Global Warming's Terrifying New Math

i would say its scary but its way beyond that. kind of an r.i.p. earth dispatch really.

"In early June, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton traveled on a Norwegian research trawler to see firsthand the growing damage from climate change. "Many of the predictions about warming in the Arctic are being surpassed by the actual data," she said, describing the sight as "sobering." But the discussions she traveled to Scandinavia to have with other foreign ministers were mostly about how to make sure Western nations get their share of the estimated $9 trillion in oil (that's more than 90 billion barrels, or 37 gigatons of carbon) that will become accessible as the Arctic ice melts. Last month, the Obama administration indicated that it would give Shell permission to start drilling in sections of the Arctic."

well that's good news, at least

we're fucked

all that pesky arctic ice was hiding all the oil!

it's why if you talk to people who work on climate change (people at environmental nonprofits, climate scientists, think tanks), everyone has this attitude that's beyond fatalistic. like, you almost have to laugh at the situation a little bit to keep yourself from going insane. i guess the article talks about that a bit:

We're in the same position we've been in for a quarter-century: scientific warning followed by political inaction. Among scientists speaking off the record, disgusted candor is the rule. One senior scientist told me, "You know those new cigarette packs, where governments make them put a picture of someone with a hole in their throats? Gas pumps should have something like that."

but yeah, it's absurd. in 2010, my dad told me "you know who Obama should appoint for secretary of energy? Sarah Palin. i don't agree with her about a lot of stuff, but she has really good ideas about energy." my dad's kind of an outlier i guess, because he's a super fundamentalist who believes the earth is 8000 years old and doesn't believe that climate change could happen because god promised not to flood the earth again, and even if environmental catastrophe did occur, he'd be raptured out of it (the "pre-wrath rapture" theory") before the shit hit the fan. but man, there are a toooooooon of really ignorant people out there that don't want to hear anything that's bad news.

it really is up to the governments of the world. all of them. the average person is too far gone to really change things. i'm too far gone! he mentions that moral outrage over the loss of a city due to climate-related storms would change opinion, although there has already been mass devastation to cities due to super storms and it hasn't changed anyone's mind about anything. plus, for some reason people don't want to make the connection. major damage due to warming doesn't make people hate the oil companies.

this is increasingly all I think about and it leaves me in a heavy depression. I try to be fatalistic about it and tell myself that the universe will go on regardless, but that's not comfort since I guess one day it will be a dark grey cold mass of atoms.

i find it near-impossible to imagine a government stepping in to take the necessary action against oil companies in liberal socialist Europe, there's absolutely no chance in hell it wd happen in the US or China

all the news stories here about the drought are about how you might be paying more at the pump in the future! that is the number one concern. oh and food prices are gonna go up. that takes second place.

thats really the frustrating part; it really seems like as a planet we could buckle down and fix things, we just won't

whenever I hear the phrase "the price at the pump" it makes me insane. was looking at various political parties' platforms, and of course in the energy section for the democrats' paper there is little mention of climate change, and instead just talk about energy security, independence, and yes, the "price at the pump."

It sounds like it may be coming to a head in the US soon if next year's corn harvest may be fucked.

I am curious what the thinking inside China is - I oddly expect more of them than the US, partly because I don't associate them with "Oh God won't let that happen".

I remember having my huge bout of paralyzed fear about the environment in early 1992 -- still always associate the Church's stellar Priest = Aura with that, probably why that album has lingered with me for so long. I don't see myself returning to that state anymore because it's almost like...well, I went through it, and my fears never went away. I just became inured, and so I'll just live my life as low impact as possible and...wait.

xpost but it's up to people to force their governments to act.

what i'm dreading even more than the world that we'll have to live in for the rest of our lives - where the new normal is weeks on end of 100+ degrees, droughts, Katrinas, oceanic foodchains ruined by acidification, climate refugees struggling to move to the remaining pockets of the world where agriculture isn't wrecked - is the geoengineering "solutions" that will inevitably arise. it's so obvious that that's where we're headed. and no doubt, geoengineering efforts will probably be pushed by exxon-mobil and the like.

what is the true percentage of people in the US that believe god is protecting us though? I feel that there are many who just don't want to admit the truth because it is terrifying, or are just susceptible to listening to whichever account of events is least traumatizing. I figure it's quite a minority who really believe that God Himself will prevent any ecological disaster, even if a majority of Americans identify as religious.

xxpost

like most Americans are religious, but not thaaaaat religious, right? I mean most people just like to say they believe in god and attend church once in a while. right guys??

now I think I'm fooling myself maybe

i need a drink after reading this

I get the impression that it works on a lower/earlier level, like as long as there's FUD about climate change, people can react to it as "one story is this, and one story is that, but God would not put us in the situation where Story 1 happens so it must be Story 2"

I am curious what the thinking inside China is - I oddly expect more of them than the US, partly because I don't associate them with "Oh God won't let that happen".

also because their leadership would actually have the ability to unilaterally "force" action on the issue. don't know if they'd actually do it, but at least it's possible.

there was a nyer stat about 26% (iirc) of americans defining themselves as evangelicals, recently (xxxp)

hey Z S, sorry to use you as a lazy wikipedia substitute, BUT, is it correct that the limited action that was taken by governments after the discovery of the hole in the o-zone layer was actually effective? that stat always seemed slightly reassuring to me, because i couldn't believe that anyone did a lot, but the idea that some modest action was effective seemed promising.

these are some of the people in power in the united states. just so we are clear:

In 2009, for the first time, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce surpassed both the Republican and Democratic National Committees on political spending; the following year, more than 90 percent of the Chamber's cash went to GOP candidates, many of whom deny the existence of global warming. Not long ago, the Chamber even filed a brief with the EPA urging the agency not to regulate carbon – should the world's scientists turn out to be right and the planet heats up, the Chamber advised, "populations can acclimatize to warmer climates via a range of behavioral, physiological and technological adaptations." As radical goes, demanding that we change our physiology seems right up there.

U.S. Chamber of Commerce is horrible for many reasons, not least of which is that they fool people into thinking they're an actual gov't agency!

Not long ago, the Chamber even filed a brief with the EPA urging the agency not to regulate carbon – should the world's scientists turn out to be right and the planet heats up, the Chamber advised, "populations can acclimatize to warmer climates via a range of behavioral, physiological and technological adaptations." As radical goes, demanding that we change our physiology seems right up there.

as cynical as i am about the intelligence of our conservative political leaders, i think that many of them really do understand the implications of climate change. as time goes on and denying climate change becomes more and more absurd - think about the first warnings about cigarettes and cancer in the late 50s, the loooooooong conservative battle against those scientists who were trying to save lives, and then the gradual, quiet acceptance of the facts in the following decades - the rhetoric will quickly shift to geoengineering "solutions", since by then it will be too late to actually effectively mitigate climate change by reducing CO2 emissions. hell, it's probably already too late NOW, when you take into account tipping points/feedback loops. anyway, they'll be happy to move straight to geoengineering, because that's a pro-business attitude that doesn't involve changing your own lifestyle.

http://adsoftheworld.com/files/sony.start_.new_.tunnel20.jpg

wait did ned just say that he made his peace with the destruction of the planet via an australian college rock band from the 80's?

sounds about right

You gotta start somewhere.

hey Z S, sorry to use you as a lazy wikipedia substitute, BUT, is it correct that the limited action that was taken by governments after the discovery of the hole in the o-zone layer was actually effective? that stat always seemed slightly reassuring to me, because i couldn't believe that anyone did a lot, but the idea that some modest action was effective seemed promising.

yes, the actions taken were relatively effective! but the experience is - cue negative nancy alert - unfortunately not very applicable to the problem of climate change. ozone depletion is primarily caused by the use of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). Banning the use of CFCs in things like spray cans and refrigerators was relatively easy to accomplish, since there are chemical substitutes that could be used at a similar cost. and it was regulation that could be implemented quickly, from the top down, on industry.

climate change, on the other hand, is driven by the emission of greenhouse gases, primarily from burning coal and using oil. but the key is that the infrastructure required to deliver energy and car-centered transportation to the people is enormous. you can't change it overnight, and you can't do it in a way that consumers barely notice (like phasing out CFCs in spray cans). there are cleaner substitutes for coal and oil, of course, but the substitutes tend to be more expensive and will take a long time to replace to replace the existing infrastructure.

and also, there's just the sheer usefulness of fossil fuels. think about what a gallon of gasoline provides for you - it enables a weak, feeble human being to move a one ton automobile for 30 miles or so! imagine pushing that car! all from a gallon of fossilized ancient dead organisms! it's seriously amazing. and so incredibly cheap. $3 for access to superhuman powers. it's like playing videogames on god mode. people in underdeveloped countries understandably want access to oil and coal. again, all of this in contrast to CFCs, which could be eliminated without negatively impacting the prospects of a better life for anyone else.

xpost -- Said album was more of a vehicle and a lens, in that it builds up to a pretty harrowing ending. I don't know whether it matched my mood or enabled it, but I find it pretty inextricable in reflecting back, and anytime I encounter stories or concerns like this it's part of the soundtrack in my head.

If global warming is real, then why is it cold in winter? Huh? Fuck you, science.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4MCRrsmzYU

The first six months of 2012 were the hottest on record. Deke Arndt, chief of the climate monitoring branch of NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center, takes a look at record warm temperatures across the county and the world and their connections to global warming.

http://www.wnyc.org/shows/bl/2012/jul/11/weather/

The 'Dark Knight' shootings are terrifying and ppl will rightly be appalled by them but somehow climate change lacks the immediacy that would rightly make it that much more terrifying.

it's because what's predicted to happen has never happened before in human memory and so people just ignore it.

if you can scarcely conceptualize a threat then it's hard to motivate yourself to give up deeply ingrained habits and privileges to stop it.

i do wonder what sort of world the rest of my life will be spent in. will my neighbors and myself experience widespread privation? or will life in america just become marginally more difficult, with our wealth and technology insulating ourselves from the worst of it? will my diet change thanks to rolling food shortages? will we all simply die of malnutrition in 40 years?

3.7 x 10-99, a number considerably larger than the number of stars in the universe.

he sorta blows his math cred in the second sentence. that number is almost zero.

odds are expressed as a fraction of 1 iirc

agree. the odds are small, not large. an editor should have picked that up.

Dodgy formatting imo, should it be 3.7 x 10^99:1? Or 3.7 x 10:99? Or what?

more proof that this is all a hoax

Sorry, I've got my stupid head on and didn't read the sentence properly. Yes, it makes no sense as he has written it.

it makes sense it's just inaccurate. he shd've used odds against if he wanted to draw the stars comparison.

i mean, i knew what he meant, so it makes sense, and i squinted at the -99 index when i read it

so the warming deniers all think that its the sun's fault. the culprit is the sun. because the sun is in a warming cycle. who knows? maybe it is. kind of bad timing what with us also destroying the planet with carbon emissions.

it isn't.

http://www.skepticalscience.com/solar-activity-sunspots-global-warming-intermediate.htm

and in fact, over the last 30 years, forcing from the sun has actually shown a slight cooling trend, while global temperatures have steadily risen. global temperature used to be pretty correlated with the sun (for obvious reasons), until the latter part of the 20th century when the greenhouse effect really started to take hold. in other words, if there was no greenhouse effect, global temperatures would most likely have cooled slightly over the last 30 years.

http://www.skepticalscience.com/pics/Solar_vs_Temp_basic.gif

btw scott, and others who are interested, that website (skepticalscience.com) is a GREAT resource. it lists common arguments that people use (it's the sun, you can't rely on computer models, global warming will be good for people, etc) and then summarizes the science on the topic, organized by basic, intermediate and advanced levels of knowledge about the climate.

nice take-down of another shit hollywood climate change morality play

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/pathos-porn-about-climate-change-on-scott-z-burnss-extrapolations/

Things began to look very unusual two months ago.
Today the charts need no commentary, they speak for themselves.
This is the Atlantic. https://t.co/P26XnJmKj6 pic.twitter.com/Xin8kUT3Fr

— Dr Thomas Smith 🔥🌏 (@DrTELS) June 10, 2023

is this good

looks great if you like monster storms with high winds and rainfall measured in inches per hour

https://scontent-lga3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t39.30808-6/356238972_10161305771492137_5491188824864969283_n.jpg?_nc_cat=106&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=730e14&_nc_ohc=0oVjV0OT554AX8ETKhd&_nc_oc=AQlI8ChoVJgz3LUBSb9x3z_jMQvXRrni8nHnzsMWYBNZ8j9fR9AdWVZIpA87Wldp4_U&_nc_ht=scontent-lga3-1.xx&oh=00_AfBxe-dgGsDqvUKT3GM1jybmmTPAdkV5uTQRmtz3sCRpIg&oe=64A37B4B

They really shouldn’t dive off of that, the water is not that deep there.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nykR3t3aKA8

The lake near me is lower than usual this year, apparently. I don't know, when I drive past it looks plenty fuckin' deep. Maybe some of the rich fucks around here shouldn't try to float superyachts behind their goddamn multi-million-dollar houses.

Global warming's terrifying effects on rich boat owners?

are we going to do anything to mark the warmest days on earth in 125,000 years? feel like i should bake a cake. ON THE SIDEWALK.

With ice growth remaining slow, the record #Antarctic sea ice anomaly (negative departure from average) continues to somehow get larger in size...

Seasonal cycle graphs at https://t.co/V0Lt0w20IQ. More info at https://t.co/QXRkBvOtPG. pic.twitter.com/MiVukwJoCn

— Zack Labe (@ZLabe) July 6, 2023

hell, i thought i was scared of everything already but now i'm scared of something else!

"This phenomenon, which creates air circulation in a clockwise direction, prevents the formation of clouds and, Dr. Domínguez Sarmiento added, “allows radiation to hit directly, as the sky is completely clear and thus temperatures on the surface rise.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/06/world/americas/hermosillo-mexico-heat.html

it was nice of you guys not to worry me about anticyclones though. i was blissfully unaware of the phenomenon until now.

the future is the present's past already. people still dealing with the effects and trauma of recent events. years to recover and rebuild. what if next summer is hotter? nobody is ready for that. biden thinks he's low on relief money now? lemme telly buddy, this planet is gonna be a pricy place to live.

“Miscarriages have been increasing because of the intense heat,” said Zainab Hingoro, a local health-care worker. When she once would have 3 out of 10 pregnant patients miscarry, she now has 5 to 6 out of 10."

“It was like thousands of snakes sighing all at once,” he recalled."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/interactive/2023/pakistan-extreme-heat-health-impacts-death/

We went to a UW-Madison football game on Saturday, and they had the local weatherman on hand to announce that it was officially the hottest temperature the team had ever played in there. And everyone cheered.

sounds about right.

They'll stop cheering when all the corn, wheat and soy fields shrivel up and burn to a crisp.

They'd think that that was owning the libs, seeing as they prefer to eat meat.

I think they were mostly just happy to have broken a record, any record. I mean, it *was* a sporting event ...

the two on the right are august and july of this year

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

A lot of nasty 'positive' feedback loops have already been triggered. They'll be self-reinforcing for the foreseeable future no matter what steps we take to limit our emissions. Doesn't mean we shouldn't stop digging the hole we're in even deeper.

I don’t think this has been shared here yet https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/life-and-death-in-americas-hottest-city?fbclid=IwAR3a3I5AWGbIcTM1Z__d8ahnBj_t4L-3YFYwrbq-gDoxuRKANXcZ2Goeyi4#

By the end of 2007 more than 3 million copies of the DVD set for the BBC series Planet Earth had sold. At an average weight of .25 pounds that is more than 750,000 pounds or over 375 tons of mostly unbiodegradable waste filled with toxic chemicals and metals.

i see so many copies of this in my line of work so i crunched some numbers.

Man-made global warming aside, new study projects mammals could face extinction in 250M years, more or less the amount of time since they first appeared
The immediate good news is that can all claim to be the peak of evolution

source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-023-01259-3

Alfred Wegener playing the ultimate long game in exacting revenge upon his foes.

Step aside climate change and Red Giant Sun, I’m burning the Earth first. The Andromeda-Milky Way Collision is the end of show fireworks. Angry neutron stars yelling that you don’t have to go home to resist entropy but you can’t do it there.

JFC: https://kotaku.com/shell-big-oil-roadtrips-fortnite-map-collab-tiktok-ign-1850907435

lol kids are absolutely not gonna fall for that shit. they're just throwing money into a hole. good thing they have so much of it!

https://www.nbcnews.com/science/environment/search-10-billion-missing-snow-crabs-scientists-eye-marine-heat-waves-rcna121449

When insurance giant AIG rattled the industry last year with an audacious plan to stop writing policies for some of the most heavily polluting fossil fuel projects, environmentalists and lawmakers showered the company with plaudits.

Like so many other large companies pledging to help the world avert climate catastrophe, AIG is finding that making such vows is easier than making good on them. The company is now a target of a Senate investigation into the insurance industry, led by lawmakers who warn that AIG and other companies continue to play a pivotal role in underwriting some of the most carbon-intensive fossil fuel projects in the world — despite lofty climate promises.

...AIG, which declined to comment or share its response to questions about its climate pledge from the committee, is hardly unusual. Over the last year, Amazon retreated from an effort to zero out the emissions of half its shipments by 2030. Shell Oil dropped an ambitious initiative to build a pipeline of carbon credits through investment in forest preservation and other carbon-absorbing projects worldwide. And BP significantly scaled back its plan to reduce emissions by as much as 35 percent by the end of the decade.

As the planet heats up at an alarming pace, these turnabouts expose the shortcomings of leaving it up to voluntary corporate action to solve an existential crisis, said John Lang, the project lead at Net Zero Tracker, a group that monitors progress on corporate and government climate pledges.

“There is a massive credibility gap with these corporate targets,” he said. “We need more regulation. Otherwise, the dial just will not turn.”

...Lang’s group examined more than 1,000 companies that have pledges to zero out their emissions by 2050. It found that 38 of them — less than 4 percent — are doing the bare minimum required under the Paris agreement’s goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. The rest are not meeting the “starting line criteria” laid out by the United Nations, which calls on companies to track their carbon footprint across supply chains, immediately cut emissions, create a scientifically credible plan for using carbon offsets and report annual progress on meeting climate targets.

gift link: https://wapo.st/48470m1

nice to see some reporting on the failed commitments, rather than just the front-end coverage of corporate PR bullshit promises that have no enforcement mechanism.

Alaska's snow crab season canceled for second year in a row
https://www.yahoo.com/news/alaskas-snow-crab-season-canceled-002948381.html

“People are like, ‘Yeah, yeah, the world is going to end. But I’m still going to vacation on the Greek islands or the Bahamas.’”

Everyone at Davos should have been Mr. Choppy'ed years ago.

will bono be spared

no

the only thing pro bono will be mr choppy's defense lawyer

Mexico City running out of water.

https://news.yahoo.com/mexico-city-teeters-unprecedented-water-000337079.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/02/09/atlantic-ocean-amoc-climate-change/

Mexico City running out of water.

https://news.yahoo.com/mexico-city-teeters-unprecedented-water-000337079.html

― a man often referred to in the news media as the Duke of Saxony (tipsy mothra), Thursday, 1 February 2024 bookmarkflaglink

Last year it was Montevideo. All of these flashing points..

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

the solid black line is global surface ocean temperatures for 2024, so far
the gold line is 2023

the three dotted black lines represent the mean temps from 1981-2011, and then 2 standard deviations above and below that mean.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/02/skyrocketing-ocean-temperatures-have-scientists-scratching-their-heads/

Thanks, z. That article is a fabulous example of good science writing that doesn't dumb down its subject. And considering it describes a phenomenon I shall only experience in its third or or fourth order effects, it is still miserably stomach-churning.

https://img.thedailybeast.com/image/upload/c_crop,d_placeholder_euli9k,h_2150,w_3822,x_0,y_0/dpr_1.5/c_limit,w_608/fl_lossy,q_auto/v1710158341/Screenshot_2024-03-11_at_11.46.32_vwhvnz

In a drastic attempt to protect their beachfront homes, residents in Salisbury, Massachusetts, invested $500,000 in a sand dune to defend against encroaching tides. After being completed last week, the barrier made from 14,000 tons of sand lasted just 72 hours before it was completely washed away, according to WCVB.

someone tell ben shapiro about this real estate opportunity

“Nobody really anticipated that the Earth would speed up to the point where we might have to remove a leap second,” Agnew said.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/27/climate/timekeeping-polar-ice-melt-earth-rotation

*nerd in the back*

"....um i did, neeeheeeheee!"

Solastalgia (/ˌsɒləˈstældʒə/) is a neologism, formed by the combination of the Latin words sōlācium (comfort) and the Greek root -algia (pain, suffering, grief), that describes a form of emotional or existential distress caused by environmental change.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solastalgia

i think that's a new one for me? i can dig it. as a word.