A question about climate change/global warming.

The Arctic is rich in natural resources like fossil fuel and already under significant climate stress, warming more than twice as fast as the rest of the planet. The more the Arctic warms and melts, the more humans build industrial infrastructure, mine metals and produce oil and gas–emitting greenhouse gases that accelerate the warming and melting.

It would be interesting to conduct some psychological case studies of local residents of the area to see how they're coping with this. I suspect we might be able to find some of the same profiles in residents of Aus...

No mention of clathrates that I see though, which was some scientists were concerned about about ten years ago but I haven't seen it mentioned that much recently. Generally seems like thermokarst is a bigger concern, with the evidence clear to the eye at ground level.

If you're wondering "Do they sleep?" ...I don't, I don't sleep. Much, at least. (Not just this keeping me up, but in general. Gotta admit after yesterday reading through this whole thread which is like some tragic farce, it was a bit much as I was winding down for the evening. Can't imagine what it was like to live through that.)

I'm afraid that them moving past outright denial isn't necessarily any kind of progress on the issue

A question about climate change/global warming.

A question about climate change/global warming.

https://i.imgur.com/FdUfjRd.jpg

Good news, everybody! Turns out that the high-paid National COVID-19 Co-ordination Commission that is staffed almost entirely with fossil fuel millionaires or stooges and contains no doctors or scientists has determined that the best way to recover from COVID-19 is to sell and burn a fuckload more fossil fuels than we're already selling and burning!

Update: we don't even need to sell gas to solve COVID recovery, the government should just give money directly to the fossil fuel companies.

'A presentation on the final report of the National COVID-19 Co-ordination Commission manufacturing taskforce, seen by The Age and The SMH, recommends "cutting red and green tape" to help the gas industry rapidly increase gas extraction and create up to 170,000 manufacturing jobs.'

The final report of the National COVID-19 Co-ordination Commission’s manufacturing working group has called for a relaxation of gas industry regulations and calls for the Morrison government to consider more tax incentives for the construction of new projects.

One of the recommendations of the working group is that the federal government should “underwrite demand” for gas, agreeing to purchase gas in a situation where the market is oversupplied. This from an industry lobby that has constantly argued that there is a supply shortfall.

With gas companies recording a series of project delays and massive write-downs of the value of existing investments, which have already totalled almost $20 billion in Australia alone, Greenpeace Australia Pacific said that taxpayers shouldn’t be left to foot the bill.

“Whichever way you look at it, gas is an industry in decline, with billions of dollars in write-downs around the world due to the renewable energy boom. Wasting public money on the polluting industries of the past rather than the modern renewable technology of today is an abuse of public trust,” Greenpeace Australia Pacific campaigner Jonathan Moylan said.

Two months ago:
The processes of this taxpayer-funded commission are not open to the public.

Yesterday:

On Monday, prime minister Scott Morrison announced that he was reconstituting the National Covid Coordination Commission as a body that reports directly to the federal cabinet.

“The COVID Commission will work within government. It won’t be an external agency. It will work within government and can form part of the Cabinet deliberative processes, which is an important innovation,” Morrison said.

The change is likely to further reduce the transparency and public visibility of what the Commission is advising government, as cabinet deliberations are not released to the public and are generally exempt from freedom of information laws.

BP spilled 95 tonnes of crude oil off the Shetland Isles, due to not having completed writing a "safety procedures" document when setting up a new well, and therefore not having safety procedures to follow.

After four years of investigation, the local court has concluded that this was bad, and fined them £7,000.

Some steak dinners being had by BP lawyers tonight I guess

Fucking shameless

Oh sorry, I misread that - they spilled 7 tonnes of crude oil and were fined £95,000.

^ not true, but it's great that even that would be insanely fucked

Two months ago:

The processes of this taxpayer-funded commission are not open to the public.

Yesterday:

On Monday, prime minister Scott Morrison announced that he was reconstituting the National Covid Coordination Commission as a body that reports directly to the federal cabinet.

...

The change is likely to further reduce the transparency and public visibility of what the Commission is advising government, as cabinet deliberations are not released to the public and are generally exempt from freedom of information laws.

Today, in response to freedom of information requests:

"The prime minister’s department refused to publicly release 1,100 documents linked to the Covid-19 commission’s discussion of gas projects and 690 documents about potential conflicts of interest, while also redacting its meeting minutes on economic and national security grounds."

https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2020/8/12/21361498/climate-change-air-pollution-us-india-china-deaths

The evidence is now clear enough that it can be stated unequivocally: It would be worth freeing ourselves from fossil fuels even if global warming didn’t exist. Especially now that clean energy has gotten so cheap, the air quality benefits alone are enough to pay for the energy transition.

...

Shindell’s testimony reveals that the effects of air pollution are roughly twice as bad as previously estimated. That is a bombshell — in a sane world, it would be front-page news across the country.

“The air quality scientific community has hypothesized this for at least a decade, but research advances have let us quantify and confirm this notion, over and over,” says Rebecca Saari, an air quality expert who teaches in civil and environmental engineering at the University of Waterloo. “The air quality ‘co-benefits’ are generally so valuable that they exceed the cost of climate action, often many times over.”

thank you for that link, sic

The Hammersmith Bridge in London has been closed due to climate change: increased heat has exacerbated a crack to the point of emergency.

A tweet thread from climate futurist Alex Steffen on the Brittleness Bubble:

The Brittleness Bubble is far, far bigger than we're acknowledging.

A staggering percentage of the world's critical infrastructure is now entering a world where climate conditions routinely exceed the tolerances for which that infrastructure was designed. https://t.co/chIOcoZ4Gw

— Alex Steffen (@AlexSteffen) August 13, 2020

TBF even if it is the canary in the coalmine the Hammersmith bridge has always been a shit bridge.

It looks so nice though!

It’s been falling down and in an almost constant state of repair since they built it.

it does seem to be closed more than it's open

if you walk across it you can see the individual wooden planks that are the base of the road

https://www.reelstreets.com/wp-content/uploads/Films/repulsion/re022.jpg

(http://movie-tourist.blogspot.com/2012/07/repulsion-1965.html)

Great news, everyone! We're way ahead of schedule

Apparently this event was modeled as the *worst case scenario* in 2050 and it is happening right now. This is real sublime terror, this is an abyss, I don't know what this means. https://t.co/PgI1TvrNqv

— blue lives splatter 📉 (@postcyborg) August 16, 2020

Scientists aren't holding back on the science in our papers. Why would we? (IPCC summaries are another matter.) But in public it's "Here are some graphs" and the language is constrained. In private over beers it's "We're fucked."

— Peter Kalmus is the People's Climate Scientist (@ClimateHuman) August 8, 2020

The last 12.000 years. pic.twitter.com/5KAnqmO2Tv

— Alexander Radtke (@alxrdk) August 16, 2020

*sigh*

Fuck yeah. Fuck yeah, we did it!!!

The highest temperature ever reliably recorded was reached today, with Death Valley in California hitting 130°F (54.4444°C). In July 2018, the Valley's average temperature of 108.1 degrees represented the hottest month ever measured on the planet.

"The Trump administration on Monday authorized a sweeping plan to sell drilling rights and spur oil development in Alaska’s rugged Arctic refuge, setting up a possible auction by the end of 2020 and a political clash if the president loses the November election."

average temperature of 108.1 degrees

in case it wasn't obvious an average temperature includes both high and low temps, not just high temps.

Studies in the last decade have suggested that global warming is exacerbating the effects of El Niño and La Niña events.

Today the Bureau of Meterology announced Australia is facing three-times the normal threat level of deadly rain and cyclones to end 2020.

VOTE DADDY / MOMMY 2020

https://earther.gizmodo.com/democrats-quietly-cut-opposition-to-fossil-fuel-subsidi-1844768172

There are at least 367 wildfires active across California today.

Since the state relies on slave labour for firefighters, one single COVID-19 outbreak at a Lassen Country prison means that only 30 of California's 77 wildfire crews (17 prisoners per team) are available.

Still, nice to know you have options of what hideous lung damage you can endure for $2 an hour pay (plus $1 while actively in a fire).

Today the Bureau of Meterology announced Australia is facing three-times the normal threat level of deadly rain and cyclones to end 2020.

Time to place your bets! Will the rain put out, or will the cyclones spread, the bushfires? 702 fires have been fought in Australia's third-smallest state since July 1st, and the latest is so large that the official fire season is being brought up to start September 1, the first day of spring.

The Greenland ice sheet lost one million tonnes per minute in 2019.

As of yesterday, two of the fires in California ranked as the seventh- and tenth-worst in the state's history.

By sun-up today, those two ranked second and fourth.

VOTE DADDY / MOMMY 2020

https://earther.gizmodo.com/democrats-quietly-cut-opposition-to-fossil-fuel-subsidi-1844768172

Even before the primaries, the Sunrise Movement rated Biden an F-

on "preserving a livable planet" -related policies

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/12/05/sanders-scores-highest-mark-sunrise-movements-climate-report-card-while-biden-told#

good news, guys! California is to ban fracking and to nationalise the for-profit company that just emerged from bankruptcy after being held responsible for the 2017-18 wildfires

California fires in 2019:
- 4,927 fires
- 118k acres burned.

California fires in 2020 (so far):
- 7,606 fires
- 2.3 million acres burned.

CLIMATE. CHANGE. IS. REAL.

— Gavin Newsom (@GavinNewsom) September 8, 2020

wait no

the governor will do a second, firm tweet though

average population drop of 68% across all animals since 1970

https://livingplanet.panda.org/en-gb/

😬

🤔 pic.twitter.com/4q7Ers10B6

— Waleed Shahid (@_waleedshahid) September 10, 2020

you've granted 48 fracking permits since April https://t.co/EyZDoRbMLr

— Anna Bahr (@anna_bahr) September 11, 2020

Fuck Newsom sucks so hard. Thank god he’s probably too much of a weasel to be President.

Spectacularly awful anti XR piece in today’s age reprinted from the Daily Telegarph. It’s all fine nothing to see here the free market has fixed climate change.

https://www.theage.com.au/business/the-economy/the-problems-climate-activists-still-worry-about-are-already-solved-20200911-p55ulc.html

they could have saved us all some time by deleting the article and pasting thisisfine.jpg underneath the headline instead

https://rosaluxnycblog.org/california-fires/amp/?

As is this extract from Davis' book:

https://longreads.com/2018/12/04/the-case-for-letting-malibu-burn/amp/

This seems like the right thread, for some reason:

https://doggielawn.com

Australian PM Scott Morrison has said, of reaching net zero emissions by 2050, that the country is "doing it in a canter."

The government's own projections show them doing it by... 2303.

This is really good on the UK's efforts:

https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/uk-climate-just-transition/tnamp/?

Great article and a particularly good middle section on exporting emissions, particularly important right now as both the Australian liberals and labour are trying to set Australia up as an even more massive importer of emissions through natural gas to hydrogen programmes.

hmm

at a guess, this timeline for fusion power is super-optimistic, but might be achieved if it had Manhattan Project-scale state backing https://t.co/fg0Yz1qKZV

— ryan cooper (@ryanlcooper) September 29, 2020

thing is, there are also a lot of clean energy tech that already works well, and which are also expected to improve over time. a Manhattan/Apollo Program-scale effort, for clean energy, would achieve many of the same goals as nuclear fusion, but would be much, much more likely to succeed

sounds like socialism

but fusion was one of those things i thought was really cool when i was 12 so there's that

reminds me of 12-year-old elon musk, dreaming about building single-car tunnels

Figuring out grid-scale longer term power storage seems a way bigger priority than the never ending jobs program for Physics PhDs that fusion research has been for the past 60+ years. Even for nuclear engineers, modular fission reactors, thorium reactors, and travelling wave breeders have way better prospects of making a dent.