Global Warming's Terrifying New Math

recommended reading, especially if you don't much about solar power, CSP vs PV, capacity factors, price volatility, etc:

http://www.vox.com/2016/3/10/11192022/big-solar-boom-times

it's by david roberts (formerly Grist), who is a good fit for Vox because he's able to take complicated subjects and boil them down to the essentials.

cool, thanks

CSP is pretty much dead IMO

I remember 10 years ago people said this would never happen. so there.

There are [resource issues](http://www.nrel.gov/analysis/pdfs/article_teln_ga_ieee_pv.pdf) with current PV technologies, so I think CSP, particularly using sodium or another high BP metal as the working fluid with heat-storage for off-peak produciton, still has a big place in the mix.

i noticed that solar power is becoming popular in my hometown, all of the giant houses in my old neighborhood (that they clearcut the forest behind my parents' house to build) are covered in solar panels now

i assume similar things are going on all over the 'burbs

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cdh4QfYUIAAQMlb.jpg

Antarctica’s ice is being carved up from below

For those who remember the simulation game Fate of the World from 2011, evidently its on Steam, bugs have been patched, and its somewhat playable. There was a pretty good discussion on Reddit:

Simulating Collapse in Fate of the World

• You're a skilled player if you can stay beneath 2.5 degree Celsius without triggering a complete collapse of global civilization, complete with nuclear warfare and billions of deaths.
• China's development has to be restrained, while India's development has to be sabotaged if anything.
• It's practically impossible to survive without provoking an (economic) collapse. The trick here is to engineer an artificial collapse, without letting the collapse run out of control.
You need to buy yourself time, before your new technologies are ready that are supposed to solve your problems.
• It can ironically be best to keep people rather right-wing and chauvinistic. Green politics cause people to reject geoengineering, which means that you have no way to stop the positive feedback loops of Arctic methane and forest fires that cause temperatures to further spiral out of control. It's also an advantage to have a xenophobic population that wants refugees to be shot on sight when trying to cross the border. Refugees after all, are not productive members of society until they are integrated into society.
• You can't really survive the 22nd century without science-fiction technologies. You can use geo-engineering to keep temperatures low, but eventually your intervention in the atmosphere becomes so large that you get big droughts and other problems. It's possible to nearly completely decarbonize Western economies, but it takes time and money to introduce such technologies in third world countries, which will emit carbon in the meantime. It might be possible to get emissions down by 80%, but that merely buys you some time, eventually you run into the same problems that you would run into otherwise.
• Players of the game were upset, because it's not really easy to win and you generally have billions of deaths, even if you do quite well. What did they do? They made a mod that removes the worst positive feedback effects of climate change!

Billions of deaths sounds grimly realistic.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2016/03/22/james_hansen_sea_level_rise_climate_warning_passes_peer_review.html

so what else about the latest Hansen estimates?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ann-reid/james-hansen-talks-climat_b_9557920.html

Did anyone post about the extensive bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef?

For half a century, climate scientists have seen the West Antarctic ice sheet, a remnant of the last ice age, as a sword of Damocles hanging over human civilization.

The great ice sheet, larger than Mexico, is thought to be potentially vulnerable to disintegration from a relatively small amount of global warming, and capable of raising the sea level by 12 feet or more should it break up. But researchers long assumed the worst effects would take hundreds — if not thousands — of years to occur.

Now, new research suggests the disaster scenario could play out much sooner.

Continued high emissions of heat-trapping gases could launch a disintegration of the ice sheet within decades, according to a study published Wednesday, heaving enough water into the ocean to raise the sea level as much as three feet by the end of this century.

With ice melting in other regions, too, the total rise of the sea could reach five or six feet by 2100, the researchers found. That is roughly twice the increase reported as a plausible worst-case scenario by a United Nations panel just three years ago, and so high it would likely provoke a profound crisis within the lifetimes of children being born today.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/31/science/global-warming-antarctica-ice-sheet-sea-level-rise.html

the worst case scenario keeps getting worse

if i were canada, i would build a border wall to keep us out

well good, it might act as a dam for about 3 days

http://nautil.us/issue/33/attraction/why-our-intuition-about-sea_level-rise-is-wrong

This Harvard geophysicist has some interesting theories on how the gravitational distribution of melting glaciers and ice sheets from Greenland could actually raise the sea level by 30% in the southern hemisphere, whilst at least in the short term, local sea levels could actually drop.

oh christ i can just hear james inhofe alrady

You probably need to actually read it properly then.

This century, any gravitational effects from the Greenland melt will be swamped by the melt's effects in slowing thermohaline circulation. The Gulf Stream appears to be slowing down long before its usual spots nearer Iceland, so aside from a cooler Arctic Atlantic and worse storms for Europe, the stalled stream also deposits is heat in the mid-American coast, raising local sea levels by thermal expansion.

https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/service/global/map-percentile-mntp/201501-201512.gif

xp
oops, possibly misunderstood your comment there. I thought you meant Mitrovica was sounding like him.

i think the jim inhofe reference is that in such a crazy situation (where sea levels are 30% higher in the southern hemisphere and dropping in the north), inhofe could be expected to be like "derp derp hey climate change is a hoax, sea levels are falling off the gulf coast, derp derp derp!"

btw if i read the interview correctly, the temporary 30% rise in the southern hemisphere is a thought experiment based on the greenland ice sheet suddenly collapsing overnight - not something that anyone thinks is going to happen. Richard Alley thinks it will be centuries. not that it isn't a concern and not that it doesn't obviously contribute to sea level rise, but the sudden collapse thing isn't a thing.

Sorry Your Fav..., Britisher misunderstanding there and no offence intended.

I absolutely love Nautilus, but I always get this feeling that it is way too stylish and fun to be true science.

http://gizmodo.com/we-finally-know-why-the-north-pole-is-moving-east-1769588584

what does this increased speed in positional shift affect?

The most sophisticated model to date:

DeConto RM and Pollard D, 2016. Contribution of Antarctica to past and future sea-level rise. Nature, 531(7596), pp.591-597.

Polar temperatures over the last several million years have, at times, been slightly warmer than today, yet global mean sea level has been 6–9 metres higher as recently as the Last Interglacial (130,000 to 115,000 years ago) and possibly higher during the Pliocene epoch (about three million years ago). In both cases the Antarctic ice sheet has been implicated as the primary contributor, hinting at its future vulnerability. Here we use a model coupling ice sheet and climate dynamics—including previously underappreciated processes linking atmospheric warming with hydrofracturing of buttressing ice shelves and structural collapse of marine-terminating ice cliffs—that is calibrated against Pliocene and Last Interglacial sea-level estimates and applied to future greenhouse gas emission scenarios. Antarctica has the potential to contribute more than a metre of sea-level rise by 2100 and more than 15 metres by 2500, if emissions continue unabated. In this case atmospheric warming will soon become the dominant driver of ice loss, but prolonged ocean warming will delay its recovery for thousands of years.

Alas, 15 m isn't an option at geology.com's Global Sea Level Rise Map, but that total ~20 m rise (incl contributions from Greenland and thermal expansion) puts my current position as 30 miles from the nearest dry land in the year 2525.

I think my good friend in Houston is finally giving up and moving. This current flood is just the final straw, because even when it's dry ... it's still Houston.

Any ILXors down there?

Sanpaku iirc! And a couple others I can't recall off the top

Looking at Sanpaku's graphic from 2 weeks ago, I think the record coldest area just off the southern tip of Greenland worries me even more than the record warmest ones.

http://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/northwestern-us-80-degree-record-warmth-to-spread-from-san-francisco-seattle-portland/56741765?utm_source=fark&utm_medium=website&utm_content=link

I haven't lived in Houston for 5 years. I'm in a New Orleans suburb.

xp. it's july warm in vancouver, bc, has been for a few days. records broken throughout the province for april, as they were at the end of march when we had a hot spell. forest fires have started in northern b.c. and alberta.

really starting to feel like the beginning of the end huh

Welcome to the New Era. Let's hope it doesn't accelerate any faster than it already has, because (to use a phrase) the changes to come over the next decade or more are already baked in to the system and nothing we do today can avoid them now.

i am currently in houston (though leaving in a week--hooray). but i also grew up here and this kind of flooding has been happening here pretty much since forever. it's a poorly placed city, global warming or not.

Like most heavy industry cities, Houston location amidst the poorly draining bayous and mosquitos between the Trinity and Brazos is an artifact of resource distribution. Houston is a perfectly placed port for exporting the oil found around Kilgore in 1930, and the subsequent infrastructure investment in pipeline hubs, refineries and chemical plants isn't going to move. The wealthy all live on the better drained west side, far from the sources of Houston's early wealth.

> really starting to feel like the beginning of the end

The human mind is as ill-made to comprehend multigenerational threats. 2015-16 is an outlier in a long-standing trend and like the past very strong El Niño in 1997-98, it will probably be used by deniers to persuade themselves of a pause in warming for another decade. There seem more then enough voters whose concerns don't extend beyond proximate threats like jobs, immigration, abortion or terrorism to ensure we collectively fiddle about the edges of the problem for decades to come.

The rest of the biosphere is surely rooting for antibiotic resistant pandemics.

NPR podcast ep about just this thing:

http://www.npr.org/2016/04/18/474685770/why-our-brains-werent-made-to-deal-with-climate-change

Still think Jared Diamond's Easter Island essay has the most evocative verbiage on this (even if the rats carried to Rapa Nui were the major culprits).

As we try to imagine the decline of Easter’s civilization, we ask ourselves, Why didn’t they look around, realize what they were doing, and stop before it was too late? What were they thinking when they cut down the last palm tree?

I suspect, though, that the disaster happened not with a bang but with a whimper. After all, there are those hundreds of abandoned statues to consider. The forest the islanders depended on for rollers and rope didn’t simply disappear one day--it vanished slowly, over decades. Perhaps war interrupted the moving teams; perhaps by the time the carvers had finished their work, the last rope snapped. In the meantime, any islander who tried to warn about the dangers of progressive deforestation would have been overridden by vested interests of carvers, bureaucrats, and chiefs, whose jobs depended on continued deforestation. Our Pacific Northwest loggers are only the latest in a long line of loggers to cry, Jobs over trees! The changes in forest cover from year to year would have been hard to detect: yes, this year we cleared those woods over there, but trees are starting to grow back again on this abandoned garden site here. Only older people, recollecting their childhoods decades earlier, could have recognized a difference.

Gradually trees became fewer, smaller, and less important. By the time the last fruit-bearing adult palm tree was cut, palms had long since ceased to be of economic significance. That left only smaller and smaller palm saplings to clear each year, along with other bushes and treelets. No one would have noticed the felling of the last small palm.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-04-20/great-barrier-reef-bleaching/7340342

"Aerial and underwater surveys of the Great Barrier Reef have revealed 93 per cent of it has been bleached to some extent."

(not sure if you were being tongue in cheek there Sanpaku, the rats link doesn't really support the claim)

decimation by an introduced species would still be an anthrogenic (albeit arguably by proxy) cause. either way it's best to be very skeptical of jared diamond.

xp: That should have read, "prove to be the major culprits". Rapa Nui's collapse has received a lot of attention, the most recent paper argues deforestation, introduced rats, and European diseases all played a role.

hoooooooraaaaaaaay!!!!

The Senate on Wednesday passed the first broad energy bill since the George W. Bush administration, a bipartisan measure to better align the nation’s oil, gas and electricity systems with the changing ways that power is produced in the United States.

The bill, approved 85 to 12, united Republicans and Democrats around a traditionally divisive issue — energy policy — largely by avoiding the hot-button topics of climate change and oil and gas exploration that have thwarted other measures.

Its authors, Senators Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, chairwoman of the Senate Energy Committee, and Maria Cantwell of Washington, the panel’s ranking Democrat, purposely stepped away from any sweeping efforts to solve or fundamentally change the nation’s core energy challenges.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/21/us/politics/senate-passes-broad-bill-to-modernize-energy-infrastructure.html

"This is a great day in the Senate," Sen. Murkowski said, "This energy bill proves that if we avoid doing anything hard or important, we can accomplish a few easy things that hardly matter!"

hope the more and more ladies enter congress, the less and less crazy shit gets

this is a stupid bill

I mean it's not all bad but the bad things in it are p boneheaded

hoooooooraaaaaaaay!!!!

Australia’s National Coral Bleaching Task Force has surveyed 911 coral reefs by air, and found at least some bleaching on 93 percent of them. The amount of damage varies from severe to light, but the bleaching was the worst in the reef’s remote northern sector — where virtually no reefs escaped it.

“Between 60 and 100 percent of corals are severely bleached on 316 reefs, nearly all in the northern half of the Reef,” Prof. Terry Hughes, head of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University, said in a statement to the news media. He led the research.

Severe bleaching means that corals could die, depending on how long they are subject to these conditions. The scientists also reported that based on diving surveys of the northern reef, they already are seeing nearly 50 percent coral death.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2016/04/20/and-then-we-wept-scientists-say-93-percent-of-the-great-barrier-reef-now-bleached/

Did we talk about the Earth's tilt being changed? http://mic.com/articles/140605/the-earth-s-axis-is-tilting-thanks-to-climate-change-nasa-scientists-say?utm_source=policymicTBLR&utm_medium=style&utm_campaign=social#.sTvgxhrc7

yep i think we did a little bit upthread. pretty weird