Global Warming's Terrifying New Math

yup, here we go, full on climate chaos

WAKE UP libcucks, how can there be GLOBAL WARMING if it’s HAILING in MEXICO in JULY

https://www.utilitydive.com/news/los-angeles-solicits-record-solar-storage-deal-at-199713-cents-kwh/558018/

-*The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) is preparing a potentially world record-setting power purchase agreement (PPA) for solar + storage at 1.997 cents and 1.3 cents per kWh, respectively.

• LADWP presented the 400 MW solar, 800 MWh storage project to the city's Board of Power and Water Commissioners on June 18, previewing its planned July 23 submission for approval. The solar + storage contract would beat out the previous U.S. record, a 2.376 cents per kWh solar project proposed by NV Energy in June 2018, with both the Nevada and California projects under developer 8Minute Energy.

yarg, i meant $30/MWh, not $3

anyway, it is a very good thing when clean energy prices are cheaper than the carbon-heavy status quo

Paper in Nature says we need to ban all fossil fuels now if we want to keep the temp rise to 1.5 degrees. What next? The scientists form militias? They go full Unabomber? This is not an inconvenient truth, it is a fount of cosmic horror, and I am not surprised that so many choose to lie to themselves about it. We are a self-limiting pathogen and society is in the early throes of what may well be its terminal decline. I'm personally a bit upset about that but it's also a larger tragedy, in the Greek sense. Our fatal flaw is the imperative to grow and consume at any costs.

If anyone reads this, Uatu or whoever, don't listen to Peter. Go ahead and judge this race by empty remains. It harms us none to do so, honestly is an unearned consolation to think that anyone will even be left to judge us.

Our fatal flaw is the imperative to grow and consume at any costs.

that is true for a lot of people, today. we have a biological drive to reproduce, like a lot of other creatures. i'm not sure that necessarily translates into an inherent drive to grow and consume. it hasn't been that way for all cultures. it certainly is for our own, right now.

we also have a drive to adapt and use technology. there's a positive vision for how that might play out. *insert project utopia summary here, involving a dramatic & unexpected change of political will and the invention of perpetual motion machine*

the more likely scenario is that our ability to adapt and innovate will be useful in moderately mitigating the worst effects of climate change. maybe 50 million die instead of 2 billion. maybe we save 50 cities from the water that would have otherwise gone under. that kind of thing. it's hard for us to see those things as "victories", but they are, in a way.

or maybe a much smaller population of humans adapt to the hellscape of 2150, and everyone tells each other that this is pretty much the only way it could have happened.

the point is that we have more impulses than just reproducing and growing and consuming. adapting and using technology is what makes humans special. terrible outcomes are definitely possible, even likely. but they're not inevitable.

I prefer Octavia Butler's take, that we have a fatal combination of intelligence plus hierarchical bioprogramming

fyi as an academic bolshevist in tie-dye and hippie stink lines, i believe the word y'all are looking for is "capitalism"

Thanks for the good thoughts. The way I adapted yesterday was going full-on Buddhist. The challenge I have is not getting trapped in suffering but at the same time not trivializing it. I don't know how it plays over in societies where Buddhism is a real social force, but it's easy here for it to come across as "your suffering isn't real", which isn't true at all - suffering just isn't _ultimate_ reality, doesn't define who we are. The difference between me and Buddhism is that I have no fucking clue about what ultimate reality is. Buddhism seems like it has some pretty good guesses but I don't know if it's any more than that.

Anyway, whenever the end comes for humanity, if it's in the next hundred years or hundreds of millions of years down the line, there's always going to be sadness and regret, but I'm sort of feeling liberation from the endless cycle of death and rebirth this morning.

it terrifies me that this exists on some level
https://clexit.net/

Why be terrified?

Academic reputations have had diminishing returns. The fossil fuel interests have (mostly) good credit. There have always been whores (no disrespect to honest sex workers). They do what they think is necessary for their children to go to college, but they're all (and I think in most cases, knowingly) ethically stained for their participation in these charades.

From the standpoint of what is practical for the first stage of decarbonisation, there's no question natural gas will remain a big part of the mix, as until major changes are made to the grid (continent wide smart grids, HVDC transmission from renewable rich areas), natural gas is how we buffer renewable intermittancy. For some energy applications, like air and water transport, renewables aren't remotely competitive at present.

However, anyone who follows this knows that to retain human carrying capacity, extraction of most present fossil fuel reserves can't be permitted. So we divide and conquer. Coal fueled electricity generation comes under our fire first, petroleum-fueled land transport and space heating second, and then we run out of low hanging fruit and have to hope for miracles on the algal fuels front for air transport and shipping.

The US gas companies were happy when it was all about solar and wind buildout, as they knew that for every MW of either a MW of gas peaking plant had to be built. But some of them have interests in the petroleum side. Coal is different, the coal companies typically have never diversified. Lotsa bankrupcies there lately, but the executives will all keep their salaries and bonuses.

it terrifies me that this exists on some level
https://clexit.net/

the list of founding members of this thing has a lot of predictable names on it. guys like christopher monckton, who gets away with a lot because he has a Lord in front of his name and his accent makes republicans think he is smart and trustworthy, and marc morano, who runs climatedepot.com, the second most popular climate denier website, a mix of the drudge report and the meeting minutes of the flat earth society.

don't be terrified of stuff like clexit. no one gives a shit about that. but most of those same guys are the darlings of the Heartland Institute, a much more prominent (and successful) organization dedicated to lying about climate change so that fossil fuel interests can party for a while longer

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-49086783

"This paper should finally stop climate change deniers claiming that the recent observed coherent global warming is part of a natural climate cycle," said Prof Mark Maslin, from University College London, UK, who wasn't part of the studies.

lol

https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/624/cpsprodpb/163D1/production/_107998019_206830.jpg

happy overshoot day everyone

Mankind will have used up its allowance of natural resources such as water, soil and clean air for all of 2019 by Monday, a report said.

The so-called Earth Overshoot Day has moved up by two months over the past 20 years and this year’s date is the earliest ever, the study by the Global Footprint Network said.

The equivalent of 1.75 planets would be required to produce enough to meet humanity’s needs at current consumption rates.

“Earth Overshoot Day falling on July 29 means that humanity is currently using nature 1.75 times faster than our planet’s ecosystems can regenerate. This is akin to using 1.75 Earths,” the environmental group, which is headquartered in Oakland, California, said in a statement.

Earth Overshoot Day 2019 is approaching on July 29th, the earliest ever. Join the community of Date Movers on our new crowd-sourced solutions platform. We’d love to learn about your favorite solutions that help to push back Overshoot Day later in the year. https://t.co/qqgJeOcJdX pic.twitter.com/mnV3gnGVd4

— Footprint Network (@EndOvershoot) July 28, 2019

don't think we mentioned it itt when it appeared in the nyt back in april, but this piece on how the pinkertons are gearing up for climate change is amazing

According to the World Bank, by 2050 some 140 million people may be displaced by sea-level rise and extreme weather, driving escalations in crime, political unrest and resource conflict. Even if the most conservative predictions about our climate future prove overstated, a 1.5-degree Celsius rise in temperature during the next century will almost certainly provoke chaos, in what experts call climate change’s “threat multiplier”: Displacement begets desperation begets disorder. Reading these projections from the relative comforts of the C-suite, it wasn’t difficult to see why a company might consider enhancing its security protocols.

For Pinkerton, the bet is twofold: first, that there’s no real material difference between climate change and any other conflict — as the world grows more predictably dangerous, tactical know-how will simply be more in demand than ever. And second, that by adding data analytics, Pinkerton stands to compete more directly with traditional consulting firms like Deloitte, which offer pre- and postdisaster services (supply-chain monitoring, damage documentation, etc.), but which cannot, say, dispatch a helicopter full of armed guards to Guatemala in an afternoon. In theory, Pinkerton can do both — a fully militarized managerial class at corporate disposal.

Later, after Paz Larach took his turn on the range — during which he emptied a Galil ACE assault rifle into a human-shaped cardboard cutout, then quickly drew his nine-millimeter, grouping four shots in the chest-cavity bull’s-eye — he offered the example of Hurricane Maria. On the day the Category 4 hurricane made landfall in Puerto Rico in 2017, he received more than 30 calls from American businesses and multinationals. He wouldn’t go into detail but explained that many chief executives felt blind to the situation and effectively tendered a blank check if Pinkerton could provide security. Over the next few days, as the company deployed hundreds of agents to the island, some of them, Paz Larach claimed, reported seeing firearms brandished at gas stations. “We had to escort the cargo with real agents, have cars chase the main truck,” he said. “Those who did not have protection were having their cargo hijacked.”

Aware that he might end up sounding vampiric, Paz Larach hesitated, then eventually confessed what he’d wanted to say in the first place: The future looked pretty good for Pinkerton.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/10/magazine/climate-change-pinkertons.html

wheeeeeeee

One common metric used to investigate the effects of global warming is known as “equilibrium climate sensitivity”, defined as the full amount of global surface warming that will eventually occur in response to a doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentrations compared to pre-industrial times. It’s sometimes referred to as the holy grail of climate science because it helps quantify the specific risks posed to human society as the planet continues to warm.

We know that CO2 concentrations have risen from pre-industrial levels of 280 parts per million (ppm) to approximately 410 ppm today, the highest recorded in at least three million years. Without major mitigation efforts, we are likely to reach 560 ppm by around 2060.

When the IPCC’s fifth assessment report was published in 2013, it estimated that such a doubling of CO2 was likely to produce warming within the range of 1.5 to 4.5°C as the Earth reaches a new equilibrium. However, preliminary estimates calculated from the latest global climate models (being used in the current IPCC assessment, due out in 2021) are far higher than with the previous generation of models. Early reports are predicting that a doubling of CO2 may in fact produce between 2.8 and 5.8°C of warming. Incredibly, at least eight of the latest models produced by leading research centres in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and France are showing climate sensitivity of 5°C or warmer.

https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2019/august/1566136800/jo-lle-gergis/terrible-truth-climate-change

That is very bad, but keep in mind that it takes a while (hundreds of years) for the temperature equilibrium to be reached. So if CO2 was 560 ppm in 2060 and the expected equilibrium is 5C increase in temp, that means that over the course of hundreds of years global temps would rise 5 degrees C

Temperatures have been above average across Alaska every day since April 25. None of the nearly 300 weather stations scattered about Alaska have recorded a temperature below freezing since June 28, the longest such streak in at least 100 years.

On Independence Day, the temperature at Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport hit 90 degrees for the first time on record. It comes as no surprise that the Last Frontier is just a day away from rounding out not only its warmest July but its warmest month on record.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2019/07/30/alaskas-summer-heat-has-been-basically-off-charts

i imagine it would not be hard to find footage/quotes of senator ted stevens pooh-poohing climate change, observing hilariously that just yesterday there were 10 inches of snow in his hometown, etc.?

also

Dunleavy has proposed eliminating all state funding for research based at UAF (which includes climate change): "I hope the regents accept this offer." #akleg

— Matt Acuña Buxton (@mattbuxton) July 30, 2019

just read an article arguing we could reforest the entire planet for roughly 2/3rds the cost of Trump's tax cut, which in turn could suck enough CO2 out of the air to send us back to the 1920s

ah the gilded age, jazz, spanish flu

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/29/ethiopia-plants-250m-trees-in-a-day-to-help-tackle-climate-crisis

This seems promising. A direct atmosphere capture process cost analysis that runs $232/t. A universal carbon tax of that much ($2.06/US gallon gasoline) could fund a carbon neutral economy. Caveat: this is three times the highest carbon taxes, worldwide.

Keith et al, 2018. A Process for Capturing CO2 from the Atmosphere. Joule, 2(8), pp.1573-1594.

spare a thought for blackrock investors during this difficult time

BlackRock, the world’s biggest investor, has lost an estimated $90bn over the last decade by ignoring the serious financial risk of investing in fossil fuel companies, according to economists.

A report from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) has found that BlackRock has eroded the value of the $6.5tn fund by betting on oil companies that were falling in value and by missing out on growth in clean energy investments.

The report found that BlackRock’s multi-billion dollar investments in the world’s largest oil companies – including ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell and BP – were responsible for the bulk of its losses.

The fund was also stung by the collapse of big US fossil fuel companies, including General Electric, and the coal mining company Peabody.

womp womp

in related news

Switching just some of the huge subsidies supporting fossil fuels to renewables would unleash a runaway clean energy revolution, according to a new report, significantly cutting the carbon emissions that are driving the climate crisis.

Coal, oil and gas get more than $370bn (£305bn) a year in support, compared with $100bn for renewables, the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) report found. Just 10-30% of the fossil fuel subsidies would pay for a global transition to clean energy, the IISD said.

Ending fossil fuel subsidies has long been seen as vital to tackling the climate emergency, with the G20 nations pledging in 2009 to phase them out, but progress has been limited. In May, the UN secretary general, António Guterres, attacked subsidies, saying: “What we are doing is using taxpayers’ money – which means our money – to boost hurricanes, to spread droughts, to melt glaciers, to bleach corals. In one word: to destroy the world.”

The new analysis shows how redirecting some of the fossil fuel subsidies could decisively tip the balance in favour of green energy, making it the cheapest electricity available and instigating a rapid global rollout.

“Almost everywhere, renewables are so close to being competitive that [a 10-30% subsidy swap] tips the balance, and turns them from a technology that is slowly growing to one that is instantly the most viable and can replace really large amounts of generation,” said Richard Bridle of the IISD. “It goes from being marginal to an absolute no-brainer.”

Most experts define fossil fuel subsidies as financial or tax support for those buying fuel or the companies producing it. The IMF also includes the cost of the damage fossil fuel burning causes to climate and health, leading to an estimate of $5.2tn of fossil fuel subsidies in 2017, or $10m a minute. Ending the subsidies would cut global emissions by about a quarter, the IMF estimates, and halve the number of early deaths from fossil fuel air pollution.

Multi vortex tornadoes. In Luxembourg.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OaV_Kfk-0c0

just read an article arguing we could reforest the entire planet for roughly 2/3rds the cost of Trump's tax cut

If you only figure the cost as including the seedlings and the labor involved to plant the trees, this could be correct. However, wherever a tree grows it takes a certain amount of land out of agricultural use. The shade limits what can be grown under it and the roots interfere with tillage of the soil in general, but especially with mechanized tillage.

which in turn could suck enough CO2 out of the air to send us back to the 1920s

This apparently refers only to the CO2 levels of the 1920s not the agricultural acreage of the 1920s, when a very large amount of the CO2 now liberated in the atmosphere was sequestered underground in the form of oil, natural gas and coal, rather than in the form of forests, which stand above ground. So, if we were to follow this plan, it would drastically reduce the agricultural capacity of the planet. That could have consequences as disruptive and chaotic as the agricultural devastation caused by unchecked climate change.

impressive how a teenage girl taking a cargo ship makes people lose their fucking minds

sail boat? bc she awesome and those people are lunatics
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WT8NemS6FmQ

Ok is the first Icelandic glacier to lose its status as glacier. In the next 200 years, all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path. This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and know what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it.

August 2019

415ppm CO2

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-49345912

Scientists warn that losing another fifth of Brazil’s Amazon will trigger the feedback loop known as dieback, in which the forest begins to dry out and burn in a cascading system collapse, beyond the reach of any subsequent human intervention or regret. https://t.co/oQquBYsM3Z

— The Intercept (@theintercept) August 21, 2019

don't worry, though:

This is horrifying but perhaps it will prove that carbon dioxide is not warming the planet.

— Alaine (@LoyolaTrue) August 21, 2019

bolsonaro is one of the most necessary assassination targets in human history

that terminal cancer he’s supposed to be hiding needs to up its fucking game tbrr

are there compelling short-term economic benefits to destroying the amazon or is it more bolsonaro saying 'fuck you' to the world?

i can't even tell with these people anymore

Well he’s massively corrupt so I’m sure he’s counting on big kickbacks from developers. He also hates the indigenous tribes that are living there and is happy to see them murdered.

Really should have gotten that worldwide eco-socialist militia organized a decade ago.

are there compelling short-term economic benefits

For the small scale ranchers, yes. The new grassland is fertile for a few years before the remaining nutrients are lost and they have to raze some more forest.

https://66.media.tumblr.com/57c59dc6f3b1575acb8e9f1d90254a06/tumblr_inline_pqdcblar7K1srge0i_540.jpg

That first image was after burning deforestation, the latter appears to be after ranching was abandoned and there was some recovery.

details on that: https://aleteia.org/2019/05/01/brazilian-couple-replants-forest-with-over-4-million-trees/

Killing Bolsanaro wouldn't solve anything. Deforestation has been the case way before him, it was just at lower levels.

Killing Bolsanaro wouldn't solve anything.

Oh, it would solve a few things, but not the deforestation of the Amazon Basin.

Killing Bolsanaro wouldn't solve anything.

macron and merkel want G7 talks on the rainforest fires.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/23/amazon-rainforest-fires-macron-calls-for-international-crisis-to-lead-g7-discussions

bolsonaro is accusing them of colonialist interventionism.

gee, i wonder whose side trump is going to take

Guardian from 2017: The Amazon effect: how deforestation is starving São Paulo of water

The big immediate losers from further deforestation will be Brazilians. On r/collapse, a Brazilian called for an embargo. I guess I can add it to my long BDS list.

Maybe there's a competition right now to be the world's most deliciously murderable man.

Omg I just asked a white man at a bar what he thought of jack antonoff and he said “Actually I’m voting for Bernie”

— Vrinda Jagota (@vrindajagota) August 24, 2019

(commune mag editor)

lol er sorry, that should have been

I read Bernie's GND platform. Some thoughts:

— Jasper Bernes (@outsidadgitator) August 24, 2019