Global Warming's Terrifying New Math

semen + oil = cactus?

is it a form of political insanity i have to hope that some of the worst case AGW scenarios realize themselves just to shame the deniers?

not that i'm leaving my car running to bring them about or anything

I don't like this arrangement
Your wild schemes are nothing but pipe dreams
I don't like this arrangement
And we can't win without the kid

We need somebody
Somebody to watch our backs
We need somebody
We don't care what they did
We need somebody
Somebody like the kid

lol took me a second to recognize that

just in case anyone harbors any illusions that obama might give a shit about global warming, he put out a new radio ad today in ohio that criticizes Romney for not loving coal enough.

and of course, the impact of coal isn't limited to the dominant role in plays in releasing greenhouse gases to the atmosphere - coal plants also causes thousands upon thousands of pre-mature deaths, heart attacks, hospitalizations and asthma attacks each year.

but whatever. get re-elected. when people are wondering why the fuck we didn't do anything a few decades from now, they'll totally understand that he needed to get re-elected, no big deal

The ad quotes Romney in 2003 saying that he "will not create jobs or hold jobs that kill people. And that plant kills people…."

Relevant to this thread, Bill McKibben (author of the article at top) commented "Romney says so many untrue things that it’s deeply ironic and deeply troubling when he gets attacked for one of the few straightforward and accurate charges he ever made."

more news from my alter ego, daryl doomburger:

http://www.climatecentral.org/images/sized/images/uploads/news/8-7-12_andrew_recordsratiographic-500x329.jpeg

Thanks to a record warm January-to-June period and intense, long-lasting heat waves during March, June, and July, the U.S. has passed an ominous milestone: with about five months remaining in the year, there have already been more record daily high temperatures set or tied so far this year than were set or tied during all of 2011. And 2011 had the second-warmest summer on record for the lower 48 states.

http://www.climatecentral.org/news/more-record-highs-during-2012-so-far-than-all-of-2011-14768/

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/48578898/ns/world_news-the_new_york_times/?__utma=14933801.819737031.1342482211.1344388830.1344475796.25&__utmb=14933801.1.10.1344475796&__utmc=14933801&__utmx=-&__utmz=14933801.1342482211.1.1.utmcsr=(direct)|utmccn=(direct)|utmcmd=(none)&__utmv=14933801.|8=Earned%20By=msnbc%7Ccover=1^12=Landing%20Content=Mixed=1^13=Landing%20Hostname=www.nbcnews.com=1^30=Visit%20Type%20to%20Content=Earned%20to%20Mixed=1&__utmk=188209448#.UCMSp_aPXE0

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

And given that the Dark Knight shootings will lead to zero changes in gun control, what hope does the planet have?

Kim Stanley Robinson said in one of his novels "It's easier to destroy the planet than change capitalism one small bit."

The McKibben article has a real feel of a man realising all his work has been for nothing, and that we're all fucked.

That KSR quote is a lift from someone/something else but I can't remember who or what damnit.

Ah shit it's Zizek.

here's an article about how many managers of zoos aren't sure if talking about the underlying issue that threatens the viability of many of the animals IN the zoo is a good idea. it might be a bummer for people to hear.

In the 1980s and ’90s, Dr. Boyle noted, some zoos and aquariums made a big push to emphasize threats like the depletion of the earth’s ozone layer, the razing of rain forests by loggers and farmers and the overfishing of the Pacific. Electronic boards toted up the numbers of acres being cleared, and enlarged photographs depicted denuded landscapes.

Surveys of visitors showed a backlash. “For lots of reasons, the institutions tended to approach the issues by talking about the huge scale of the problems,” Dr. Boyle said. “They wanted to attract people’s attention, but what we saw happening over time was that everyday people were overwhelmed.” It did not help that a partisan split had opened in the United States over whether global warming was under way, and whether human activity was the leading cause.

At the Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta, Brian Davis, the vice president for education and training, says to this day his institution ensures its guests will not hear the term global warming. Visitors are “very conservative,” he said. “When they hear certain terms, our guests shut down. We’ve seen it happen.”

Great job Brian Davis, vice president for education and training!

we've found that people don't really like education all that much, so i play a lot of minesweeper and drink my paycheck

the line between zoo and circus is very fine

The presence of clowns is a good indicator.

I listened to an interview with McKibben about a week ago. He's now trying to organize a mass movement prior to the 2014/2016 election cycle, as his last, best hope to turn this shit around short of climatic globacide. What he proposes to do has never been done before. Not even close. But I give him credit for trying.

2013: hottest ever

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/new_scientist/2012/09/will_2013_be_the_hottest_year_climate_change_and_el_ni_o_will_make_next_year_sweltering_.html

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/09/rocking-the-ac/

Here's a decent article by Bill Blakemore (veteran ABC journalist) trying to explain why media coverage of climate change is so abysmal: http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/technology/2012/09/the-elephant-were-all-inside/

he basically attributes it to two things:

1) "...a cynical disinformation and intimidation campaign — as reported in detail by a handful of professional journalists and academics including Steve Coll, Naomi Oreskes, Erik Conway, and Ross Gelbspan (as we’ve reported before on Nature’s Edge) paid for, so the reporting says, by multinational fossil fuel companies, often based in the United States, that are fighting a rear-guard action to prevent inevitable regulation on carbon emissions as long as possible.:

2) the unprecedented scale of the problem. he has some useful insights regarding the newsroom, which is typically divided into local, national and "foreign" stories. climate change is different. it's beyond "foreign", it's everyone. it's global. newsrooms aren't really used to handling this kind of story.

i'm also glad that he's willing to go ahead and say that "Manmade global warming is, according to the world’s climate scientists, solidly on track to be far bigger than history’s biggest atrocity so far."

which really goes back to the scale of it. i don't think people can really comprehend that we're talking tens of millions, possibly hundreds of millions of ruined human lives from this thing. it's too much to handle, so we just ignore it.

that's definitely a thing that humans do, which is going to be a big problem in the future, not just (though probably most importantly) in the case of climate change, but for the more and more problems that, in a world of 7, 8, or 10 billion people will just be too big to fathom.

Exxon's CEO, from that ABC article:

"I'm not disputing that increasing CO2 emissions in the atmosphere is going to have an impact. It'll have a warming impact. The -- how large it is is what is very hard for anyone to predict. And depending on how large it is, then projects how dire the consequences are.

As we have looked at the most recent studies coming -- and the IPCC reports, which we -- I've seen the drafts; I can't say too much because they're not out yet. But when you predict things like sea level rise, you get numbers all over the map. If you take a -- what I would call a reasonable scientific approach to that, we believe those consequences are manageable. "

yeah, the shift from "it's not happening" to "we need geoengineering" to fix this this is on the wall. hope everyone likes the Terminator version of the future, brought to you by Exxon et al!

i would bet $ that the 'futurama solution' has been considered

...a cynical disinformation and intimidation campaign — as reported in detail by a handful of professional journalists and academics including Steve Coll, Naomi Oreskes[...]

That's not the Steve Coll who writes for the NYer, I take it?

sorry Leee, just saw your question. It is the Steve Coll that writes for the NYer. He put out a book this year called Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power, but I haven't read it.

Also, sigh

http://www.realclimate.org/images//nsidc.jpeg

ah like 5 mins into this frontline episode on global warming deniers and i can feel the rage

i guess its on the politics of global warming altogether but its just the deniers so far

ha theyre all 'thank god for al gore'

god these people are such barbarians

You have a stronger stomach than i

co2 is just plant food is kinda hilarious and brilliant

I haven't watched it yet. Focusing attention on deniers is actually useful in the U.S. context, esp. if it draws attention to the fossil fuel-driven disinformation campaign. So many duped people.

that one republican legislator with the dog-eared denier book was interesting because he seems to have been legitimately duped

What surprised me was working on the fuel truck on my second pipeline construction job. It was one of 3 fuel trucks we used on the job servicing all of the equipment. Cat is the main supplier of most pipeline jobs, though john deere also. On that job which was 87 miles of 42" inch pipe we had roughly 20 trackhoes, 15 side booms, 12 dozers of varying sizes, 2 very large front end loaders, 5 fork lifts, 40 water pumps of varies sizes, who knows how many welding machines, 2 graders, 12 compressor trailers for testing, directional drilling equipment, etc... We would start the day at 4 am with a full tank of diesel and by noon we were having to drive back to the fueling station for another tank. Each of the trucks would do this everyday for the whole length of the job. I can imagine it's similar to building and trade work, trucking, farming, power plants, etc. Working in construction, you realize fossil fuels are how things are built, grown, and distributed. Imagining a change in this seems impossible.

running out of the fossil fuels will be quite the change

the link to the episode on frontline's website was a little hard to find, so here it is in case others were looking for it.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/climate-of-doubt/

there wasn't really any new information in the episode, but it did a nice job of summarizing the key aspects of the disinformation campaign. for anyone who was fascinated by the part about fred singer's "professional contrarianism" (i.e. his role in getting paid to protest the science about secondhand smoke, the ozone layer, acid rain and now global warming), check out Merchants of Doubt by Oreskes and Conway.

cool thx

That was depressing. I was not aware of these global warming skeptics. I've met people with different ideas about the effects of global warming (i.e. can we global warm just enough to delay the next ice age). I've met scientists who believe that "brown cloud" emissions are more important than CO2 emissions, etc. But the correlation between CO2, brown cloud, etc. production and the warming temperature of the Earth is undeniable. The laws of thermodynamics linking the two are not controversial.

ime, conservatives do love any contrarian opinion that's fed to them, though.

So, I know that there's something like 98% consensus among scientists that climate change is real and caused by human activity. Does anyone know what kind of consensus there is on McKibben's doomy numbers?

Sort of wish I was 40 years old and that I could live a moderately comfortable life and die in peace, instead of being 24 and looking at a grim-ass death in the face of dwindling resources and hostile, migrating neighbors killing each other over what little potable water remains.

Memorize all the songs from Annie now, while you still can. They will see you through.

Sort of wish I was 40 years old and that I could live a moderately comfortable life and die in peace, instead of being 24 and looking at a grim-ass death in the face of dwindling resources and hostile, migrating neighbors killing each other over what little potable water remains.

― global tetrahedron, Monday, October 29, 2012 8:30 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this will probably not happen if you live in a rich country that is not a small island. at least not in your lifetime.

According to the defense scenario thinkers Gwynne Dyer spoke with for Climate Wars, the major human effects we'll see in the first half of the century are most likely due to agricultural failures in the subtropical zones, as the Hadley cell atmospheric circulation enlarges. As a result (and this is seen is the majority of the 40 odd computational climate models used in the IPCC reports) the twin belts of desert that circle the globe at about 30° N and S will push incrementally polewards. That means serious drought in Mexico, the US southwest and Western great plains, the southern tier of the European Mediterranean, through Turkey, Ukraine and the Indian subcontinent. I guess the Argentine pampas and Australian grain belt as well. The last decade has already seen droughts in all these places, and the near failure of the Indian monsoon last year was a real nail-biter. There's probably still enough grain production to feed the wealthy countries (though meat will become dear), but its another matter entirely for developing nations that even today have difficulty feeding themselves. There's also an issue with rice, originally a temperate region grass, failing to germinate if daytime temperatures hold above 35° C or nighttime temperatures above 25° C.

So, stop thinking about rising sea levels or storms. Those will happen, but these are smaller issues this century (current estimates have Greenland melting in 1500 to 5000 years) compared to the agricultural impacts, and the flood of climate refugees. People always raid before they starve. The working phrase for UK defense planners considering the mid-21st century is "Lifeboat Britain". I'm sure the U.S. military has similar metaphors. The Chinese (who like the temperate West get off pretty easy) will eye thawing Siberian arable land with interest. Pakistan and India may get a chance to use their new atomic toys as they dispute shrinking Indus tributary water in an era of diminishing Himalayan glacial runoff. The Saudis, Chinese and Koreans have been on an African farmland buying spree. Good luck convincing any African leaders to keep those contracts when the fecal matter impacts the rotary air circulator.

Mentioned hereabouts before, but Dyer's audio documentary for the CBC is just riveting stuff.

In summary, the much derided ABC speculative program Earth 2100 seems to have followed the defense planning scenarios Gwynne Dyer reported on remarkably well:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUWyDWEXH8U

I guess by 'grim-ass' death I meant less living/dying in a Mad Max style situation and something more akin to major social decay? I imagine unrest such as the type taking over Greece eventually will eventually make its way to the US. I have no reason to doubt my future won't be like that of a current Greek retiree seeing the loss of their pensions up against austerity measures enacting a dismantling of basic social nets, combined with the unraveling of other social structures we take for granted. Not drowning as my equatorial island is consumed by the ocean, but still grim...

Ryurc

GT, if you're only in your 20s you won't have to wait til retirement to see wholesale abandonment of pensions and entitlements. That all starts later this decade, and early next. The US as economy that also has to invest in the future can't afford to spend 25% of its income on healthcare, primarily to boomer retirees. Ergo, it won't. The fight is just over whether the drone that gets to say no to your medical interventions is on a government or private payroll. (Advice: try not to get sick. Most chronic disease and hence medical costs are due to dietary choices in earlier life. It also helps to be lucky.) Social security will continue to be eroded away but understating inflation adjustments, as has been done to the tune of 1-1.5% a year since 1995's Boskin Commission. Pensions? Only public sector workers have heard about such things for decades, and a lot of municipalities will look at the path of San Bernardino or Harrisberg for a way out from their unfunded pension overhang. They promised what their tax base couldn't afford, and there's only one way out now.

As for Greece, its been a pretty sick political patronage society for decades. Tax cheating is near universal, railway workers were taking in €88,000, retirement was arbitrarily set in the early 50s for a lot of professions (including sedentary ones like hairdresser). There was never enough government revenue to pay for the largess, and you could tax Greek millionaires at 100% and there still wouldn't. Add in a private credit bubble of similar magnitude that won't recur, and you get the economy of the early 90s, plus a lot more empty promises. Sad for those who assumed money would continue to rain down from Northern Europe forever, but the smart Greeks put their savings in Swiss accounts starting decades ago.

The U.S. has issues, but they're nowhere near the gravity of those faced by places like Greece (or southern Italy, or hell, lots of Africa) where the common good hasn't been part of the political discourse for a rather long while. I mostly hope that in time more outsiders will come to understand Greece's plight as a cautionary tale, rather than fuel for their own domestic partisanship.

The thing is, paper currencies come and go, governments come and go, but cultures tend to endure. Create a culture of shared sacrifice for common goals, and pick the goals well (no one will remember America's golden age of sickcare largess in 100 years, but they might remember excellent preschool that changed the course of their life), and solutions become possible. Create a modern Greece (starting under the colonels, if not earlier), and you won't have the social infrastructure to deal with a lot of problems (demographic, monetary, resource, and most importantly this century climatic) at once.