Global Warming's Terrifying New Math

I've been thinking about asking this here for a while, and now seems like a particularly good time: are there any nonprofits that any of you would recommend donating to? I'd be interested in basically any angle on the issue: helping populations threatened by changes like sea levels or droughts, land conservation, legal initiatives, disseminating alternative energy tech, etc.

On the political side, I recommend Citizen's Climate Lobby.

And after the Sierra Club opposed I-732, I sent them a letter and won't contribute again.

sanpaku, how do you feel about capitalism's relationship to climate change? is fighting to end capitalism a worthwhile -- if quixotic -- political goal?

I'm currently reading Felicity Scott's (great) Outlaw Territories - very 'academic' (Zone Books) and she's an architectural historian by discipline, but one of the threads running through it is the development in the early 1970s of a certain, very delimited, official version of what the problems of the 'environment' were, and what kind of solutions would work on it. She's good at tracing different groups and concerns - hippie back-to-the-land characters, Nixonian politicos, dyed-in-the-wool technocrats, white people who read The Population Bomb and locked onto fears of ~teeming, starving Third World hordes~ surging onto their shores - and how they ended up converging in certain spaces and times. Basically, you end up with global capital preferring to imagine environmental problems as ones solved by adding more neo-colonial developmentalism, with negative externalities borne by the developing world.

She also marks exceptions, and moments where other narratives break through, as where Asian, African and South American delegations to UN conferences challenge the assumed problems and solutions and basically pointed out that their environmental problems are caused by the logics of First-World corporations and capitalism generally. Not expressly on-topic for this thread, but several of the last few posts have kind of reminded me of this.

xp
thanks Sanpaku. Looking at that site also reminded me to check what happened to that Florida solar power amendment; some good news there at least: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/election/article114377458.html

mbison: Capitalism (by which I mean directing investment through financial intermediaries) is the only alternative to command economies to redirect large scale investment to worthwhile goals. It will work for public goods with the right incentives. And command economies have a very bad record for improving general prosperity. What works is regulated captitalism with social safety nets.

Right now, the incentives favor ignoring the external cost of carbon emissions, but this can in theory easily be fixed. Only a few entities are extracting fossil fuels from the ground or import fossil fuels from overseas. That carbon can be taxed at a rate commensurate with the environmental costs. Its a regressive tax, so to limit the effects on the poor we cut other regressive taxes like sales and payroll taxes. This sort of approach is better than grants for green energy, as it changes the economic landscape for all in a predictable way. It doesn't pick winners with dubious economics, like rooftop solar. It provides incentives for conservation measures (improving insulation with spraycrete, etc), which are at least half the game.

I'm almost as disappointed in the defeat of I-732 (Washington state carbon tax), in which the Sierra Club joined the Koch Brothers in opposition, as I am with the presidential election.

mbison: Capitalism (by which I mean directing investment through financial intermediaries) is the only alternative to command economies to redirect large scale investment to worthwhile goals. It will work for public goods with the right incentives. And command economies have a very bad record for improving general prosperity. What works is regulated capitalism with social safety nets.

Right now, the incentives favor ignoring the external cost of carbon emissions, but this can in theory easily be fixed. Only a few entities extract or import fossil fuels. That carbon can be taxed at a rate commensurate with the inherent environmental costs. Its a regressive tax, so to limit the effects on the poor we cut other regressive taxes like sales and payroll taxes. This sort of approach is better than grants for green energy, as it changes the economic landscape for all in a predictable way. It doesn't pick winners with dubious economics, like rooftop solar. It provides incentives for conservation measures (improving insulation with spraycrete, etc), which are at least half the game.

I'm almost as disappointed in the defeat of I-732 (Washington state carbon tax), in which the Sierra Club joined the Koch Brothers in opposition, as I am with the presidential election.

Sorry for the dupe. At least I corrected some of my grammatical errors in the second.

bise: I think to put a different spin in on capitalism, I'm a lot more dubious than Sanpaku, especially if we're talking about:

1. the consumption-based capitalism that is backing a lot of the resistance to large-scale changes (mitigation/adaptation);
2. and the focus on economic growth, which itself, as I understand it (admittedly weakly), is predicated both ever-expanding extraction of resources to eventually sell to ever-expanding (consumer) markets.

Exponential growth on a finite world is impossible.

That part of market expectations is unfounded, and sooner or later enough debts will go bad, and faith in credit-based currencies will collapse. I hope later. But money was always a consensual fiction, with no more reality outside human minds than the divine right of kings, or the state itself.

What is real, what doesn't go away when we stop believing in it, includes atmospheric greenhouse gases. They will hang around for a very long time. Currently models indicate about 60% will dissolve into acidify the oceans over the course of the next millenium, but about 40% is there for tens of thousands of years. Maybe that prevents the next scheduled ice age. But for now it causes drought in breadbaskets, reducing the carrying capacity of the planet. Our generation is making decisions that adversely impact the next hundred generations. I don't believe we have the right, and I think future generations will vilify us for thinking we did.

Do alternative economic structures offer much improvement? Judging from the polluted sites left in the Soviet sphere and the nightmarish environmental situation in China, it doesn't seem so. If humanity is to create a sustainable economy that doesn't require constant vigilance, it will be with the aid of myths that support taking the long view. The Great Spirit of the Plains Indians. Perhaps there are vengeful Gaia-like deities from Eastern religions.

For now, we don't have the benefit of those sorts of consensual fictions. Within the system we're trapped in, there's only market values, and the government can either adjust those prices to better reflect true costs (as with alcohol and tobacco), or it can choose collective suicide.

it's a few weeks old, but i missed this graph

http://i.imgur.com/IMgAi4b.png

(Gavin Schmidt is the director of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies)

in case it's not clear, the graph shows the strong correlation between temperature anomalies recorded between January-September (x-axis) and what the year-end, January-December temperature anomalies ended up being for those same years (y-axis). as you'd expect, there's a very strong correlation; if it was very hot globally from January-September of a particular year, it's fairly easy to estimate how hot it will have been by the end of the year.

so in the graph above, the real data is for 2016 is on the x-axis: from january to september 2016 it's been ~1.25C above the modern annual average. the error bar on the y-axis is showing the range of estimates for what that will look like by the end of the year, within the margin of error or confidence interval. even at the very bottom of the estimate, it would top 2015 by a large margin.

(sorry if all that is obvious, i just know from experience that some people don't intuitively understand charts like this so wanted to try to convert it into plain language).

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/oct/18/2016-locked-into-being-hottest-year-on-record-nasa-says

Appreciate it, KM.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2016/11/17/the-north-pole-is-an-insane-36-degrees-warmer-than-normal-as-winter-descends/?utm_term=.e5e857f9a1dc

cool

Comments depressing as always.

Man, the first comment is that there are no thermometers at the North Pole, so there!

I thought we had a half dozen or so weather bouys up there. We have 168, 6 of which being within 2 degrees (122 miles) of the North Pole.

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2016/11/donald_trump_will_be_the_only_world_leader_to_deny_climate_change.html

heh

"Heh"

Not that many of the others are doing any fucking good either

we've now had a climate denying president from 2000-2008, a brief 2 year window of democratic control that didn't result in a cap and trade bill because ted kennedy died and massachusetts thought it would be good to replace him with scott brown for fun, followed by 6 years of GOP "noooooooo" + more climate denial, and now the election of a complete psychopath

you can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes you might find you get a psychopath

Both Arctic sea ice area and extent have been declining since Nov 15 during Arctic night. Unprecedented.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/nov/22/nasa-earth-donald-trump-eliminate-climate-change-research

heh

That's so unbelievably infantile. Forget about the tremendous benefit of being able to observe Earth from space. NASA is about rocket ships and spacemen, and its mission should be to boldly go plant a flag on the Kuiper belt.

excuse me i'll be in the next room puking up breakfast for the next few years. fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck, these assholes

In terms of scientific merit (ascertained by citations), NASA is probably 80% earth observations, 18% astronomy and planetary science (from unmanned probes and orbiting telescopes), and < 2% from the entire manned program.

Should probably fit in 15% aeronautical engineering type stuff in there. But as far as capital S Science goes, Earth observations are by far the most important element of NASA for the wider scientific community.

FUCK

Fucking Trump and his fucking fuckery

http://www.theverge.com/2016/11/29/13780410/antarctica-glacier-ice-sheet-melting-sea-level-rising

the twitter account of the House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology just tweeted a Breitbart link ("Global Temperatures Plunge. Icy Silence from Climate Alarmists")

https://twitter.com/HouseScience/status/804402881982066688

fuuuuuuuuuck this country

The chair of that committee is the rep of my district. He's a choad.

Btw surprise lots of campaign donations from energy companies

I have nothing to add except for more depressing FUCKs FUCK FUCK FUCK

If you have time, I think this is the sort of climate change message (food insecurity) that might get through to Midwesterners:

Its also really, really scary:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YToMoNPwTFc

q for ppl who know:

what are a few of the best short essays/papers on despair/terror about global warming? i am interested in stuff that is not necessarily trying to generate despair/terror, but that considers the role these may have in generating inaction/helplessness/fatalism about the environment.

maybe connected to the tradition of beautiful/(terrifyingly)sublime thinking about nature, if possible.

I haven't read these, but it seems an interesting topic, so I just scanned Scholar for leads. Given the ranking system, the humanities oriented papers are fairly buried, but they're out there. If nothing else, they might offer pointers to something less academic:

Yusoff, 2009. Excess, catastrophe, and climate change. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 27(6), pp.1010-1029.
Foust and O'Shannon Murphy, 2009. Revealing and reframing apocalyptic tragedy in global warming discourse. Environmental Communication, 3(2), pp.151-167.
Fiala, 2010. Nero's Fiddle: On Hope, Despair, and the Ecological Crisis. Ethics & the Environment, 15(1), pp.51-68.
Smith, 2010. Is there an ecological unconscious. The New York Times Magazine, 31, pp.36-41.
Yusoff and Gabrys, 2011. Climate change and the imagination. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, 2(4), pp.516-534.
McIntosh, 2012. Hell and high water: Climate change, hope and the human condition. Birlinn.
Willox, 2012. Climate change as the work of mourning. Ethics & the Environment, 17(2), pp.137-164.
Dossey, 2013. Global climate change and despair: a way out. Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing, 9(5), pp.261-271.
Levene, 2013. Climate blues: or how awareness of the human end might re-instil ethical purpose to the writing of history. Environmental humanities, 2(1), pp.147-167.
McKinnon, 2014. Climate Change: Against Despair. Ethics & the Environment, 19(1), pp.31-48.
Murphy, 2014. Pessimism, optimism, human inertia, and anthropogenic climate change. Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, p.isu027.

Psychologists have been thinking about the issues for a while, one of the titles sounds like something out of Ballard. I'm surprised some of these journals already exist.

Fritze et al, 2008. Hope, despair and transformation: Climate change and the promotion of mental health and wellbeing. International Journal of Mental Health Systems, 2(1), p.1.
Albrecht, 2011. Chronic environmental change: Emerging ‘psychoterratic’ syndromes. In Climate Change and Human Well-Being (pp. 43-56). Springer New York.
Doherty and Clayton, 2011. The psychological impacts of global climate change. American Psychologist, 66(4), p.265.
Bourque and Willox, 2014. Climate change: The next challenge for public mental health?. International Review of Psychiatry, 26(4), pp.415-422.
Hasbach, 2015. Therapy in the face of climate change. Ecopsychology, 7(4), pp.205-210.

surprised to see this note in the mckinnon 2014!

Despite despair being an instantly recognizable, and not obviously mad, re-
sponse to the climate crisis, very little has been written on this. Notable exceptions are: Nolt 2010; Williston 2012; Fiala 2010.

https://twitter.com/MetmanJames/status/805716431711174656

cool

i gotta stop reading this thread

https://weather.com/news/news/breitbart-misleads-americans-climate-change?cm_ven=T_WX_CD_120616_2

there was a NYT Sunday op piece suggesting that the way to get through to GOP/Trump and investors, for that matter, on climate change is that greening the economy is provably GOOD FOR PROFITS. But I'm not holding my breath.

You just need to structure climate incentives so that most businesses benefit. For example, there are plenty of U.S. businesses that would benefit if the employer share of payroll taxes was replaced by a carbon tax in a revenue neutral fashion. Initially, yep its regressive, though the economists assure us wages/employment would adapt. But frankly progressive/reactionary in traditional terms mean rather little once one comprehends what 5 or 6 °C entails for all.

another good way could be to say it will bring more scary immigrants due to instability in hotter climates

(to get through to GOP base, although this would necessitate an understanding of cause/effect on multiple levels so)

another good way could be to say it will bring more scary immigrants due to instability in hotter climates

conservative response: fine, then let's build a bigger, stronger wall, and cut off all immigration. except for white people that we know and trust.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/statoil/2015/02/27/is-algae-the-next-sustainable-biofuel/#3179da527fa6