Global Warming's Terrifying New Math

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...

A lot easier to get out of an underwater city, or over to another one, than underground?

Also of course

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybSzoLCCX-Y

Even in "worst case" global warming scenarios, the entire surface doesn't become uninhabitable.

Climates and associated biomes just move hundreds of miles polewards. Coastal cities flood. Parts of continental interiors (and around inlets like the Persian Gulf) become lethal for parts of the year without climate control. Much of current grainbelts becomes non-arable brushland. Important food staples fail to germinate during the worst parts of the year. These happen to coincide with resource shortages in non-renewable energy, some metals, and phosphate fertilizer. Feeding 7-9 billion, certainly at developed nation standards, becomes impossible. Climate migrants throng borders, until better off countries begin defending their own resources and standards of living with lethal force. Debt-based monetary systems undergo perpetual deflationary spirals, until the helicopter drops of money to consumers begin, when the inflationary blow offs occur. Living becomes much more expensive in real labor terms in the developed North, but its still breezy compared to the developing world, there's an endless succession of civil wars and warlords. Pandemics will thrive in times of malnutrition, displaced populations, and physically threatened heathcare services. Basically, all of today's trends, extrapolated.

But there will still be civilization. For example, much of the Mackenzie River valley could be arable, given a solstice to solstice growing season. Greenland will become green, and there's probably nice alluvium ground under that cap. It just won't support as many in the comfort our golden era became accustomed to.

Living underground generally isn't an option in most parts of the world. Yes, climate control is easier, but the water table is too high (and rising) in much and all the renewables save geothermal are at the surface. Plus, wouldn't you rather pour burning pitch on the rabble, rather than be gassed out through your ventilation shafts?

solid pvmic, enjoyed that sanpaku. i do wonder how 'breezy' developed world is in this scenario, since almost everything they currently consume comes from the rest of the world, through resource and labor chains that will surely be badly disrupted if not completely shattered by the surrounding events described. start weaning yourself from coffee and tea now, i say. also almost everything else.

i wonder how my Big Pharma meds deliveries will be affected?

i am seriously grateful i will not be living to be very old

During the Cold War, Switzerland built enough underground shelter for the whole population. http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/bunkers-for-all/995134 Not sure how long-term liveable it really is, though.

Perhaps a Swiss ILXer will let us know whether they're required to keep massive water stores and rotate emergency food in the residential shelters.

Water is the real difficulty for most emergency accommodations. Something like a minimum of 1 gallon/person/day (not including cooking or bathing), so hanging out 2 weeks awaiting some dissipation of short-lived isotopes from upwind ground blasts would take 2-3 55 gallon (200 L) drums for a family. Perhaps real reason fallout shelters fell out of favor in the U.S. wasn't so much the end of the Cold War, but a dawning realizaion of the futility of civil defence, when any large exchange would be followed my months to years of [nuclear winter](https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B-2XWDkPfB2OQ2VocENya2Jrb1E&usp=sharing). Not even the top secret U.S. government bunkers stocked up to survive that. Those that didn't perish would starve. Maybe observant Mormons with their emergency food pantrys would have another year, before starving (unless, of course, they proselytized to their better armed neighbors).

I am reminded of passages from this book, by a dude a lot of folks roll their eyes at:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_Emergency

I quite enjoy his fiction

I used to be really into Kunstler, at like age 18 or 19? And then I gradually realized he was actually just a garden variety old-man-yells-at-cloud crackpot who'd aligned himself with a movement (New Urbanism) that would ultimately be a much bigger deal (for better or worse) and didn't really need him. His future world is your classic apocalypse written backwards from the way he wants things to be anyway: no cars, no contemporary architecture, no teenagers with their hip-hop music. The one thing I've never shaken from that period is my belief that Peak Oil is just around the corner and will be the unexpected doom of us and the way of life that supports sitting around digesting veggie Thai delivery and posting on ILX.

Yes I wasn't 19 at the time but the whole peak oil armageddon fantasy did hold a strong allure circa 1995. In fact an argument could be made that an oil price shock contributed significantly to both the 2008 financial meltdown, and the Arab Spring (oil price surge led to food shortages in some areas). I've stopped following sites like the Oil Drum, but it seemed like the general consensus by 2010 was that we weren't headed to peak oil but rather plateau oil, with production leveling off close to where we're at now.

I had a similar realization about Kunstler, particularly after reading some of his particularly vindictive rants against the entire southern region of the USA. I mean yeah conservatives do suck in many ways, I won't deny it, but it's a little much to blame the entirety of the nation's woes on that one region.

Sanpaku I appreciate you sharing what seems like a pretty highly informed perspective here. Personally I'm not quite as attached to the attitude that everything is inevitably fucked as I used to be. Seemed like from 2007-2012 we were hitting a lot of milestones in climate change and it hasn't been quite as bad for the past few years. Not that things are getting better by any means by from my POV they're not getting worse quite as fast as I anticipated. Regardless, the fact is that any prediction has some element of uncertainty to it. No one knows exactly what's going to happen in 50 or 100 years. Of course that's absolutely no excuse for inaction. Just saying that in our best case scenarios they may still be some glimmer of hope for avoiding total catastrophe.

*2005, not 1995. How old am I? *counts fingers*

Have you read much of the rest of the thread, viborg?

OT: Peak conventional oil actually occurred in Spring 2005. Surpluses since then have been from unconventional shale oil (fracked at $5+ M / well), and gas condensate. The main reason WTI has dipped as low as $26 is the China bust and continuing global deflation. It won't last, all the marginal oil costs $60+/bbl and most of the marginal players are going belly up. The investment banks, which carefully structured loans and kept just the senior debt, will own mineral rights for lots of N. Dakota and S. Texas to the tears of equity and junk bond holders.

anyone know when there will be so little oil left that we don't have to go to work anymore?

xpost

Yes I've read most of the rest of the thread sporadically but I may have missed part of it. Anything specific I should go back to?

Basically, we're all fucked

Yeah like I said that's kind of arguable.

I hope you're right, I deeply fear and suspect you're wrong

it hasn't been quite as bad for the past few years.

please cite your evidence to support this claim

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

http://lh4.ggpht.com/-R9cyI5k_IB0/VMpIx1y-hAI/AAAAAAAAahg/7ZiGRx2kzRM/image%25255B5%25255D.png?imgmax=800

xp at this point the area under the 2016 peak is about as large as the area of the 2011 trough - overall the linear fit seems to work OK.

actual question: do you think people - what's left of them - will just end up living underground?

There's always this study:

http://assets.inhabitat.com/files/dunecity.jpg

Sietch Nevada: Desert Oasis for a Drought-Stricken Future
http://inhabitat.com/sietch-nevada-desert-oasis-for-a-drought-stricken-future/

Sietch Nevada is a futuristic concept city that envisions a dystopian water-hoarding society where drought is a constant state and wars are fought over water. Designed by Matsys Designs, the underground city is situated within a network of tunnels and caverns that offer protection and water storage, creating an oasis in the desert. The dense underground community includes a network of waterways and canals enclosed by residential and commercial cavern structures that form an underground Venice so to speak.

Carbon emissions from tunneling all that might be untenable though.