Global Warming's Terrifying New Math

the biggest geo-engineering experiment took place in b.c. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/oct/15/pacific-iron-fertilisation-geoengineering

thx sleeve

sorry, Alfred

https://gizmodo.com/this-is-how-south-florida-ends-1783803198

record high october temps set across the US, unprecedented late-season heatwaves, 7+ consecutive days of record setting 92F+ temperatures here in chicago. it's a perfect time to announce plans to repeal of the Clean Power Plan. i guess it hasn't been posted here because there's not much to say about it. i have no idea how our ancestors will make any sense of the time we live in. it is an awful feeling to be living in an age with unprecedented access to information and have to witness our political representation act in this way. it's not ignorance, it's not stupidity - they're actively making decisions to enrich themselves with the knowledge that their actions are killing people and will kill many more.

it's not ignorance, it's not stupidity -

it's corruption in its purest form

https://gizmodo.com/hurricane-nate-sets-record-for-most-consecutive-atlanti-1819264248

Napa valley on fire, “among worst in state’s history”

http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-napa-fires-20171009-story.html

When I lived near the Bay Area it was basically never not damp or foggy. The idea that wine country would get dry enough to go full tinderbox is dissonant.

There's always been plenty of dry areas here even just a little inland from the coast, but no lie this is something else.

yeah spent a very tense evening last night with a close friend whose whole family is out there, some evacuated, some waiting and seeing. fucking terrifying.

Entire Bay Area can smell smoke, and it's been getting worse every day.

in Oregon, back in August, we had to buy 100% particulate filter masks, like full on respirators, just to be able to go outside. this lasted for days.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), widely seen as the Senate’s most active advocate on climate change, says he is in routine communication with “six to 10” Senate Republicans who, he says, privately support his carbon tax bill but are unwilling to publicly back it. Only one Senate Republican, South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham, is willing to publicly support that idea.

In an interview with Vox, Whitehouse talked excitedly about the former Republican officeholders and George W. Bush officials who have formally voiced their support as well.

....

Sheldon Whitehouse: ...On the climate side, we have a very different situation. We have a party with a considerable number of elected [officials] who are not only willing but eager to do a bill of some kind on climate change. They have signaled — through [Hank] Paulson, [George Bush’s Treasury secretary]; [former GOP Secretary of State James] Baker; [conservative economist Arthur] Laffer; the American Enterprise Institute; a whole variety of entities — that the way they want to do that is with a price on carbon. That’s the conservative way to do it.

I’m happy with a carbon fee. I don’t think that’s a bad idea. So there’s not, like, some idea on the horizon that we’re far from but want to try to guide toward. We have an immediate virtual yes from the Republicans about this; we have an immediate problem that we have to solve sooner than later.

So trajectory points on the horizon aren’t part of our battle in climate. Finding a way to have Republicans see safe passage to the fossil fuel industry’s threats and bullying and political weaponry is the test there. And that’s a question of putting the heat under them with the facts of what’s happening in their own states and across the world; pressing on them with NDAA amendments in the House and Senate; pushing on the American corporate community, the good guys, to do a good job actually showing up; and trying to shame the fossil fuel industry and their huge array of smelly, scandalous front groups that they maintain.

There’s almost no correlation between the two sets of problems. I see no overlay other than the fact that we’re all Americans, it’s about the American polity, and this is government. Other than that, the similarities totally end.

Jeff Stein
I was hoping you could expound more on your suggestion that there are Republican idea men and conservative officials who, if I’m hearing you correctly, you think have enough sway to get Republicans to a yes —

Sheldon Whitehouse
Not quite yet. But there are enough to prove the proposition that there is a yes to get to on the other side of the kill zone that the fossil fuel industry has set up.

Jeff Stein
You don’t see this as a “Lucy pulling the football from Charlie Brown” situation?

Sheldon Whitehouse
No.

Jeff Stein
What gives you faith Republicans are going to move on this issue? Only one, Lindsey Graham, has co-sponsored your carbon bill, and the Republican president denies the reality that it even exists.

Sheldon Whitehouse
Because it’s so widespread ... from people who are Republicans but who are not currently Republican officeholders. That’s a very bright signal of where the party wants to be and where they want to go, and it’s all virtually the same place — a border-adjusted, revenue-neutral price on carbon. That’s what they all virtually are saying.

Then you have the people in the corral — with Exxon and the US Chamber and API and Americans for Progress and the whole rest of the ghouls — that say, “If you dare touch this issue we’ll punish you politically.”

Another way I describe it is that the problem is that talking to Republicans about climate change is like talking to prisoners about escape. Once you find safe passage for them through the fence, through the kill zone around the fence, then the getaway car on the other side is one we all agree on. There are truly six to 10 Republican senators who I talk to about this stuff and are waiting for their moment and are quite candid about what the problem is, and it’s the politics of political threat from the agents of the fossil fuel industry — mostly the Koch brothers, but also the US Chamber [of Commerce].

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/10/16/16394818/sheldon-whitehouse-congress-climate

there's a lot more. this seems very much like a "Lucy pulling the football from Charlie Brown” situation, but what do i know

i thought carbon credits were bullshit

this isn't a conversation about carbon credits, it's about a carbon tax - putting a price on carbon.

otm

this was one of the rare non-terrifying things I've read on this issue lately:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/oct/16/texas-town-georgetown-energy-green

i'm guessing that otm wasn't for me, haha, so just to clarify:

carbon credits are based on a marketplace of GHGs allowances. say we each have allowances to emit 10 tons of GHGs. i suck, so i determine that i need to emit 15 tons of GHGs. you, on the other hand, make some modifications to your factory and can get by with only emitting 5 tons. i need an extra 5 credits, you have an extra 5, so i pay you for your credits. the idea is that this will create a marketplace which will incentivize lower emissions since many entities would rather be under the cap so that they can generate additional revenue by trading away their credits to higher emitters. anyway, that's an originally a republican idea from the 1980s (to deal with sulfur dioxide emissions), and it has its fair share of problems, not least of which is international monitoring and enforcement.

a carbon tax is different. it places a price on carbon upfront which is levied on the industrial generators of GHG emissions. this increase in cost, of course, would inevitably be passed on to consumers, so there are a number of ways of how to address that. one popular idea is "fee-and-dividend": all of the fees collected from the carbon tax would be distributed evenly to all households in the form of a rebate check. this would create a progressive system in which lower-income households would end up coming out ahead (ie, the rebate check that they'd receive would be more than the increase in electricity costs that would arise as a result of the carbon tax), while driving overall emissions down as all industries would have an incentive to lower ghg emissions.

or actually, just google carbon credit vs carbon tax because i fucking hate the way i try to explain things and i confuse even myself

lol no actually it was for you :)

ty Karl :)

A carbon tax prices externalites, and encourage all the ways that emissions may be reduced, from household to utility scale, from conservation to low-carbon energy.

Carbon credits are fees paid by utilities to Wall St so they can conduct business as usual while some rainforest is cut down in a different order.

later

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0185809

yup, at least I'll die of cholera or something before I starve to death a decade from now

yeah that seems..

v bad

*gulp*

Clearly the decline is because they kept catching the flying insects in traps for 27 years!!!

Malaise Trapped: Stuck on a Planet with Humans

https://longreads.com/2017/10/19/we-should-be-talking-about-the-effect-of-climate-change-on-cities

maybe some of you animated shorts oscar geeks already knew about this but it belongs on this thread

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0YSFvPTm2A

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/sep/28/alarm-as-study-reveals-worlds-tropical-forests-are-huge-carbon-emission-source

Heh

heh. oooof.

the good news is that at least in the united states, our new industrial scientist leaders in the government probably won't ever read that study, therefore it doesn't exist

http://blog.ucsusa.org/michael-halpern/the-epa-science-advisory-board-is-being-compromised-heres-why-that-matters

i need to go back to bed and just start the day over. the world is fucked imo

yr Fourth National Climate Assessment has arrived

https://science2017.globalchange.gov/chapter/executive-summary

civilization has always been too much anyways

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2017/11/03/trump-administration-releases-report-finds-no-convincing-alternative-explanation-for-climate-change/?utm_term=.f6d0d60e8515

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/11/the-zombie-diseases-of-climate-change/544274

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/nov/05/donald-trump-accused-blocking-satellite-climate-change-research

re the Science Advisory Board:

One of Pruitt’s other appointees to this board, from which he has purged most of the scientists whose findings inconvenience his longtime benefactors, is this guy Robert Phalen, who runs a lab at Cal-Irvine that studies the health effects of air pollution. Phalen, it seems, believes that we are coddling our children with too damn much fresh, clean air. From The Independent:

Speaking to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2012, Mr. Phalen told the audience: “Modern air is a little too clean for optimum health.” Mr. Phalen has also argued that the risks associated with modern particulate matter are “very small and confounded by many factors”. In a 2004 study, he wrote that, “neither toxicology studies nor human clinical investigations have identified the components and/or characteristics of [particulate matter] that might be causing the health-effect associations”.

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a13381482/air-too-clean-epa-official-trump/

I bet that cunt really believes his own papers and snorts a bit of asbestos and w/ diesel fumes for breakfast, just to get his required impurity levels up. Clean water is killing us! Drink bin-juice mixed with surgical spirits!

There is an extensive literature on hormesis, and I think one can make a persuasive case for ambient radiation or some banned but persistent organic pollutants as harmless in human health. I've never seen it applied to atmospheric particulates. If there's any benefit to atmospheric particles, it occurs *well below* levels seen by industrialized societies.

it's almost like scott pruitt appointed someone to head the SAB who doesn't know what they're doing! but why would he do that?!

can the UN charge him with crimes against humanity or something

“neither toxicology studies nor human clinical investigations have identified the components and/or characteristics of [particulate matter] that might be causing the health-effect associations”.

This is effectively saying that we know that particulate matter in the air is associated with really nasty health effects, but until we can isolate the exact mechanisms by which particulate matter ruins people's health, he's perfectly happy to ruin lots of people's health.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/20/opinion/climate-capitalism-crisis.html

...the hope that we can empower intelligent people to positions where they can design the perfect set of regulations, or that we can rely on scientists to take the carbon out of the atmosphere and engineer sources of renewable energy, serves to cover over the simple fact that the work of saving the planet is political, not technical. We have a much better chance of making it past the 22nd century if environmental regulations are designed by a team of people with no formal education in a democratic socialist society than we do if they are made by a team of the most esteemed scientific luminaries in a capitalist society. The intelligence of the brightest people around is no match for the rampant stupidity of capitalism.

new trump budget guts climate science studies (graduate and pro) anyways. MAGA

this problem will outlive the trump era y'know

not necessarily, if civilization ends prior to trumpski's russkie trot

you know we're not that lucky

:(

https://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21731397-stopping-flow-carbon-dioxide-atmosphere-not-enough-it-has-be-sucked-out

ugh

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/30112017/arctic-sea-ice-extent-record-chukchi-bering-sea-alaska-ocean