Global Warming's Terrifying New Math

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.

nice take-down of another shit hollywood climate change morality play

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/pathos-porn-about-climate-change-on-scott-z-burnss-extrapolations/

Things began to look very unusual two months ago.
Today the charts need no commentary, they speak for themselves.
This is the Atlantic. https://t.co/P26XnJmKj6 pic.twitter.com/Xin8kUT3Fr

— Dr Thomas Smith 🔥🌏 (@DrTELS) June 10, 2023

is this good

looks great if you like monster storms with high winds and rainfall measured in inches per hour

https://scontent-lga3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t39.30808-6/356238972_10161305771492137_5491188824864969283_n.jpg?_nc_cat=106&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=730e14&_nc_ohc=0oVjV0OT554AX8ETKhd&_nc_oc=AQlI8ChoVJgz3LUBSb9x3z_jMQvXRrni8nHnzsMWYBNZ8j9fR9AdWVZIpA87Wldp4_U&_nc_ht=scontent-lga3-1.xx&oh=00_AfBxe-dgGsDqvUKT3GM1jybmmTPAdkV5uTQRmtz3sCRpIg&oe=64A37B4B

They really shouldn’t dive off of that, the water is not that deep there.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nykR3t3aKA8

The lake near me is lower than usual this year, apparently. I don't know, when I drive past it looks plenty fuckin' deep. Maybe some of the rich fucks around here shouldn't try to float superyachts behind their goddamn multi-million-dollar houses.

Global warming's terrifying effects on rich boat owners?

are we going to do anything to mark the warmest days on earth in 125,000 years? feel like i should bake a cake. ON THE SIDEWALK.

With ice growth remaining slow, the record #Antarctic sea ice anomaly (negative departure from average) continues to somehow get larger in size...

Seasonal cycle graphs at https://t.co/V0Lt0w20IQ. More info at https://t.co/QXRkBvOtPG. pic.twitter.com/MiVukwJoCn

— Zack Labe (@ZLabe) July 6, 2023

hell, i thought i was scared of everything already but now i'm scared of something else!

"This phenomenon, which creates air circulation in a clockwise direction, prevents the formation of clouds and, Dr. Domínguez Sarmiento added, “allows radiation to hit directly, as the sky is completely clear and thus temperatures on the surface rise.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/06/world/americas/hermosillo-mexico-heat.html

it was nice of you guys not to worry me about anticyclones though. i was blissfully unaware of the phenomenon until now.

the future is the present's past already. people still dealing with the effects and trauma of recent events. years to recover and rebuild. what if next summer is hotter? nobody is ready for that. biden thinks he's low on relief money now? lemme telly buddy, this planet is gonna be a pricy place to live.

“Miscarriages have been increasing because of the intense heat,” said Zainab Hingoro, a local health-care worker. When she once would have 3 out of 10 pregnant patients miscarry, she now has 5 to 6 out of 10."

“It was like thousands of snakes sighing all at once,” he recalled."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/interactive/2023/pakistan-extreme-heat-health-impacts-death/

We went to a UW-Madison football game on Saturday, and they had the local weatherman on hand to announce that it was officially the hottest temperature the team had ever played in there. And everyone cheered.

sounds about right.

They'll stop cheering when all the corn, wheat and soy fields shrivel up and burn to a crisp.

They'd think that that was owning the libs, seeing as they prefer to eat meat.

I think they were mostly just happy to have broken a record, any record. I mean, it *was* a sporting event ...

the two on the right are august and july of this year

https://i.imgur.com/nyVMtVO.png

A lot of nasty 'positive' feedback loops have already been triggered. They'll be self-reinforcing for the foreseeable future no matter what steps we take to limit our emissions. Doesn't mean we shouldn't stop digging the hole we're in even deeper.

I don’t think this has been shared here yet https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/life-and-death-in-americas-hottest-city?fbclid=IwAR3a3I5AWGbIcTM1Z__d8ahnBj_t4L-3YFYwrbq-gDoxuRKANXcZ2Goeyi4#

By the end of 2007 more than 3 million copies of the DVD set for the BBC series Planet Earth had sold. At an average weight of .25 pounds that is more than 750,000 pounds or over 375 tons of mostly unbiodegradable waste filled with toxic chemicals and metals.

i see so many copies of this in my line of work so i crunched some numbers.

Man-made global warming aside, new study projects mammals could face extinction in 250M years, more or less the amount of time since they first appeared
The immediate good news is that can all claim to be the peak of evolution

source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-023-01259-3

Alfred Wegener playing the ultimate long game in exacting revenge upon his foes.

Step aside climate change and Red Giant Sun, I’m burning the Earth first. The Andromeda-Milky Way Collision is the end of show fireworks. Angry neutron stars yelling that you don’t have to go home to resist entropy but you can’t do it there.

JFC: https://kotaku.com/shell-big-oil-roadtrips-fortnite-map-collab-tiktok-ign-1850907435

lol kids are absolutely not gonna fall for that shit. they're just throwing money into a hole. good thing they have so much of it!

https://www.nbcnews.com/science/environment/search-10-billion-missing-snow-crabs-scientists-eye-marine-heat-waves-rcna121449

When insurance giant AIG rattled the industry last year with an audacious plan to stop writing policies for some of the most heavily polluting fossil fuel projects, environmentalists and lawmakers showered the company with plaudits.

Like so many other large companies pledging to help the world avert climate catastrophe, AIG is finding that making such vows is easier than making good on them. The company is now a target of a Senate investigation into the insurance industry, led by lawmakers who warn that AIG and other companies continue to play a pivotal role in underwriting some of the most carbon-intensive fossil fuel projects in the world — despite lofty climate promises.

...AIG, which declined to comment or share its response to questions about its climate pledge from the committee, is hardly unusual. Over the last year, Amazon retreated from an effort to zero out the emissions of half its shipments by 2030. Shell Oil dropped an ambitious initiative to build a pipeline of carbon credits through investment in forest preservation and other carbon-absorbing projects worldwide. And BP significantly scaled back its plan to reduce emissions by as much as 35 percent by the end of the decade.

As the planet heats up at an alarming pace, these turnabouts expose the shortcomings of leaving it up to voluntary corporate action to solve an existential crisis, said John Lang, the project lead at Net Zero Tracker, a group that monitors progress on corporate and government climate pledges.

“There is a massive credibility gap with these corporate targets,” he said. “We need more regulation. Otherwise, the dial just will not turn.”

...Lang’s group examined more than 1,000 companies that have pledges to zero out their emissions by 2050. It found that 38 of them — less than 4 percent — are doing the bare minimum required under the Paris agreement’s goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. The rest are not meeting the “starting line criteria” laid out by the United Nations, which calls on companies to track their carbon footprint across supply chains, immediately cut emissions, create a scientifically credible plan for using carbon offsets and report annual progress on meeting climate targets.

gift link: https://wapo.st/48470m1

nice to see some reporting on the failed commitments, rather than just the front-end coverage of corporate PR bullshit promises that have no enforcement mechanism.

Alaska's snow crab season canceled for second year in a row
https://www.yahoo.com/news/alaskas-snow-crab-season-canceled-002948381.html

“People are like, ‘Yeah, yeah, the world is going to end. But I’m still going to vacation on the Greek islands or the Bahamas.’”

Everyone at Davos should have been Mr. Choppy'ed years ago.

will bono be spared

no

the only thing pro bono will be mr choppy's defense lawyer

Mexico City running out of water.

https://news.yahoo.com/mexico-city-teeters-unprecedented-water-000337079.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/02/09/atlantic-ocean-amoc-climate-change/