Global Warming's Terrifying New Math

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.

We're all familiar with Arctic sea ice extent, but records are also kept of global sea ice extent.

https://sunshinehours.files.wordpress.com/2016/10/global_sea_ice_extent_zoomed_2016_day_304_1981-2010.png

*gulp*

i mean, tell me that's not actually as terrifying as it looks

Historically, Arctic sea ice extent has trended lower, while Antarctic trended higher (IIRC, because of lower salinity Antarctic surface waters due to glacial melts). This is the first year where both Arctic and Antarctic ice are the lowest seen. For more, see Current State of the Sea Ice Cover (NASA).

Zooming out on Antarctic sea ice, its less marked, but still unprecedented:

http://neptune.gsfc.nasa.gov/uploads/images_db/CSIC_figure6.png

So, global sea ice extent was already close to the lowest recorded in the last 40 years back in mid-Sept, and, subsequently, the 1.5-2.5 sq km growth that pretty much always happens during October... just hasn't happened. Because Jul/Aug were the warmest months on record. Not good.

If I lived on one of the low lying island nations I'd be hoping there would be some serious contingency planning going on. I mean the Maldives alone has a population of nearly 400000, if things started happening quickly there could be a far worse catastrophe than the '04 tsunami.

The Maldives are using foreign grants to build up islands 2 m above sea level, for instance the island of Hulhumalé, which was originally intended for population overflow from the capital Male. Longer term, they've been in discussion with Sri Lanka as a future refugee destination. The Maldives are in a much better situation than Pacific atolls, given their high tourism income of nearly $US 1 billion/yr.

Paradise almost lost: Maldives seek to buy a new homeland

Kiribati's attempts to follow the Maldives: https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2014/december/1417352400/john-van-tiggelen/cold-comfort

...subsequently, the 1.5-2.5 sq km growth that pretty much always happens during October... just hasn't happened. Because Jul/Aug were the warmest months on record

Sorry "Mike Jones" (heh) but that doesn't seem accurate. Take a look here:

https://neptune.gsfc.nasa.gov/uploads/images_db/CSIC_figure1.png

While it's true that current Arctic sea ice extent is apparently the lowest ever for this time of year, there still has been a significant rebound in October from the summer low. I think what's actually making the difference, as Sanpaku seems to imply, is that the loss in the Antarctic sea ice extent is what's driving the global net low this year. It remains quite worrisome particularly because of the positive feedback due to the reduced albedo effect (meaning more heat is absorbed from sunlight by water than by ice). Still, when we hit a relative low in the Arctic in 2007 I was sure that by this time we'd have ice-free summers in the Arctic. I guess things could be worse.

[Source: https://neptune.gsfc.nasa.gov/csb/index.php?section=234]

And basically, if you're wondering about the difference between "extent" and "area", apparently extent is just based on actual sea ice coverage, while area factors in the sea ice concentration.

Right, gotcha. I was only going by that graph above, where there isn't the major upturn in *global* sea ice extent in the last 25 days that one would normally expect to see. Arctic sea ice, yes.

Business as usual models run 2.6-4.8° C in 2100. Now, paleoclimate data suggests a higher sensitivity to atmospheric carbon, leading to a higher projected range of 4.8°C to 7.4°C

Climate change may be escalating so fast it could be 'game over', scientists warn (The Independent)
The new paper has a more reserved title: Nonlinear climate sensitivity and its implications for future greenhouse warming

7°C, by the way, is roughly where large swathes of the American Midwest become uninhabitable in Summer due to continental climate+humidity: it becomes impossible to dissipate heat by sweating.

To any anyone stumbling across an archive of this in future decades: I'm so sorry.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/cp/opinion/election-night-2016/goodbye-to-the-climate

That a bit alarmist tbh. Yes things are bad but exactly how bad? That's the question. Frankly it seems like emotions are running high around here right now and maybe we all need to take a breather. Sanpaku I saw some of your remarks on the election thread, are you doing ok now? I'm probably going to have to stay away from the strictly political threads for now, they've gotten too emotional for me and I don't feel like it's good for my mental wellness at the moment. Nothing personal to anyone involved, just my POV.