Global Warming's Terrifying New Math

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.

not great don!!

Thing is, chuds would have no problem believing in it if their leader believed in it.

I spend an inordinate amount of time these days thinking about how we're all trapped on a dying world, how direct action may be our best option left, and how we lack the courage to carry it out.

— Matt Ford (@fordm) November 28, 2018

maybe this should be another thread idea, but this hit home for me

The trick is inducing widespread, rapid change without creating chaos or a reactionary police state. This should still be possible. A good chunk of the rest of the world is not as dysfunctional as the USA. In 20 or 30 years, maybe not so much.

it's a little galling to read that tweet when there *are* people carrying on direct action all over the world right now -- extinction rebellion in the uk alone has created a stir like nothing i've quite seen, to say nothing of uh that thing called standing rock matt has definitely heard of

lol, xp
There is a thread for "what can I do" type actions, I think HOOS started it.

Some ppl I swear just want to tweet armed uprisings rapidly into existence and I sympathize and sometimes I am one of those people but those people should not do that

Like even if he's talking about direct action in the specific mode of infrastructural monkeywrenching I would love nothing more than to see the likes of Deep Green Resistance ("we will dismantle and destroy your pipelines") gain a foothold at The New Republic, do a damn Google before you use the third person plural for yourself my dude

What's legitimately bothering me about the tweet I think is the way it upholds this frustrating noble nihilism narrative that I've been seeing more and more of this year. It's a keening hopelessness about the future generally from white westerners that's rooted in individualist existential angst & anxieties, and given that knowledge economy dorks like Matt Ford & I are very low on the long list of people who can expect personally catastrophic impacts from climate change, the whole orientation just makes me kind of livid for its relative solipsism and refusal to engage with the necessary collective effort.

"oh the world is ending, isn't it sad," like, team, we have shit to do and the clock is ticking, let's all buy each other sun lamps this holiday and get to fuckin work

Anyway sorry I don't mean at all to be down on anyone for whom that Tweet resonates, like, the emotional-psychological impact he's alluding to is obviously real and widespread and I feel it too or I wouldn't be running climate change anxiety group therapy

come on guys, be realistic, it's not like a wildcat general strike of 2/3rds of a major industrial nation's workforce has ever happened.

Anyway sorry I don't mean at all to be down on anyone for whom that Tweet resonates, like, the emotional-psychological impact he's alluding to is obviously real and widespread and I feel it too or I wouldn't be running climate change anxiety group therapy

― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Wednesday, November 28, 2018 1:56 AM (four hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

no no your criticism is super legit, i did think the royal "we" was more than a bit presumptuous.

obv it's a bad look to say so now, but everything before the last clause is what hit for me.

It's a keening hopelessness about the future generally from white westerners that's rooted in individualist existential angst & anxieties, and given that knowledge economy dorks like Matt Ford & I are very low on the long list of people who can expect personally catastrophic impacts from climate change, the whole orientation just makes me kind of livid for its relative solipsism and refusal to engage with the necessary collective effort.

― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Wednesday, November 28, 2018 1:46 AM (four hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

im not taking this personal but im taking this to heart, ykwim?

Hoos I am not a fan of DGR cuz of their insane ott transphobia, bad example imo

the tactics on the other hand, yeah I'm good there

Yeah I'm not holding them up as paragons just noting that like, It's Been Done And It's Doin

copy that

I'm sorry if this was already posted, but this word salad from Trump scares me.
Jokes about his sanity are no longer funny to me:

"One of the problems that a lot of people like myself — we have very high levels of intelligence, but we’re not necessarily such believers. You look at our air and our water and it’s right now at a record clean. But when you look at China and you look at parts of Asia and when you look at South America, and when you look at many other places in this world, including Russia, including – just many other places — the air is incredibly dirty. And when you’re talking about an atmosphere, oceans are very small. And it blows over and it sails over. I mean, we take thousands of tons of garbage off our beaches all the time that comes over from Asia. It just flows right down the Pacific, it flows, and we say where does this come from. And it takes many people to start off with."

Yeah "he's dumb" seems to have been superceded by "he's... developing dementia and senility?"

I thought this was a really useful take on his syntax - it's not supposed to make sense, it's an open ended thing where the first part of the sentence lets his followers fill the rest in with their internal bias, so the rest of it doesn't need to mean anything:

Trump "says it like it is" by saying the first part of a thought and letting the listener fill in the rest. Exactly as it is in their mind.

— Emily G (@EmilyGorcenski) February 19, 2017

And then...

"Number two, if you go back and if you look at articles, they talked about global freezing, they talked about at some point the planets could have freeze to death, then it’s going to die of heat exhaustion. There is movement in the atmosphere. There’s no question. As to whether or not it’s man-made and whether or not the effects that you’re talking about are there, I don’t see it — not nearly like it is."

You see, the planets could have freeze to death

yes he's an idiot and almost certainly going senile but the overwhelming majority of his base thinks exactly the same way don't they? I encountered the "only the sun can determine how hot it is" argument last week

although, I guess there are dumber takes out there

The melting of the Polar Ice Cap will open up The Northern Sea route to shipping, greatly reducing the cost to ship goods from place to place

Indeed, Global Warming is something to be excited about! pic.twitter.com/R3Ck5SbhCI

— Jacob Wohl (@JacobAWohl) November 25, 2018

I realize this has been said already, but how is he not in jail

jailing the greatest prodigy since mozart... smdh @ u and @ america

it flows

Mr. Obama used the opportunity to defend his presidency, noting that energy production and stock markets increased on his watch.

“That whole suddenly America’s the biggest oil producer — that was me, people,” he said. As for Wall Street tycoons who complain that he was anti-business, Mr. Obama said, “Have you checked where your stocks were when I came to office” and where they were when he left? “What are you complaining about? Just say thank you, please.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/28/us/politics/obama-baker-consensus.html

not surprising that yet another president who advocated for All of the Above still doesn't get it

wth he sounds like he got infected with orange brainworms.

let's see if this matters

https://www.courthousenews.com/majority-of-all-americans-now-believe-in-climate-change/

don't make me do the 'narrator voice' thing

When asked to imagine what would happen if insects were to disappear completely, scientists find words like chaos, collapse, Armageddon. Wagner, the University of Connecticut entomologist, describes a flowerless world with silent forests, a world of dung and old leaves and rotting carcasses accumulating in cities and roadsides, a world of “collapse or decay and erosion and loss that would spread through ecosystems” — spiraling from predators to plants

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/27/magazine/insect-apocalypse.html#commentsContainer

the most interesting parts of the new climate assessment are the emphases on the value of preserving, reviving, and using indigenous knowledge to create the future:

Indigenous knowledge systems can play a role in advancing understanding of climate change and in developing more comprehensive climate adaptation strategies,6 ,7 ,118 in part because they focus on understanding relationships of interdependency and involve multigenerational knowledge of ecosystem phenology (the study of cyclic and seasonal natural phenomena)6 ,119 ,120 and ecological shifts.25 ,121 For example, Inupiat residents in Alaska have identified cyclical patterns of coastal erosion, and their understanding of how quickly and in which direction wind and wave energy reaches the coast can help communities prone to flooding.122 Indigenous adaptation planning, including considerations of issues such as flooding and water rights, benefits from a greater focus on participatory planning in natural resource management.19 ,22 ,123 ,124 ,125 ,126 This planning incorporates local knowledge and values from conception through implementation127 ,128 ,129 in ways that ensure the protection of Indigenous knowledges and Indigenous peoples’ rights not to share sensitive information.22 In this way, traditional ways of knowing are contributing to sustainable land management practices under changing environmental conditions.130 ,131 ,132 ,133 For example, the Wabanaki Nations of Maine work closely with local researchers, foresters, and landowners as part of the Cooperative Emerald Ash Borer Project to precisely catalogue and map the decline of the native black ash deciduous trees on which these communities rely for economic, cultural, and spiritual practices. The cooperative leverages Indigenous knowledge of environmental history as it relates to the invasive emerald ash borer beetle.131 Additionally, the Nez Perce Tribe employs Indigenous knowledges as part of an initiative to enhance local salmon populations that have been in decline (Ch. 24: Northwest, KM 2). For more on Indigenous knowledges, see the regional chapters in this assessment.

they zoom in on this some in the hawaii section here: https://nca2018.globalchange.gov/chapter/27/?fbclid=IwAR2Sd6vFQBbSaDKsEyklmfH5-HOdrwnH2TTNlFRys28-GHp7WjLEmyFxnRc

xp: The pollinator dieoff is [a huge problem](https://drive.google.com/open?id=1vUTJrMht7U1JdWaFTz_xJZ8fJswKtCug), up there with soil and groundwater depletion.

Kinda orthogonal to climate change, though. There are specific crop protection chemicals largely responsible for say the bee dieoff, and as the croplands heat up (and don't face hard-freezes in winter), insect pests will become if anything worse.

Go USA! Promoting coal at a climate conference:

The moment that an idiotic trump official promoted fossil fuels at the UN climate talks in Poland and was met with laughter and chants. This regime is embarrassing.pic.twitter.com/oznCaEYLp6

— Ricky Davila (@TheRickyDavila) December 11, 2018

IEA's annual coal report is out.

In the US, coal is decidedly on the decline despite the current administration's attempts to save it. US coal plant retirements doubled in 2018, and demand for coal dropped to the lowest level in more than three decades. But the International Energy Agency's (IEA) annual coal report (called Coal 2018) reminds us that the forces that have sent coal into a free fall in the US don't exist elsewhere in the world. In fact, demand for coal is growing globally for the second year in a row after a few years of decline, driven by high demand in India and Southeast Asia.

In the US, cheap natural gas has been a primary driver in coal's fall from grace. (This was the conclusion of the Department of Energy's 2017 "baseload study.") But in other parts of the world, coal remains the cheapest and most available energy source. Declines in the US, Canada, and Europe have been counter-balanced by coal growth in India, Indonesia, Vietnam, Philippines, Malaysia, and Pakistan, the IEA wrote.

China, too, "accounts for nearly half of the world's coal consumption," although the Chinese government has taken steps to control the growth of coal in recent years.

Despite the most recent two years reflecting growth in the coal market, the IEA says this growth is slowing and will become an aggregate decline by 2023. "Coal’s contribution to the global energy mix is forecast to decline slightly from 27 percent in 2017 to 25 percent by 2023," the IEA wrote. Chinese coal demand specifically is forecast to decline by three percent over the same period.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/12/coal-may-be-dying-in-the-us-but-coal-demand-is-on-the-rise-globally/

I'm reading some hard sci fi and was wondering if there were any books in the genre that could be described as conservative in the American sense. Almost assuredly not, is my assumption.

No shortage of libertarian sci-fi, most notably the strain following from Heinlein. There's a whole subgenre of dismal "prepper fiction", about how some guy with a basement full of guns and canned goods protects his family from social collapse. Sci-fi that endorses biblical literalism I've encountered takes the view that gods are malevolent/indifferent/inscrutable aliens, which undercuts any value to US conservatives.

However, I'm just not familiar with climate denier fiction, with the notable exception of Michael Crichton's State of Fear. We all have full dispensation to steal from Crighton's estate and shit on his grave for that one.

Politically conservative sci-fi tends to line up with the sentiment that it's a harsh and dangerous universe full of enemies whom you must fight to the death using advanced, science-based weaponry. Pretty much a projection of the Cold War into sci-fi.

it's astonishing to me at times the extent to which the story arc of such sci-fi is like, the exact opposite of my understanding actual history.