Global Warming's Terrifying New Math

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.

Read "Subtract a private credit bubble" in 2nd para. Pretty unclear hasty typing on my part.

things are def fucked up but american per capita income is 2x that of greece and we control our own currency. you just don't get a lot out of making a comparison like that.

also don't be jealous of 40 y/os, they're fucked too

via ned: Nation Suddenly Realizes This Just Going To Be A Thing That Happens From Now On

http://thinkprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/BBW.jpg
It's Global Warming, Stupid

for over ten years I've been thinking that at some point, climate change would make for a single-issue electorate, and all we'd have to do is wait

but the one thing I never quite anticipated, was that the presidential debates held the month before that very turning point, would have our two candidates trying to outarguing each other on which one was more coal-friendly, and that there might be any confusion as to whom to vote for on the issue

Global Warming's Terrifying New Math

and yet, bloomberg just unexpectedly endorsed obama, emphasizing, of all things, obama's ability to lead on climate change.

iatee posted this on one of the political threads, and it's worth reposting here:

“@ezraklein: 1. Bloomberg's endorsement is one of the most fascinating and strategically designed endorsements I've seen.”
“@ezraklein: 2. By endorsing this close to the election, he's trying to impose a real cost on the Republican Party for climate denialism.”
“@ezraklein: 3. By attacking Obama and praising the old Romney in his op-ed, he's buttressing his role as an arbiter of the center.”
“@ezraklein: 4. And then he's spending that credibility to make "acting to stop climate change" a centrist issue.”
“@ezraklein: 5. Bloomberg's not endorsing Obama so much as he's trying to reset the incentives on climate change. It's a huge play.”
“@ezraklein: 6. And by tying the endorsement to Sandy, Bloomberg is trying to cement the idea that Sandy=climate change”
“@ezraklein: 7. Making it at least a bit more likely that the political elites will see Sandy as a proper forcing event for action on climate change.”

― iatee, Thursday, November 1, 2012 6:46 PM

and yeah, gotta agree, fuck obama on climate change, and triple fuck romney (and pretty much every republican), but i'm really glad bloomberg did what he did.

i really was affected by this article, but on re-reading, some of it is a bit hard to pin down.

eg

the 327th consecutive month in which the temperature of the entire globe exceeded the 20th-century average, the odds of which occurring by simple chance were 3.7 x 10-99, a number considerably larger than the number of stars in the universe.

where did he get this from?

counting the stars

what are the stars

the number comes from multiplying 0.5 by itself 327 times. 0 .5 to the 327th power is 3.6575597e-99, or rounded, 3.7e-99

by "simple chance", the probability of a number exceeding the average is 0.5 (1 in 2). Think rolling a six-sided die. The average roll is 3.5. half of the time (0.5) you'll roll above average (4, 5 or 6). The probability of exceeding the average roll twice in a row is 0.5 x 0.5, or 0.25. In other words if you roll a die twice, you have a 25% chance of rolling above average twice in a row. The probability of exceeding the average three times in a row is 0.5 x 0.5 x 0.5 (12.5%) And so on.

i still wish he wouldn't led off the article with that, though, because it's confusing and not too illuminating. it's like saying the odds of someone growing up to be over seven feet tall are 1 in 333,000, a number considerably larger than the number of residents in Dayton, Ohio.

but essentially, to cut through all the bullshit, what he's saying is "the odds of the monthly temperature of the planet exceeding the average of the 20th century for 327 months in a row are INCREDIBLY, MINDBOGGLINGLY LOW. it's not pure chance which is impacting temperatures - something else is in play. And climate scientists have conclusively shown that, more than any other factor, it's humans that are impacting temperatures by our use of fossil fuels.