Global Warming's Terrifying New Math

wow hello i am a copyright policeman and you are under the fuck arrest

How do you sleep at night, m bison? Probably on a pile of copyright violation penalty payments

talking back to a police officer AND violating john lennon's copyright on "how do you sleep at night"?

you commies are all the same, please go to jail.

jk jk, capitalism is a cancer on the world

About those 100 companies: https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jul/10/100-fossil-fuel-companies-investors-responsible-71-global-emissions-cdp-study-climate-change (PDF of the report is linked off of that page)

Easily the most extraordinary exchange I've ever seen in a panel Q&A. @SciFleur, at the end of the #ApolloPlus50 panel, challenged Harrison Schmidt, the 12th man to walk on the moon, about his record of climate denial. 1/n

— Adam Becker (@FreelanceAstro) October 15, 2018

From the NYer article Karl linked earlier:

(This past winter, parts of the Arctic saw temperatures of up to forty-five degrees above normal, even as parts of the United States and Europe were being buried under snow; some scientists believe the two phenomena are related, though others note that the link is, at this point, unproved.)

I work with people who legit believe that there’s a ton of money to be made in pushing the climate change hoax. “Follow the money,” they say, fuckin QED — wilfully oblivious to the fact that all the money is in industry. “Just look up Al Gore’s net worth.” QEfuckinD.

If there’s a shitton of $ to be made convincing people to stop burning the fucking planet down, where do I apply?

*soros punchline*

some good news is nice, on occasion

The US power sector has reduced its CO2 emissions 28% since 2005. What's responsible? Roughly speaking: 50% reduced demand, 25% coal-to-natural-gas switching, 25% renewables. https://t.co/0u2J3nXt4w pic.twitter.com/uuR3fSwTMl

— David Roberts (@drvox) October 30, 2018

it's not enough to offset growth in the rest of the world, and there's much more to do. but it's something.

it kinda drives me nuts when the Y-scale is manipulated like that, just because a lot of people don't notice. so i made a few edits. here's the full scale version:

https://i.imgur.com/2fv7QMd.jpg

Reduced demand is where its at! Around our house I refer to wasting electricity as "killing baby salmon".

Say by some miracle democrats control all three branches of government in 2021, what would we want them to do/what could they realistically do that would help the most? What solutions should we be priming for?

green jobs guarantee for infrastructure transformation, which is what i thought obama was gonna give us 10 years ago when he talked about the seas beginning to roll back

also what the hell those of us out left let's swing for the fences and start talking way more about degrowth and see how that filters its way into the partisan discourse

We need a carbon price, with values for the carbon tax much higher than generally recognized. The EU carbon price is currently $23/tonne, the recent UN report calls for a tax of $135 to $5,500 per tonne by 2030. So, imagine a carbon tax bill that replaces all current gasoline taxes, which our few hundred fossil fuel producers pay at the mine, well, or point of import of petroleum, starting at $30/tonne ($0.09/gallon) in 2021, ramping towards $300/tonne ($0.90/gallon) by 2030. At future intervals, regulatory bodies can determine the pace at which the carbon price should increase to match emissions targets.

While PACs such as Citizens' Climate Lobby, Vote Climate U.S. and Americans for Carbon Dividend call for returning the revenue from such a tax with flat dividends, I think a simpler course is to use carbon taxes to replace other regressive taxes, from state sales taxes to federal payroll taxes. Americans will pay more at the pump and for their winter heating oil, but they will go home with considerably more income. Small business owners will no longer have to pay their share of payroll taxes. It can be designed to make life for average Americans simpler, with no more tax paperwork, while providing the right incentives to reduce fossil fuel use via renewables, efficiency, and conservation, whichever makes more sense for each family or electricity producer.

http://www2.aceee.org/e/310911/ia-reduced-electric-demand-has/4m4q7s/239486839

that headline - "Reduced electric demand has halved carbon emissions in power sector" - is more than misleading, it's inaccurate. carbon emissions in the the power sector are 1,744 MMmt in 2017, compared to 2,416 MMmt in 2005. that's a decline of about 28%. and that's great! it's just not the same as "halved carbon emissions".

as the article itself notes, it's not that carbon emissions in the power sector have halved, it's that reducing demand growth has accounted for half of the decline in carbon emissions. the headline writer just got it wrong.

the EIA's original graph (posted just above) may have contributed to the confusion, because it appears to show carbon emissions at about half the level of 2005. that graph is misleading, because the Y-axis is truncated, so i photoshopped in the rest of the graph for the correct scale (also a few posts above)

ah sorry glad this was already covered

I generally stay out of this thread because it's too nerve-wracking/infuriating/nihilist-heavy

oh, i completely understand. i'm kind of disturbed by how little that stuff affects me, because i generally believe that we're fucked! but yet, i'm listening to the B-52s and everything is ok

Say by some miracle democrats control all three branches of government in 2021, what would we want them to do/what could they realistically do that would help the most? What solutions should we be priming for?

― Fedora Dostoyevsky (man alive), Friday, November 2, 2018 9:33 AM (three hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

green jobs guarantee for infrastructure transformation, which is what i thought obama was gonna give us 10 years ago when he talked about the seas beginning to roll back

― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Friday, November 2, 2018 9:57 AM (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it's interesting to think about what would have happened had obama blown all his political capital on climate change instead of healthcare. saving lives in the future vs saving lives now, i don't envy his situation.

but yeah, if a progressive/socialist who really gets climate change is in the white house, and democrats control congress, i would like to see a Moonshot/WW2-style combination of funding and mobilization of the workforce dedicated to clean energy, energy efficiency, and public transport. it would create millions and millions of jobs. i would support just straight up giving the 50,000 fucking coal miners dibs on the first of those clean energy jobs, even, giving them buyouts on their shitty coal mining jobs, paying for their retraining, and paying them to work in the sunshine and lay solar panels or build wind turbines. i don't even care if the sun shines in west virginia or if there is wind in south dakota. just stop mining coal, for fuck's sake.

i would support any number of carbon tax variations. i think sanpaku's idea of using it to replace other taxes might ultimately be something that would push a handful of conservative assholes across the aisle. at any rate (no pun intended), we need to address the externalities of burning carbon.

honestly, though, i think we are headed toward geoengineering. even if the united states does all the good stuff we want them to do, we are only part of a world which is still heavily reliant on fossil fuels and which is set to add billions more people with higher living standards, many of whom would like to eat more meat.

it's interesting to think about what would have happened had obama blown all his political capital on climate change instead of healthcare

distinct memories of having this EXACT argument with my family in 2008

ha, how did that go? probably paaaainfully

do people itt know about Drawdown

and part of my calculation was v v cynical ie the boomers fucking suck if a bunch of them have to die from shitty healthcare in order to save a future, hopefully better generation then so long assholes

I am in a bad mood today fyi

ha, how did that go? probably paaaainfully

eh it was all the lefty side of the family so it wasn't too bad tbh. I was mostly accused of arguing from my own narrow perspective working in the energy industry - which is true, but also, I WAS RIGHT

https://www.drawdown.org/ xxp

xp

i haven't read drawdown but i learned a lot from Hawken's Natural Capitalism, back in the day

and part of my calculation was v v cynical ie the boomers fucking suck if a bunch of them have to die from shitty healthcare in order to save a future, hopefully better generation then so long assholes

recently i've been wondering if a large part of the conservative opposition to caring about climate change is due to lingering distrust/anger over perceived fearmongering by environmentalists back in the late 60s/early 70s (club of rome, population bomb, etc) during their baby boomer young adulthood. they see people now warning about climate change, pointing to complicated models and graphs that most common people don't really understand, with the backing of scientists and very important people and passionate young people, and they're reminded of paul ehrlich on johnny carson, warning that we were surely all going to die soon from overpopulation and pollution and overconsumption of resources, using complicated models and graphs that most common people didn't really understand back then, with the backing of scientists/VIPs/youth. so they just say baloney and ignore it, believing that either the whole problem was bullshit then just as it is now, or that the new problem will be solved via technological advances, like it was then.

i don't know, i was born after most of that played out, so i'm not really sure how much of that cultural memory lingers

i definitely hear that casually referred to a lot -- "in the 70s they said we were gonna have an ice age!" thanks TIME magazine -- by everyday skeptic types

They're different political fracture lines.

Those who read the scientific literature are horrified by the train in tunnel of climate change, and recognize that what we do in our generation will kill billions over the next several thousand years. Those of advanced age or with prexisting conditions in their families will think that enacting even the lousy 1994 Republican health care plan will make a difference in their lives.

I try to be a utilitarian, without discriminating against future generations or others in developing nations. I know that it would be preferable for the United States to cease to exist, if that meant preventing the worst predictions from climate science. Nothing else on the political landscape is remotely comparable, because only climate change will effect humanity and the entire biosphere for the next 10 to 160 thousand years. The numbers add up. One generation just doesn't fucking matter in the expanse of time.

I try to be a utilitarian, without discriminating against future generations or others in developing nations.

i think this is great, and i try to be that way too. but of course this flies in the face of human nature. and also we have plenty of trouble with discriminating against our current generation! as climate refugees start to pile up, that will become painfully apparent.

i wish i didn't believe that geoengineering is our fate, because it is the worst option (possibly even worse than doing nothing at all, if unintended consequences of geoengineering lead to something even worse than BAU). but it seems like the default direction for humanity, given that

1) a significant amount of chaos is already baked-in based on historical emissions - warming, sea level rise, acidification, species lost.
2) in some ways, technology is the defining human characteristic (especially if you consider language to be a tool/technology). it is what we do.
3) (loopy apocalyptic speculation alert >>) if a country, city, organization or individual actor has the resources to unilaterally implement geoengineering, what can be done to stop them? one can imagine the restraints right now, ways to prevent that from happening, or stopping the implementation after it occurs. but what about in 2050, or 2075 or 2150, as climate chaos mounts? again, even the baked-in climate change from our history to date is going to be creating escalating, severe problems that won't stop for many generations. there will be pressure to "fix" it.

oh man is the geoengineering war gonna precede the water wars

Geoengineering can be "done right".

For example, if the equilibrium mean global warming is 4° C, it is still beneficial for biodiversity to limit the pace of that warming so that it occurs over two centuries, rather than one, as this (alongside policies like making mountain ranges linear refuges) can permit much current biodiversity to survive that would otherwise perish. This also has the merit of limiting our commitment (to flying a couple of squadrons of U-2 spy planes to deposit sulfates in the stratosphere) to a a comprehensable century or two, rather than indefinitely.

I have no children, and will never have any: I've known this was in the works for decades. But I have nephews. If they have children, there's a non-zero chance that some will starve to death. The most important effect of global warming for human civilization is in radically reducing crop yields and human carrying capacity. I sometimes hate Al Gore for soft pedaling the case by pointing at storms and sea level rise, which aren't existential risks in the same sense that collapse of agriculture presents.

The amount of climate change that is already "baked in", when one considers the moderating effects of oceans, "global brightening" as we reduce tropospheric sulfate emissions from coal, and permafrost/peat/seabed hydrate etc, seems likely to me to be around 3° C. If humanity makes heroic efforts to decarbonize, we might limit the end state to the 4° C range. If we don't, its 6°+ C. The main brakes will be that 1) climate forcing is a logarithmic function, with the Earth system's climate sensitivity probably around 3°/CO2 doubling, and 2) dead people don't burn coal.

A 3-6° world is a world where only Canada, Scandanavia, and parts of Siberia can support their current population, much less refugees. America and other developed nations shift from the politics of abundance that they have known, to a politics of scarcity. Its rather unfortunate that our legacy of politics of scarcity is Italian/German/Japanese fascism. We in the West have never lived with fear of starving with the next winter. Trump is only a vague hint of what is to come.

As I see it, we can reduce our personal guilt by "living small", including urbanism, veganism, and consumer "minimalism", but this won't save the world. There may be no saving the world. We must decide what we want to save. Our models should be the Svalberg seed bank, or the Long Now societies Rosetta disk. We should expand these to encompass all of human civilization that is worth saving. Because rebuilding after climate change will be a lot easier if our descendants don't have to make all the mistakes we did.

There's nothing (besides war) to prevent, say, Bangladesh from lofting sulfates into the stratosphere on weather balloons to delay climate change. Preventing sea level rise matters a lot more to them than it does to Geneva diplomats. Geoengineering would cost only billions per year, and hence is several orders of magnitude cheaper than the economic/social effects of climate change.

The problem with stratospheric albedo geoengineering generally arise because it is a "temporary" fix. Should whatever political body sponsoring it be voted out, or their nation states collapse, all the effects of aggregate greenhouse emissions still take place, just in decades rather than centuries. It the intermittancy that's calamitous for natural biological and agricultural symptoms. Geoengineering, as conventionally envisioned, is just recipe for delaying but intensifying climate chaos.

I agree with Gwynne Dyer that we will inevitably engage in stratospheric albedo geoengineering. In coming decades, starving populations will make it a political necessity. I hope that we will manage it so as to slow the pace of climate change, rather than attempt to reverse it. As noted above, this may preserve much biodiversity, while avoiding an indefinite commitment.

^biological and agricultural systems (not symptoms).

any geoengineering measures used to combat climate change would, due to their scale, be necessarily things that couldn't be tested first, and would have irrevocable and unknowable consequences.
― Cornelius Pardew (jim in glasgow), Monday, January 25, 2016 1:51 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Also there's the law of unintended consequences, whereby injecting all that shit into the air will inevitably lead to complex unmodelable conditions causing who knows what other problems.
― Mince Pramthwart (James Morrison), Monday, March 5, 2018 5:53 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

by the very nature of the thing geoengineering is not something that can be tested in a real world setting, and has to be completely based on theoretical calculations
― khat person (jim in vancouver), Tuesday, March 6, 2018 4:11 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

All true, all irrelevant. You haven't lived in an era in which millions faced starvation in developed nations.

tell us more, o visitant from future planets

you mean these guys?

https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.11490

also what the hell those of us out left let's swing for the fences and start talking way more about degrowth and see how that filters its way into the partisan discourse

― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Friday, November 2, 2018 10:00 AM (eight hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

my man

Decarbonization advocates (particularly economists) still pretend that with a dash of technology it will be possible to retain our happy motoring societ. Few have the physics/engineering background to work through the math. Culturally, we're a long way from appreciating that most of our descendants are going to live a lot smaller.

https://i.redd.it/rz13ubssa0zy.jpg

Mining Cryptocurrencies Is More Energy Intensive Than Actual Mining, Researchers Say
During the past two years, researchers estimate cryptocurrencies generated between 3 million and 15 million tons of carbon emissions.

~~

we will innovate our way out of this mess

about half of the republicans on the climate solutions caucus just got defeated, or retired. also,

Climate moderates were already a minority among House Republicans. In July, Representative Steve Scalise, who could soon become House minority leader, introduced a symbolic resolution denouncing a carbon tax. A carbon tax is a type of climate policy that charges polluters for every ton of carbon pollution they emit into the atmosphere. Several surviving leaders of the Reagan White House have called for Republicans to endorse such a policy as a conservative answer to climate change. And yet, all but six House Republicans voted for Scalise’s symbolic measure. Half of those six dissenters could be gone from the next Congress: Two of them lost their election Tuesday; and a third trails in current results.

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/11/how-many-house-republicans-believe-climate-change/575233/

for any sort of legislative solution, we need some sort of bipartisan cooperation. but republicans get punished whenever they attempt to approach reality.

Eh, if they were primaried I'd call it punishment. A better description is that "only Republicans in remotely competitive districts will consider climate solutions".

I'm at the stage of grief: Don't have kids. Live small. Microetch classic literature and science textbooks on nickel plates, and distribute them widely so that they may still be found in 5000 years. The cunts won, and have been winning for the last 40 years.

https://www.newyorker.com/podcast/the-new-yorker-radio-hour/the-financial-crash-and-the-climate-crisis

Hank Paulson, climate hawk?

Lots of neoliberals are climate "hawks". The Economist has been promoting carbon taxes for over a decade.

The problem, of course, is that they've allowed their preference for smaller government to become a preference for idiot moron fucking cretin pseudo-christian evangelical politics. A group of people who have no interest in future for the humanity or the planet, as they're all convince they're imminently going to bodily risen into heaven in a 2nd century ergotism hallucination.

I'm at the stage of grief: Don't have kids. Live small. Microetch classic literature and science textbooks on nickel plates, and distribute them widely so that they may still be found in 5000 years. The cunts won, and have been winning for the last 40 years.

― They Bunged Him in My Growler (Sanpaku)

i'm beyond grief i think. i find it hard to see how we ever had a chance. maybe it's a failure of imagination. i believe that the mass extinctions and mass death are just the tragic result of human sentience. i believe i have both individual and collective guilt in this matter, but there is no one to judge me. contemplating collective death on top of individual death makes it harder, but in some sense my impending individual death mitigates the horror of our collective death. who doesn't somewhere, in some way, find some selfish relief in being part of the Last Generation?

We’ll put on some light music.