Global Warming's Terrifying New Math

I'd just like to congratulate all who pushed the Woodland, NC story from the Roanoke Chowan News Herald to international papers of record since 8 Dec. While it would be nice to believe Bobby Mann's comment harmed investment in Woodland more than he can imagine, Perdue Agribusiness, the poultry processor and major employer in town, probably doesn't give a damn.

On the other hand, I imagine this zoning hearing topping all Google results for the town for the forseeable future will deter other local governments from thinking zoning against solar has no repercussions.

chait likes

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/12/climate-deal-is-obamas-biggest-accomplishment.html#

https://twitter.com/NRO/status/676516015078039556

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CWN3D6nWUAUmQWW.png

i think someone needs to shake their thermometer

Perfectly accurate graph showing an approximately 2-degree increase in global temperature.

if you zoom out enough, nothing actually exists!

you know, my eyes can't zoom like that

see the longview = no problem

If the earth is supposedly round, why is the horizon flat? Answer that, smart guy!

Early this year my allergy got 20 times worse. As the year went on I suspected it might be climate change but I just searched today and there are loads of articles about it. Not only symptoms getting worse but also more people developing them. One of the most worrying things was hearing about people who could previously cope with the help of medicine are now completely miserable no matter what they take.

Why Are Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) Studies Reaching Different Temperature Estimates?
http://www.wri.org/sites/default/files/uploads/INDC-Temp-Analysis.png

so the US is gonna export oil for the first time in 40 years?! really green, eh?

tradeoff for extension of ITC for wind and solar... not sure if that's a good thing, bad thing, or a wash as far as carbon goes.

Its a political victory for upstream E&Ps over refiners. The U.S. has long been a net exporter of refined products.

I'm not a believer in the shale oil "revolution". The decline rates are so high that Williston, ND will be a ghost town in a decade.

afaics, allowing the export of US oil is insider baseball. it won't change the overall global usage of oil, only how the profits are distributed.

probably nothing new here but

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/12/21/the-siege-of-miami

nice double take on the North Carolina town that was scared of solar:

http://www.vox.com/2015/12/18/10519644/north-carolina-solar-town?utm_campaign=vox&utm_content=article%3Afixed&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook

now I feel just a little bit bad for pointing and laughing. just a little.

if the OG article had focused on the total lack of benefit to the tax base, that would have been a more accurate and less sensational story.

probably nothing new here but

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/12/21/the-siege-of-miami

― Crazy Eddie & Jesus the Kid (Raymond Cummings)

anyone wanna pick me up?

so can we say since there's no snow coming anytime soon in vast expanses of the country that normally get it . . . that the oil companies and other carbon polluters are waging war on christmas? get on it, FOX NEWS!

that miami piece was excellent... thank you.

yesterday it was in the mid 70s

today a tornado passed w/in five miles of my parents house

tomorrow we get hit by a winter storm with snow expected

merry xmas

just an isolated incident

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2015/12/28/freak-storm-in-north-atlantic-may-push-temperatures-70-degrees-above-normal-at-north-pole/

they updated the post so that it's "only" 50 degrees above normal, but yikes.

re: the New Yorker's piece on Miami, a couple years back my girlfriend and I recorded a series of future dystopic advertising jingles, one of which (https://soundcloud.com/kyle-herbert/new-atlantis) was for an aquatic amusement park named "New Atlantis" built over the ruins of a submerged Miami. Frightening to see that it's getting more and more plausible.

Up up up.

http://ds.data.jma.go.jp/tcc/tcc/products/gwp/temp/fig/dec_wld.png

http://www.aviso.altimetry.fr/fileadmin/images/data/Products/indic/msl/MSL_Serie_MERGED_Global_IB_RWT_GIA_Adjust.png

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/21/science/earth/2015-hottest-year-global-warming.html

yeah, but it was really hot in 1997 so that means it hasn't gotten much hotter, also in the 1970s some people talked about global cooling, and have you heard about this epic snowstorm due this weekend, we could use some global warming around here am i right

just to recap

Don't forget that it gets pretty cold every night in some places.

Most of the jump in 2015 was El Nino effects, but a lot is probably from China emitting fewer coal combustion aerosols as its economy stagnates. IIRC, about 0.5 C of warming has been masked by global dimming. Here's to a shitty 2016 global economy, more sunlight at sea level, and a top-3 year in 2016.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/22/us/politics/court-rejects-bid-to-delay-obama-rule-on-climate-change.html?_r=0

Not sure what thread this should go in, but in the end it may deserve its own. The Zika outbreak is pretty scary and astounding. Is there a precedent for entire countries warning their citizens to put off getting pregnant for a few years? Pretty serious stuff forcing lots of decisions, big and small. For example, we know someone who was supposed to go on vacation to a country dealing with Zika. She's pregnant and is not sure if she should cancel and eat the cost. That's a small decision. But my wife knows someone who works in a local hospital who just saw her third case of Zika, a woman back from visiting family in Colombia. The woman is pregnant, but it's too early to tell if the baby has microcephaly or micro calcifications, yet she's going to have to make a decision about keeping the baby or not. That's huge and heartbreaking.

I suppose it's only tangentially related to climate, but still.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/25/zika-virus-brazil-dystopian-climate-future

Given that it spread eastward across the Pacific during an El Nino, climate may have played a role. I can only imagine the panic when it gets to Florida and the swamps I live in. They'll be calling for DDT.

Global Aedes aegypti distribution
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/73/Global_Aedes_aegypti_distribution.gif

mckibben:

And now think about the larger, less intimate consequences: this is one more step in the division of the world into relative safe and dangerous zones, an emerging epidemiological apartheid. The CDC has already told those Americans thinking of becoming pregnant to avoid travel to 20 Latin American and Caribbean nations.

Eventually, of course, the disease will reach these shores – at least 10 Americans have come back from overseas with the infection, and one microcephalic baby has already been born in Hawaii to a mother exposed in Brazil early in her pregnancy. But America is rich enough to avoid the worst of the mess its fossil fuel habits have helped create.

i've felt a bit unhinged recently (more than normal, at least), obsessing about scenarios where the gap between rich and poor reaches a snapping point in terms of what we all can handle, psychologically. it's absurd to scroll through the feed and read about latest mindblowing tech advances X Y + Z mixed in with news about an epidemic that produces shrunken infant heads and warnings to entire swaths of continents not to have babies any time soon. i know it's just a personal issue because everyone else around me seems to be able to intake all this info simultaneously without much of a problem. and i've been feeling really out of touch recently, veering toward the paranoiac deep end. a few weeks ago during the state of the union, the splitscreen propaganda on the white house/amazon feed was so overwhelming it felt like i was in the midst of a philip k dick fugue state or something, just very unreal, and it made me feel insane when i realized it wasn't really a big deal to anyone. anyway, when i've brought up the crazy tech/poverty dichotomy to friends, the thought that it's accelerating, the general response is just that the divide is nothing new. *shrug* i guess all you can do is shrug, who am i to criticize? i certainly don't have an idea of how to fix it.

anyone else feeling this way? anyone paying attention to climate change has known that things are bound to get much, much worse for many people, but for some reason the thought that tech+money will save the day for so many people who don't deserve it makes things unbearable.

Americans are generally blind to how relentlessly we have fucked over the rest of the human race since becoming an imperial power (most of them are offended enough by 'dwelling on' slavery/Native genocide); i expect that fuckage/denial will continue.

xpost Every day can be a struggle to move beyond the very things that are paralyzing you. But once I do that life seems so surreal that humor, fatalism and irony allow me to navigate tragedy OK, especially when I think about how many horrible things we've all collectively conquered. I mean, I imagine life used to be pretty terrible for everyone, everywhere, every single day, to a degree. It's a luxury but also a gift to be able to feel bad for other people, because it teaches empathy, and empathy in part I think stems largely from security. Working on even little ways to make things better for other people can go a long way toward balancing all the woes, at least on a personal/psychic level, whether that's volunteering in food pantries or even just being nice to strangers. Baby steps.

the zika virus stuff really seems like we're living through the everything-turns-to-shit montage at the start of an apocalypse movie

seems like we'll know within our lifetimes whether technology is going to outpace climate change, which is pretty intense

yup (PS: the answer is "no")

https://dge.stanford.edu/labs/caldeiralab/Caldeira_research/Caldeira_MIT.html

Already, in the middle latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere, average temperatures are increasing at a rate that is equivalent to moving south about 10 meters (30 feet) each day. This rate is about 100 times faster than most climate change that we can observe in the geologic record, and it gravely threatens biodiversity in many parts of the world

that's a really good way to describe rising temps that i hadn't heard before

in the tech vs climate change race, I'm thinking cc will totally humiliate tech

my money's on tech

if we gave it some kind of wartime effort that is

any geoengineering measures used to combat climate change would, due to their scale, be necessarily things that couldn't be tested first, and would have irrevocable and unknowable consequences.

there's a pretty terrifying chapter in "this changes everything" about it

The world's oceans absorbed approximately 150 zettajoules of energy from 1865 to 1997, and then absorbed about another 150 in the next 18 years, according to a study published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change.

Link to the AP story.

Zetta is a decimal unit prefix in the metric system denoting a factor of 10^21 or 1000000000000000000000. Link to a chart showing where zettajoules of energy fall in the order of magnitude.

god we're fucked

Send in the next horseman...

Argentina Scrambles to Fight Biggest Plague of Locusts in 60 Years
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/26/world/americas/argentina-scrambles-to-fight-biggest-plague-of-locusts-in-60-years.html

actual question: do you think people - what's left of them - will just end up living underground? go far enough and there will be plenty of water. solar up top could run generators down below. minus forty degree winters and 130+ summers could make this the smart option. always surprised more dystopian sci-fi i read doesn't have more underground cities. more often it's underwater cities. guess that makes sense too. though i'd think it would be a lot harder.

feel like there's gotta be someone out there who's already building large scale underground facilities

bill gates...

all the internet billionaires will have their own underground cities. it will be the "cool" thing to have. they will be the survivors...