Global Warming's Terrifying New Math

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

a quite literal hot take if u will

jfc

can't wait to hear his verse on the next ye single

Maybe an apple... is an orange!

so if you believe gender is an immutable scientific fact then you think climate change is...still all in your head? also D, anthropogenic climate change is literally a social construct but thanks for participating

terrible arguments made via brute-forced nonsense analogies were so common in the blogosphere days, but twitter has really made them virulent

After his book (The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left), I think we can shun/ostracise Dinesh, forever.

meanwhile, everyone in the northern US complained about abnormally cold weather in early April

April 2018 was the 3rd warmest on record globally - @CopernicusECMWF analysis (ERA-Interim). Coldest conditions (relative to average) over eastern North America. Well above average in Europe, Arctic, and coastal Antarctica.

For more information: https://t.co/galMOMkRbz pic.twitter.com/UrQLLxUFng

— Zack Labe (@ZLabe) May 4, 2018

spent some time today with an academic who has a paper coming out soon on a climate-change related topic which has been bounced around in peer review for months, primarily because one of the reviewers is a climate change skeptic who is also a petrochemical-industry-funded lobbyist who kept raising objections he had cut-and-pasted from other reviews he'd done elsewhere

that same academic has another paper held up with another journal for reasons he suspects are not too dissimilar

makes me wonder just how much potentially important research around the world is being delayed by deliberate interventions from what are essentially paid saboteurs

makes me wonder just how much potentially important research around the world is being delayed by deliberate interventions from what are essentially paid saboteurs

From 2010: https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/green/reports/2010/10/14/8484/big-oil-goes-to-college/

If Big Oil doesn't have a problem with funding civil wars and buying off politicians, tossing your petty cash at academics seems like a good insurance policy.

A stat that caught me by surprise- Wyoming is, by far, the largest producer of coal in the US:

As of 2014, twenty-five states produced coal. The coal-producing states were, in descending order, with annual production in millions of short tons:

1. Wyoming 395.7
2. West Virginia 112.2
3. Kentucky 77.3
4. Pennsylvania 60.9
5. Illinois 58.0
6. Montana 44.6
7. Texas 43.7
8. Indiana 39.3
9. North Dakota 29.2
10 Colorado 24.0
11. Ohio 22.3
12. New Mexico 22.0
13. Utah 17.9
14. Alabama 16.4
15. Virginia 15.1
16. Arizona 8.1
17. Mississippi 3.7
18. Louisiana 2.6
19. Maryland 2.0
20. Alaska 1.5
21. Oklahoma 0.9
22. Tennessee 0.8
23. Missouri 0.4
24. Arkansas 0.1
25. Kansas 0.1

something something trump's hairspray amirite

A sharp and mysterious rise in emissions of a key ozone-destroying chemical has been detected by scientists, despite its production being banned around the world.

Unless the culprit is found and stopped, the recovery of the ozone layer, which protects life on Earth from damaging UV radiation, could be delayed by a decade. The source of the new emissions has been tracked to east Asia, but finding a more precise location requires further investigation.

CFC chemicals were used in making foams for furniture and buildings, in aerosols and as refrigerants. But they were banned under the global Montreal protocol after the discovery of the ozone hole over Antarctica in the 1980s. Since 2007, there has been essentially zero reported production of CFC-11, the second most damaging of all CFCs.
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The rise in CFC-11 was revealed by Stephen Montzka, at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in Colorado, and colleagues who monitor chemicals in the atmosphere. “I have been doing this for 27 years and this is the most surprising thing I’ve ever seen,” he said. “I was just shocked by it.”

link?

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0106-2

thanks, but I was referring to the quoted article (always appreciate primary sources though)

yeah, sorry about that

also https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/16/mysterious-rise-in-banned-ozone-destroying-chemical-shocks-scientists

Yes this happened

http://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/388161-gop-lawmaker-says-rocks-falling-into-the-ocean-is-causing-higher

from the splinter news story on this guy:

As the Washington Post found, you’d need to drop a rock that weighed 6.6 quadrillion pounds directly into the ocean to see the level of sea rise that we see now.

look if you can prove to me that a 6.6 quadrillion pound rock didn't fall into the ocean i might be more likely to accept climate change is possible okay

"I'm pretty sure that on human time scales, those are minuscule effects,” responded Duffy

The only way to be absolutely sure is to halt all research on global alarmist warmism and divert all funding and attention to the important new Falling Rocks Theory Law

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/21/human-race-just-001-of-all-life-but-has-destroyed-over-80-of-wild-mammals-study?CMP=share_btn_tw

Humankind is revealed as simultaneously insignificant and utterly dominant in the grand scheme of life on Earth by a groundbreaking new assessment of all life on the planet.

The world’s 7.6 billion people represent just 0.01% of all living things, according to the study. Yet since the dawn of civilisation, humanity has caused the loss of 83% of all wild mammals and half of plants, while livestock kept by humans abounds.

hell yeah, fuck you animals

*dons giant foam finger with 'humanity #1' printed on it*

Somehow misread the thread title as Global Warming's Terrifying New Hat.

https://goo.gl/images/4yP4Zr

Fuck,should have been
https://i3.cpcache.com/product/293429211/cap.jpg

so uh this seems bad

https://theoutline.com/post/4708/montreal-protocol-vienna-convention-noaa-nasa-ozone-layer-hole-cfc?zd=2&zi=k5lys3ei

Pruitt pointed to “the demand for Powder River Basin coal,” referring to the basin straddling Wyoming and Montana that accounts for a large chunk of American coal production, as an example of exported American coal.

“I was in Wyoming recently,” he continued. “And if we really care about clean air, we would allow Indonesia to buy our coal from Wyoming, because it’s far cleaner than what they’re using now.”

...“So we need to be exporting LNG [Liquid Natural Gas], and we need to be exporting coal to the rest of the world,” Pruitt continued. “We need to be sharing with them our technology to access natural gas through hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling. Those are things that will help air quality across the globe.”

“What most people don’t realize,” he added, “is that the challenges we have domestically with respect to air quality, a lot of it is because of what happens internationally. And if those countries would simply adopt what we’re doing here, air quality in the United States would be better, and it would be better in those areas as well.”

https://i.imgur.com/T03Espu.jpg

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/pruitt-if-we-really-care-about-clean-air-we-should-export-more-american-coal

to state the obvious, this kind of analysis only makes sense in a world a) without a greenhouse gas effect, b) with zero other options for energy besides coal. a real leader would be pushing to make the united states the leader in clean energy tech and exporting THAT

There's an argument for a robust LNG market as a bridge fuel to a zero carbon future. At present, natural gas is a natural complement to renewables, as in places without massive hydropower resources (like say, Denmark+Sweden), every MW of utility solar or wind power is backed by a MW of gas turbines to handle intermittency. Increased green energy purchasing and mandates have driven firms to build renewables, and replace coal boilers with gas turbines. It's the later shift that's been responsible for most reductions in greenhouse emissions.

However, O&G companies have been exporting fracking technology for a decade, and frankly, there are relatively few places outside the US where its been successful. For example, Poland has some huge shale beds, and Europe has high gas prices, and hundreds of exploratory wells have been drilled by a dozen companies, but the returns to date have been dismal. China has its own mega O&G companies that are perfectly capable of developing their own fracking tech. As I understand it, pretty much every innovation in the field since Mitchell Energy fracked the Barnett shale under the DFW area in the late 90s has been incremental improvements to number of fracked stages or in pumped fracking solutions for specific fields, nothing earth shattering.

Of course, Pruitt is a shill, and no serious observers believes there's a role for coal. There's simply no way to make clean coal (gassification + oxy-fuel combustion + underground sequestration) profitable. Even renewable power-to-methane (PTM) for carbon neutral use of gas turbines would be cheaper.

I hereby declare my intention to become a leader in healthy eating by insisting that the whipped cream topping be left off my Chocolate Brownie Explosion Platter.

As I understand it, pretty much every innovation in the field since Mitchell Energy fracked the Barnett shale under the DFW area in the late 90s has been incremental improvements to number of fracked stages or in pumped fracking solutions for specific fields, nothing earth shattering.

Sanpaku also appears to be eliding the "underreported methane leaks from fracking and pipelines" issue that Karl went into upthread

I'm aware of it, but wellhead/pipeline leaks are a regulatory issue. Methane from wellheads could be monitored, with political will; and the cost wouldn't be that high. Methane monitors are low 4 digits, every wellhead is already networked. I personally doubt that fracked wells have any greater issues than conventional ones here, the cracks barely propagate 100 ft, rather than the 1000s to the surface.

I think the main issue is that we are so behind in electricity storage technology in areas without hydropower that I wouldn't be surprised if NG generation wasn't a big part of the energy mix throughout my lifetime (maybe 30-40 years). At present, batteries are viable for a few hours demand, but there are places where the wind doesn't blow, or the skies are overcast, for a week.

The most viable path I've seen is a heavy push towards power-to-methane, so that existing NG pipeline infrastructure could be used for longer term renewable energy storage, and the gas turbines gradually shift from geological to manmade fuel.

man I hate this thread's title

anyway: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2018/06/01/trump-withdrew-from-the-paris-climate-plan-a-year-ago-heres-what-has-changed/?utm_term=.a3a8b76e7553

One prominent group studying how countries are faring in their Paris goals, the Climate Action Tracker, just improved its assessment of the United States’ expected performance, rather than downgrading it, citing a continuing reduction of carbon in the electricity sector that is being driven mainly by market forces, rather than Trump policies.

“Although the Trump administration is working hard on rolling back climate policies, we do not yet see an effect on our projections of greenhouse gas emissions,” said Niklas Höhne, a founder of NewClimate Institute and professor at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. “In fact, still it’s the opposite. We have revised our projections for the U.S. in 2030 downward because there have been more renewables online and less coal.”

Hurrah for the market?!

http://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2018-06-14/antarctica-sea-level-rise/9859828

looking forward to reading this

The August 5 issue of @NYTmag will be dedicated entirely to a single story, a captivating, revelatory history about the decade we almost stopped climate change, but didn't. Story by @NathanielRich with stunning aerial photography by George Steinmetz.

— Jake Silverstein (@jakesilverstein) July 25, 2018

oh man

a deep dive into the history of the luddites, i assume

Would that be the '00s or the '90s?

haha, yeah i had the same question. it seems like they're going to use hansen's 1988 testimony as a starting point, so maybe they mean the 90s.

Rich's climate change novel, 'Odds Against Tomorrow', was very good. Looking forward to this.

welp

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DizDn0nWsAAesOj.jpg

London and New York now resemble something you might have visualised whilst listening to a Drexciya album.

looking forward to dying in an off-to-the-side skirmish of the First Polar War, glad i won't have to live to see the world where 95% of humanity have died off but somehow the remainder have rewired the whole planet with solar and nuclear infrastructure to support their high rise city covering New Zealand. tho i'm sure their hunger games equivalent will make for great television.

i am terrified by the geopolitical implications of this map but also delighted by a well-done infographic map

here's where gregg easterbrook mentions how great it will all be for canada and siberia

the implications of those big brown 'uninhabitable' areas are gonna keep me up at night for sure

I mean that's not going to happen overnight. but the global south will get hit hardest first. this bullshit with border patrol and ice right now almost feels like a test run for the decades of potential fascism to come.