Global Warming's Terrifying New Math

@thenation and I are proud of this joint investigation of a grave but little recognized climate science findings: tropical forests are flipping to release rather than store carbon. That must be reversed, soon. Here's our version of @eatonsam's report: https://t.co/AmauUQvVa5 https://t.co/7dacCgUU2y

— Mark Hertsgaard (@markhertsgaard) September 14, 2018

Countdown to fuckwits levelling all remaining rainforests...

find Kevin Anderson's take on flying inspirational
https://youtu.be/wcobuqiSo8I

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2014/10/plane_carbon_footprint_i_went_a_year_without_flying_to_fight_climate_change.html
this article is nice, too

i luv eric holthaus

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/trump-administration-sees-a-7-degree-rise-in-global-temperatures-by-2100/2018/09/27/b9c6fada-bb45-11e8-bdc0-90f81cc58c5d_story.html?utm_term=.60492852926e

WOW. hope no one minds if i excerpt (i tend to think most people don't click links, even on ILX)

Last month, deep in a 500-page environmental impact statement, the Trump administration made a startling assumption: On its current course, the planet will warm a disastrous seven degrees by the end of this century.

A rise of seven degrees Fahrenheit, or about four degrees Celsius, compared with preindustrial levels would be catastrophic, according to scientists. Many coral reefs would dissolve in increasingly acidic oceans. Parts of Manhattan and Miami would be underwater without costly coastal defenses. Extreme heat waves would routinely smother large parts of the globe.

But the administration did not offer this dire forecast, premised on the idea that the world will fail to cut its greenhouse gas emissions, as part of an argument to combat climate change. Just the opposite: The analysis assumes the planet’s fate is already sealed.

The draft statement, issued by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), was written to justify President Trump’s decision to freeze federal fuel-efficiency standards for cars and light trucks built after 2020. While the proposal would increase greenhouse gas emissions, the impact statement says, that policy would add just a very small drop to a very big, hot bucket.

“The amazing thing they’re saying is human activities are going to lead to this rise of carbon dioxide that is disastrous for the environment and society. And then they’re saying they’re not going to do anything about it,” said Michael MacCracken, who served as a senior scientist at the U.S. Global Change Research Program from 1993 to 2002.

i don't know how that one slipped through the cracks at the white house, other than the ongoing chaos and general incompetence.

it seems like they've skipped to the final stage of climate denial

1) climate change is a hoax
2) some warming may exist, but humans have nothing to do with it
3) humans have something to do with it, but climate change is not a problem, and in fact it might be a good thing
4) we can't solve climate change. are we really so vain to think that we can affect an entire earth's climate?
5) it's too late to do anything about it

lol nothing matters as policy

we're already up 1°F on the 1986-2005 average. 7° is unfathomable

This is a bad headline. They mean a 4 degree rise. (Which could still spell the end of civilization.) https://t.co/SwCY0csCZl

— Jonathan M. Katz✍🏻 (@KatzOnEarth) September 28, 2018

Jonathan M. Katz, Defender of Celsius

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/oct/01/cities-sink-sea-first-earth-submerge-coastline

All futures are fathomable. +7° F (3.89° C) is a world that's been seen and surpassed before in the geological record. I think in our future context, its one where current breadbaskets are scrubland, carrying capacity is reduced by perhaps 4 billion, majorities support killing migrants at the border, and coastal cities are replaced by aggregations of houseboats.

But that's not the future I'm scared about. 2.9-3.5° C is the current Paris Accords commitments future, 3.9° C is a Black Death scale calamity, but the business as usual future is 5-6° C by 2100, maybe pushing 8° C after ocean equilibration and carbon feedbacks, assuming most of humanity starves and can't burn the deep coal. A world that supports a few hundred million in current Arctic/Antarctic basins.

It's decades too late in any plausible politics to avoid catastrophe, but there remains a chance to prevent the human carrying capacity from plummeting from a future 4-5 billion on more prudent paths to < 500 million. That 3-5° C margin between Paris Accords and business as usual runaway is the margin between *Homo sapiens* and Earth being a failed project, never again advancing beyond Renaissance technology (fossil fuels are a single-chance bootstrap), and our descendants becoming our universe's self-awareness and cosmologically significant.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Figure_of_speech

Well that explains a lot about you xp

It's decades too late in any plausible politics to avoid catastrophe, but there remains a chance to prevent the human carrying capacity from plummeting from a future 4-5 billion on more prudent paths to < 500 million. That 3-5° C margin between Paris Accords and business as usual runaway is the margin between *Homo sapiens* and Earth being a failed project, never again advancing beyond Renaissance technology (fossil fuels are a single-chance bootstrap), and our descendants becoming our universe's self-awareness and cosmologically significant.

― godless hippie skank (Sanpaku)

oh, you're talking about hope, aren't you? i remember that stuff. didn't we use up the last of it in 2008, though? maybe there's an additional source of it under the arctic ice.

That hope was converted to methane a long time ago

twbb_drainage.gif

our descendants becoming our universe's self-awareness

to be accurate, as self-aware constituent parts of the universe, we are already the universe's self-awareness

Above, I was probably just channeling a memory of this quote by UC Santa Cruz cosmologist Anthony Aguirre, from Peter Brannen's Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth's Past Mass Extinctions:

Even though Aguirre works with scales and time spans that reinforce the astronomical insignificance of our species, he nevertheless thinks that our stewardship of the planet in the coming years is existentially, even cosmologically, consequential.

“I think we’re at the point where essentially—depending on what happens in the next 100 years—I think it’s likely that either civilization and potentially all life on earth is going to self-destruct, or if it doesn’t, I think the likelihood is we will manage to get to nearby planets, then faraway planets, and sort of spread throughout the galaxy,” he said. “And so, if you compare those futures, one of them has basically zero interesting conscious stuff going on in it—depending on where you count animals and things—and one of them has an exponentially growing supply of interesting conscious experience. That’s a big deal. If we were just one species among many throughout the galaxy, it would kind of be like, ‘Well, if we do ourselves in, we had it coming. We got what we deserve.’ But if we’re kind of the only one in the galaxy—or one of very few—that’s a huge future that we’ve extinguished. And it’s all just because we’re being stupid now.”

just because we’re being stupid now

Stupidity isn't a temporary aberration, but the shadow side of our "interesting" consciousness. It's a package deal; you can't separate them.

how dare u suggest there’s anything interesting about my consciousness

Climate Change Will Get Worse. These Investors Are Betting on It

Investors focused on climate change have traditionally bet on fixes, such as renewable power and electric vehicles. Mitigation and adaptation is a grimmer project. But Jay Koh, co-founder and managing director of the Lightsmith Group, a private equity firm focused on climate adaptation, says it's necessary to acknowledge that things could get worse. “There is a requirement for some kind of psychological journey that people have to go through,” Koh says. “I’d rather have a strategy designed for the set of circumstances where we might not 100 percent win.”

also known as sets of circumstances where we lose

we should really just get plans in place for an orderly wind-down at this point

invest in a chain of assisted suicide centers and sterilization clinics

get a Junior Anti-Sex League up and running

maybe just kick off some wars now so we can spread it out a bit, not have to eradicate too many populations at once

this is good. it's about a week-long workshop in sweden for people overwhelmed by the world, run by one of the Dark Mountain guys (i had forgotten about them). somehow it's both exactly and not at all what you'd expect

Group Therapy for the End of the World

hmm i’m no sanpaku for sure (i mean that in the informational sense) but i rather think the progression will shake out as a series of eruptive, economically extrinsic events, possibly geopolitical ones, which are so difficult to monetize reliably that theyre (we’re?) just burning money to stay fed, ultimately. I guess itll be rather long way down tho.

silby otm re: the assisted suicide centers and sterilization clinics

"i'm not only the president, i'm also a member"

er, a "client"

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

FEMA’s public assistance program has provided at least $81 billion in this manner to state, territorial and local governments in response to disasters declared since 1992, according to a New York Times analysis of federal data. But an examination of projects across the country’s ever-expanding flood zones reveals that decisions to rebuild in place, often made seemingly in defiance of climate change, have at times left structures just as defenseless against the next storm.

hm yep that'll definitely be above water for at least eight more weeks

Have I posted about the little group meetings I've been running, that could fairly be characterised as group therapy about climate change? It's been good.

You haven't mentioned this here, AFAIK.

If you're a mental health professional I hope you're aware of reddit's r/CollapseSupport, which seems the current nexus guiding towards resources for those coming to terms with climate change, overpopulation, resource constraints, human extinction etc. Personally I'm past depression and into acceptance, but it cost me some years of life.

xp: The entirety of Plaquemines parish will succumb to the waves within the next 50 years, all of Lousiana south of I-12 in the next 200. I live here, but only rent.

I'd really like a Dem majority to require that flood maps reflect the 1-2 m of sea level rise by 2100, the 4-5 m by 2200. As well as either limiting subsidized flood insurance to property above flood plains in updated maps. There no point in subsidizing coastal/marsh property that has no future, besides as scuba destination.

Elsewhere i already predicted that trumpist developers/scotus will determine that remapping for safety and value is actually causing sea level rise and ocean encroachment, and deem it to be a violation of the takings clause, and order repayment of oceanfront owners for actual costs plus investment expectation $$. I mean it’s hella dumb but if it gets on fox news he could start tweeting—

In fact, even this report is overly conservative, as these IPCC reports often are. It turns out that in some ways this latest report has actually understated the amount of warming that we’ve already experienced because of the burning of fossil fuels and the increase in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. And so arguably we are actually closer to those 1.5 degrees Celsius and 2.0 Celsius thresholds, temperature thresholds, that are discussed in the report.

https://therealnews.com/stories/michael-mann-we-are-even-closer-to-climate-disaster-than-ipcc-predicts

good mourning

more mourning

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/10/un-says-climate-genocide-coming-but-its-worse-than-that.html

A lot of this IPCC report has been in the literature for over a decade.

So the remarkable thing here is that the US (and other fossil producer) diplomatic representatives didn't veto the language. Either outright official dissent or indifference by appointees who don't think IPCC report matter (more true than not).

Another remarkable thing is the *much* higher carbon prices the IPCC report suggests. Currently, they're under $50/ton where pricing exists, I've been thinking north of $200/ton and ramping up (to match targets) would be necessary, but the IPCC report goes straight to "135 to $5,500 per ton in 2030, $245 to $13,000 per ton in 2050, $420 to $17,000 per ton in 2070 and $690 to $27,000 per ton in 2100".

This change in language, I hope, presages a time when international bodies call for tariffs against countries with sub-par GDP/emissions ratios. If US/Canada/Russia/China are forced to pay for their climate externalities through tariffs on their export goods, it will go a long way towards saving civilization.

this was a hell of a thing to come out the week of Mental Health Day

I'm generally an optimist by nature but I'm just so completely worn down by this, as I have been the last five years or so. What gets me is how it's always bad news, every single article on the topic is bad news, either the millionth iteration of "it's worse than we thought" or the hundredth "here's another really bad feedback loop" or another "here's a cool carbon capture technology that will never work". The cherry on top of course being the "we could've stopped this in the 80's but we didn't", cool, good to know.

my kids are 3 and 1. by the time they get out of college the conventional wisdom by well be "we're properly doomed and there's nothing we can do to stop it. your dad's generation probably could've though"

I've been very reassured in the last several years that there's nothing to be done and mass death and destruction are an inevitability. It's freeing.

Even if there were something to be done I'm certainly not in a position to do any of it.

My long-range life plan is to kill myself around the time I'm facing starvation

Assuming my supply of life-sustaining antidepressants doesn't get cut off before then