Global Warming's Terrifying New Math

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.

We're not eating lions and wolves. The global human trophic level is 2.21 (same as anchovies), the US/UK trophic level is 2.44-2.45, mine as a vegan is 2. So there's room for improvement. Before climate change, the carrying capacity of the U.S. is around 800 million on a lacto-vegetarian diet.

My thought of a carrying capacity around 1-3 B is largely driven by the Ag research:

Rice yields decline with higher night temperature from global warming

Grain yield declined by 10% for each 1°C increase in growing-season minimum temperature in the dry season

Holding current growing regions fixed, area-weighted average yields are predicted to decrease by 30–46% before the end of the century under the slowest (B1) warming scenario and decrease by 63–82% under the most rapid warming scenario (A1FI.

suitable growing days will actually decrease globally by up to 11% when other climatic variables that limit plant growth are considered (i.e., temperature, water availability, and solar radiation). Areas in Russia, China, and Canada are projected to gain suitable plant growing days, but the rest of the world will experience losses. Notably, tropical areas could lose up to 200 suitable plant growing days per year.

A study conducted comparing normal seasonal temperatures (1980–2010) for Ames, IA, to a normal + 4°C environment.... Grain yields decreased from 84 to 100% because of exposure to high nighttime temperatures and disruption of the pollination process as evidenced by the large reduction in kernels per ear.

Status quo groundwater management will likely reduce irrigated corn acreage by ~60% and wheat acreage by ~50%. This widespread forced shift to dryland farming, coupled with the likely effects of climate change, will contribute to overall changes in crop production. Taking into account both changes in yield and available irrigated acreage, corn production would decrease by approximately 60%

These are all effects seen before the end of the century, long before much of Miami is flooded. Humanity will starve *long* before many of us are displaced by rising sea levels.

I wouldn't be surprised if populations fell south of 500 million, but not from climate effects alone. Fundamentally, I think the 20th century was bumping against food resource constraints around 2-3 billion, before Haber-Bosch ammonia, superphosphate, and Norman Borlaug's dwarf cereals. Ammonia can be made with renewable energy (and is a pretty ideal way of using surplus renewable electricity), but phosphate bearing rock is limited, and very unevenly distributed. I expect phosphate will ultimately determine human populations, and the phosphate deposits of Morocco & Western Sahara to be fought over for centuries to come. That last cite has the elegant line, "When all of these are exhausted, a food-based population reduction will follow."

ilu

More disaster porn (flooding in California).

https://features.weather.com/us-climate-change/california/

http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/April-2018/The-Future-of-Water/

I’m finna airbnb my place to make money off all the climate change tourists.

1. Much of the key climate news of late has been about sea level rise. It hasn’t been good.

— Chris Mooney (@chriscmooney) April 25, 2018

a good, quick summary of two recent developments related to rising sea-levels and freshwater: the stratification feedback loop (melting glacier water leading to increased melting of glaciers), and the availability of freshwater on low-lying islands (rising sea levels/waves can salinize groundwater)

worthwhile thread thx

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/apr/26/were-doomed-mayer-hillman-on-the-climate-reality-no-one-else-will-dare-mention

A Hawaiian island got about 50 inches of rain in 24 hours. Scientists warn it's a sign of the future (LA Times link)

Since the 1940s, the Hawaiian island of Kauai has endured two tsunamis and two hurricanes, but locals say they have never experienced anything like the thunderstorm that drenched the island this month. "The rain gauge in Hanalei broke at 28 inches within 24 hours," said state Rep. Nadine Nakamura of the North Shore community. "In a neighboring valley, their rain gauge showed 44 inches within 24 hours. It's off the charts." Actually, it was even worse. This week the National Weather Service said nearly 50 inches of rain fell in 24 hours. Now, as Kauai continues to recover, scientists warn that this deluge on April 14 and 15 was something new — the first major storm in Hawaii linked to climate change.

always a good time to check in on global CO2 emissions

https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/lf2WZ2K1QcQ_Dp5OBa7Cz8TZPGc=/0x0:1080x1080/1720x0/filters:focal(0x0:1080x1080):format(webp)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/10749029/jz_climate_contributors.png

(https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/4/30/17300946/global-warming-degrees-replace-fossil-fuels)

*blinks, replaces head firmly in sand*

Pakistan May Have Just Set a World Heat Record

🌡️🔥Exceptionnel 50.2°C à Nawabshah au #Pakistan ce lundi 30/04/2018, #RECORD national de chaleur pour un mois d'avril ! 🔥🌡️
(précédent : 50°C à Larkana le 19/04/2017)
*** aussi un nouveau record mensuel pour tout le continent asiatique ! *** pic.twitter.com/GTCOJuDT9Q

— Etienne Kapikian (@EKMeteo) April 30, 2018

hello future climate refugees, sorry we fucked up your homelands

in the meantime here's a deep thought from dinesh d'souza which will no doubt help you get through your 50-plus-degree spring weather

https://i.redditmedia.com/K55pAUNPgsdi7RrbV7wx7CbwYgJzKF3GLg48-cT-Kto.jpg?w=640&s=bbc78a7b4857f3bd747cfbed270172c3