Global Warming's Terrifying New Math

Based on a novel written by a climate denier, btw.

there's six billion of us and counting while annual temperature records mount and the US government is *officially* like fuck you 'what, me worry'

7.5 billion, tbf

there are now more people living in cities than were alive when i was born

they like the hustle and bustle

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/may/19/arctic-stronghold-of-worlds-seeds-flooded-after-permafrost-melts?CMP=share_btn_tw

Kinda love how the Svalbard vault's interior uses the same shelving as my local hardware store.

lefty conspiracy from the Eisenhower days, no doubt

64 years ago today: "How Industry May Change Climate" by Waldemar Kaempffert, May 24, 1953 @nytclimate pic.twitter.com/PYFjsE28JR

— Brad Johnson (@climatebrad) May 24, 2017

makes sense

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/05/report-trump-is-planning-to-pull-out-of-paris-climate-deal.html

well, nice knowing you all

the tweet embedded in that piece is legit terrifying

How hot does Earth get if the U.S. abandons the Paris #climate agreement? @borenbears found out. https://t.co/gPZGvVRcFC? pic.twitter.com/BCSORD8r7D

— Jonathan Fahey (@JonathanFahey) May 27, 2017

NBD, we'll all be dead by then. Because the US pulled out of the Paris accord.

cities are going to get hotter faster, shoulda posted the piece last week

http://www.iflscience.com/environment/global-warming-is-turning-cities-into-costly-urban-heat-islands/

old article but interesting

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/dec/12/james-hansen-climate-change-paris-talks-fraud

I mean he is 1000% otm on the carbon tax

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1tAYmMjLdY

To mark rejection of Paris accords, Antarctica about to calve a Wales-sized iceberg, one of largest ever recorded https://t.co/CFctzJFEhb

— Bill McKibben (@billmckibben) May 31, 2017

bigger big-league bergs

SAVE THE WALES

i can't believe i tweeted a correction at bill mckibben but i had to. the article says it was the size of Delaware (1,930 sq miles) which is about a quarter the size of Wales (8,023 sq miles). I guess he meant that the iceberg was about the length of Wales. anyway, oof

SAVE THE DELAWALES

thank you!

— Bill McKibben (@billmckibben) May 31, 2017

i want to ride around on bill mckibben's ankle like fievel in a shirtpocket

I remember when icebergs the size of Manhattan were a big deal.

*heavy sigh*

Trump calls mayor of shrinking Chesapeake island and tells him not to worry about it

“He said we shouldn’t worry about rising sea levels,” Eskridge said. “He said that ‘your island has been there for hundreds of years, and I believe your island will be there for hundreds more.’”

Eskridge wasn’t offended. In fact, he agreed that rising sea levels aren’t a problem for Tangier.

“Like the president, I’m not concerned about sea level rise,” he said. “I’m on the water daily, and I just don’t see it.”

makes sense

starting to think that dilbert dipshit might be on to something about trump's hypnotic powers

another post hat makes me want to move to Canada - in this case because it will be the only place with snow in the future and not 140 degrees in summer

It's not hypnotic powers. Most if not all here on ilxor are complex personalities, ensconced like an onion with something approximating Freud's Id, Ego, and Superego. Some further than themselves with irony or deadpan humor about the human predicament.

Trump's onion has a rather thin, if any cortex. He's just a grasping Id, little burnished by education or curiosity. Most with this defect go unseen by the educated classes, as they don't make it through the socioeconomic filters.

But there are millions like him, just exposed ids awaiting someone to articulate their resentments and desires. As many Americans confuse wealth with virtue, Trump's largely inherited wealth insulated him from moral critique.

As this is the climate thread, I think we who are concerned about climate, about effects that linger for thousands of years, need to start speaking to these unfilted ids. I care about those billions living (or not) in the year 3000. That's perhaps why those on the national security side (from DoD reports to Obama) have started talking about future refugee crises, because if slow sea rise doesn't scare the recalcitrant, perhaps a deluge of brown people will.

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a55736/climate-change-storms-scott-pruitt/

yayyy!

Scientists have spent decades measuring what was happening to all of the carbon dioxide that was produced when people burned coal, oil and natural gas. They established that less than half of the gas was remaining in the atmosphere and warming the planet. The rest was being absorbed by the ocean and the land surface, in roughly equal amounts.

In essence, these natural sponges were doing humanity a huge service by disposing of much of its gaseous waste. But as emissions have risen higher and higher, it has been unclear how much longer the natural sponges will be able to keep up.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/26/climate/carbon-in-atmosphere-is-rising-even-as-emissions-stabilize.html?platform=hootsuite&_r=1

three years till the point of no return. good thing mr. trump is in the white house and mr. pruitt heading the EPA

https://www.nature.com/news/three-years-to-safeguard-our-climate-1.22201?dom=icopyright&src=syn

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2017/06/29/iran-city-soars-to-record-of-129-degrees-near-hottest-ever-reliably-measured-on-earth/?utm_term=.3a1ec637f002 🔥🔥🔥

The Earth has experienced five mass extinctions before the one we are living through now, each so complete a slate-wiping of the evolutionary record it functioned as a resetting of the planetary clock, and many climate scientists will tell you they are the best analog for the ecological future we are diving headlong into. Unless you are a teenager, you probably read in your high-school textbooks that these extinctions were the result of asteroids. In fact, all but the one that killed the dinosaurs were caused by climate change produced by greenhouse gas. The most notorious was 252 million years ago; it began when carbon warmed the planet by five degrees, accelerated when that warming triggered the release of methane in the Arctic, and ended with 97 percent of all life on Earth dead. We are currently adding carbon to the atmosphere at a considerably faster rate; by most estimates, at least ten times faster. The rate is accelerating. This is what Stephen Hawking had in mind when he said, this spring, that the species needs to colonize other planets in the next century to survive, and what drove Elon Musk, last month, to unveil his plans to build a Mars habitat in 40 to 100 years. These are nonspecialists, of course, and probably as inclined to irrational panic as you or I. But the many sober-minded scientists I interviewed over the past several months — the most credentialed and tenured in the field, few of them inclined to alarmism and many advisers to the IPCC who nevertheless criticize its conservatism — have quietly reached an apocalyptic conclusion, too: No plausible program of emissions reductions alone can prevent climate disaster.

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When Did Humans Doom the Earth for Good?

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-too-hot-for-humans.html

SWEET DREAMS

sooo...we arming up for the revolution or nah?

https://lastexittonowhere.imgix.net/uploads/catalogue/productimage-picture-quietus-regular-t-shirt-5955.jpg

S'okay.

Cancer now more common than getting married or having a first baby.

If The Graduate were remade in 2017, there's a decent chance that when the young hero is pulled aside by the middle-aged man and told the secret word describing the path to making big money, it wouldn't be "plastics", but "cancer".

Editors of PNAS usually less fretful.

Ceballosa et al, 2017. Biological annihilation via the ongoing sixth mass extinction signaled by vertebrate population losses and declines. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1704949114

if this even happened, it was probably chinese dynamite that did it

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/07/trillion-tonne-iceberg-breaks-antarctica-170712095845744.html

underrated album imho

forgotten kung-fu exploitation picture from the 70s iirc

An iceberg of 5800 square kilometers!

i. c. e.
b. e. r. g.
what's that spell?
iceberg baby can't you read?

A small thing, but

https://www.buzzfeed.com/zahrahirji/lamar-smith-tours-the-arctic

Oh cool my rep *barfs*

This also sounds like some good news:

Seaweed shown to reduce 99% methane from cattle

the David Wallace-Wells series has been unavoidable and immiserating in the extreme

Immiserating is a word that David Foster Wallace would use.

I've commented on the article (and its annotated version) on other forums. Its on the extreme side, and though its explicit that its presenting worst case scenarios (business as usual, long term, lower probability), some climate scientists have come out attacking it for being alarmist. Frankly, conservative IPCC reports aren't getting through, weather casters ascribing mildly catastrophic weather events to climate change isn't getting through, so maybe its time for alarums. I've already encountered everything it reports studying climate change and mass extinction events in the geological record.

As for myself, I can't imagine how humanity exits the 21st century with more than 5 billion considering multiple environmental/resource issues, which entails a lot of future suffering. I'd raise the alarm all the time were there appropriate venues, but yesterday I attended my brother's baby shower and smiled benignly.

Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), noted climate change denier and chair of the House Science Committee, on Monday penned an eyebrow-raising op-ed that argued there are “benefits” to a changing climate.

“The benefits of a changing climate are often ignored and under-researched. Our climate is too complex and the consequences of misguided policies too harsh to discount the positive effects of carbon enrichment,” Smith wrote in an op-ed for The Daily Signal, a website run by the conservative Heritage Foundation.

Smith acknowledged that the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is increasing and argued that it would help plant growth and farming. He also posited that sea ice melting in the Arctic would open up new shipping routes, spinning ice melt as a positive change for the Earth.

nope
https://www.skepticalscience.com/global-warming-positives-negatives-basic.htm

so sad that the place where i found the article about smith's comments (http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/lamar-smith-benefits-climate-change) didn't bother to mention WHY he was completely wrong. all they did was call it "eyebrow-raising" and put "benefits" in quotation marks.