Global Warming's Terrifying New Math

a few scientists as well

pfft i get all my science updates from the star of tin cup thanks

Exxon researched climate change in 1977 and confirmed fossil fuel burning was causing it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppfpFZ92JAY

http://insideclimatenews.org/content/long-tale-exxon-and-climate-change

http://insideclimatenews.org/sites/default/files/styles/img_large_breakpoints_theme_solve_mobile_1x/public/ExxonTigerTimeline1058px.png

the Bad Guys who are smart usually do figure that shit out early

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/16/hitlers-world-may-not-be-so-far-away

A review of Snyder's Black Earth lead me to listen to his prior Bloodlands this week. Harrowing, and goes a long way to explaining why Belarus and Ukraine are fucked up to this day. While the Poles were no angels, its a bit miraculous that their politics seems relatively sane, 70 years later.

profit time!

http://www.forbes.com/sites/amorylovins/2015/09/21/four-trends-driving-profitable-climate-protection/

have we already linked the recent RS story?

http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/features/what-megablazes-tell-us-about-the-fiery-future-of-climate-change-20150915

article made me feel slightly hopeful, although obviously part of obama's job is to not convey the overwhelming doom he almost certainly feels

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/obama-takes-on-climate-change-the-rolling-stone-interview-20150923?page=18

it's encouraging to hear a world leader talk about climate change as a real and urgent problem but god, reading stuff like this from the interviewer is like a fucking punch in the gut:

When we were hiking at the glacier in Seward the other day, one of the rangers who works for the park said that more and more people are making pilgrimages to see the glacier before it vanishes. Some people even kiss it goodbye.

Possible AMOC collapse, noted by RM Fanney last month, has now been reported on by the Washington Post.

"A review of Snyder's Black Earth lead me to listen to his prior Bloodlands this week. Harrowing, and goes a long way to explaining why Belarus and Ukraine are fucked up to this day"

Going off-topic here. Snyder's description of the Babi Yar massacre in Bloodlands is the most harrowing thing I have ever read. I listened to the audio-book after reading it and found that section even worse in audio form for some reason. I have not read Black Earth yet but think it is very important that book's like Bloodlands exist for future reference.

ignore my apostrophe butchering ilx people

re that Post article

"the researchers suggested that this source of freshwater is the melting of Greenland, which is now losing more than a hundred billion tons of ice each year."

fuuuuuuuuucck

The GRACE satelites indicate its 367 Gt/year from 2002-12. A cube a bit more than 7 km on a side.

Mind, the island has 2,850,000 km3 of ice, so its ~7000 years of melt at the current rate, somewhere around 1000 if we stop at 4º C.

So the ocean currents might only be disrupted for a millennium, then... well, okay, no messages in a bottle for this old sailor.

RUSH LIMBAUGH: There's so much fraud. Snerdly came in today 'what's this NASA news, this NASA news is all exciting.' I said yeah they found flowing water up there. 'No kidding! Wow! Wow!' Snerdly said 'flowing water!?' I said 'why does that excited you? What, are you going there next week? What's the big deal about flowing water on Mars?' 'I don't know man but it's just it's just wow!' I said 'you know what, when they start selling iPhones on Mars, that's when it'll matter to me.' I said 'what do you think they're gonna do with this news?' I said 'look at the temperature data, that has been reported by NASA, has been made up, it's fraudulent for however many years, there isn't any warming, there hasn't been for 18.5 years. And yet, they're lying about it. They're just making up the amount of ice in the North and South Poles, they're making up the temperatures, they're lying and making up false charts and so forth. So what's to stop them from making up something that happened on Mars that will help advance their left-wing agenda on this planet?' And Snerdly paused 'oh oh yeah you're right.' You know, when I play golf with excellent golfers, I ask them 'does it ever get boring playing well? Does it ever get boring hitting shot after shot where you want to hit it?' And they all look at me and smile and say 'never.' Well folks, it never gets boring being right either. Like I am. But it doesn't mean it is any less frustrating. Being right and being alone is a challenging existence. OK so there's flowing water on Mars. Yip yip yip yahoo. You know me, I'm science 101, big time guy, tech advance it, you know it, I'm all in. But, NASA has been corrupted by the current regime. I want to find out what they're going to tell us. OK, flowing water on Mars. If we're even to believe that, what are they going to tell us that means? That's what I'm going to wait for. Because I guarantee, let's just wait and see, this is September 28, let's just wait and see. Don't know how long it's going to take, but this news that there is flowing water on Mars is somehow going to find its way into a technique to advance the leftist agenda. I don't know what it is, I would assume it would be something to do with global warming and you can -- maybe there was once an advanced civilization. If they say they found flowing water, next they're going to find a graveyard.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CQU75blWoAAgvkK.png

from here: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-01/half-of-the-world-s-coal-output-is-uneconomical-moody-s-says

@billmckibben
In 28 years of thinking about climate change, no single story has made me as angry as today's revelation about Exxon

http://graphics.latimes.com/exxon-arctic

exxon CEOs should be tried for treason to the planet IMO

RINOs think the silliest things

http://www.wral.com/choose-science-stewardship-in-understanding-climate-change/14964318/

"And oh by the way, I am not for a one-world government."

a sadly necessary point that must be made in any former climate skeptic's conversion story

Alaska mulls extra oil drilling to cope with climate change

The state is suffering significant climate impacts from rising seas forcing the relocation of remote villages.
Governor Bill Walker says that coping with these changes is hugely expensive.
He wants to "urgently" drill in the protected lands of the Arctic National Wilderness Refuge to fund them.

Hey that makes sense.

so not gonna happen

http://www.sfgate.com/news/us/article/Interior-Department-curbing-future-Arctic-6574641.php

http://www.vox.com/2015/10/19/9567863/climate-change-ambitious-cuts

The science here is pretty straightforward: if we want decent odds of avoiding more than 2°C (or 3.6°F) of global warming — which has long been the goal — then there's only so much more carbon-dioxide we can put into the atmosphere. The world's annual CO2 emissions will need to shrink to zero to stay within this "carbon budget."

In their paper, Peters and his co-authors sketch out a plausible carbon budget if we want a 66 percent chance of staying below 2°C. (Because there's some uncertainty around climate sensitivity, this is couched in terms of probabilities.) Roughly speaking, the world has just 765 gigatons of CO2 left to emit. We currently emit about 35 gigatons per year.

The authors then compared this carbon budget (the dark line) with what the United States, European Union, and China* are currently promising to do on emissions between now and 2030:

https://cdn1.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/C3aRcK7NInEfdlAra_tbOPFVuBU=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn0.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/4176176/Screen%20Shot%202015-10-19%20at%2010.46.24%20AM.png

There's a huge problem here: If the United States, EU, and China all followed through on their current emissions pledges, they'd consume practically the world's entire carbon budget by 2030 — leaving only scraps for the rest of the world (the part shaded in gray).

This thread is a really effective means of birth control.

Off-topic environmentalist question: I accidentally bought some soap that have microbeads in it -- it's safer just to throw it out than to use it, yes?

more terrifying news:

Bubble plumes off Washington, Oregon suggest warmer ocean may be releasing frozen methane

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-wzF7mLm8JIM/ViUwIAENMII/AAAAAAAAB2A/5hv5_n3CCWk/s400/McKibben_ExxonKnew_1_CRYGvCkUsAAdO-m.jpg
^
bill mckibben

http://exxonknew.tumblr.com/

Couldn't get through that whole post.

I'm having a hard time engaging with the moral panic on the #exxonknew front. Of course they knew. Every big IOC and most of big NOCs have enough PhD's on hand, and specifically geophysicists, that working through the math for elementary climate models could be done in their spare time. Arrhenius came close to modern results with pencil and paper in 1896. As for big coal, its plausible they wouldn't have staff with the requisite skills.

Corporations, by their very nature, aren't moral. They're chartered to maximise discounted present value for their shareholders. Discount the future at a high enough rate, and starvation of our great grandchildren doesn't figure at all.

This is of course a major reason why corporations should be excluded from any voice in political systems. Human lives aren't discounted as profits are, so arguably the welfare of future generations should be of paramount importance to us today. Only "persons" that have a stake in the future, including past their own deaths, should be granted free political speech.

agree w all that

i wouldn't expect anyone that is somewhat knowledgeable about climate change to experience anything approaching moral panic over it because no, it's not surprising in the least.

i think that the exxon knews might be more interesting to people who need to put a human face on the entire "controversy". there are a lot of people who just zone out at the mention of ppm, CO2, charts, graphs, science, statistics, etc etc. i think some people need to be able to identify a Villain. Exxon and frenz were already the Villains in this story, but that might not have been as obvious to some people when their misdeeds were described in terms of their products contributing X% of global emissions over Y% of time, leading to a Z% chance of exceeding a certain temperature decades in the future. Putting it in the context of human beings who knew about something and then consciously lied about it to maximize profit might be more persuasive to some people.

(there may also be a small subset of people who bought into anti-climate change propaganda who would feel a bit betrayed, though that's doubtful because i doubt those same people would make the connection to exxon et al's role in funding/promoting disinformation.)

the biggest impact might come from litigation? putting exxon in a phillip-morris-esque position? i dunno. i mean, it's almost certain that absolutely nothing will come of the #exxonknew effort - interest in it, anecdotally, seems to be just about zero. but in the end it's an attempt to open up another front in a much larger war.

any outrage is good outrage, really

i know no one cares but sanders is asking the attorney general to look into it

http://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/sanders-calls-for-probe-into-exxon-mobil-claims-on-climate-change

I am writing concerning a potential instance of corporate fraud – behavior that may ultimately qualify as a violation of federal law. I respectfully request the Department investigate these allegations, and take appropriate action if the investigation yields evidence of wrongdoing.

...These reports, if true, raise serious allegations of a misinformation campaign that may have caused public harm similar to the tobacco industry’s actions – conduct that led to federal racketeering convictions. Based on available public information, it appears that Exxon knew its product was causing harm to the public, and spent millions of dollars to obfuscate the facts in the public discourse. The information that has come to light about Exxon’s past activities raises potentially serious concerns that should be investigated.

Bubble plumes off Washington, Oregon suggest warmer ocean may be releasing frozen methane

― sleeve, Monday, October 19, 2015 7:14 PM (1 week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

suddenly glad i have a lot of canned goods

a fun glimpse into the future

Climate Change Is Expected To Turn The Persian Gulf Into an Intolerable Kiln Where People Can't Go Outside

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/10/27/world/greenland-is-melting-away.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=photo-spot-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

read a sci-fi book recently where siberia was the big rich power in the world because it was the world's breadbasket. makes sense. might start seeing mass migration to greenland. when it's greener...

https://theconversation.com/its-been-australias-hottest-ever-october-and-thats-no-coincidence-49941

http://cdn1.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/aLsovV69NYR5fp3hspIgKeTy6ck=/1600x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn0.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/4213871/borneo_amo_2015292.jpg

On at least 38 days in September and October, Indonesia's fires were spewing more daily CO2 than the entire United States economy.

One of the worst eco-disasters on the planet is currently unfolding in Indonesia. Over the past two months, thousands of forest and peatland fires have been raging out of control, choking the entire region with thick, toxic haze.

The massive smoke columns can be seen from space. NASA snapped this satellite pic of Borneo peat fires on October 19:

The fires have been a public health nightmare, forcing widespread evacuations, killing at least 19, and triggering respiratory illnesses in more than half a million people. The haze has stretched as far as Malaysia and Singapore.

It's also a climate-change disaster. So far this year, Indonesia's fires have released more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than all the fossil fuels burned annually in Germany. On at least 38 days in September and October, Indonesia's fires were spewing more daily CO2 than the entire United States economy.

Follow-ups here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/31/world/asia/indonesia-forest-fires-wildlife.html
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/oct/30/indonesia-fires-disaster-21st-century-world-media
http://www.news.com.au/technology/environment/nasa-warns-of-worst-ever-forest-fires-environmental-disaster-as-smoke-blankets-six-countries/story-e6frflp0-1227585225331

http://act.350.org/sign/exxon_DOJ/?akid=8314.808566.r1xGN2&rd=1&t=1

^petition for DOJ to investigate

just an isolated incident, folks. nothing to see here

http://www.emirates247.com/news/emirates/cyclone-chapala-live-3-killed-on-yemen-s-socotra-mukalla-set-for-hit-video-2015-11-02-1.608666