Global Warming's Terrifying New Math

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

Apple predicts climate change will increase demand for iPhones, noting that they double as flashlights and sirens and can be charged by hand crank. https://t.co/eR3yhtiGRQ pic.twitter.com/RUTjTfN20j

— Christopher Flavelle (@cflav) January 22, 2019

massive eyeroll

god, if i somehow worked at apple and had to be involved in the preparation of whatever dumbass presentation/report they're referring to, i think i'd just quit that day and walk into the ocean

the pentagon issued a report this week with the 'force multiplier' idea, 'climate change is gonna make everything that's bad worse'

we're going to need to decide how we feel about migration. and by that i mean we going to need to change our fucking views on what acceptable "levels" of border-crossing are and start acting like one human race for once.

xp
doesn't surprise me, DOD has been putting out reports along similar lines for the past 15 years or so (at least) that seem to be completely ignored by people who typically worship at their feet

we're going to need to decide how we feel about migration. and by that i mean we going to need to change our fucking views on what acceptable "levels" of border-crossing are and start acting like one human race for once.

otm, and i have a very bad feeling about how this national conversation is going to unfold

The situation is a lot worse for Europe than in the Western Hemisphere, given how large tropical/subtropical populations already dependent on food charity, but I fully expect lifeboat ethics to be publically discussed by mainstream politicians in a couple decades. From a systems perspective, only systems with "circuit breakers" like impermeable borders are resilient to the kind of stresses losing half of global agriculture will bring.

Europeans are already funding nationalists in Libya to deter migrants. It's such a cheap and easy solution to encourage brown people to abuse brown people, that it will be adopted everywhere. In fact, I think Trump could have gotten his wall, if it was for subsidizing a wall between Mexico and Guatemala/El Salvador.

If there's hope for those in the developing tropics, its for initiatives in girl's education and family planning to make the turn in demographic trends, and charitable funding of self-sufficiency in energy and agriculture.

or, you know, we could just grow the fuck up?

can you say more about this option

Australia has just seen the world's hottest temperature recorded next to open ocean: 120.4°F (49.1°C), less than a block from the sea. https://t.co/fuEUt3Yqju

— Bob Henson (@bhensonweather) January 25, 2019

yes but it's far more important that we continue driving oil-machines and keeping certain human beings on the other side of an imaginary line BE REALISTIC

We’re really fucked if people treats statements like this seriously and not as ..you know...denial.

Neoliberalism rots people's brains into thinking climate policy means sacrificing something. If we do it right climate policy will mean most everyone gets luxurious public goods & a better quality of life as billionaires become millionaires and we shutter the fossil fuel industry

— Kate Aronoff (@KateAronoff) January 27, 2019

yeah thats some wishful thinking

it sounds like wishful thinking to me too, but i know kate pretty well, and because of her years of reporting on the issue i trust that she knows the boundaries of the possible on this subject better than any of the 3 of us.

i'm sure its dark mirth for sanpaku, i don't get it either, i just have trust in the source here. see for ex a response here from Kallis, a degrowth guy whose work i follow:

Sounds like a good summary of what we mean by degrowth, yes. (I guess the part of degrowing private and material goods is left tactically out of the summary).

— Giorgos Kallis (@g_kallis) January 27, 2019

the problem? climate change! the solution? genocide!

Colonisation of the Americas at the end of the 15th Century killed so many people, it disturbed Earth's climate.

That's the conclusion of scientists from University College London, UK.

The team says the disruption that followed European settlement led to a huge swathe of abandoned agricultural land being reclaimed by fast-growing trees and other vegetation.

This pulled down enough carbon dioxide (CO₂) from the atmosphere to eventually chill the planet.

It's a cooling period often referred to in the history books as the "Little Ice Age" - a time when winters in Europe would see the Thames in London regularly freeze over.

"The Great Dying of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas led to the abandonment of enough cleared land that the resulting terrestrial carbon uptake had a detectable impact on both atmospheric CO₂ and global surface air temperatures," Alexander Koch and colleagues write in their paper published in Quaternary Science Reviews.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-47063973

didn't this get reported last year also?

the evidence for the ecological benefits of genocide mounts!

That sort of result was claimed for the Mongol invasions and Black Death here:

Pongratz et al, 2011. Coupled climate–carbon simulations indicate minor global effects of wars and epidemics on atmospheric CO2 between ad 800 and 1850. The Holocene, 21(5), pp.843-851.

Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if some enterprising billionaire is funding development of some antibiotic resistant pneumonic plague, etc. as the least painful way of dealing with coming overpopulation/climate/resource crises.

The plot of The Kingsman iirc

this is what i had in mind from last year

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/jun/10/colonialism-changed-earth-geology-claim-scientists

“The arrival of 16th century Europeans, in particular the British and Spanish, had a profound impact on central and southern America,” Maslin told the Observer. “They carried germs for smallpox, measles, flu, typhoid and many other diseases that led to the deaths of more than 50 million Americans – who had no previous exposure to these pathogens – within a few decades. Society in America collapsed and subsistence farming there was wiped out.”

Forests returned to land that had been abandoned by humans. “We can detect this in Antarctic ice cores,” added Maslin. “These provide a history of the atmosphere for thousands of years and show carbon dioxide levels reached a distinct minimum around 1610 because forests, which are much better than farm crops at absorbing carbon dioxide, were now covering vastly increased areas of the American landscape – thanks to the eradication of the people who had once farmed there.” This effect continued for decades until America’s population of humans was restored.

Within decades of the discovery of America, Europeans were eating its potatoes and tomatoes, while China and India were consuming its peppers. These imports also had a profound impact. “In China, for example, the arrival of maize allowed drier lands to be farmed, driving new waves of deforestation and a large population increase,” say the authors. The colonising of America resulted in a trade triangle: manufactured goods from Europe were sold to Africa for slaves, who were transported to the Americas to grow cotton and tobacco for Europe. For the first time, the world was bound into a single global economic system. Globalisation had begun and its impact on the planet has since been vast. One result has been the homogenisation of life on Earth. Rats and other pests carried on ships have overrun the habitats of isolated species, while more and more land has been turned over to agriculture.

“A good example is provided by the earthworm,” said Maslin. “In the US, most of the earthworms you will find there are actually European. They are better at competing for nutrients. So they have taken over the soil in North America since Europeans brought them across the Atlantic in the 16th century. That is not something you can unpick. They are there for good.” This last point is summed up by the two authors: “The Anthropocene began with widespread colonialism and slavery; it is a story of how people treat the environment and how people treat each other.”

see also:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05727-4

Nicholas Loughlin at the Open University in Milton Keynes, UK, and his colleagues examined soil cores from a lake in Ecuador’s Quijos Valley. Pollen, charcoal and fungal spores in the cores indicate that indigenous peoples intensively farmed and burned the land for some 500 years before the first Europeans arrived in the sixteenth century.

The samples also suggest that this agricultural activity ended abruptly in around 1588, when an influx of Spanish colonists led to the death or dispersal of most of the local population. By roughly 1820, the structure of the Quijos Valley ‘cloud forest’ was similar to that of the forests that blanketed the region 40,000 years ago, well before humans first settled the area.

thanks for these links, hoos, i'll read through them when i get home.

it's all very...awkward, from an enviro/political/persuasive point of view. for the last three decades we've had competing strategies on how to address pollution and climate change. broadly:

1) a cornucopian belief that existing and future technology will save the day via the invisible hand
2) a tech/policy-driven posture that aligns with neoliberalism and technocratic governance approaches
3) a more aggressive, radical activist (and some scientists) movement to fundamentally change the way we approach energy and the environment,
4) whatever we should call the dumbfuck evil republicans and industry groups which actively seek policies which undermine the lives of billions of people.

4 plays well with 1. And 1 and 2 have a lot of overlap. 3 has always been off in its own world, with little political support. Recent political leaders and big green groups have found themselves firmly entrenched within 2. And part of the neoliberal technocratic approach is the constant assurance that people aren’t the problem, stressing that we don’t have to sacrifice human wellbeing to fix the environment (that we broke), that human and environmental progress can go hand and hand. That was certainly the line in the Obama administration, which was a big improvement over the Bush-era.

but…the problem is that 3) is probably the most appropriate way to go at this point. There was a time, about twenty to thirty fucking years ago, when there might have been time to bend the curve of GHG emissions downward, trending toward zero, with enough of a buffer to mitigate most of the worst consequences of climate change. That time appears to have passed, but the political world is still operating as if nothing has changed.

i don’t know, not sure what point I’m getting to, if there is any. It’s just…the Obama-era “all of the above” energy strategy and “cutting energy use is actually GOOD for GDP, which is a wonderful way to measure human progress!!” is really hard to square with reports like the ones Hoos highlighted. I hope this means that more and more AOC’s will show up who will tell the truth, but there are just a TON of people out there who still have no idea and got sick of hearing about this shit back during the Population Bomb-era.

starting this today also as a counterbalance to the degrowth reading

https://imgv2-1-f.scribdassets.com/img/word_document/281433794/original/432x574/f3576d30fb/1548487424?v=1