores.

No one else may care, but that end-Triassic link should go here.

I read your link on purple sulfur bacteria and agree that having it show up in the water along the Oregon coastline is pretty horrific. The pace of climate change seems to me to be accelerating rapidly, looking at both the pace at which new weather records are being set in the past year and the margins by which those new records are eclipsing the old ones.

frankly, i avoid the numbers as much as possible. because every story i read about these things, every set of facts i come across, corrodes my sanity (which was never that great to begin with) more and more. and i don't think it's just me. given the choice between madness, ignorance, and denial, i guess i'll go for ignorance.

i think that's the decision that most people make, whether they say it or not

i think about it a lot but i don't really know what i'm supposed to do with it.

One step beyond!

After one goes through all the Kübler-Ross stages, there's still wry humor and the knowledge of how privileged we are to know just why our civilization is closing up shop. Most didn't get this before their droughts, plagues, eruptions, and sacks of cities. Document it, preserve what's valuable, wake up each day.

Oh, and root for bird flu or a similar pandemic that might give us a chance in hell.

learn how to make & repair things, have basic tools, learn about edible plants

buy camping gear, you might need it someday

that is very good advice

rapacity seems built into the human brain. sometimes i really do think that people would rather die than scale things back.

this should really be the cover of someone's next scare book...

http://i.imgur.com/8HJzT81.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/Dr4Vhip.jpg

Rapacity -- we probably evolved to glut ourselves in times of plenty, so yeah!

But as awful as we are, we'd be able to adapt to losing our creature comforts; I'm guessing our survival drive would/will win out over our desire for smartphones and SUVs.

xxp

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/30/world/united-states-russia-arctic-exploration.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=first-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0

well, at least i still have the ability to enjoy a FUN FACT from time to time:

"When President Obama travels to Alaska on Monday, becoming the first president to venture above the Arctic Circle while in office..."

more will go when it becomes a warm & sunny resort destination

see, this is what turns you into ted kaczynski, when you realize that this sort of environmental catastrophe was inevitable from the beginning of the industrial revolution 200 years ago. but goddam, i do not want to return to a state of nature. hobbes was right. if the only alternative on the table is to re-establish malthusian economics, then hurtling headlong into the unknown, into mass extinctions and mega-genocide, under the foolhardy hope that we'll figure out some way to fix it before it's too late actually becomes the preferable option. fuck subsistence.

This idea of a whole ocean becoming anoxic is quite scary, imagine the stench from a gigantic globe spanning pond.

I am become Elizabeth, New Jersey, destroyer of worlds...

i feel like the human race is reliving the plot of "flowers for algernon"

When President Bush XIV travels to address aid workers in former Washington State, he will be the first president to travel south of the Arctic Circle in decades.

https://33.media.tumblr.com/65b3f598635c97b75b76e30e4603adae/tumblr_ntuxa08v2C1qdmmiqo1_500.gif

ABOARD COAST GUARD CUTTER ALEX HALEY, in the Chukchi Sea —

best dateline

Climate trauma survival tips from Dr. Lise Van Susteren

http://i.imgur.com/Dr4Vhip.jpg

― 1995 ball boy (Karl Malone), Saturday, August 29, 2015 1:11 PM (6 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Las Vegas, 2009, aerial photo by Alex MacLean.