Global Warming's Terrifying New Math

good luck meeting your daily caloric needs on celery alone tho

don't forget all the bodies

celery is also said to be good for detecting certain gases in the praxis range of the spectrum, so that could come in handy.

what we're facing is basically a modified version of the malthusian trap, isn't it?

Not sure how climate change related this is, but I just heard vanilla is now more expensive than silver by the ounce. Hence farmers in Madagascar having to do night-shifts to guard their crops.

When one looks at history, the Malthusian Trap is the normal state. It might not have been possible before the 18th century (and caloric imports from New World as sugar, rum, and dried cod, as well as crops like potatoes) for Malthus to even notice it, as before then it was normal for peasants and paupers with every bad crop.

^to die en masse with every bad crop.

of course, malthus was writing about all of history up to and including his own time. the difficult thing is that a lot of people, including myself, thought that post-industrial capitalism offered an escape from the malthusian trap, in that a couple generations of societal prosperity cause the birth rate to drop back down to sustainable levels. unfortunately malthus was a little too specific in his theory, which led people to focus entirely on the birth rate statistic. the real problem is the human species' insatiable appetite for growth, an appetite which can be checked only by resource limits - birth rates drop, resource consumption rates don't. the tragedy of capitalism is that it reached a point where it appeared to offer a solution to the malthusian trap, but in fact was simply acting to implement that trap on a planetary scale.

We gotta be out here reweaving the social fabric, team. Hell & high water comin both.

perhaps one of you clever lot can tell me (or point me towards an article that can tell me) to which extent we are already seeing the effects of global warming?

I ask because I have a feeling we ain't seen nothign yet and when people blame a hot summer, forest fires etc. on global warming this is more anecdotical than scientific

dunno if this is the type of thing you're after. just read it this morning though, and it's relevant imo
https://www.sciencealert.com/the-arctic-permafrost-is-melting-strange-thermokarst-lakes-climate-change-abrupt-melting

that's definitely interesting/terrifying

but I was looking more for stuff on the correlation between climate change and what people currently experience as... unusual weather phenomenon (like mild winters, hot summers, forest fires)

I guess an article like this gets at what I'm thinking about
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/20/us/california-wildfires-human-causes-arson.html

that it makes sense that global warming has an impact on forest fires, but there may also be other reasons we're seeing an increase in fires

ofc it's good that unusual weather phenomenon draws more attention to the causes of climate change, I just have a feeling that a lot of people are erroneously attributing relatively "normal" stuff to climate change, and 1) I don't like flawed logic 2) it may distract from the actual catastrophical shit to come

Experiential style evidence, like when trees leaf out?

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/07/180703084147.htm

O_O

What if phenology is just phrenology

daaaamn

I ask because I have a feeling we ain't seen nothign yet and when people blame a hot summer, forest fires etc. on global warming this is more anecdotical than scientific

i'd say a good rule of thumb is don't listen to "people" (unless, cough cough, that person is me! haha. fuck) about climate change. some people will blame a single hurricane (or a forest fire, or a flood, etc) on climate change. then other people will say, with reason, that hurricanes existed before the industrial revolution. then those two people will argue with each other until other people reach the conclusion that it's a big debate with no clear answers.

my advice is to listen to scientists who research climate change. scientists know how to consider single, 'anecdotal' events in the context of the larger trend of data. it's true that forest fires occurred long before the steam engine was constructed. forest fires have always existed. they're necessary for the restoration and resiliency of ecosystems. so one can't really say that any single forest fire was "caused by climate change". however, one can say that "there are five times more large fires today than we did in the 1970s", or that the fire season lasts months longer each year than it used to a few decades ago, for example.

think about days of record heat. if you tell an old man that climate change is causing more and more days of extreme heat in the summer, he'll tell you all about the summer of 1934 and how it was so fucking hot out there by the creek. why, i reckon the fish done went belly up in a dry patch out there in the middle where the rapids should have been, i tell you what. and it's true, there have always been extremely hot days, long before humans started fucking things up. so instead, it's useful to quantify the number of days of recordbreaking heat and see if there's an identifiable trend:

https://i.imgur.com/94isY4b.png

i like this chart because it demonstrates that even in the midst of a clear warming trend, there are days of extreme cold! it still happens! even in 2100 when our descendants are literally burning in earth hell and wishing that god would come visit just to really , REALLY end it all, obliterating all memories and traces of consciousness, there's gonna be a really fucking cold summer day in Boise and the great-great-great-grandson of the guy who saw the fish flopping in hot dust in 1934 will be saying "see, global warming is hogwash! if global warming is real, why is it so cold in the summer? ok, i'm going back into virtual reality now, because that's where humanity lives in 2100." but as they slip back into virtual reality, you can tell them that even though any single day of recordbreaking heat (or cold) can't be solely attributed to climate change, the overall trend is clear: more record highs, fewer record lows.

haha, thanks Karl, that's what I was going for

I just have a feeling that a lot of people are erroneously attributing relatively "normal" stuff to climate change, and 1) I don't like flawed logic 2) it may distract from the actual catastrophical shit to come

tl;dr: "people" do make mistakes like that, but scientists are well aware of the other, non-human, factors that contribute to rising temps/forest fires/rising sea levels/etc. even with these other factors taken into account, they still say, unequivocally, that climate change is overwhelmingly driven by rising greenhouse gas emissions from humans.

oof, that chart i posted was needlessly confusing. there used to be a more straightforward version that just showed the number of record heat days vs record cold days, like this one for ft collins, CO:

https://i.imgur.com/yGczFsp.png?1

It's really hard to look at a single weather event and say definitively that it was caused by climate change (since weather is just a single data point that makes up the climate), but when you can aggregate a bunch of similar data points, you can detect an overall trend with much more confidence.

Ft. Fun is so damn hot right now.

me in 2008: we gon die ¯\_(O_o)_/¯

me in 2018: we gon die ¯\_(˘‿˘)_/¯

Although this administration has been a long parade of horrors, Trump's effort to repeal the Clean Power Plan and boost greenhouse gas pollution stands out as his most terrible crime against humanity. https://t.co/2ox8qNi0iZ

— Public Citizen (@Public_Citizen) August 21, 2018

It's crazy we're trying to shut out all that beautiful clean coal, you know.

high fives. we did it, people

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/21/arctics-strongest-sea-ice-breaks-up-for-first-time-on-record

As the nation plans new defenses against the more powerful storms and higher tides expected from climate change, one project stands out: an ambitious proposal to build a nearly 60-mile “spine” of concrete seawalls, earthen barriers, floating gates and steel levees on the Texas Gulf Coast.

Like other oceanfront projects, this one would protect homes, delicate ecosystems and vital infrastructure, but it also has another priority — to shield some of the crown jewels of the petroleum industry, which is blamed for contributing to global warming and now wants the federal government to build safeguards against the consequences of it.

The plan is focused on a stretch of coastline that runs from the Louisiana border to industrial enclaves south of Houston that are home to one of the world’s largest concentrations of petrochemical facilities, including most of Texas’ 30 refineries, which represent 30 percent of the nation’s refining capacity.

Texas is seeking at least $12 billion for the full coastal spine, with nearly all of it coming from public funds. Last month, the government fast-tracked an initial $3.9 billion for three separate, smaller storm barrier projects that would specifically protect oil facilities.

https://whyy.org/articles/big-oil-asks-government-to-protect-it-from-climate-change/

love how Earth is basically a dystopian novel at this point

privatize the profits + socialize the losses = heavy weather

Recommended book for thread regulars. Pretty much self-explanitory from the title.

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51TPtPykmCL.jpg

ugh, that must be a heartwrenching read. the political turmoil of the last several years in europe, in response to the migrants there, and in the US, with trump and his stupid-ass wall and all of the people who believe in it, give me exactly 0% hope that the most privileged and wealthy nations will treat climate migrants humanely in the future

the future i am expecting is made up of a) medieval, feudal-like mini-states/castles, lorded over by the descendants of rich people from the end of whatever era this is now, heavily fortified by personal militaries b) full-on fascist nightmare nations and the people who are allowed to live there, probably justifying to themselves why it could only be that way, and c) everyone else caught in the middle

https://m.imdb.com/title/tt4333474/

^

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lazarus_(comics)

back in the real world, stories like this are emblematic of why nuclear is NOT the energy of the future:

The primary owner of a power plant with two partially built nuclear reactors in South Carolina walked away from the $9 billion project last summer because of high construction costs and delays. Now no one wants to pay for it.

The utility overseeing the Virgil C. Summer plant is asking ratepayers across the Palmetto State to shoulder its construction expenses of $4.7 billion, citing a law passed last decade. But local lawmakers are trying to force South Carolina Electric & Gas Co. to pick up more of the tab.

nuclear is just flat out expensive compared to wind and solar. the capital costs are high, things like fukushima inevitably occur, and even if all goes well, at the end of nuclear plant's lifecycle it has to be decommissioned (expensively) and the nuclear waste sent to some hellscape deep within a mountain, hypothetically

meanwhile the cost curves of building and maintaining wind and solar are already lower than coal (and natural gas, in some places) and will keep getting lower and lower.

I was drinking something carbonated and burped through my nose -- was the ensuing nasal burning the same chemistry behind ocean acidification, and would that make a useful learning tool to illustrate ocean acidification?

the only way to find out is to keep burping carbonated things through your nose, in the name of science!

the future i am expecting is made up of a) medieval, feudal-like mini-states/castles, lorded over by the descendants of rich people from the end of whatever era this is now, heavily fortified by personal militaries b) full-on fascist nightmare nations and the people who are allowed to live there, probably justifying to themselves why it could only be that way, and c) everyone else caught in the middle

― Karl Malone

that doesn't sound anything like fully automated gay space communism. i'm still expecting that, for the record.

all we'll get is space force, if we're lucky

#Temperature anomalies 1880-2017 by country 🌡. No matter how you visualize it, it looks scary! #GISTEMP #dataviz #climatechange #globalwarming
Download / watch hi-res 🎞: https://t.co/ZdGPVTM5yO pic.twitter.com/cAn9wG8FPU

— Antti Lipponen (@anttilip) August 25, 2018

That’s a whole lot of emojis and hashtags ffs

read the comments to see an irl disinformation campaign playing out. some of these people are just fools, but others must be paid or somehow organized

also just the sheer impossibility of providing full answers (via twitter, no less) to the people asking questions who aren't paid trolls

storming the wall is very very good and really filled in the shadowed gaps in my understanding of the oncoming future -- miller gave a talk at my office a couple of months ago and quoted from some of the DHS reports that imagine a future of 'starving climate refugees' at our heavily militarized borders; grim but ultimately bracing stuff, forces one to reckon with the old socialism v barbarism question

None of this is new. Leftie Gwynne Dyer wrote about this, drawing from military scenario planning, in Climate Wars from 2009.

Brazil and Argentina still manage to feed themselves, but Mexico has been expelled from the NAFTA, leaving the United States and Canada with just enough food and water to maintain at least a shadow of their former lifestyles. The Wall along the U.S.-Mexican border is still holding.

Even the U.S. border with Mexico could be sealed, at a tiny fraction of the amount spent annually on the war in Iraq, if the United States ever decided that it was willing to forego the constant influx of cheap labor that is facilitated by the current deliberately porous border controls. The notion that Europe cannot control its sea frontiers with Africa is simply laughable; it is just not yet willing to use physical force to defend them.

By 2026, about half a million illegal immigrants were streaming into the United States each month. Social services in the border states were collapsing under the pressure of providing basic emergency services to the newcomers, and American public opinion finally demanded that something serious be done about the border.
It was done. In 2029, the frontier fortifications stretched three thousand kilometers from the mouth of the Rio Grande in Texas to the suburbs of San Diego in California, and the border truly was sealed. After some very ugly incidents early on when groups of would-be immigrants tried to cross the completed sections of the 'Big Fence' and were practically wiped out by the automated weapons and mines, attempts to sneak across the border in the old style practically ceased.

The chain-link fence or its lineal descendant is still there, as easy to climb over or cut through as ever. However, it now bears warnings in Spanish and English to proceed no further on danger of death, and the signs are brightly lit at night. About two hundred meters to the north, on the American side, there is a much more serious barrier: two parallel open-mesh fences, three meters high, with razor wire on top, and separated by a raked sand strip, fifty meters wide, and a dry moat, three meters deep.
There are closed-circuit television cameras atop these fences (including infrared ones for night vision), and movement sensors buried beneath the sand strip, and anti-personnel land mines in the dry moat. There are also automated machine guns atop the northernmost fence every four hundred meters, all the way from the Gulf of Mexico to San Diego on the Pacific Ocean. All that talk about how you can't seal off the Mexican border was just deliberately misleading propaganda from people who wanted to keep the border porous.

At first the Mexican-American community (and the other, much smaller, Hispanic groups) split down the middle, with the longer-established families tending to agree with the non-Hispanic. But when they saw how drastic it was going to be—bad to be, if it was going to work—they were appalled. The pictures of innocent people being blown up by land mines and machine gunned by automated weapons had the same impact on Mexican-Americans that it had on Mexicans south of the border: shock, horror and an outraged rejection of a policy that involved such cruelty.

I've lived with the knowledge that this was likely since 2009, and almost certain since the 2016 election.

Wow ... Central European University is suspending all programs related to refugees. This is related to the new Hungarian law going into effect on Monday that taxes 25% of entire budget of universities that do anything (research, teach, services) with refugees.

— Charles Mathies (@charles_mathies) August 29, 2018

as ever, sanpaku, i'm very impressed by your economy of verbiage in insisting you know more than everyone and knew it first.

I don't post in this thread mostly cuz I absolutely hate the title so idk if this has been covered already but
http://sd24.senate.ca.gov/news/2017-05-31-california-moves-closer-100-clean-energy

good news everyone, the past would like to let us know it is time to cry

DECIN, Czech Republic (AP) — Due to this summer’s drought in Central Europe, boulders known as “hunger stones” are reappearing in the Elbe River.

The low water levels in the river that begins in the Czech Republic then crosses Germany into the North Sea has exposed stones on the river bed whose appearances in history used to warn people that hard times were coming.

Over a dozen of the hunger stones, chosen to record low water levels, can now be seen in and near the northern Czech town of Decin near the German border.

The oldest water mark visible dates to 1616. That stone, is considered the oldest hydrological landmark in Central Europe, bears a chiseled inscription in German that says: “When you see me, cry.”

https://apnews.com/9512be71cc8f40a7b6e22bc991ef2c6c