Global Warming's Terrifying New Math

Yeah, I’m vaguely familiar. And the nukes option is obviously one of the worst, but just provocative in its simplicity. I’m just wondering when the point will come to think about these solutions. Clearly my preference is to move to green energy—something with benefits beyond stopping climate change—but if that doesn’t work...

It seems like if climate change really does threaten the viability of human civilization we will need to do whatever is necessary.

there’s no ‘if’

Ok fine. Then eventually one of these things will be tried, we can assume.

I know its not ideal but should it be dismissed, out of hand, as pointless or worse?

would it be possible to reverse climate change by blowing up a bunch of nukes in, say, the mojave desert?

very strangely reminiscent of the ending of the British sci-fi klassik The Day the Earth Caught Fire

well, here's one point in favor: we have a lot of nukes, just sitting around doing nothing

as Madame Albright might ask, what's the good of that?

"Nuke the Climate" has a ring to it

deserts aren’t just nuke playgrounds they have ecosystems

https://thetelltalemind.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/crackintheworlddm25hs.jpg

https://frinkiac.com/img/S08E07/768784.jpg

there used to a big argument within the environmental community about whether geoengineering should even be discussed as an option. scientists who advocated for geoengineering - even just as a backup backup backup plan - were often ostracized by environmental groups. (the general line of reasoning was usually based on "fears that the idea of unproven and potentially disastrous geoengineering technologies being an option to shield societies from the impacts of climate change could be used to distract policy makers and the public from addressing the core of the climate change issue – that is, curbing emissions in the first place.")

that debate seems to have subsided somewhat, and more people seem to be ok with the idea of exploring geoengineering. it's a difficult issue. i dread geoengineering. it seems incredibly risky, and there are so many better options. but i also have little faith in humanity to solve this problem in time. it goes far beyond individual action, or attacking the 100 companies that emit the majority of GHGs (as sanpaku said, their emissions are related to things they provide to their customers, and the reason they are all enormous world-destroying companies is because there's such a demand for what they're producing. it's not as simple as just asking them to please use clean renewable energy.) the US and EU are, to an extent, succeeding in capping GHG emissions are starting to reduce them. those successes are more than outweighed by growing emissions in China, and what's going to happen if/when India starts emitting at comparable levels as their economy continues to develop? and the rest of the world?

https://i.imgur.com/cH5jG4t.png

i don't mean to say it's impossible. the clean energy tech and policies are out there, already. there's a possibility that india and other developing countries could leapfrog the EU and US and China in clean tech. there are things that can be pursued to mitigate the damage. but geoengineering is starting to look more and more likely at some point. it is all really bleak to think about.

> 100 companies generate 71% of global emissions

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

― Sanpaku, Wednesday, November 21, 2018 3:28 PM (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Not to dispute this but to complicate it: those customers live with lifestyle expectations created and normalized by our oil-soaked market culture, and under de facto energy monopolies enabled by specific forms of government action & inaction -- the demand for our unsustainable lifestyle exists because it's profitable, it's not profitable because the demand exists.

HOOS otmfm

Thats a good overview karl. It seems extremely odd to me that green energy has proven so difficult when we seem to transform the world every ten years in a million ways.

It seems extremely odd to me that green energy has proven so difficult when we seem to transform the world every ten years in a million ways.

it's frustrating, but it shouldn't be surprising. i'm just bullshitting here but three broad things come to mind.

1) sanpaku would be a much better person to weigh in on this, but there are many practical obstacles with overhauling energy systems from fossil fuels to clean energy, from production and refineries/electricity generation to public policy at the national, state, and local levels, all the way to transmission and consumption. you name it, there's a dilemma that needs to be worked through, and the big black cloud hanging over all of it is that until relatively recently fossil fuels were far cheaper than clean energy alternatives (because the true cost of fossil fuels would include the costs of pollution and climate change. but they're not currently factored in - they're "externalized"). even now, when clean energy is really taking off in some areas AND the price is comparable or less than fossil fuels, there are significant barriers to 100% renewable energy, even when it has strong public support (see https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/9/14/17853884/utilities-renewable-energy-100-percent-public-opinion)

2) in the exact opposite, wishy-washy direction, i think human beings often fail to do the correct thing even when it everyone agrees it should be done and is important. i'm probably just thinking of this because of my depresso-leanings, so it's in my mind a lot. but on a personal level, we obviously fail to do the right thing on a constant basis. at a local and state level, we do things like cut school funding and pay our teachers shit-wages, even though everyone agrees this is a terrible idea. cities widen roads all the time to fight traffic, even though anyone who has taken an urban planning course in the last 30 years knows it won't work.

Our annual reminder: Widening 👏 highways 👏 doesn't 👏 work 👏

This freeway -- LA's 405 -- was JUST widened at a cost of .6 billion. pic.twitter.com/vFSTmfdhnC

— Streetsblog USA (@StreetsblogUSA) November 21, 2018

our national infrastructure is crumbling, and building it back up is something that pretty much any reasonable person agrees with, would generate many jobs, and would also be a way to build up green infrastructure. even republicans that don't believe in climate change usually support getting away from our oil addiction so that we're not reliant on a country that murders children in Yemen on a regular basis.

but we don't do these things. or rather, we do, slowly and agonizingly, sort of in the right direction. there are reasons for all of those continual failures beyond just "we humans suck", but i'm just saying that the fact that there is an obvious thing we should do doesn't mean that we do that thing.

3) active resistance from oil and gas industry. they are the satanic poison cloud hovering above the big black cloud of externalized fossil fuel costs. they are straight up evil. they cheat, they lie, they manipulate people. they are directly responsible for untold human suffering, in the past and for many many years in the future. it is no exaggeration. they are the worst people in the entire universe.

our national infrastructure is crumbling, and building it back up is something that pretty much any reasonable person agrees with, would generate many jobs, and would also be a way to build up green infrastructure. even republicans that don't believe in climate change usually support getting away from our oil addiction so that we're not reliant on a country that murders children in Yemen on a regular basis.

*reproduces a very familiar drum*

imo make drawdown the blueprint for the green new deal

for sure! i think the energy is behind the idea, and the people acting in good faith are behind the idea. i do think we'll get there eventually, here in the US. unfortunately there are two things already out of our hands - whether it's already too late to avoid triggering feedback loops, and how the rest of the world will respond to the crisis now and for the next several decades. uncertainty on those things is no reason to avoid taking the necessary steps here and now, of course.

Off topic, but that thing about highway widening inducing demand is interesting. I didn't know that.

yeah i mean it strikes me that all action at this point is harm reduction and there shouldn't be any illusions about that

Has "mitigation" evolved into "harm reduction" in the vernacular now?

harm reduction is language that comes out of addiction treatment, suggests a policy approach that's about assuming a certain amount of harm is baked into a social process (e.g. 'heroin addicts are gonna inject drugs') so in addition to reducing the number engaged in the process we should work to minimize whatever vectors for harm we have access to ('we should provide safe needle exchanges')

didn't really mean it in the sense of 'mitigate climate change' as much as the sense of 'people are gonna die, let's try to make it fewer people'

Perhaps this was addressed in the flurry of responses, but:

> would it be possible to reverse climate change by blowing up a bunch of nukes in, say, the mojave desert?

No.

Nuclear winter has temporary effect on climate, on the order of a couple years to a decade. Thereafter, the climate returns to its prior state. In our case, an Earth system forced towards a higher energy state, but not yet at equilibrium.

It isn't the sand or nuclear products that bring nuclear winter, but soot injected by firestorms into the stratosphere. One hundred nukes at White Sands test range would have little effect, but detonate them over drought-striken Amazonian rainforest, or Siberian evergreens, or cities built of lumber and paper, then one gets the sort of firestorm required. For all the news about wildfires you've seen, I don't think we've had a "proper" firestorm, in which the fires themselves dictate local weather, since the bombings of Dresden and numerous Japanese cities in 1945.

This sort of small scale nuclear winter was modeled in the context of a regional nuclear war (eg, India v. Pakistan).

Robock et al, 2007. Climatic consequences of regional nuclear conflicts. Atmospher Chem Phys, 7(8), pp.2003-2012.

We ... calculate the response of the climate system to a regional nuclear war between emerging third world nuclear powers using 100 Hiroshima-size bombs (less than 0.03% of the explosive yield of the current global nuclear arsenal) on cities in the subtropics. We find significant cooling and reductions of precipitation lasting years, which would impact the global food supply.

A global average surface cooling of −1.25 °C persists for years, and after a decade the cooling is still −0.5 °C

So, yes, a regional scale nuclear war in which tens of millions are incinerated would produce a temporary halt and reversal in climate change, but that soot settles out of the stratosphere over a decade or two and one's left with a worse situation than before. This isn't a purely theoretical scenario: India has fixed volume water rights to the tributaries of the Indus river, and once the Himalayan glaciers have melted and water is scarce, New Delhi could let the Indus go dry and Pakistan starve.

> that thing about highway widening inducing demand is interesting. I didn't know that.

It gets worse. Energy efficiency can increase consumption. Jevons paradox

We have to fundamentally change economic incentives and costs so that "living small" becomes a widespread goal of the masses, and not just for the woke. Otherwise, people will be happy to zip around in their Tesla's, oblivious of how their electricity is ultimately sourced. We may have to tackle the status tokens we've come to live for.

I saw something a few weeks ago, which struck me and seems related. California has strong economic incentives for rooftop solar. This makes sense for those with southward slanting roofs. However, the solar installers are finding that customers with houses facing north to their street are asking for their rooftop installation to be on their northward slanting roofs, so that the panels are at such an oblique angle to the sun that its no longer economic. Ie, a major motivator for home solar now is that its just another status token, and dare I say, virtue signal.

yeah that pretty much skews the overall carbon footprint into the "bad" side, solar panels barely break even (in terms of carbon) with good placement the last time I checked.

Brutal and Extended Cold Blast could shatter ALL RECORDS - Whatever happened to Global Warming?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 22, 2018

he plays the hits

i know geo-engineering is pretty heavily frowned on in these parts, and i guess i'm not necessarily understanding why. i mean, i understand that it's possibly immensely destructive and damaging to ourselves and our habitat without any assurances it will have the desired effect, but that's pretty much what human beings do, right? not just for the last 200 years, but at least since the time we genocided the megafauna. sure, there's a pretty strong moral argument against it, but it's fairly conclusively established that we, as a species, aren't historically moral and are vanishingly unlikely to start now, right? yes, ten years ago there would have been less catastrophic ways of dealing with the mess we created, but we didn't do any of those, and though i haven't been paying especially close attention to, say, the french fuel riots, in the long term i do feel like any attempt to achieve those goals would inspire increasingly adamant and violent backlash. are any other options even remotely viable at this point?

Not directly relevant but in a case of what you might call ecological engineering, European settlers in Australia tried to control cane beetles by introducing... cane toads. Didn't turn out too well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cane_toads_in_Australia

just got a nyt phone alert letting me know that "climate change could slash the size of America's economy by 10 percent by 2100 unless major action is taken, a federal government report says"

i know that is supposed to seem alarming, but my immediate takeaway is that if that's the extent of the damage, than the united states came out GREAT. holy shit, that would be a wonderful worst-case scenario. here is what a 10% reduction in GDP over several decades looks like:

https://i.imgur.com/dB6PBzj.jpg

i made that in 5 minutes, sorry it looks like shit. it's just the OECD projection for the US economy (their longest range prediction is for 2060) in red. the blue line shows what a 10% loss (about $3.8 trillion) looks like.

i haven't even looked into the report, so i guess it's kind of ridiculous to dismiss the whole thing out of hand.

anyway, it just seems like the most counterproductive "alarming" (if it was actually meant to be alarming) report that could come out. here's how the NYT describes it:

WASHINGTON — A major scientific report issued by 13 federal agencies on Friday presents the starkest warnings to date of the consequences of climate change for the United States, predicting that if significant steps are not taken to rein in global warming, the damage will knock as much as 10 percent off the size of the American economy by century’s end.

The report, which was mandated by Congress and made public by the White House, is notable not only for the precision of its calculations and bluntness of its conclusions, but also because its findings are directly at odds with President Trump’s agenda of environmental deregulation, which he asserts will spur economic growth.

"the starkest warnings to date" ??

The report puts the most precise price tags to date on the cost to the United States economy of projected climate impacts: $141 billion from heat-related deaths, $118 billion from sea level rise and $32 billion from infrastructure damage by the end of the century, among others.

$118 billion from sea level rise? Katrina ALONE cost $125 billion

That *woefully* underestimates the economic losses.

Displaced refugees, and starving people, aren't very productive in GDP terms. The "broken window" falacy applies to rebuilding entire communities, too.

Anyway, last night I came across this keynote address to the 2018 Morningstar investment conference by Jeremy Grantham. One of the good multi-millionaires, devoting 98% of his assets to climate/green foundations, and I agree with every word. Of particular interest are his comments on climate change, downpours, and soil erosion.

Maybe they left a zero off.

The report puts the most precise price tags to date on the cost to the United States economy of projected climate impacts: $141 billion from heat-related deaths, $118 billion from sea level rise and $32 billion from infrastructure damage by the end of the century, among others.

i suppose they mean those figures on an annual basis, not cumulative, which makes more sense.

still, there's just this fundamental *disconnection* in the report which comes from the underlying assumption that the US economy is still going to be this unstoppably growing thing that will be several times larger by 2100.

i don't know, it's a terrible analogy, but to me it's kind of like imagining a small child that is torn from their family, taken out of school, forced to fight in a war, then thrown into the woods for 10 years through childhood and adolescence. and then saying "we predict that will reduce their overall productivity by 10% by the time they reach age 40." uuuuummm, maybe if you just assume that they magically emerge from the woods and excel in college and land a nice position at a law firm or something??

It's hard to find these figures in the original report, but I think this is the heat-related deaths one. It's an annual cost.

Annual damages associated with the additional extreme temperature-related deaths in 2090 were projected to be $140 billion (in 2015 dollars) under a higher scenario (RCP8.5) and $60 billion under a lower scenario (RCP4.5).157

Annual damages associated with the additional extreme temperature-related deaths in 2090 were projected to be $140 billion

I can imagine participants at the Wannsee Conference conscientiously calculating the economic losses imposed on the Third Reich by the year 2000 by pursuing the Final Solution and including it in their report.

thank you - i was looking for the same heat death figure and couldn't find it in my first quick skim.

i'm probably criticizing the report too much but it just all seems weird to me. like, imagine the 2100 united states as a place where there's damage on the scale of a few Iraq wars every year. and yet it all manifests itself as a big dent in an otherwise endlessly expanding growth curve??

xp

The author of Climate Shock: The Economic Consequences of a Hotter Planet, which is at the other end of the scale in recognizing the calamity from the above report, just released a study which IMO pretty accurately depicts what stratospheric albedo geoengineering would look like and cost.

Guardian: Solar geoengineering could be ‘remarkably inexpensive’ – report

Smith and Wagner (2018) Stratospheric aerosol injection tactics and costs in the first 15 years of deployment. Env Res Lett, 13:12

xp Also, going back to the report form which those estimates were sourced, if I'm reading this right, it's just talking about people dying in heat waves and through exposure to extreme cold. Not, say, famine. And the model only covers a third of the US population (49 large cities).

speaking of geoengineering,

(CNN)Scientists are proposing an ingenious but as-yet-unproven way to tackle climate change: spraying sun-dimming chemicals into the Earth's atmosphere.

The research by scientists at Harvard and Yale universities, published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, proposes using a technique known as stratospheric aerosol injection, which they say could cut the rate of global warming in half.
The technique would involve spraying large amounts of sulfate particles into the Earth's lower stratosphere at altitudes as high as 12 miles. The scientists propose delivering the sulfates with specially designed high-altitude aircraft, balloons or large naval-style guns.

https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/23/health/sun-dimming-aerosols-global-warming-intl-scli/index.html

you gotta love CNN's framing of this as a brand new idea

this thread is too positive. don't worry, i'll here to bring everyone down some more

The World Needs to Quit Coal. Why Is It So Hard?

An October report from the United Nations’ scientific panel on global warming found that avoiding the worst devastation would require a radical transformation of the world economy in just a few years.

Central to that transformation: Getting out of coal, and fast.

And yet, three years after the Paris agreement, when world leaders promised action, coal shows no sign of disappearing. While coal use looks certain to eventually wane worldwide, according to the latest assessment by the International Energy Agency, it is not on track to happen anywhere fast enough to avert the worst effects of climate change. Last year, in fact, global production and consumption increased after two years of decline.

...So, why is coal so hard to quit?

Because coal is a powerful incumbent. It’s there by the millions of tons under the ground. Powerful companies, backed by powerful governments, often in the form of subsidies, are in a rush to grow their markets before it is too late. Banks still profit from it. Big national electricity grids were designed for it. Coal plants can be a surefire way for politicians to deliver cheap electricity — and retain their own power. In some countries, it has been a glistening source of graft.

And even while renewables are spreading fast, they still have limits: Wind and solar power flow when the breeze blows and the sun shines, and that requires traditional electricity grids to be retooled.

“The main reason why coal sticks around is, we built it already,” said Rohit Chandra, who earned a doctoral degree in energy policy at Harvard, specializing in coal in India.

The battle over the future of coal is being waged in Asia.

this is a good article. it gets at treeship's question above on why it takes so long to overhaul the energy system when so many other things in life seem to change completely every 10 years. it also gets at some pessimistic stuff i mentioned a few days ago about GHG emission increases in china and india more than outweighing the decreases elsewhere.

Home to half the world’s population, Asia accounts for three-fourths of global coal consumption today. More important, it accounts for more than three-fourths of coal plants that are either under construction or in the planning stages — a whopping 1,200 of them, according to Urgewald, a German advocacy group that tracks coal development. Heffa Schücking, who heads Urgewald, called those plants “an assault on the Paris goals.”

Indonesia is digging more coal. Vietnam is clearing ground for new coal-fired power plants. Japan, reeling from 2011 nuclear plant disaster, has resurrected coal.

The world’s juggernaut, though, is China. The country consumes half the world’s coal. More than 4.3 million Chinese are employed in the country’s coal mines. China has added 40 percent of the world’s coal capacity since 2002, a huge increase for just 16 years. “I had to do the calculation three times,” said Carlos Fernández Alvarez, a senior energy analyst at the International Energy Agency. “I thought it was wrong. It’s crazy.”

Spurred by public outcry over air pollution, China is now also the world leader in solar and wind power installation, and its central government has tried to slow down coal plant construction. But an analysis by Coal Swarm, a U.S.-based team of researchers that advocates for coal alternatives, concluded that new plants continue to be built, and other proposed projects have simply been delayed rather than stopped. Chinese coal consumption grew in 2017, though at a far slower pace than before, and is on track to grow again in 2018, after declining in previous years.

BREAKING: Trump on dire warning issued by his administration on economic effects of climate change: 'I don't believe it'

— AP Politics (@AP_Politics) November 26, 2018

not great imo

if he's ever pressed on it and he pretends to give an answer, he will cite the important fact of the temperature going up and down in the past, many people are saying

maybe it's an exclamation of his shock and a recognition of how dire things are

“I’ve seen it, I’ve read some of it, and it’s fine,” Trump said of the report.

the trump administration is betting that their supporters (the only people they even feign to represent) don't give a shit. and honestly, they're almost certainly right about that.

In publishing the assessment, White House officials made a calculation that Mr. Trump’s core base of supporters most likely would not care that its findings are so at odds with the president’s statements and policies.

That view is supported by Steven J. Milloy, a member of Mr. Trump’s E.P.A. transition team who runs the website junkscience.com, which is aimed at casting doubt on the established science of human-caused climate change. “We don’t care,” he said. “In our view, this is made-up hysteria anyway.”

Mr. Milloy echoed a talking point used by other critics of the report, calling it the product of the “deep state,” a term that refers to the conspiratorial notion of a secret alliance of bureaucrats and others who oppose the president.

“Trying to stop the deep state from doing this in the first place, or trying to alter the document, and then creating a whole new narrative — it’s better to just have it come out and get it over with,” said Mr. Milloy. “But do it on a day when nobody cares, and hope it gets swept away by the next day’s news.”

I had my 60 second sermon on Thanksgiving. There's no convincing anyone who accepts college dropouts like Limbaugh as experts.

I'm the crazy uncle who brought lentil loaf and digressed on science.