Global Warming's Terrifying New Math

batteries!

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/images/2022.08.03/main.svg

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=53299

was stoked to read about this 'sand battery' idea, sounds promising and cheap:

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-61996520

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jul/30/total-climate-meltdown-inevitable-heatwaves-global-catastrophe

― papal hotwife (milo z)

wait his solution is _vote_? "glue yourself to a motorway, or, i guess, vote?"

bad vibes in the spaces i'm in this week. my life gets interrupted more and more often with blind existential panic. all of the media are saying "it's not too late" because what else are you going to say? it's the only responsible thing to say. what do you do if it's too late, in ten years life will be unrecognizably bleak for those of us who aren't dead already? i'm lucky that i gave up living for the future, lucky that i have no purpose in life other than every day to survive in a world that wants me dead, because today is the only thing i have to live for. at what point is "don't doomscroll" identical to "stick your head in the sand"? in terms of anything _i personally can do_, we're doomed. if we're not doomed, you know, there's nothing _i_ can do to make that happen. that's the ground facts. that's not having power and having to live with the consequences.

happy friday.

I feel all of that and I wish I had an answer except to reduce doomscrolling as much as possible which I tend to fail at anyway

any solution will have to be a collective one which isn't obviously forthcoming but a lot of things could happen as things get worse. hopefully things other than fortifying borders and properties and building more prisons and expanding police and military which seems to be the trajectory we're on right now (which even a lot of climate activists don't seem too bothered about). I tried to start this paragraph on a cautiously optimistic note but fuck

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/08/12/climate/california-rain-storm.html

(for fans of the other harrowing chapter in ministry of the future)

fwiw I follow a lot of climate scientists on Twitter and most of 'em have commented on that Guardian article saying it's not only unhelpful but flat out wrong in a lot of places

i mean, i don't exactly have a lot of trust in the guardian as a newspaper lol, and i don't have trust in _any_ non-scientific source when it comes to science reporting. i _do_ have trust in my own sense of foreboding, though, and the sense of foreboding the people i care about have. "foreboding" is, strictly speaking, outside the realm of climate science, but they're increasingly intertwined.

So nobody here thinks the dump-a-bunch-of-iron-dust-in-the-ocean is a good idea?

https://salvage.zone/denial-futures/

"They are sitting on a beach in northern Michigan. He is my grandchild or yours, keeping watch over his family as best he can."

No. No grandchildren. Bad enough that there's still a me.

yikes

Horrible news: @Amtrak @PacSurfliners between LA & San Diego has been suspended indefinitely due to coastal erosion.

The route was the 2nd busiest intercity rail corridor in the US, w/ 26 daily trains & ~3M riders per year.

Climate change is here, and we are totally unprepared pic.twitter.com/wxJULUqczq

— Jacob Mandel 🚲🚋🌴 (@TallDarknJewish) September 30, 2022

Ugh

(Is there an emoji for why am I not surprised, the hell timeline is the only timeline for me, the best of all possible worlds etc.?)

🙃 and/or 😶 i think

🤔🤨🧐

Sorry I meant to type 😕

Well, that sucks.

not sure if this is the right thread but holy fuck

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/oct/13/almost-70-of-animal-populations-wiped-out-since-1970-report-reveals-aoe

headlines like this just seem unreal to me, which i guess is part of the problem but people what the fuck are we doing, this is a nightmare

i can't help thinking of this essay

https://www.davidquammen.com/sampler/18-planetofweeds

That essay went a bit off at the end as the writer starting sketching out the future but I certainly see that: 1) the awful things are happening as predicted and 2) that enough damage will occur so that we are stopped from living as we are and that 3) we could find ourselves helping each other out overtime or that it's too late and we slowly die off but that's speculation. 1) is happening and I guess I will see a lot of 2).

I did like the last sentence. In 10 billion years, whatever we do, the ecology will recover.

the adaptive way to living through our current 6th extinction event is to glance at the URL headline "70% of animal populations wiped out since 1970" and think "hmm, but i just read there are 20 quadrillion ants on earth. that must mean that there were once 66.7 quadrillion ants, in 1970. this is good progress"

There seems to be a lot more climate related sabotage happening these days than the media is actually covering. As things get worse it's going to get harder to hide that people are taking matters into their own hands.https://t.co/KCim0iE0MX

— Tovarisch (@nwbtcw) October 14, 2022

this is the kind of shit that you see as a tv news report playing in the background at the beginning of a disaster movie https://t.co/LBnsmXus26

— BOO-RG (@borgposting) October 14, 2022

a billion here a billion there, sooner or later you're talking about real numbers

70% reduction in animal populations in 50 years will do that i guess

The big reduction of insect biomass that started to be measured a couple of years ago is like the canary in the coal mine found inert on the floor of its cage.

When asked what fishermen can do in this situation, with their livelihoods dependent on the ocean, Prout responded, "Hope and pray. I guess that's the best way to say it."

It's a covert way of saying the situation looks hopeless and we don't have a prayer of it getting better.

Yesterday, I attended a conference at which an influential financier shared this unpublished map. Look at it. The estimated death toll is 2-3 *billion*; the timeframe is 20-30 years (previously: 50). Segments of the elite have simply 'written off' large parts of the Global South. pic.twitter.com/P7JTfepn9k

— Benjamin Ramm (@BenjaminRamm) October 16, 2022

"ideal zone for capturing solar energy to power the global north"

Psychedelics conference

what even is one of them?

Saw several tweets saying that map is rubbish (one tweet traced it to 20 years ago). But the point was that, as things get worse, certain groups of people are going to try and figure out how they can come out relatively unscarred.

White House is pushing ahead research to cool Earth by reflecting back sunlight

The White House is coordinating a five-year research plan to study ways of modifying the amount of sunlight that reaches the earth to temper the effects of global warming, a process sometimes called solar geoengineering or sunlight reflection.

The research plan will assess climate interventions, including spraying aerosols into the stratosphere to reflect sunlight back into space, and should include goals for research, what’s necessary to analyze the atmosphere, and what impact these kinds of climate interventions may have on Earth, according to the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy. Congress directed the research plan be produced in its spending plan for 2022, which President Joe Biden signed in March.

Mrburns.jpg

The ones who accept the science and think some Breaking Bad cliffhanger plot twist is going to avert the coming genocide are worse than the outright deniers. Tho I suspect that as with Covid, the most vocal deniers are actually following the science quite closely.

But the point was that, as things got worse, certain groups of people figured out how they could come out relatively unscarred.

ftfy

(can we do strikethrough text?)

this is an excellent, really long feature with lots of interesting photographs, videos, and infographics about the deforestation of the amazon and how that's directly creating droughts and tipping points already crossed which can't be undone (not in our lifetime, at least). it's washington post so paywalled, but i have a 'gift link' which should work for everyone:

How the Forest Dies
https://wapo.st/3As5FHc

not at all surprising that cop27 was a total failure in terms of actually mitigating climate change, given that no powerful country is willing or able to divorce from growthism, but still quite depressing to witness

— kaisa (@kuuhulluutta) November 20, 2022

if COP26 was about rolling back mandatory decarbonisation, at #COP27 we got roll-out Wall Street Consensus:

(carbon) financiers triumph in scaling up the derisking state - see green hydrogen/Just Transition partnerships & 'influencer' NGFS central banks https://t.co/RRwqcBvUkz

— Daniela Gabor (@DanielaGabor) November 20, 2022

US climate envoy John Kerry backs the United Arab Emirates’ decision to appoint the CEO of a state-run oil company to preside over the upcoming UN climate negotiations in Dubai, citing his work on renewable energy projects.

In an interview Sunday with the Associated Press, the former US secretary of state acknowledged that the Emirates and other countries relying on fossil fuels to fund their state coffers face finding “some balance” ahead.

However, he dismissed the idea that Sultan al-Jaber’s appointment should be automatically disqualified due to him leading the Abu Dhabi National Oil Co. Activists, however, equated it to asking “arms dealers to lead peace talks” when authorities announced his nomination on Thursday.

“I think that Dr Sultan al-Jaber is a terrific choice because he is the head of the company. That company knows it needs to transition,” Kerry said after attending an energy conference in the Emirati capital. “He knows – and the leadership of the UAE is committed to transitioning.”

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jan/16/cop28-john-kerry-backs-uae-appointment-oil-chief

“We believe we have compromised significantly, and we're prepared to compromise further" - John Kerry, years ago, shockingly

oceans broke heat record in 2022, breking the 2021 record, which broke the 2020 record, which broke the 2019 record...

such bad luck, when is this random bad luck going to stop

A random walk down Maple Street.

When I was in grad school towards the end I was doing Atmosphere-Ocean stuff and remember reading about how it was a good thing that the jet stream kept the weather patterns relatively stable. Now just listening to the anecdotal evidence of this crazy wind outside today, um...

Silver linings

https://heatmap.news/politics/the-war-criminal-who-accidentally-decarbonized-the-world

Again, this story is not all rosy. Price increases have created gas shortages in countries like Pakistan that can’t afford to compete. But even this is showing one of the enormous upsides of renewable power: relative price stability. Renewable power production is somewhat erratic depending on the weather, of course, but most of the expense of wind and solar is in the purchase and installation. Afterwards maintenance costs are predictable and production reasonably easy to forecast, particularly at utility scale.

Carbon power, by contrast, relies on a continual supply of mined commodities traded in a global market where prices can and do gyrate wildly based on the business cycle, discovery or depletion of deposits, movements in financial markets (if not speculator chicanery), and as we’ve learned this year, the lunatic depredations of the dictators who control most global supply.

Via el tweetbox

Putin's war of aggression kicked off a de facto Green New Deal in the EU, and it is going far better than the most optimistic projections: https://t.co/UX42mAuRoK pic.twitter.com/JiyfoEvjxS

— ryan cooper (@ryanlcooper) March 8, 2023

ground sourced heat pumps require a large upfront investment but once they're up and running they are incredibly efficient, reliable, low cost and low maintenance. if most houses, apartments and commercial buildings switched over for their heating and cooling it would produce a HUGE carbon savings over any other method.

Vladimir Putin - thank you!

My dad did/does think global warming is all nonsense but sees the cost savings in solar panels, electric car and ground-source heat pumps so has gone fully Green over the past decade or so.

feeling extinction-pilled today. after spending a couple minutes pondering the astonishing indifference (at best) anybody remotely adjacent to power has towards the rapidly mounting genocide of people like me... i'd usually talk to my support network, but they're all going through crises more immediate than genocide, which is more ever-present background noise.

so i wind up thinking about the other background noise - the overwhelming likelihood that the earth will basically be uninhabitable 50 years from now. sure, trans people are confronting genocide, but in the larger scheme of things, it's really just a sideshow, isn't it? if you look at it in kubler-ross terms... well, you've got your denial, and you've got your anger. why not blame the queers? millennia of christianity have made us damn near ideal scapegoats for anything you like. and here i am, just going through depression, again. well, i guess i'm predisposed to it. save the earth? i can't even protect my friends...

just to be clear, the earth is not going to be uninhabitable 50 years from now

Technically no, but it could be a wee bit more unpleasant than it might be now.