Global Warming's Terrifying New Math

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.

spice must flow

don't panic...

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/03/health/zika-sex-transmission-texas.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

We now have a rolling thread for pandemic disease. Just one thread to discuss looming threats was triggering my claustrophobia.

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-35492273

When climate scientists pound on tables:
Consequences of twenty-first-century policy for multi-millennial climate and sea-level change

long-term perspective illustrates that policy decisions made in the next few years to decades will have profound impacts on global climate, ecosystems and human societies — not just for this century, but for the next ten millennia and beyond.

just in case someone has this thread bookmarked and not the supreme court one:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/10/us/politics/supreme-court-blocks-obama-epa-coal-emissions-regulations.html

a shitty day for the world

In a second filing seeking a stay, coal companies and trade associations represented by Laurence H. Tribe, a law professor at Harvard, said the court should act to stop a “targeted attack on the coal industry” that will “artificially eliminate buyers of coal, forcing the coal industry to curtail production, idle operations, lay off workers and close mines.”

asshole. if even a portion of the environmental/health costs of coal were reflected in its cost, the mines would have been closed years ago.

December was a record month at 1.11° C. January is another record at 1.13° C.

Watch The 1958 Frank Capra Film That Warns Of Global Warming

^ I saw that film in elementary school many times. It was a favorite and I was one of the students in charge of taking projection equipment to classrooms and showing the films. The global warming mention is fairly brief, not emphasized, and is easy to miss or be quickly forgotten.

Seas Are Rising at Fastest Rate in Last 28 Centuries
By JUSTIN GILLIS FEB. 22, 2016

The oceans are rising faster than at any point in the last 28 centuries, and human emissions of greenhouse gases are primarily responsible, scientists reported Monday.

They added that the flooding that is starting to make life miserable in many coastal towns — like Miami Beach; Norfolk, Va.; and Charleston, S.C. — was largely a consequence of those emissions, and that it is likely to grow worse in coming years.

The scientists confirmed previous estimates, but with a larger data set, that if global emissions continue at a high rate over the next few decades, the ocean could rise as much as three or four feet by 2100, as ocean water expands and the great ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica begin to collapse.

Experts say the situation will grow far worse in the 22nd century and beyond, likely requiring the abandonment of many of the world’s coastal cities.

“I think we can definitely be confident that sea-level rise is going to continue to accelerate if there’s further warming, which inevitably there will be,” said Stefan Rahmstorf, a professor of ocean physics at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany and co-author of a paper released Monday by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences....

The upper estimate of three to four feet of sea-level rise in the 21st century rules out any large contribution from Antarctica in the near term, but that finding is tentative, given that the ice covering the western part of that continent is already showing signs of instability. And recent studies suggest that the destruction of large parts of the Antarctic ice sheet may have become inevitable, even though that could take hundreds or thousands of years to play out.

“Sea level is going to continue going up for many centuries,” Dr. Rahmstorf said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/23/science/sea-level-rise-global-warming-climate-change.html

coal industry death: https://t.co/xNZdC8IlmJ

Our Hemisphere’s Temperature Just Reached a Terrifying Milestone

As of Thursday morning, it appears that average temperatures across the Northern Hemisphere have breached the 2 degrees Celsius above “normal” mark for the first time in recorded history, and likely the first time since human civilization began thousands of years ago.

Using unofficial data and adjusting for different base-line temperatures, it appears that February 2016 was likely somewhere between 1.15 and 1.4 degrees warmer than the long-term average, and about 0.2 degrees above last month—good enough for the most above-average month ever measured. (Since the globe had already warmed by about +0.45 degrees above pre-industrial levels during the 1981-2010 base-line meteorologists commonly use, that amount has been added to the data released today.)

Keep in mind that it took from the dawn of the industrial age until last October to reach the first 1.0 degree Celsius, and we’ve come as much as an extra 0.4 degrees further in just the last five months. Even accounting for the margin of error associated with these preliminary datasets, that means it’s virtually certain that February handily beat the record set just last month for the most anomalously warm month ever recorded. That’s stunning.

somehow, though, this is even more surprising:

The data for February is so overwhelming that even prominent climate change skeptics have already embraced the new record. Writing on his blog, former NASA scientist Roy Spencer said that according to satellite records—the dataset of choice by climate skeptics for a variety of reasons—February 2016 featured “whopping” temperature anomalies especially in the Arctic. Spurred by disbelief, Spencer also checked his data with others released today and said the overlap is “about as good as it gets.” Speaking with the Washington Post, Spencer said the February data proves “there has been warming. The question is how much warming there’s been.”

Roy Spencer is the "official climatologist of the Rush Limbaugh show", and is infamous for pushing the claim that temperatures have been declining over the last 20 years, in the face of all evidence. i thought it would feel really good when people like that could no longer ignore the truth, but instead it's just even more depressing, somehow

another incredibly depressing paragraph:

Almost overnight, the world has moved within arm’s reach of the climate goals negotiated just last December in Paris. There, small island nations on the front line of climate change set a temperature target of no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius rise by the year 2100 as a line in the sand, and that limit was embraced by the global community of nations. On this pace, we may reach that level for the first time—though briefly—later this year. In fact, at the daily level, we’re probably already there. We could now be right in the heart of a decade or more surge in global warming that could kick off a series of tipping points with far-reaching implications on our species and the countless others we share the planet with.

well fuckity fuck, that's awful

On the other hand, https://newmatilda.com/2016/03/03/gas-baron-killed-in-exploding-car-after-coming-under-fire-from-us-authorities/