Global Warming's Terrifying New Math

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.

Related Stories

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.

Yeah, one thing his constituents need in Texas is hotter weather and less rain.

lamar smith is my MC and i want him to drink bleach

read it and weep:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/08/07/climate/document-Draft-of-the-Climate-Science-Special-Report.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0

also, your dog is killing us all:

http://www.dailywire.com/news/19316/ucla-climate-change-study-has-some-very-bad-news-james-barrett#

Technically, V-dog exists. The chow I feed my dog is largely potatoes and/or rice, with chicken meat by products for flavoring. He gets leftovers. I doubt dog food competes with the human demand for steaks/hamburger.

from the grauniad

The small Louisiana town of Cameron could be the first in the US to be fully submerged by rising sea levels – and yet locals, 90% of whom voted for Trump, still aren’t convinced about climate change

some highlights:

For 10 years, Smith was a truck driver, which gave her a particular vantage point from which to observe the coast. “I think the coast is disappearing, I really do. Because I traveled this road so much, driving for the oil fields. By the way it looks, it looks like the water is getting closer and closer.”

But Smith stops short of offering an explanation. “I really don’t know what is causing it, I don’t know what you’d call it – erosion? I guess it’s probably caused by climate change, but I don’t really believe in the concept.

“If you go by what the real scientists say, there’s no proof. In the last 10 years the average temperature of the world hasn’t even risen a half degree. And if you listen to everyone talking it, it’s up five or 10 degrees. And it’s not true! It’s a political thing. How much money has Al Gore made off global warming?,” he laughs, shaking his head with a cackle. “It ain’t happened yet!”

“Do I think it is climate change? That’s hard,” she says, smiling. Theriot seems caught between her job as a science educator and her life as a longtime Cameron resident, tasked with teaching about the environment in a fiercely red town.

“From a scientific perspective ... data is manipulated all the time. So whoever is interpreting the data, as much as you try to not have a bias, you could still have a bias. Of course, I am going to be more proactive about coastal restoration and protections because it is directly affecting me, so for me, looking at the data, I am very very worried.” She relents: “But I think the data is incomplete. And I am still not sure about climate change. I am still researching it. I feel like I don’t have enough good sources to say yes or no on if climate change is a real thing.”

“If you go by what the real scientists say, there’s no proof. In the last 10 years the average temperature of the world hasn’t even risen a half degree. And if you listen to everyone talking it, it’s up five or 10 degrees.

hoo boy. a big part of the problem is that many people have failed to achieve even basic science literacy (or another way to put it, we have failed to provide our people with basic science literacy), and then those people "debate" each other and get incredibly confused, mixed in with rush limbaugh people screaming deliberately misleading things at them on the radio

we have failed to provide our people with basic science literacy

Included in "people" are science teachers, apparently. D:

Blind. Deaf. Dumb.

The Trump administration just disbanded a federal advisory committee on climate change

The committee was established to help translate findings from the National Climate Assessment into concrete guidance for both public and private-sector officials.

Seattle Mayor Ed Murray (D) said in an interview Saturday that the move to dissolve the committee represents “an example of the president not leading, and the president stepping away from reality.” An official from Seattle Public Utilities has been serving on the panel; with its disbanding, Murray said it would now be “more difficult” for cities to participate in the climate assessment. On climate change, Trump “has left us all individually to figure it out.”

the free market will pay for it. privatize the profits; socialize the losses :)

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a57276/harvey-longterm-effects/

As it happens, Harvey has killed an estimated 44 Texans and forced some 32,000 into shelters since it struck, a week ago. That is a catastrophe for every one of those individuals, of course. Still, those figures look small alongside the havoc wreaked by flooding across southern Asia during the very same period. In the past few days, more than 1,200 people have been killed, and the lives of some 40 million others turned upside down, by torrential rain in northern India, southern Nepal, northern Bangladesh and southern Pakistan.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/sep/01/disaster-texas-america-britain-yemen

I just realized that anything happening in Bangladesh is automatically going to affect more people than the same thing happening anywhere else.

Does anyone have a recommendation for reading up on the various geo-engineering options?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terraforming_of_Venus

step one of terraforming venus seems u&k

Reducing Venus's surface temperature of 462 °C (864 °F).