Global Warming's Terrifying New Math

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.

Humans have a wider ecological range than cockroaches. Some of us will pass through the bottleneck. For most of us, the contribution we'll make to their world is mostly negative, but there's still a lot worth saving.

hari seldon i ain't. i'm happy enough to live, die, and be forgotten.

I'm happy to be a micro-Seldon.

There's a fundamental human desire to leave a legacy, but genes get diluted, wealth dissipates, and most intellectual effort is correctly judged subpar and not worth preserving.

However, if you can save a species that would otherwise go extinct, or knowledge that would otherwise be lost to time, then despite not being a genius, or present when simply "above average" qualified for posterity, you can still make a difference.

I've got a Rosetta Project disc. I tithe to the Nature Conservancy. If I could find charities that are making analogues of the Svalberg seed depository, just for embryos of other species, I would.

I'm still awaiting green energy investment opportunities that isn't just another brand attached to commodity products, and hence likely doomed. But if you need North American indium, perhaps for CIGS photoelectric chips, one of my companies will be there for you. It certainly fucked me enough.

https://speculativenonbuddhism.com/2018/11/14/tragic-perception/

thought this might be of interest to a HOOS, and others

is it a true real thing? it's very interesting. i noticed it's tagged buddhofiction and it carries a definite meta-fiction vibe imo, but i haven't even googled to see if the program is real or not

It appears to have been a real program. I read the first half of the essay and found it interesting, but wasn't getting much sense of what the actual practices and day-to-day activities of the program were like.

oh i dunno i assumed so. a program of readings assigned by philosopher types into buddhist meditation and fin-de-sicle pessimism studies seemed to be pretty easily imaginable to me.

anyway the full essay is not as good as i thought - bit dogmatic and schematic, if not sophomoric, to basically adopt a two-worlds view that gives the first noble truth a foundational status w.r.t. every single other product of philosophical or religious culture - but the bit about sincere questions and pessimism seemed nice to me. a definite structural weakness of the way philosophy programs in general, and no doubt related ones, are incentivized toward offering activism-inflected educational promises.

The New Politics of Climate Change

decent article in the atlantic about where things stand after the election

I'm vegan. I turn off lights in *every* unoccupied room. I drive a used car, sparingly, and long to move to where I can rely on public transport and a bicycle. I'm voting for the greener of viable candidates every election. I've given up hobbies like overseas scuba diving as a) I couldn't justify the air travel emissions, and b) I got depressed looking at bleached, lifeless reefs. I'll never have children.

I don't think I've convinced a single other human being to become conscious. Of late, I've mostly spent my eco-conscious internet time explaining to teens/students that human extinction won't come in their lifetime, so they should step away from that ledge, but civilizational suicide will occur over the next two centuries on business as usual trajectories.

I've been feeling this a lot lately, and it's getting me down. I'm friends with and work with plenty of intelligent younger people, who ostensibly care about the environment but balk at the idea of doing things that could drastically reduce their carbon footprint, e.g. giving up a car, giving up meat, or probably the biggest thing - overseas travel (this is the one that makes you come across as the biggest loony I've found). I firmly believe that the only way we have a chance at saving ourselves is through mass governmental action, but I also feel that the pressure for that isn't going to happen unless individuals are willing to show that they are willing to make the sacrifices necessary for that to occur. I am finding it increasingly harder not to become sanctimonious and judgemental - I know that it's not the best way to approach these things with people. But I feel very deflated and exhausted when I see that no one is willing to make the sacrifices needed for effective action.

It depresses and angers me when I see people obsessed with their individual carbon footprint. By all means do whatever makes you feel better about your life, but your individual carbon footprint essentially does not matter. 100 companies generate 71% of global emissions *on their own*. Anyone trying to sell you that ethical consumption measures undertaken in our private lives are the way out of this mess is a fucking rube or worse.

I reject that kind of defeatist thinking, because we absolutely do play a part in that system, and we absolutely can influence how it works if enough people decide to do something about it. Of course individual changes in the system we're in right now is not the way out of it. As I said, I believe that mass governmental action is the only way out. But those companies, and their methods of production, do not exist without demand for their products. An individual might not make a difference, but if enough people do change the ways they consume, then it absolutely can.

The main reason I can see for taking individual actions to reduce one's carbon footprint is so you can see that at least something is being done, which, however trivial it may be in the larger picture, is necessary in order to maintain a bare minimum of hope. It also provides an example to others that you take the issue seriously, even if they don't. Talking the talk and not walking the walk tends to undermine one's message of urgency.

I'm not saying it doesn't have optical value or whatever, but if that's all it amounts to in the end then all you're doing is "waling the walk" straight into the rising oceans. We can't let the primary onus be on individuals.

That's been the goal of the multinationals reaming the earth since they invented the rhetoric around littering.

We can't let the primary onus be on individuals.

OK. Now tell us how.

Sure, let me just draft the action plan to save the fucking planet.

But i all seriousness, only mass collective action in support of truly tranformative programs is going to get the job done. For more on how to do that in your community, talk to your local HOOS.

As I said, I believe that governmental action is the only way out.

An individual might not make a difference, but if enough people do change the ways they consume, then it absolutely can.

― triggercut, Wednesday, November 21, 2018 3:51 AM (fourteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

only mass collective action in support of truly tranformative programs is going to get the job done.

― wayne trotsky (Simon H.), Wednesday, November 21, 2018 4:01 AM (four minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I feel like we're all on the same page here

Largely, yes, I think so.

I can offer a little specialized knowledge re: another topic brought up earlier: cryptocurrency. Energy use associated with BTC mining is indeed horrific. Right now, the #2 crypto, Ethereum, is preparing for a move to a different system for achieving consensus called "Proof of Stake" (the current system used by most cryptos, including Ethereum and Bitcoin, is called "Proof of Work"). Switching to some version of Proof of Stake would shrink each currency's energy footprint down by a huge factor. I'm hopeful that the Bitcoin network will eventually make the move to PoS but I don't know what the precise likelihood is -- hopefully there's some momentum moving in that direction in that community. I only mention it because current projections about the amount of energy these networks will use over time are presumably not taking potential protocol changes into account.

God help us if the best we can do about global warming is inventing a new kind of cryptocurrency.

to be clear, changing the consensus model wouldn't invent any new networks/currencies, it would be essentially act as a sort of patch/update on existing currency networks

but anyway, the crypto sector should be very, very low on your list of concerns for future energy use reforms

like, if you're going to enter into the kind of prolonged international collaboration and complex regulatory and police work that would have to be undertaken in order to dismantle the Bitcoin network, then congratulations, you're now prepared to enact change in *much* more impactful ways in actually huge industries, though I certainly understand how cryptocurrency's energy use is uniquely grating

or probably the biggest thing - overseas travel

Actually something even bigger is the decision of having a child or not.

yep

always a popular one

'cryptocurrency's energy use is uniquely grating"

srsly, i read this "uniquely grafting" and i was, "lol you got THAT straight amigo."

> 100 companies generate 71% of global emissions

Rather, their customers do. Coal miners don't burn much coal.

https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/02/110223-nuclear-war-winter-global-warming-environment-science-climate-change/

i don't know if this has been posted yet.

i am highly ignorant of all kinds of science, especially climate science.

would it be possible to reverse climate change by blowing up a bunch of nukes in, say, the mojave desert? it would surely have unprecedented effects, but if global warming is threatening to snuff out human civilization, would drastic measures be justified?

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8c/Trolley_problem.png/1200px-Trolley_problem.png

Treesh, that's a geo-engineering "solution" -- other geo-engineering solutions that are more talked about is releasing sunlight blocking gases into the atmosphere or seeding the oceans with iron to promote algae growth to consume C02.