Global Warming's Terrifying New Math

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"

yes but expected

we are committing suicide, all so that rich fucks don't have to worry themselves about the prospect of considering sacrificing their luxuries by redesigning society to be less productive (less work, less commuting) and more sustainable. we are very professional and practical, in other words. shrewd, you might say. smart. go humanity

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/earth-s-co2-passes-the-400-ppm-threshold-maybe-permanently/

Some non-terrifying math: http://futurism.com/solar-power-cost-has-dropped-25-in-only-5-months/

It'll be interesting to see how much is overcapacity. Buying solar has been a bargain, investing in it has been a nightmare.

Clarrification: I haven't, but I've watched for a decade. Photovoltaic panel manufacturing is the definition of a bad investment: little branding, no margins, constant R&D just to stay on the treadmill.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/15/world/africa/kigali-deal-hfc-air-conditioners.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0

http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/green-tech/a23417/convert-co2-into-ethanol/

The paper and supporting information.

It's doesn't seem like a negative emissions technology, but rather a means to capture some otherwise wasted excess renewable energy using emissions from a source for relatively pure CO2, like a natural gas generation plant.

While its not as sexy, the story lead me to discover an eminently plausible way of coping with renewable intermittancy: hydrolyse water to hydrogen, methanate with CO2, and store the resulting methane in the existing natural gas distribution network, like the 30 power-to-gas demonstration plants active or being built in Germany.