Global Warming's Terrifying New Math

we are all the unabomber now

march is the new january for us east coasters.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-02992-9

https://cleantechnica.com/2018/03/14/climate-researchers-say-march-may-new-january-thanks-soaring-arctic-temperatures/

i could have told you that though. without all the fancy research.

If geoengineering is being considered as a realistic fallback, what about reconsidering nuclear?

this is good, although it seems like articles like this have been written for 20 years now, with the same assessments (WW2/apollo program level effort is needed to transform energy ASAP; nothing will change until there's a price on carbon), and just updating the stats slightly each year :

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610457/at-this-rate-its-going-to-take-nearly-400-years-to-transform-the-energy-system/

xpost wind/solar are cleaner/safer than nuclear, and are cheaper to build and maintain, even without subsidies.

we're not failing because of a lack of good energy options. we're failing because the real costs of fossil fuel aren't reflected in the price.

that's true

though you cannot use wind energy as jet fuel afaict

can’t melt steel beams with it either

xp not quite yet, but close

https://www.popularmechanics.com/flight/news/a28540/boeing-backed-electric-plane-fly-2020s/

xp: nuclear is a good litmus test of how well informed environmentalists are of the relative risks of nuclear energy and anthropogenic climate change.

Fugitive emissions are a real and sometimes underestimated complication of the natural gas transition, but the science McKibben tells you not to worry your pretty little head about suggests that they're a matter for regulatory and technological improvements rather than giving up on what remains a less greenhouse-gas-intensive approach

https://thebreakthrough.org/index.php/voices/ted-nordhaus/bill-mckibbens-misleading-new-chemistry
https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/05/did-fracking-ruin-obamas-climate-legacy/
https://grist.org/climate-energy/is-a-fracking-ban-a-good-idea/

xpost
i mean, go to town on nuclear energy. if the choices are limited to coal, natural gas, and nuclear, then let's put on the fallout soundtrack and get nuclear. but the reason it's not the fuel of the future is because it's already more expensive to build, maintain, and decommission new nuclear plants than it is to build various permutations of solar/wind tech, and solar/wind is likely to get even less expensive as time goes on, compared to nuclear.

also, as someone who expects a bleak century with widespread climate and resource scarcity-driven civil disorder and conflict, i think wind and solar tech will be much easier/simpler to repair and continue to put to use as compared to trying to rehabilitate scores of abandoned, unmaintained nuclear power plants

i watched an episode of Deep Space Nine last night where they accidentally time traveled to 2024, a future where the many structurally unemployed are herded into "sanctuary zones," put on years-long waiting lists for jobs maintaining machinery, and often arrested for lacking the proper national ID card. when they get there the medical officer admits he doesn't know much about the time they're in--"21st century history isn't one of my strong points. Too depressing."

v prescient except the part where humanity survives and travels the galaxy

that'll just be elon musk and about 20 descendants of jeff bezos, all of them bald

"You know, Commander, having seen a little of the 21st century, there is one thing I don't understand: how could they have let things get so bad?"
"That's a good question. I wish I had an answer."

the most fanciful part of that episode was that a riot/martyrdom would have provoked sweeping changes

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/mar/20/marine-heatwave-set-off-carbon-bomb-in-worlds-largest-seagrass-meadow

baby steps

https://www.reuters.com/article/oil-climatechange-hearing/us-judge-to-question-big-oil-on-climate-change-idUSL1N1R21OY

that case is really interesting and weird.

On trial for causing climate change, oil companies don’t plan to deny it’s happening

The hearing stems from a state lawsuit that San Francisco and Oakland filed against the world’s biggest oil companies for their greenhouse gas emissions. U.S. District Judge William Alsup agreed to move the case to his court, and in so doing, he ordered both sides to present him with a five-hour “tutorial” Wednesday on climate change science.

The hearing, first reported by McClatchy, is unusual and sure to be closely watched. But it promises to be far from a full-throated public debate on atmospheric science that some partisans have sought. Lawyers for Chevron, one of the defendants in the case, say the company accepts the international consensus that human activities are a main driver of the build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and the resulting warming.

...Legal experts, including those for Chevron, say they’ve never previously heard of a court-ordered tutorial on climate change. “I’m not aware of a similar type of tutorial setup,” said Garbow, a partner in the Washington, D.C. office of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher.

Alsup wants to the two sides to answer eight questions about the history of climate change, and how carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases interact in the atmosphere. These questions range from the melt-off from previous ice ages to: “What are the main sources of heat that account for the incremental rise in temperature on Earth?”

Each side will have 60 minutes each to present material on the history of climate change science, and then another 60 minutes each to present on the best climate science currently available. But it will not be an evidentiary hearing, with both sides grilling each other. Only the judge will ask questions.

i guess it's the debate that scott pruitt and trump wanted, only in a court of law, and both sides of the debate agree that climate change is driven by human activity, but one of those sides actively funded anti-science climate change to amplify the exact opposite message for a few decades

chinesehoaxwhere'sthebirthcertificatebenghazitaxcuts

https://www.afp.com/en/news/2265/world-sees-rapid-upsurge-extreme-weather-report-doc-12v7z32

if the choices are limited to coal, natural gas, and nuclear, then let's put on the fallout soundtrack and get nuclear. but the reason it's not the fuel of the future is because it's already more expensive to build, maintain, and decommission new nuclear plants than it is to build various permutations of solar/wind tech, and solar/wind is likely to get even less expensive as time goes on, compared to nuclear.

all true. tbh my environmental concerns re: nuclear have less to do with radioactive waste and more to do with the heat transfered to natural water sources from the cooling towers

but it is kind of neat that one gram of uranium can yield as much energy as, like, carving out a whole fucking mountain full of coal

The hearing is a good move and part of a larger trend in the law. A judge with a generalist legal education that ended nearly 50 years ago when the prospect of planetary AGW was just being seriously recognized is not going to be equipped with the latest in climate science as would be an expert in the area, and should be. The same goes for the other scientific/technical areas as to which he's previously requested such tutorials.

http://quotes.ino.com/img/sites/ino/email/5485.jpg

Solarwinds is a company that sells network performance monitors for enterprise IT. Effectively zero renewables exposure.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUnJQWO4YJY

For the curious, the best compendium. I've found for greenhouse emissions from various foods in the American context. A supplement to:

Heller and Keoleian, 2015. Greenhouse gas emission estimates of US dietary choices and food loss. J Indust Ecol, 19(3), pp.391-401.

The research for emissions from individual foods in the UK context is better, IMO. See pg 37-39 here:

Audsley et al, 2010. How low can we go? An assessment of greenhouse gas emissions from the UK food system and the scope reduction by 2050. Report for the WWF and Food Climate Research Network.

The Environmental Protection Agency is considering a major change to the way it assesses scientific work, a move that would severely restrict the research available to it when writing environmental regulations.

Under the proposed policy, the agency would no longer consider scientific research unless the underlying raw data can be made public for other scientists and industry groups to examine. As a result, regulators crafting future rules would quite likely find themselves restricted from using some of the most consequential environmental research of recent decades, such as studies linking air pollution to premature deaths or work that measures human exposure to pesticides and other chemicals.

The reason: These fields of research often require personal health information for thousands of individuals, who typically agree to participate only if the details of their lives are kept confidential.

The proposed new policy — the details of which are still being worked out — is championed by the E.P.A. administrator, Scott Pruitt, who has argued that releasing the raw data would let others test the scientific findings more thoroughly.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/26/climate/epa-scientific-transparency-honest-act.html

not specifically climate change-related, but wasn't sure where else to put it. scott pruitt is the worst. evil + competent

I've a long list of people's graves I will shit upon. His is near the top.

Maybe I'll make it a photo essay.

Here's hoping that Pruitt is the next to get the boot: https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/03/politics/curbelo-pruitt/index.html

We're in the middle of a mid-April ice storm up here, with treacherous, unplowed roads. When I talk about the weather with my 3/4s tomorrow, I want to begin by saying "Seriously, guys--what the fuck?"

WE
COULD
USE
SOME
OF
THAT
GLOBAL
WARMING
RIGHT
ABOUT
NOW

Fatboy Slim lyric, right?

Check out current Rossby waves over the North America. The poles are warming faster than the tropics, the polar vortex is weakening, and Rossby waves meander far more to the north/south. This video offers a succinct description of the mechanism.

xposts

on one hand, the cold-ass weather in the United States could be linked to insanely warm winter and accompanying loss of sea ice in the North pole the loss of sea ice in the North Pole, which join forces to push the arctic jet stream of coldness and despair down to our latitudes.

https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/BAMS-D-16-0259.1

on the other, though

https://i.imgur.com/xnR3BDT.jpg

sanpaku that realtime global wind link you posted is amazing

Climate Change Is Messing With Your Dinner

I highly recommend those wind maps when you're high.

While further temperature increases may go too far and erode lobster populations in coming decades, for now crustaceans are still breeding in great profundity.

Point taken, but I think you may have meant to say 'fecundity'.

Lol yes

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2018/04/18/global-warming-has-changed-the-great-barrier-reef-forever-scientists-say/?utm_term=.a291320a898d

Instead, “we were surprised to see about a 25 percent loss of corals in the north that was more or less instantaneous,” Hughes said. “That number of corals died in two weeks. They didn’t die slowly of starvation, they actually cooked.”

Last week, I wrote a comment under my favorite German dirtbag leftist podcast, linking a speech in which Chancellor Merkel, doctor of physics, went offscript for a minute in 2013, casually mentioning to a crowd of scientists that the two-degree target could not be reached even if all emissions were cut immediately, and that this has been widely known and accepted since the 2009 Copenhagen conference.

This week, one of the podcast's presenters went on a lengthy rant on how climate change couldn't possibly end humanity, let alone all life on Earth. Increased migration, food shortages, some shitty weather, but extinction? Impossible.

I envy that man, a little.

i don't think humanity will go extinct, either. and all life going instinct isn't going to happen anytime soon, unless a giant object collides with Earth and we all go flying out into deep space

but yeah, iirc almost all the scenarios that involve keeping it under a 2 degree increase involve not only emission cuts but also "negative emissions" - geoengineering, taking CO2 out of the atmosphere and storing it underground, etc. we're fucked

I agree with that. The earth system has seen "humanity" sized injections of carbon dioxide in the recent geological past from large igneous provinces (Columbia River Basalts (17-14 Ma) or Ethiopian Highlands (29-31 Ma)), which constrains the effects. I see the worst case scenario, incorporating feedbacks, would be a repeat of the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, an extinction event, but not one of the 'big 5'. Human carrying capacity could fall to as low as 1-3 billion, but we're just as adaptable as rats and cockroaches.

unless a giant object collides with Earth and we all go flying out into deep space

and even then i bet there would be some tiny earth fragment hurdling through space with a cockroach in a space helmet doing a wheelie

somehow there's not a stock image for that, so i borrowed a bit from an orkin commercial

https://i.imgur.com/T4EvVOA.jpg

Life will not go extinct. Bacteria own this planet and always will. Multi-cellular life will not entirely die off, either.

we're just as adaptable as rats and cockroaches.

Those animals exist much closer to the base of the ecosystem, while humans are at the apex and require a lot of energy inputs to stay alive. I do not expect human extinction, but anticipating a population of 1-3 billion humans as a worst case scenario seems overly rosy to me. Somewhere south of 500 million seems very conceivable to me.