Global Warming's Terrifying New Math

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.

in this book

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/515TD3ctgWL._SX355_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

he excerpts various Defense Department reports on climate change where they explicitly talk about the need to fortify the border against future incoming "starving climate refugees"

tbf as discussed above, this is an old racist/xenophobic thing - tons and tons of malthusianism following the population bomb, taken seriously and studied by all kinds of decision-makers.

yeah to be clear, i reject the matlthusian trap as a flimsy pretext for aspiring fascists to unleash their genocidal tendencies.

yuuuuup.

i'll take the contrarian view there - we're only 50 years out from the publication of the population bomb, and the ultimate consequences of the J-curve of population in a world of constrained resources are not at all clear. the agricultural green revolution in the 60s really saved the day by increasing crop yields through the world, at least temporarily, in ways that the neo-malthusians didn't forsee (and tbf, almost no one did). but the underlying problems outlined by those gloomy malthusians are still there (sanpaku to thread), and counting on new agricultural/genetic revolutions to solve them.

don't get me wrong, obviously the entire topic of population and resource constraints is thorny and rife with potential for mischaracterization by racists. but that doesn't mean that resource constraints are solved or that we shouldn't worry about population.

the neo-malthusians did foresee this, sorta - one of the ways this mentality manifested itself in decision-making was in support for technocratic and developmentalist solutions like the green revolution which also dovetailed with neocolonial capitalism. it was already underway of course but it got a serious boost from this. i was babbling about this upthread when i read outlaw territories, the details are already a little foggy to me though.

but agreed with your overall point - my pointing out the history of these ideas is by no means me trying to say there's nothing to see here folks. there are serious resource crises ahead. i just think we should put effort into expanding our minds with regard to other paradigms than us-versus-them or how-will-capitalism-invent-our-way-out-of-this-one. i was on a design review a while back where one earnest young man was pitching conversions of offshore oil rigs into vertical farms because "we're running out of farmland and there won't be enough to feed everybody." notwithstanding the problems with vertical farming and the minuscule amount of land this would make up for, my real concern was that he was buying into the scarcity claims. we're not running out of farmland, we're just doing other, stupid things with it like building suburban sprawl or raising cattle instead of soybeans. (MVRDV's "pig city" film essentially already did his project but as a pointed dystopian commentary: https://vimeo.com/89893363 ) so we should be pushing as much as possible the point that the problem is capitalism, not only in creating global warming, but in maintaining an inequitable distribution of its products. there is enough to go around.

obviously this gets much trickier is when regions are rendered uninhabitable and we get into real questions of relocation. i live in a city where people can't even move their way into the middle of a subway car to make room for the people entering the door. "THERE'S SO MUCH ROOM," i have sometimes had to point out to people. so getting them to realize that we can and must reconfigure the sprawling landscape of north america and accommodate millions of climate refugees seems like a tall, perhaps impossible order. but if we don't start thinking this way we're preemptively ceding the definition of the problem and of its plausible solutions to the build-a-wall fascists of today and 2050 alike. i dunno, all easier said than done.

i'm sorta...if we're already not "fair and just" at resources distribution now, and if we haven't been safe from 40 yrs of ascending fascism from 80 to 20 (partially as a result of population relocations), i'm intimidated at the possibility of catastrophic scarcity of food and water too.

*re-reads KM's post, considers replacing txt with 'yup'* xp

i just think we should put effort into expanding our minds with regard to other paradigms than us-versus-them or how-will-capitalism-invent-our-way-out-of-this-one.

otm! sadly, though, these seem to be the two defaults that we're heading toward. the military, left to their own devices, will likely see climate refugees as threats and build walls and detention camps. and most other people seem happy to rely on people like elon musk to solve things.

your point about inequitable distribution being the real problem is correct, i think, but it's been true for many years now. there shouldn't be anyone starving out there right now, and no one living on $1 a day. and yet...here we are. so i'm not optimistic that mankind will successfully initiate a peaceful global political-economy-agricultural revolution centered on long-term ecological thinking, just as resource constraints get tighter and the effects of climate change continue to become more real and physical and damaging. we're already geared toward short-term thinking, and that's before the electricity goes out for a week, or the grocery store in some small town starts missing shipments.

realistically, how many human beings can this planet support in the long term? if it's 7b and we have 8b, then what happens?

it's a moving number that will always change with resource depletion, climate, efficiency of applications, and when skynet becomes sentient.

I suppose living in a society where the 8 richest people are worth as much as the poorest 4,000,000,000 fudges the numbers a bit

MOV EOT MARS

elon and grimes already closed the sarcophagus drank the fluid and flew there to stake properties, also mars is now named "musk."

re the map up there, gonna give my friends in Saskatoon a call

Three things surprised me reporting this story:
1) I didn't realize just how much of the US economy depends on outdoor labor
2) Heat hurts productivity well before it reaches dangerous levels
3) There's no national workplace heat protection standardhttps://t.co/b2dKSrIJnF

— Umair Irfan (@umairfan) July 27, 2018

I was listening to a piece on the radio on how recently built glass fronted apartments in London have been built to a spec for a moderate, rainy climate and have become impossibly hot during this summer. They lack a window the other side for through ventilation and have ceilings too low for fans, which don't really solve the problem anyway.

There is an element of low sympathy rating for people who buy a close to a million pound valued apartment, and then discover it is a like a baking tin in the summer!

scene report: the southwest is on fire for the 10th year straight.

southwest us i mean

xpost I had friend that was working at St0ne B4rns (Blue H1ll) and I was shocked that when they were out working all day in this bourgie ethical farm in the heat and sun, they had absolutely no shade during breaks. I was like tell "them they need to set up temporary tents or something, and make them supply all the sunblock!"

humans must evolve these features

how many human beings

We were probably beyond carrying capacity (that is, the population that could be supported indefinitely without non-renewable resources) at 3 billion in 1960. That's on the higher end of estimates from Cohen's How Many People Can the Earth Support, some estimates are around 1.5 billion. The Green Revolution of Haber-Bosch nitrogen, potash, and phosphate fertilizers; and dwarf cereal crops that didn't bend under the weight of their seed; didn't really change that, as phosphate, potash, and the methane used in Haber-Bosch are finite (though there are renewable workarounds for the last). Crop yields in developed nations have plateaued, so there's little sign of a second Green revolution.

I find the UN projection of 11 billion in 2100, a bit fanciful. The projected 750 million Nigerians would turn the nation, already a major food importer, into a Yemen like basketcase. Were it not for climate change, I suspect we might have had a blowoff party touching 10 billion before resource constraints (petroleum, phosphate, soil, groundwater, ecosystem services, etc) felled us. Then the Four Horseman would do their bit to bring humanity back below carrying capacity. Ecological overshoot is the worst roller coaster.

Climate change likely to hastens the timeline. The rule of thumb from studies of research farm plots (with adequate water, fertilizer, and pest control) is that every °C reduces crop yield by about 10%. Some, like rice in the tropics, decline more, 17% / °C. Germination at elevated temperature has been vexing the crop breeders for decades. The real world would be worse, as precipitation shifts, groundwater is exhausted, weeds & pests become worse, monsoons become shorter (eg, Indonesia's is barely enough for 2 rice crops/year), and working outdoors becomes seasonally lethal in places like the Ganges basin. On "business as usual" emissions trajectories (+ 4 °C MST in 2100, not including poorly modeled feedbacks), would that mean -50% global food calories? -60%? It all gets rather dire the more one looks.

“I’m an environmental journalist, but I never write about overpopulation. Here’s why.” https://t.co/PgrruphpF3 via @voxdotcom

— Pawel Frelik (@Nomad93) July 27, 2018

This is what Redding, California looks like right now. The fire is devastating and we are all overwhelmed. pic.twitter.com/mArsZnhOb4

— Candace McHatton (@bullettoothRuth) July 27, 2018

the big NYT magazine article is up:

This narrative by Nathaniel Rich is a work of history, addressing the 10-year period from 1979 to 1989: the decisive decade when humankind first came to a broad understanding of the causes and dangers of climate change. Complementing the text is a series of aerial photographs and videos, all shot over the past year by George Steinmetz. With support from the Pulitzer Center, this two-part article is based on 18 months of reporting and well over a hundred interviews. It tracks the efforts of a small group of American scientists, activists and politicians to raise the alarm and stave off catastrophe. It will come as a revelation to many readers — an agonizing revelation — to understand how thoroughly they grasped the problem and how close they came to solving it.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/01/magazine/climate-change-losing-earth.html

gonna save that one for when i have some mental health to spare

Already some who miss the point.

Scientists aren’t impressed with New York Times’ new story on climate change

'how close they came to solving it' assumes a lot of initiative and inertia that doesn't actually exist tbh

it's one thing to fuck things up for people and polar bears, but puppies?

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/environment/global-warming/melted-asphalt-shoes-for-dogs-as-europe-wilts-in-heat/articleshow/65274425.cms

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/aug/06/domino-effect-of-climate-events-could-push-earth-into-a-hothouse-state

hypothetically, what would a "fix" to climate change even look like? could we, I dunno, plant a billion trees or something?

presumably mad scientist sequestration of billions of tons of carbon dioxide but hopefully not by using genetically engineered microorganisms in a runaway process that goes Too Far

Industrial civilization has added 560 gigatonnes of carbon to the Earth system. The total biomass of trees, globally, is 283 gigatonnes. So, to scrub human impact, we'd have to triple the current land mass devoted to forests, and then find a way to sequester that carbon. Not gonna happen.

In the physical world, its a retreat of populations to denser/walkable living in urban centres (with suburbs plowed under for farmland), as fast as possible rollout of wind, solar, nuclear, power-to-methane, algal fuel. In the policy world, its ceasing all new government leases of fossil fuel mineral rights, and putting a price on carbon of around $100-200/ton, which would make renewables the more economic choice for utility and private investment. Domestically, one could offset the impact of carbon taxes by using them to replace all payroll (pension) and income taxes for all under some income threshold. Internationally, an international body would have to be set up to define universal export tariffs for all countries that are cheating on carbon pricing.

It's not going to happen until electorates are made aware of the consequences of unchecked climate change. Sea-level rise, droughts, storms and fires, they get press but these are fairly minor compared to the billions who will starve, and the collapse of nation states in most of the global South. We're reducing the human carrying capacity of the Earth for millenia, if its just a 2 billion reduction over 5000 years that's 125 billion who will never live, more than the total of all humans who have lived to date.

It doesn't harm anyone if a hypothetical person doesn't come to be.

More strongly, being born is an irreparable harm so that just sounds like 125 billion hypothetical people spared the indignity of being.

I'm sympathetic to the negative utilitarian argument, but as far as we know, humanity and more generally conscious life is the only thing giving the entire universe meaning. Whether they're suffering or happy.

yeah but meaning to whom

https://www.theonion.com/climate-researchers-warn-only-hope-for-humanity-now-lie-1828171232

hypothetically, what would a "fix" to climate change even look like? could we, I dunno, plant a billion trees or something?

― frogbs

hypothetically, what would a "fix" to climate change even look like? could we, I dunno, plant a billion trees or something?

― frogbs

hard to say. nobody who's actually knowledgable on the topic is arguing for it.

it's going to be difficult over the next century. in a sense climate change was the equivalent of that thought experiment with the train and whether to switch it from its track with, you know, seven billion people on it to the track with only hundreds of millions of people, and we collectively spent the time arguing about whether there was even a train at all. we humans are very philosophical people. i guess the next century will be a mad struggle for excuses about why it's ok that the bulk of the world's human population (along with innumerable non-human species) is dying off. in that respect i guess the current political situation is helping, because it's allowing me to let go of personal ethical beliefs that are frankly ludicrous in that context.

for almost all of the wild environment, i think maybe we’re not at excuses yet. our current management practice is transitioning from ignorance to denial. Hmm you are probly right that we’re on the cusp of an excuse-dominant social environment.