Global Warming's Terrifying New Math

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.

I can understand the libertarian sci fi, but my feeling of hard SF is that the required scientific literacy preselects e.g. climate deniers. Like, it should be accurate to say that there's a reason that you don't see conservative hard SF?

Dystopian fiction makes people more willing to justify political violence. Should you worry?

I'm just not familiar with climate denier fiction, with the notable exception of Michael Crichton's State of Fear.

I've never read it, but Fallen Angels by Pournelle, Niven, & Flynn fits in here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallen_Angels_(science_fiction_novel)

Niven is a sore spot, as Known Space (1965-80) was my favorite sci-fi world during my impressionable teens. I haven't bothered with much of his later work, and none of his collaborations with Pournelle, who I blame for his current politics.

i don't know much about desalinization, but this seems troublesome

As countries in the Middle East, Africa, and elsewhere struggle to find enough freshwater to meet demand, they’re increasingly turned to the ocean. Desalination plants, located in 177 countries, can help turn seawater into freshwater. Unfortunately, these plants also produce a lot of waste—more waste, in fact, than water for people to drink.

A paper published Monday by United Nations University’s Institute for Water, Environment, and Health in the journal Science of the Total Environment found that desalination plants globally produce enough brine—a salty, chemical-laden byproduct—in a year to cover all of Florida in nearly a foot of it. That’s a lot of brine.

In fact, the study concluded that for every liter of freshwater a plant produces, 0.4 gallons (1.5 liters) of brine are produced on average. For all the 15,906 plants around the world, that means 37.5 billion gallons (142 billion liters) of this salty-ass junk every day. Brine production in just four Middle Eastern countries—Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates—accounts for more than half of this.

Just put it in the ground with the nuclear waste nbd

wait..shouldn't we also be trying to inject it into oil deposits to improve recovery rates?

So we can retrieve and burn more oil? Splendid idea!

Seawater desalination is generally done at the shore. The brine is just returned whence it came from.

Saudi Arabia used to have substantial groundwater deposits, that were used for a few decades to turn the country into a wheat exporter. By the late-90s they finally figured out that its far wiser to import "embedded water" as wheat than to waste their last groundwater irrigating the desert.

But the brine is heavy/sodium-overloaded seawater no? It's got to be harmful for producers and consumers in an area that already has the largest dead zone on earth

There's diminishing returns with reverse-osmosis desalinisation, so the waste water usually isn't supersaturated Dead Sea brine, its just a couple fold saltier than seawater. If anything, it probably helps dead zones by sinking to the bottom with oxygen.

Atlantic: Are We Living Through Climate Change’s Worst-Case Scenario?

Personally, I've thought we'll run between RCP 4.5 and RCP 8.5, but the outcomes will be similar to 8.5 (and of course, worse in future centuries), due to "global brightening" (as fewer aerosols are exhausted into the troposphere) and poorly modeled positive feedbacks.

xps my brine oil exploitation fan-fic was supposed to be a joke

went to a good book talk last night by the author of this book Planetary Improvement: Cleantech Entrepreneurship and the Contradictions of Green Capitalism that featured a couple of my colleagues

notes in the form of a livetweet thread here for the interested:

At @Pottershousedc for @commonwaste's talk on his new book.

"One thing I found consistently in the literature is a clear admission that capitalism is the problem, followed quickly by a 'solution' that's just a variation of capitalism. Disruptive tech, hippie capitalism, so on." pic.twitter.com/EiT9z6oywa

— justin jacoby smith (@hoosteen) January 15, 2019

a relatively lighthearted look at some exxon geoengineering ideas from the 90s

https://www.topic.com/giant-mirrors-ocean-whitening-here-s-how-exxon-wanted-to-save-the-planet

Kretschmer has found that over the last decades, the stratospheric polar vortex has become weaker and less stable, so Arctic air masses can escape more easily towards the North American and Eurasian continents. Here a schematic from UCAR. pic.twitter.com/Ss9LGN7KGe

— Stefan Rahmstorf (@rahmstorf) January 21, 2019