Global Warming's Terrifying New Math

http://www.theworkprint.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/lexhackman.jpg

"...then step in and scoop up some real estate here."

[rubs hands together gleefully. thinks: they do not yet see my buried intent]

haha aimless

yes that has actually crossed my mind, except replace earthquake with housing bubble burst

I've found myself hoping that the housing bubble burst happens sooner than all the other potential future hellscapes.

As a guy who can't afford to buy a one bedroom in a duplex in an outer ring suburb of the city where he lives, I agree.

on your side, as a guy who can't afford to rent my current apartment

McKibben:

"The next president doesn’t have to wait for a climate equivalent of Pearl Harbor to galvanize Congress. Much of what we need to do can—and must—be accomplished immediately, through the same use of executive action that FDR relied on to lay the groundwork for a wider mobilization. The president could immediately put a halt to drilling and mining on public lands and waters, which contain at least half of all the untapped carbon left in America. She could slow the build-out of the natural gas system simply by correcting the outmoded way the EPA calculates the warming effect of methane, just as Obama reined in coal-fired power plants. She could tell her various commissioners to put a stop to the federal practice of rubber-stamping new fossil fuel projects, rejecting those that would “significantly exacerbate” global warming. She could instruct every federal agency to buy all their power from green sources and rely exclusively on plug-in cars, creating new markets overnight. She could set a price on carbon for her agencies to follow internally, even without the congressional action that probably won’t be forthcoming. And just as FDR brought in experts from the private sector to plan for the defense build-out, she could get the blueprints for a full-scale climate mobilization in place even as she rallies the political will to make them plausible. Without the same urgency and foresight displayed by FDR—without immediate executive action—we will lose this war."

https://newrepublic.com/article/135684/declare-war-climate-change-mobilize-wwii

He's right about the need, but way off on the politics. FDR had a democratic congress and an enormous reservoir of voter goodwill to draw upon. Still, his preparations for joining the war in Europe created tremendous unrest and resistance throughout the country. HRC attempting anything on the scale McKibbon suggests would end in her swift downfall.

anything else will end in our somewhat slower downfall

A politically impotent or impeached HRC won't solve our climate problems either.

http://eoimages.gsfc.nasa.gov/images/imagerecords/88000/88607/monthlyanoms_gis_201607.gif

fuck

hottest july ever in the history of forever. we did it! USA! USA! USA!

*craps jorts*

july 2016 was the hottest july month ever in the history of forever.

Ocean Slime Spreading Quickly Across the Earth

The algae bloom that blanketed the West Coast in 2015 was the most toxic one ever recorded in that region. But from the fjords of South America to the waters of the Arabian Sea, harmful blooms, perhaps accelerated by ocean warming and other shifts linked to climate change, are wreaking more havoc on ocean life and people. And many scientists project they will get worse.

"What emerged from last year's event is just how little we really know about what these things can do," says Raphael Kudela, a toxic algae expert at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

It's been understood for decades, for example, that nutrients, such as fertilizer and livestock waste that flush off farms and into the Mississippi River, can fuel harmful blooms in the ocean, driving low-oxygen dead zones like the one in the Gulf of Mexico. Such events have been on the rise around the world, as population centers boom and more nitrogen and other waste washes out to sea.

not connected to global warming per se, though, right?

people eat too much meat

Probably fertilizer.

However, I've spent way too much time studying past extinction events, which in the hothouse warming episodes are commonly marked by widespread blooms of green sulfur bacteria that occur when near surface waters become anoxic. The suggested kill mechanism is oceans burping H2S (rotten egg smell), which besides being directly lethal at 300 ppm, also destroys the ozone layer. We probably can't burn enough fossil fuels and liberate enough permafrost/peat/seabed carbon to initiate a hothouse extinction, but a warm greenhouse is possible.

Humanity’s impact on the Earth is now so profound that a new geological epoch – the Anthropocene – needs to be declared, according to an official expert group who presented the recommendation to the International Geological Congress in Cape Town on Monday.

The new epoch should begin about 1950, the experts said, and was likely to be defined by the radioactive elements dispersed across the planet by nuclear bomb tests, although an array of other signals, including plastic pollution, soot from power stations, concrete, and even the bones left by the global proliferation of the domestic chicken were now under consideration.

The current epoch, the Holocene, is the 12,000 years of stable climate since the last ice age during which all human civilisation developed. But the striking acceleration since the mid-20th century of carbon dioxide emissions and sea level rise, the global mass extinction of species, and the transformation of land by deforestation and development mark the end of that slice of geological time, the experts argue.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/aug/29/declare-anthropocene-epoch-experts-urge-geological-congress-human-impact-earth

Lexicographers should really get to work on an antonym for 'terraform' if there isn't one already.

'terrafuck'

That'll do.

https://frinkiac.com/meme/S11E13/416560.jpg?b64lines=WW91IG1lYW4gdGVycmEtICp1biogZm9ybQoKIFlFQUgsIFJJR0hULCBUSEFUJ1MgV0hBVAogSSBNRUFOVCwgTElTQS4gdGVycmEgdW4tZm9ybQ==

Something like terradirump or terraturb would keep things Latinate.

we are terrarists

Paul crutzen was the one that popularized the Anthropocene designation, back in 2000, although it's good to see that it's picking up steam now

picking up steam now

About 2,100 results for academic papers with "anthropocene" in the title.

Google Trends suggests it picked up steam in 2011.

The problem I have with anthropocene is that geological evidence for humanity markedly changing the environment probably starts around 45,000 years ago, when the ancestors of the Australian aborigines exterminated most large marsupial megafauna. Nothing special about them, every time humanity first entered a new continent there was an extinction event.

My vote is to simply do away with the Neolithic, and give the name Anthropocene to the last 11,700 years and the forseeable future, at least until the next, delayed, glaciation.

thanks for the dn

xp: wrote Neolithic, meant Holocene

Flooding of Coast, Caused by Global Warming, Has Already Begun

Local governments, under pressure from annoyed citizens, are beginning to act. Elections are being won on promises to invest money to protect against flooding. Miami Beach is leading the way, increasing local fees to finance a $400 million plan that includes raising streets, installing pumps and elevating sea walls.

In many of the worst-hit cities, mayors of both parties are sounding an alarm.

“I’m a Republican, but I also realize, by any objective analysis, the sea level is rising,” said Jason Buelterman, the mayor of tiny Tybee Island, one of the first Georgia communities to adopt a detailed climate plan.

But the local leaders say they cannot tackle this problem alone. They are pleading with state and federal governments for guidance and help, including billions to pay for flood walls, pumps and road improvements that would buy them time.

Yet Congress has largely ignored these pleas, and has even tried to block plans by the military to head off future problems at the numerous bases imperiled by a rising sea. A Republican congressman from Colorado, Ken Buck, recently called one military proposal part of a “radical climate change agenda.”

at the risk of being a dick, spending billions of federal dollars to try to protect rich ppl from a slow-moving and very foreseeable catastrophe seems ill-advised. move. and do it now, while suckers like ken buck are still willing to buy

Miami Beach graffiti:
https://d.fastcompany.net/multisite_files/fastcompany/imagecache/1280/poster/2016/08/3063201-poster-p-1-miami-your-million-dollar-homes-will-soon-be-underwater.jpg

“I’m a Republican, but I also realize, by any objective analysis, the sea level is rising,”

Stratospheric "Old Faithful" wind pattern goes backwards:

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2016-09/nsfc-ast090216.php

They have two hypotheses for what could have triggered it - the particularly strong El Niño in 2015-16 or the long-term trend of rising global temperatures. Newman said the scientists are conducting further research now to figure out if the event was a "black swan," a once-in-a-generation event, or a "canary in the coal mine," a shift with unforeseen circumstances, caused by climate change.

bummed that i missed human achievement hour this year

https://cei.org/content/human-achievement-hour-2016

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/news/20160912/

Posting to the choir here.
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/blogs/earthmatters/files/2016/09/tempanoms_gis_august2016.gif

http://xkcd.com/1732/

never thought I'd feel genuinely chilled by the last bit of an xkcd comic

that's okay. it's all a hoax perpetrated by the chinese to ruin our economy. they've even fooled the scientists

http://responsiblescientists.org/

The thing that irritates me to no end about this is that EVEN IF climate change is a total hoax and the 1% of scientists who think it's not man-made were actually right, taking drastic action against it is STILL gonna make the world a better place 30-40 years down the road. We're gonna run out of dead dinosaurs some day.

god will put more in the ground to fool the heathens into believing in darwin, and he'll put more oil there, too

So anyone read McKibben's terrifying NEW new math?
At this point I'm just desperately hoping he's a huckster? If I made a chart of my climate-related despondency over the last five years it would look a lot like the famed hockey stick graph.

Keep at it, you've gotten through denial, anger, and bargaining, and acceptance is around the corner.

I don't think he's a huckster but sadly it's becoming increasingly clear that the 1.5 degree goal is just not really realistic given today's current political reality.

xp: Mind, I've been following this since Stephen Schneider's "The Changing Climate" appeared in the Sep 1989 Scientific American. Think I got through denial, anger, and bargaining in the 90s, and depression before the Copenhagen conference. Now, I'm just hoping for more Svaldbard seed vault / Rosetta Project / Georgia Guidestones type work to help our distant, distant descendants pick up the pieces.

https://twitter.com/NWSFlagstaff/status/780014052160311297

good thing we're about to pull out of the Paris treaty

US folks: it takes a couple of mindless minutes to support a climate question (or all of them) for the next US presidential debate.

wow those are some depressing questions when you sort by "most votes"