I have spouted off any number of times on Twitter about global warming (yes, that’s what I’m calling it now unless I see a good reason to change to something else), less frequently here at Balloon Juice. The latest IPCC report says we have ten years to do something about it, before the really, really bad effects start to kick in. So we have to start today.
There’s a lot to understand about global warming, although the essentials are
- We must start now on a serious program.
- The goal is to end combustion of fossil fuels that puts carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
There are many things that need to be done: develop technologies, replace the idiots in government that are making things worse, educate people on how the changes that are coming will affect them. We need to be looking at ways to make our social and physical environment robust to likely changes, like the rising oceans.
To contribute to what needs to be done, I plan to post more frequently on global warming. I want to know what you want to hear about, and what you want to do. In the interests of no surprises, let me tell you up front that what individuals do is a drop in the ocean. The big targets are electricity generation and transportation, particularly international transportation.
I will also be relatively intolerant of whining to no purpose. Defining problems in order to develop solutions is good; whining that this is too big and we can’t understand and everything is terrible doesn’t do us any good. This can be solved, and we can do it. We cut our teeth on controlling emissions that cause the ozone hole. China is cheating on that now, but we’ll handle that.
I would particularly like your thoughts in the comments so that I know what things will be of the greatest interest and use for future posts.
Graphic from here.
jl
Maybe coincidence, maybe not, but William Nordhaus, a leading economist of climate change just won the 2018 semi-fake Nobel Memorial Prize in economics.
Paul Romer was the other winner.
So, a post on Nordhaus’ work might be interesting. He started decades ago with some silly articles saying that global warming might be good for productivity, IIRC.
But the climate science soon changed his mind.
Last I checked he supports the Obama $50 per ton carbon tax, except more aggressive in that Nordhauus thinks it needs to rise from that level fairly rapidly if cost of global warming prove higher than originally thought. (and from the new IPCC report, looks like that is the case).
Nordhaus is still a little too CW in his thinking, and not as aggressive as IPCC, but at least on same page. If you want to wonk the BJ house, maybe a post on Weitzman and Stern’s work on discounting in the face of looming catastrophe.
Mart
It’s time to mob up on this subject. I was hoping to be dead before the really bad stuff starts, dammit. Watching “Chasing Ice” years back just scared the living crap out of me.
Elizabelle
I agree. Solutions, no whiners and no people who tell us sagely that it is impossible to make progress because …
Cermet
Not really when you state
What they said was we have ten years to massively reduce CO2 emissions or the 1.5 C accord will be passed with no hope to achieve it. Bad stuff is already “kicking in” and will continue even if we do massive reductions. The 1.5 C rise is about “baked in” no matter what we do – even zero emissions. The issue is how far above that we are willing to allow – with the 0.001% invested in carbon still in the ground which they will extract for $$$ – the issue isn’t exceeding 2 or even 3 C but whether we make most the equatorial regions un-inhabitable for over 2 – 3 billion people in twenty or forty years time frame. Let that sink in.
Major Major Major Major
I think what’s missing from the conversation is (as you touch on) the need for collective action. We’ve got it in our heads that expending political energy arguing about banning straws and GMO’s is a good use of everyone’s time. This is no longer a question of consumer choices. We need to emphasize causes and solutions at high, top-down levels, as well as educate people on mitigation/recapture strategies.
ETA i know I picked on non-global-warming related causes there but there’s only so much room in the polity’s ecological headspace
Brickley Paiste
I would be interested in hearing the argument against Vollman’s conclusion that “Nothing can be done to save it, so nothing needs to be done.”
I am, perhaps, pessimistic by nature but I was absolutely devastated when I finished reading Carbon Ideologies.
Cheryl Rofer
@Brickley Paiste: I would be interested in hearing your argument why that is the case.
Arguing against unsupported straw men is a waste of our time. We must look for solutions.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
Watched Al Gore’s new documentary when it came out. Depressing as hell, but he also works very hard to convey the message “we’re not dead yet”.
Maybe individual carbon-footprint actions don’t help much, but they certainly don’t hurt. And individuals vote. The conservatives are not going to be educated, they need to be outnumbered. Also individuals can organize and create their own organizations outside of government.
That’s kind of the philosophy of my post-retirement business, which is focused on plastic pollution and its cleanup.
Also you mention electrical generation. Improvements in that industry don’t have to be driven top-down from the government, utilities can be motivated in other ways. I once did some reading on this subject, getting briefly interested after the big 2003 blackout, but I’ve forgotten much of what I skimmed back then. You’ve motivated me to re-educate myself on the arcane structure of electrical utilities in this country and others. I do remember that question of “what will it take to get the utilities to modernize” but I can’t remember the answer.
donnah
Here’s something to fire up the good guys: the bad guys.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-08/climate-change-will-get-worse-these-investors-are-betting-on-it
The Wall Street investors are looking to put their money into companies that will make money from global warming rather than trying to prevent it. Seawalls, temporary housing…how they can make money at the expense of the dying planet.
Kraux Pas
@Brickley Paiste:
We’re all doomed! Doooooooooomed…
Or else this is just the latest evolution of the excuse campaign not to do anything.
Kdaug
Cascading effects.
Where is the true “tipping point”?
The IPCC has been (completely understandably) looking at the data very conservatively, for both scientific and political reasons.
But have we crossed the threshold already? Do we even know?
Mart
@Kraux Pas: If “doomed” than we need to go all in on coastal infrastructure, space program science funding to find carbon answers, and figure out how to manage tens (hundreds?) of millions of displaced persons. Not sit back and watch.
Mike in DC
Well, to get to “net zero” by 2050, we’re going to need to make significant reductions in the next 10-12 years, get halfway there or better by 2040, and essentially replace all gasoline-powered vehicles on the road by the net zero deadline. That’s, realistically speaking, a massive public-private undertaking of international and global scope, and having us be on the wrong page right now is beyond shameful. Inaction for any period of time will mean additional deaths down the line. Taking coal offline in the next decade will be a challenge, but mostly one of a political nature. I have little doubt that we can replace coal-fired plants with non-fossil-fuel sources within that time frame. We’re going to need to plant a bunch of trees, and I dunno whether any of those carbon-scrubbing techs will really pan out when taken to scale. The oil industry is going to fight to the bitter end on the 2050 thing, because it means their revenues will start shrinking much sooner than that.
Martin
Well, it’s probably no secret that I think if you just look at the efforts being taken in California that you go a long way toward both definitions and solutions. I would start here:
This was written in 2009, before Brown returned as Governor. He’s put his foot on the gas hard since that event in 1976. The result is pretty clear:
The fundamental problem we have in discussing these things is that we too often see capitalism as an enemy of climate change. Guys like Bernie Sanders don’t help in dispelling that. There is nothing inherent in capitalism that produces bad outcomes. Capitalism works equally well when a set of virtuous outcomes is established through regulation. In California, consumer bills go down, utility profits go up, and carbon emissions go down. Everyone wins, and it really only works through a competitive marketplace. In California, solar companies are competing for my dollars with traditional utilities, and the utilities are adapting.
This headline on other sites has triggered a pile of non-sequiturs – arguments over meat consumption and a host of other things. Climate change is a massive collective action problem and you don’t solve those problems with piecemeal approaches that create arbitrage opportunities. You solve them through positive feedback loops that everyone sees benefits to participating in, and you can apply that approach literally everywhere. California will almost certainly hit their 100% renewable goal by 2045, but carbon neutral is a lot harder due to transportation. So, CARB has created a set of incentives as part of their Low-Carbon Fuel Standard that incentivize fuel producers that are struggling to reduce their lifecycle emissions to earn credits by installing EV chargers across the state. So industry has two choices – either keep the fuel flowing but with an increasingly lower carbon footprint, or fund an EV network which will reduce fuel demand. Either way, carbon output drops.
There are a ton of things the state is doing that I’d be happy to highlight in future post comments.
Paul W.
Agriculture and the mining should also be considered. I know that recycling is not the panacea that we had hoped it would be (it is vastly more expensive to reuse anything other than metal than to make new stuff), but there have to be some lifestyle choices we can make at citywide levels that will help reduce waste and consumption.
schrodingers_cat
What are the biggest contributors to global warming, we can focus on reducing them. Is it generating electricity or transportation or industrial production.
Brickley Paiste
@Cheryl Rofer:
I’m not sure why you would characterize Vollmans exhaustively (but idiosyncratically) sourced 1,400 page work as an unsupported straw man— I take it you’re not familiar with it
But in any event I was hoping your work had exposed you to some closely reasoned texts showing why there is still time to do something
I don’t intend to pollute your future threads with doom and gloom but I was hoping you had something you could share on the topic. Something that gives you hope. I need some
Kraux Pas
@Mart: High metabolism plants to soak up all the CO2?
Leto
So Reddit has a subsection titled, “ELI5”. Explain Like I’m 5. The whole KISS mindset that covers a whole range of topics. They had a post yesterday titled: ELI5: Why do climate scientists predict a change of just 1.5 or 2° Celsius means disaster for the world? How can such a small temperature shift make such a big impact? A lot of really smart people broke it down for this person, as well as provided more information in the vein that Cheryl is asking for: what do we do? One user listed a number of solutions which are doable right now (link here because I don’t want to copy/paste a huge swath of text). The two biggest things we can do now are 1) vote in 30 days to send more Dems (the party that still believes in science/facts) to Congress, as well as local/state legislatures and 2) continue to work our asses off so that in 2020 we take majorities/larger majorities in both the House and Senate so we can enact policies to help us now and moving into the future.
Martin
@jl: Planet Money has a nice episode on him as well.
DHD
Putting a very high cost on carbon, which is what many of us have been yelling and screaming about for years now, only to see governments botch the implementation of really mild carbon pricing and then even worse governments get voted in promising to end it entirely (okay, I’m just speaking from the Canadian perspective but still…), is basically only a starting point, which I think is in this IPCC report. So that doesn’t really inspire confidence.
Somehow the message that decarbonization is in everybody’s economic interest isn’t getting through, even though it is a lot more obviously true than it was in 2000. Maybe we need to push harder just how many jobs will be “created or saved” (to quote a certain ex-president in reference to a much less serious crisis) by acting massively and soon?
Jeff
I should be dead in 10 years.
hells littlest angel
That’s why the right-wing is demonizing immigration now. Those motherfuckers do plan for the future, just in the most grotesque way imaginable.
jl
@Kdaug: Scary thought. We have enough data now that we can move past the models into doing time series analysis and estimation. The conclusion of initial estimates from that work suggest that climate scientists’models may have been underestimating the effects of CO2, because they have been masked by particulate pollution and aerosols. The economist time series guy who helped the climate scientists on that, Peter Phillips of Yale, used to be skeptical of dire economic effects of climate change himself, decades ago. But he has long since changed his mind.
Disentangling greenhouse warming and aerosol cooling to reveal Earth’s climate sensitivity
Nature Geoscience
Abstract
Earth’s climate sensitivity has long been subject to heated debate and has spurred renewed interest after the latest IPCC assessment report suggested a downward adjustment of its most likely range1. Recent observational studies have produced estimates of transient climate sensitivity, that is, the global mean surface temperature increase at the time of CO2 doubling, as low as 1.3 K (refs 2,3), well below the best estimate produced by global climate models (1.8 K). Here, we present an observation-based study of the time period 1964 to 2010, which does not rely on climate models. The method incorporates observations of greenhouse gas concentrations, temperature and radiation from approximately 1,300 surface sites into an energy balance framework. Statistical methods commonly applied to economic time series are then used to decompose observed temperature trends into components attributable to changes in greenhouse gas concentrations and surface radiation. We find that surface radiation trends, which have been largely explained by changes in atmospheric aerosol loading, caused a cooling that masked approximately one-third of the continental warming due to increasing greenhouse gas concentrations over the past half-century. In consequence, the method yields a higher transient climate sensitivity (2.0 ± 0.8 K) than other observational studies.
https://www.nature.com/articles/ngeo2670
Peter Phillips is the guy who probably should have won a Nobel Mem econ prize for cointegration with Granger and Engel, but if they gave him one they’d have to give Johansen one too,, And I think 4 was considered too many? Or whatever. You gotta take these econ Nobel Prizes with a grain of salt, sometimes.
Cheryl Rofer
@Brickley Paiste: Hope is an ethical stand, not a candy bar I can hand you. You’ve been a doom and gloom troll here. Unless that changes, I plan to ignore you.
Another Scott
Repost from the weekend – BBC – Would you give up beef to save the planet? (2:33). It’s a short video of 5 things that people can do on their own (with varying levels of difficulty) to cut their carbon footprint.
There are lots and lots of moving parts and we, as you say, need to work on all of them.
Looking forward to your posts on this vital topic.
Cheers,
Scott.
hells littlest angel
@schrodingers_cat: Population growth.
Martin
@schrodingers_cat: Electricity and transportation are each about a third of the problem. A lot of industry is really just in those two categories.
Agriculture is tricky because here in CA, agriculture, if extended to forestry and preservation, is carbon negative. We’re the largest dairy state by a lot, but our forests and produce growing soak up more CO2 than those cows put out. Agriculture has more options here than other industries. They just need to be pressed to follow through.
sibusisodan
Thanks for this. V timely. My questions:
– what do we need to do to get carbon-trading/tax implemented widely enough at a high enough level?
– could you look at research indicating that decarbonising might actually produce _higher_ econ growth than baseline? I think that’s linked to the latest Econ Nobel Prize.
(Longtime lurker, v occasional poster)
Schlemazel
I have posted this before but never got a comment on it
Soon, but too late, the same people who claim there is no such thing or that warming will be a real boon will panic and demand the government do something. Scientists will have some plans but they will be expensive and take decades. Those people will demand quick and cheap. The results will be worse and more quick and cheap things be tried. I do not believe humans will survive the extinction event. If they do it will be in a primitve form
Cheryl Rofer
@schrodingers_cat: All of the above. We are going to need multiple ideas for multiple problems. But those are the big ones.
Martin
@hells littlest angel: Not really. Industrialization is awful for the planet, and a LOT of the planet is finally industrializing. Nations like the US are post-industrialization and has the money to reverse that.
It’s not population growth that is the problem, but the process of lifting people out of poverty. Nations like the US could mitigate that problem, but we don’t.
Litlebritdifrnt
This is a very local issue for us here in Lancashire. Several years ago there was a referendum (in the county) about whether or not to allow fracking. The public overwhelmingly voted “no”. The County Council decided to over rule that and gave fracking permits to Cuadrilla. They immediately began work at the Preston New Road site to begin drilling. There have been protests there since they did. Recently three protesters were given active jail time and people are again pissed. There has been an injunction entered so they cannot begin active fracking but who knows how long that will last. They keep saying that it is safe, but we have experienced earthquakes in Lancashire for the first time ever. We simply cannot continue to rape the earth for all its resources without consequence and yet we continue to do so. For anyone interested you can follow @frackfreelancs on twitter.
joel hanes
Walking the walk :
One of the best things any of us can do as individuals is:
seriously reduce air travel, or abandon it altogether.
DHD
@Martin: Forestry is a big deal, because inevitably we will have to do carbon sequestration, and one of the least costly ways to do that is to grow a lot of trees and then do things with them that involve that carbon not getting released back into the atmosphere.
In other words we should get busy building dense, mid-rise cities out of wood (the carbon footprint of concrete is off-the-charts terrible, incidentally – the province of Quebec recently reversed years of progress in reducing emissions by building a single cement factory).
Martin
@Schlemazel:
No, they’ll demand that some segment of society be sacrificed so they can survive.
FelonyGovt
I am very interested but very ignorant about this topic. I despair that we are going backwards right now with this gang of crooks, rather than taking positive steps. I look forward to reading whatever you share on the subject, Cheryl.
MobiusKlein
@Brickley Paiste: When you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is
STOP DIGGING.
So maybe we can’t stop all of it, but it’s still useful to have a smaller problem, or delay the onset 5 years. Maybe somebody in 20 years will have a better solution, and we need to make that possible.
schrodingers_cat
@Cheryl Rofer: My theory is that Bricks and Paste is the troll previously known as Bob in Portland (Boris in Putinland). He is a Purity Pony leftie.
Dan B
Fantastic!!! Global warming has been my number one issue for years. The focus on solutions is great …but… the discussion could be strengthened by including some of the downsides, especially local and regional impacts. Far too much emphasis has been placed on sea level rise and too little on more immediate damage. The public is not expecting food to be a big issue, and soon. Ask Syrian farmers how that played out. Weather affects crop yields. We have no plan for mitigation but there are tools available. Also security is already affected and likely to get worse. What are progressive measures that need to be front and center? Otherwise we get the Hungarian solution.
And my heart’s desire is mass communication. At present the fossil fuel interests are winning but I feel we should pay attention to effective viral methods like the Parkland students, the Beto campaign, and how the annoying Avenatti gets headlines. We need regular headlines, and to avoid the “perfect being the enemy of the good” problem.
And, to be clear, I’m not interested in “How to talk to your climate denying family/ coworker/ neighbor.” We’ve gone green: electric car, solar pv, super insulation, mininal meat, etc. etc. And my in laws go FOX zombie about “green” anything but especially about the “Chinese conspiracy” global warming myth. They’re hopeless. We’re better off putting our energy into effective storytelling and creative efforts.
I’ve got some contacts who are communications pros who may be willing to contribute their expertise if needed.
ChrisS
carbon nano-bots which hoover up free C02 and fall to the ocean floor.
It’s all I got. My personal hopeful scenario is that I’ll growing some fantastic watermelons on some northern NY property.
Schlemazel
@Cheryl Rofer:
I do know him but I am doom and gloom myself. I have had the dubious honor of fighting many losing battles so one more is not scary to me. I have won a couple of losing battles, the trick is to fight on. Doom and gloom get me motivated.
“It’s you and me against the world, when do we attack?”
Martin
@DHD: Just building dense, mid-rise cities is hugely beneficial because that’s where mass transit works. California’s problems are largely tied back to the immense sprawl here and the need to drive everywhere. Compact these cities, and then you have the density to make trains work, you mix commerce and residential, etc. Ironically, the very things liberal San Francisco is pulling out all the stops to prevent from happening.
Jay
@Kdaug:
Early reporting on Global Warming identified many possible tipping points leading to “runaway” Global Warming.
Frozen deep sea methane ice melting. Check, back in 2010.
Permafrost melting and methane burps. Check, 2014, now epidemic.
Soils and forests no longer sequestering carbon, but instead exhaling it. Check, 2016.
Ocean acidification and accelerated demonishing rates of the oceans absorbing heat. Check, 2017.
Leto
@schrodingers_cat: @hells littlest angel: Have one less child if you’re planning to have more. Switch to a plant based diet (or mostly plant based).
Brickley Paiste
@Cheryl Rofer: other than my tongue in cheek pronouncement that the Republic was doomed because people care what Taylor Swift says about politics, I haven’t made any doom and gloom pronouncements
Honesty is also an ethical choice
Martin
One policy that Californian’s could strongly back would be banning all 2-stroke engines.
Lawn equipment in CA produces more emissions than cars in CA. That’s absurd.
Schlemazel
@Martin:
That is a given. But it is also a cheap and fast solution that won’t work.
A global plague that wipes out 75% of the population would work but I expect the global conflict will be the ultimate population reduction process.
Doom-n-RUs
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
@Cheryl Rofer:
Now that’s quote-worthy!
Serious, focused pursuit of solutions in the face of grave danger and imminent calamity is heroic, and we need heroes like that now. The challenge is tremendous, the stakes cannot be higher, and success is not guaranteed – but these heroes are undaunted nonetheless.
Major Major Major Major
@Martin: and liberal Los Angeles, and liberal Oakland, and liberal Silicon Valley…
ETA a conservative is just a liberal who buys a home in California
Barb 2
@Cermet:
So true about the projected population increase. Water shortages are happening all over the world right now. The Middle East major stressors and ears are largely water related. That’s one big elephant in the livingroom. Then there is the problem of food for all the billions of humans – the choices are land for food production. In my life time I’ve seen thousands of acres of productive farm land turned into suburban sub divisions. Fruit orchards are no more in the San Francisco bay area. One example.
Yes! It is global warming. I believe that the projections are very conservative – glaciers are already disappearing and the Attic tundra is already releasing vast amounts of carbon into the world. There are “fixes” to capture carbon dioxide and lock it up. I have two books on my book stack on the subject. The intro of both books tell me that there are serious cons to many of the proposed projects – money being one of the problems.
Fox news has done a stellar job of misdirection and misinformation about global warming – this is merely a liberal hoax they tell their cult followers.
Incitatus for Senate
Even though individual action is just a drop in a really big bucket, I do think it’s important to do whatever you can. If nothing else I hate the attitude that the problem is so large we should all just give up and do nothing.
So, I covered my roof in solar panels, am working on going completely vegetarian, bought the most efficient car possible, installed a mini split system instead of window AC, and try to recycle a lot. There are things I can’t afford to do until something breaks, like replacing my oil powered hot water heater with an on demand electric unit.
Schlemazel
@schrodingers_cat:
Good ol brickhead? Aw now I am grateful I have not seen him before.
More than a purity troll he was a Putin sock puppet
Kraux Pas
@Litlebritdifrnt:
They’ve been using the economy as an excuse for so long that now renewable energy and sustainable practices are legitimately ascendant and coal is failing of its own accord. But since this was really always about sustaining entrenched power, we are now taking (further) steps to advantage fossil fuels over renewable sources. And this is all sold on the notion that people who make a living extracting a finite resource out of the ground, one that may kill us all, are entitled to that job for all of eternity, even though they’re also systematically being replaced by machines.
You know what? I feel entitled to light gas lamps for a living and be well paid. Anyone able to help me draft a petition?
A Ghost To Most
@Schlemazel:
Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?
Kraux Pas
@Brickley Paiste:
You can always do something. Sure, we’ll already face consequences for inaction. That’s no reason to allow those consequences to grow still more damaging.
Yutsano
@Leto: Inasmuch as it still looks like the planet’s population is exploding, the fact is demographically as societies develop they produce fewer children. Even in societies that value as many children as possible. Economic opportunity for women really is the best birth control.
Kraux Pas
@schrodingers_cat:
Yes.
Also these are all strongly intertwined.
Major Major Major Major
@Yutsano: isn’t Africa the only place with much population growth to speak of?
ETA only continent that is
Waynski
I would like to see some updated map projections on how it will effect all of our coastlines, east, west, gulf, great lakes. I’ve seen maps for FLA, but I’m in a low lying area of NJ on the Raritan Bay (Atlantic Highlands), so would like to see an update on how high I can expect the water to go. Would also like to know if I can expect more frequent and stronger storms, so I can make intelligent decisions about moving to higher ground and possibly investing in a generator.
Boussinesque
Thanks for this, Cheryl. My primary area of interest is the ocean-related portions of the system, so anything that touches on those, as well as the “harnessing capitalism to do good” initiatives that Martin and others have mentioned, would be especially appreciated. I’m also currently tutoring students in AP Environmental Science, so having additional hopeful ideas/developments to discuss with them is appealing (I try not to focus on the doom aspects, although it’s hard sometimes). But really, I’ll read anything you choose to present because it’s all important and you’re a good writer. Looking forward to future posts!
KBS
Thanks so much for posting about this! Climate change is my biggest nightmare, and I’ve been even more pessimistic than usual after the IPCC report came out this week. Things I’d like to see:
1. Updates on currently proposed legislation, at the federal or state level, and why it’s important for the climate.
2. Big pushes to call our congresspeople about that legislation. (The posts in 2009 about health care inspired me to make a LOT of calls.)
3. Suggestions for good climate change fighting organizations to donate to or volunteer for. There seem to be a lot of environmental groups out there that aren’t terribly effective; I’d love to hear which ones you think are doing good work.
4. I realize individual action can’t do much, but eventually, we’re all going to have to make those changes. Maybe we could have some discussion about how to make those changes easier, or how to get more people involved in doing them.
5. Threads on what we can call on our individual cities to do. What policies should we be talking to our city councilors about? What has worked well in other places? How do we help people realize that these changes can be cost effective?
trollhattan
Very happy to hear this.
Legislatively it is obvious that state-based change is the only available path at the moment. California is an obvious example but I doubt one could copy-and-paste our programs everywhere, aspects certainly.
Would like to know more about how serious the nation is of upgrading to a national smart grid, which would seem to be a necessary component. Electricity generation is pretty far along WRT affordable non-carbon sources, solar especially, so of course Fuckface* slapped his PV panel tariff. Distributed production and storage in the form of PV panels and on-site batteries can make huge dents in electricity demands and dovetails with electric passenger vehicles–a twofer. In the meantime, change every damn light out for LED.
I really dislike living at 16 feet msl a short distance from two rivers.
joel hanes
carbon nano-bots which hoover up free C02 and fall to the ocean floor.
We call that phytoplankton. A few years ago, it was hoped that fertilizing parts of the open ocean with iron would sequester a bunch of CO2 as deep-sea ooze.
Unfortunately, futher research found
1. Iron fertilization was less effective than hoped.
2. Most of the carbon is captured in the water column, and relatively little makes it to the ocean floor.
Dan B
@Martin: Excellent comment(s)! Solutions are exciting. Christiana Figueres, former UN, had a great interview by Christiane Amanpour. She put green energy in perspective: exanding exponentially, a bright spot for the economy and job creation, and happening even in emerging economies – the ones that “deserve to burn coal” to catch up with rich nations.
trollhattan
@Major Major Major Major:
IIUC the pace of population growth in Asia is slowing but that’s not the same as static. But the longer projection has most growth occurring in Africa.
s
Schlemazel – damn name still won’t persist
@A Ghost To Most:
There is a story from Corregidor. I group of ships cooks (in 1940 that means black sailors) that charges an entire company of Japanese Marines & drove them off the landing beach.
On 7-2-1863, 282 members of the 1st MN volunteers charged headlong into 1600 Alabama infantry and drove them from a breach in the center of the Union line at Gettysburg.
Those men are my heros and I have lived my life hoping that if faced with the choice I will do the same. You only lose if you quit
joel hanes
The lowest-cost and highest-leverage technology for carbon emission reduction is human contraception.
When women have confidential access to effective, low-cost contraception, the birthrate tends to fall.
Whatever we can do to make such access a global condition (increasing women’s agency in patriarchal societies, including ours, making effective contraception really really cheap) will help.
Cheryl Rofer
@Schlemazel: That’s the attitude, if doom and gloom is your thing! ?
Boussinesque
@joel hanes: I remember the iron fertilization push—we had a company called Planktos come give a presentation to our biological oceanography grad class years back, and even as students who were generally supportive of their aims, we found a lot to take issue with (they actually turned me around from a supporter to a skeptic based on the number of important unknowns at the time that weren’t captured and that they had no plans to address).
Cheryl Rofer
@Incitatus for Senate: I don’t mean to discourage individual action, and it sounds like you have done a lot!
What I want to avoid is something like the recent focus on plastic straws.
Cheryl Rofer
@Boussinesque: IIRC, you’ve contributed guest posts. I may ask you for more!
Leto
@Yutsano: Sort of OT but the last Marvel Avengers movie addressed this. The plot of the movie differs from the original comic, but I thought the movie’s motivation was more relevant for today. A number of reviews thought the premise was silly, that if Thanos had unlimited power why didn’t he just create basically another universe’s worth of planets/resources? I thought they were missing the obvious parallel to what was happening right now. Scientists warning us of coming economic disaster, food/water/resource shortages, little political will to change… I know it’s not an exact parallel, but I thought that story was better than, “I’m trying to get my girlfriend’s attention so I’m going to murder half the universe!”
Major Major Major Major
@trollhattan: I was recalling the second (slightly misleadingly titled) graph in this article https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-09-21/africa-economy-west-should-try-to-match-chinese-investment
Boussinesque
@Cheryl Rofer: you do recall correctly, and I’d be more than happy to collaborate for posts in the future—gives me some good motivation to dive back into current literature on the subject. Although I didn’t land the Research Technician position at MBARI, I’m still on the newsletter mailing list for the ARGO sensor network project, which occasionally has some interesting material.
jonas
The biggest obstacle to implementing rational responses to the threat of climate change isn’t big energy companies, it’s American evangelical Christians. It is now Gospel Truth across vast swaths of American evangelicism (and therefore the Republican Party) that climate change is a satanic hoax invented by liberals, in league with the Antichrist, to promote
environmentalismpagan nature worship through the back door and undermine capitalism and God’s sovereignty over a creation. Until evangelical Christians can be convinced that purposefully warming the planet and threatening the well-being of every living thing on earth is contrary to God’s Plan™ for creation, nothing will change.acallidryas
Drawdown is one of the best resources out there. A lot of it applies to collective action or massive change from industries, but it can also inspire some thoughts on individual change. I would be interested in some posts on how this applies to anything individuals can do, and breaking down how this can apply to individuals or local communities is something I’m working on for another project as well.
Getting municipalities, institutions and people to look directly at fossil fuel divestment is an interesting campaign, would be interested in local campaigns on this.
And, as this latest report is quite terrifying, what are aspects of negative emissions that are not insane that we should be looking at more seriously? Most geo-engineering proposals seem to be trading out one known problem for another unknown problem, or downright impossible, or something that we would have to continue forever or everything would collapse in an even more terrifying way. But large scale reforestation, soil restoration, changes to agriculture, are tried and true methods that could begin pulling carbon out, but how can we move to do this on a large enough scale?
Dan B
@schrodingers_cat: Your question may have been answered by others but here’s my take.
Greenhouse gas sources vary by region and by country. In the PNW our hydro power makes transportation our big source. We’re still getting power from some coal plants but those are heading towards closure.
India has a small carbon footprint primarily because poor people have minimsl energy consumption but is contemplating massive investment in coal to grow its economy. At the same time solar pv and wind are becoming much less expensive than coal. Distributed solar pv and battery storage would give rural communities rapid access to electricity. Their solutions will be guided by politics. If they invest in homegrown pv production it could create huge numbers of jobs. Coal plants won’t because of the automation of mining and of the plants themselves.
The solutions may be expedited by well regulated markets. This allows for flexibility to fit local conditions.
Litlebritdifrnt
Other easily achievable solutions (were there the political will) 1) introduce mass transit public transportation across the US, a lot of people drive because they have no choice. I have seen this since being back in the UK. Lots of people do not own or drive cars because there is no need. You can get a bus or a train to virtually anywhere you need to go. People take advantage of it, ergo less cars on the road. 2) all new houses being built should have solar panels built into the roof. No exceptions. Everyone says that the weather in England is crap yet you see solar panels everywhere. In the US there is sunshine 11 months out of the year (if not 12), it is shameful that all that free energy is going to waste. 3) Wind turbines everywhere, again we have the largest wind farm in the world in the Irish Sea. It generates massive amounts of electricity. Even on the smallest scale it can help, in Kirkstone Pass in the Lake District, the pub on the top of the pass has its own wind turbine. Quite often when the power goes out due to snow they still generate their own electricity as there is no shortage of wind up there (they also have solar panels). There are solutions, all we need are the damn politicians with the balls to put them into place. Without that we are, as everyone has said, doomed.
Mnemosyne
@Brickley Paiste:
NRA troll says what?
Nice try, ARGB. Did you really think people had forgotten your new nym?
trollhattan
@Major Major Major Major:
The trends bring a couple big concerns: on the China-Asia side bringing enormous populations into middle class consumers has as much if not more environmental impact than more but less wealthy people. A billion drivers going out for Big Macs?
We’re seen the recent war-driven African diaspora and its impact on Europe et al. The climate diaspora will dwarf it.
Leto
@jonas: Ah yes, the Petrobaptists. As usual, Margaret Atwood already had them pegged.
Millard Filmore
@Barb 2:
I think this is because much of the research is funded, directly or indirectly, by government grants. And government spending money is evil, And scientists just want more government money for useless projects so they can remain employed.
Sigh. No. Back around 1683 England decreed that their sea captains log the weather, ocean currents, temperature, etc. every 4 hours. There is plenty of data to determine if the earth is warming or cooling. Climate scientists have seen the planet heat up, and have gone fishing for grants to study the situation. The organization with money and motivation to fund the studies is the government. A hoax conspiracy involving the Chinese is not required.
trollhattan
It somehow fits here that today is John Lennon’s 78th. Happy birthday, John, we’ve messed the joint up a bit since you’ve been gone.
Major Major Major Major
@trollhattan: I agree that the Asian middle class explosion will be a challenge, on many levels.
Incitatus for Senate
@Cheryl Rofer: Hey, sorry if that sounded critical of your post, I didn’t mean it that way.
Cheryl Rofer
@Incitatus for Senate: No problem.
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
@Elizabelle:
I just feel like 10 years isn’t enough time. Can you see fossil fuels being phased out by 2028 everywhere?
Right-wing populism and neofascism are rising now as well, at the worst possible time. I don’t know how we solve this.
Millard Filmore
@Waynski: Google up “world” “map” “sea” “rise”. This link is a good start but a little fuzzy. There are better out there.
“This map shows the land which would be flooded if the ice caps melt in entirety, in which case the sea level would rise by 80.32 meters. ”
http://atlas-for-the-end-of-the-world.com/world_maps/world_maps_sea_level_rise.html
If you want to give your house to your (great) grand-kids, I recommend moving someplace 100 meters above current sea level.
The Moar You Know
I bet if we took Paste Bucket to the beach and buried him up to his chest a couple of feet below the high-tide mark at low tide and gave him a spoon and told him his fate was literally in his own hands, he wouldn’t be sitting there whining about how “nothing can be done”. Why, I bet the motherfucker would get real inventive real quick.
That’s the kind of thinking we need.
Jay
@Waynski:
“, but I’m in a low lying area of NJ on the Raritan Bay (Atlantic Highlands), so would like to see an update on how high I can expect the water to go. ”
The current upper level projections are 8’+, so probably higher,
“Would also like to know if I can expect more frequent and stronger storms, ”
Yes
“so I can make intelligent decisions about moving to higher ground and possibly investing in a generator.”
Go solar, get a battery back up, then add a stand alone generator, ( one not tied to the house fuel supply.)
MomSense
@Brickley Paiste:
We are past the point of reversing climate change but we can mitigate some of the consequences if we act quickly and decisively.
Litlebritdifrnt
Oh and vote out the neanderthals. Like the Republican legislature in NC that voted to not only ignore the sea level rise predictions but to basically declare them illegal. That kind of short sightedness is going to cost money as well as lives, but so long as they are owning the libs all is good I guess.
Millard Filmore
@Waynski: Here is a better WEB page for your situation.
http://globalfloodmap.org/
Uncle Cosmo
@Broccoli Pus: I OTOH would be interested on having your worthless arse banhammered into a star-thin region of the Lesser Magellanic Cloud. C’mon, FPers, time’s a-wastin’!
trollhattan
BTW this is what progress looks like
ATM renewables are supplying 43.6% of CA’s electricity and of that, solar is 82.3%.
Cermet
The solution exists, would not be all that expensive (but not cheap in any sense of the word), reduce to near zero all major CO2 production, is already “on-the-self, and will last about 100 years with currect resources (far longer once the sea is tapped.) The answer? The Candu nuclear fission, heavy water reactor. Utterly safe (really can’t melt down even with zero flow) – easy to build (a number already exist), requires few safety systems, little man-power to operate, no enriched fuel (so no proliferation issues), and produces a 1000 mega-watts a reactor. Generating hydrogen fuel using these solves the vehicle issue and of course, no coal/methane (natural gas) to generate electricity. These reactors are cheap to build because they require few systems, no massive containment dome, nor danger of a melt down (yes, nuclear waste but that isn’t an expensive issue, one that simply requires a will.)
There is almost zero chance we will build these because they are useless for subs (why we have those terribly dangerous light water reactors) and 2) the few trillion dollars of oil/natural gas/coal already in the ground that the 0.001% own.
Anyone who says we can’t get to near zero emissions in 15 years to 20 because there are no “currently inexpensive” methods relative to current fuel costs is full of shit.
Major Major Major Major
@Uncle Cosmo: it has done nothing banworthy.
jeffreyw
@schrodingers_cat:
Brick Oven Bill?
Dan B
@Leto: I seem to remember that the most successful long term solution to global warming is educating and empowering women. It works in fairly short time spans as well. Educated young women raise standards for their families.
Sorry guys. /s
Mnemosyne
@jonas:
I honestly don’t understand their spoiled child view of God and the universe. God created this incredible planet with all its biodiversity, and it’s okay for me to completely destroy everything He created because I’m part of His chosen group so He’ll have to forgive me!
Did their parents never insist that they fix or pay for the things they broke? Did they total the brand-new car they got for graduation and Daddy just patted them on the head and bought them a new one? Where does this insane sense of divine entitlement come from?
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
@Major Major Major Major:
Yeah, and Pinochet did nothing wrong
//
Richard Grant
Is the book that Paul Hawkins edited, Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming, a starting point in that it ranks 100 solutions, with the top 10 being refrigerant management, onshore wind turbines, reduced food waste, plant-rich diet, tropical forests, educating girls, family planning, solar farms, silvopasture, and rooftop solar. If one searches for it, there is a lot of information available online about where we are nationally and globally in terms of renewable energy, energy efficiency, and electric vehicles. But is there a scoreboard of key indicators about where we are in terms of any of the proposed non-energy solutions? Just because many of us might be unaware of a transition and its speed doesn’t mean that it is not happening.
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
@Mnemosyne:
They figure they’ll be dead and go to heaven. They also think HGW (human-caused global warming) is libtard hoax anyway.
Mnemosyne
@Cermet:
I would love to see Cheryl address this, because she’s an actual nuclear scientist. If there really is a super cheap and easy nuclear solution out there that is completely risk-free, I would think she would have advocated for that, don’t you?
joel hanes
Iowa currently gets well over 1/3 of its entire electricity supply from wind farms,
and that proportion is rising rapidly.
Dan B
@sibusisodan: Christiana Figueres stated that more jobs would be created with clean energy than fossil fuels on Amanpour & Co. last night.
That’s been stated by lots of experts so the info is out there. I think it’s useful to point out that coal, oil, and gas are rapidly being automated. There are great images of fewer tha 6 people operating huge mountaintop removal operations. They’d be a great image to go with a coal jobs vs solar jobs (install, mntc)
Jay
@Cermet:
Nuclear ain’t cheap, and the costs of nuclear don’t include extraction mitigation or sequestering the waste.
We can no longer afford to privatize profits and socialize the costs.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/giant-mine-pocket-lake-contamination-1.3734471
The Moar You Know
@Mnemosyne: I’d like her to address it as well. CANDU has issues. Needs water for cooling and generation. Good for coasts and major rivers, not good for anyplace else. Does not address nuclear waste (which is a monster of a problem that is not going to solve easily or cheaply) does not really address proliferation. Because waste.
Better than what we’re doing? Oh yeah, by a mile, and I think that nuclear is going to have to be part of the solution for the short term.
We also have thorium and lithium salt reactors potentially on deck, but I don’t think either one of those is being used for full scaled-up production.
jl
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??: First big developments in climate science were from godless scientists who got their start working under the godless French Revolution. so the fundies are right. And Chinese, who think long term, were in league with them at the start of the hoax. It all makes sense if you think about it correctly. All the pieces fit!
Mnemosyne
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??:
Actually, the whole “rapture” thing is fueled by a deep-seated fear of death that is so terrifying, they’ve had to invent a whole mythology that says that, if you believe the right things, you will never actually die. The Rapture will arrive and you will be assumed bodily into Heaven without ever dying.
So what they really think is that God will come to their rescue before any harm comes to them and they can then mock the rest of us from the safety of Heaven.
Cheryl Rofer
The President weighs in.
DHD
@acallidryas: I don’t know what the total carbon sequestration potential from forestry and changes to agriculture is, but it seems like the only non-insane way to do it. Photosynthesis is literally solar-powered carbon sequestration, and trees are the biggest carbon sinks… the trick is keeping the resulting biomass out of the carbon cycle. This means that we need net afforestation, which is a worthy goal in itself. But we also need to keep all that extra biomass from burning or decaying, which is unfortunately going to happen more and more because of … climate change.
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
@Cheryl Rofer:
What the fuck is he even trying to say? That reports are contradictory? Or that he can make up a report to say anything he wants it to conclude?
jl
@Cheryl Rofer: Trump only wants the Top Reports.
I think I heard on the news, that Trumpsters are thinking of a $7 per ton carbon tax (yes, that is right, seven dollars) with no provision for increases as evidence of expected damage develop over time. Anyone else here that?
The very idea that any tax could come out of the Trump administration surprises me, so I am wondering whether I understood it correctly.
Might be, since pretty much everyone is on the ball more than Trump, so could be someone at least feels they need to pretend they respect the science.
But, has Trump heard about it?
oatler.
Michael Coney’s novel “Rax” echoes some of these themes. The narrator is involved in a long-standing war with an enemy country and gradually learns that both “sides” had been using the war as a distraction to hide the fact that a catastrophic climate event was going to render the planet uninhabitable for decades, thus providing cover for stockpiling supplies.
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
@DHD:
I swear I heard that scientists had invented synthetic “carbon sinks”. If those could be scaled up then that would solve that issue.
Dan B
@DHD: Concrete is terrible for co2 emissions. Coal ash has been touted as one partial solution. The other wood / ag waste solution is terra prieta (sp? name?) It involves making a tyoe of charcoal and then incorporating into soil. It stores the carbon, increases fertility indirectly, improves tilth and microbial activity, and improves water and nutrient storage. It would be good for semi arid regions like California where trees are dying from increasing drought and almond orchards being ripped out because of lack of irrigation (decreased snowpack).
Reforestation could fail due to change in precipitation so I’m wondering if it can be assisted by also improving the rhizosphere (active soil layer). Will it work and if so can it be financed by carbon “fees” ( not the T word ).
Cheryl Rofer
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??: He is doing his usual thing of being overnoncommittal. That way, he can always say he’s right later on. He’s obviously been doing this to cover his ignorance for a long time, because he’s very practiced at it.
jl
@DHD: I’ve read indoor veggie and some fruit farming for a number of crops can save 90% of current fossil fuel and water needs.
So, there is a lot that can be done. Read up on how the Netherlands became the largest produce exporter in Europe, IIRC. I think maybe second largest in the world, compared to US, but not sure..
Jeremy
You can do all of that and it won’t make a bit of difference because there is no effort whatsoever to address the considerably worse damage being done to the climate by factory farming (which is only increasing in scope, size and output). In fact, the issue is basically hidden like it doesn’t even exist. Even by green groups. And the reason is simple: they know it’s hopeless.
Banning livestock for food via government mandate worldwide is the only action that will continue to keep the earth livable for humans in the long term. However, farming animals and then eating them is coded in almost every culture as a good and natural thing that could never possibly cause harm. So it will *never* happen
Therefore, the human race is going to slowly die off because our brains are not wired to accept information that forces us to make big changes to our lifestyle. We’ve encountered a fatal glitch in our nature; and the human species is going to go extinct much sooner than it has to because of it. Adapt to this reality. You have no other choice.
Dan B
@MobiusKlein: I told my squeeze / partner guy about this post and said that, ” Electric cars are the future.” He said that they might be the future. I replied, “No, electric cars are the future. Without them, no future.” So there’s my cynical humor take on Brickley. Gotta laugh even if it’s only dark humor at this moment.
Then I imagined a comedian at a Climate Scientist convention. Yep. It’s my acquaintance Yoram Bauman, the standup economist.
goblue72
If only it were as simple as “build more wind farms”. There is no realistic path that doesn’t involve the elimination of the internal combustion engine driven SOV. Which is in part why despite California making great strides in energy efficiency in our homes, offices, appliances, and the like – and increasing the share of electricity generation from renewables – we won’t get where we need to go as a state without tacking transportation.
Some of it will need to come from something decidedly non-technical and entirely political – land use reform. California’s system of land use planning via “death by a thousand NIMBYs” need drastic reform to take land use planning away from local jurisdictions and transfer it to the state. California – the most heavily urbanized state in the country needs to shift from its current “urbanization via suburbanization” model to a “urbanization through urbanization” by broadly increase land use density couple with increased investments in (electrified) transit. Our commute-sheds needs to shrink – and significantly so.
EV will play a role – but unless the state is prepared to buy everyone in the state a new car – or ban all new car sales that aren’t EVs – it won’t be get us there anytime soon.
I am – however – quite pessimistic that we will marshall the political will to reform.
Citizen Alan
@Martin:
This. Every single one of the pig people who insist that global warming is a hoax will also attribute every major ecological disaster to God punishing us for allowing abortion and not killing our gays or something like that.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Cheryl Rofer:
So he only looked at the pictures.
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
@Jeremy:
Jesus Christ, that’s bleak. I still think we shouldn’t just accept our fates and go quietly to our deaths like you suggest. My god.
Luthe
Cheryl, what do you know about the energy efficiency of international shipping? Since most goods move by water, I would think the shipping industry has a huge effect on carbon production.
Jay
@Dan B:
Permachar. Not so easy to make yet, as it’s creation is a combination of charcoal production and composting.
Reforestation is a long term assist, not a quick fix. It has it’s issues as studies show that the forests and soils, trap less carbon as the climate warms, and at the “tipping points”, they start releasing more carbon than they sequester.
One is also creating an “artificial” environment in many regards, with all the impacts, good and bad, it has on biodiversity, along with a massive level of uncertainty on the effects of Global Warming on tree species.
Mnemosyne
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??:
Meh. I don’t trust anyone’s One Simple Trick To Fix Global Warming, including those proposed by militant vegans. And eliding US-based factory farming with all meat and animal product consumption worldwide is not exactly an honest argument.
Citizen Alan
@jonas:
The dirty little secret about Evangelical Christianity is that it’s a death cult. It’s members actively desire the end of the world because they think they’ll be raptured up to paradise, and from that vantage point, they’ll be able to watch as everyone who ever disagreed with them or made fun of them is tortured literally forever. The only difference between Evangelical Christianity and a Cthulhu cult is that the later is fictitious.
Robert Sneddon
@DHD: Reforestation is not any kind of a solution. Trees grow by using sunlight to absorb CO2 and convert it into wood, yes but then they die, rot ad/or burn and the CO2 is released back into the atmosphere. It didn’t happen in the deep past because the bugs that eat lignin and cause it to rot hadn’t evolved so dead wood and woody plants got buried over millions of years, heated and compressed and turned into coal, oil and gas (I’m simplifying outrageously here). We’ve burned several million years worth of reforestation potential as oil and coal and gas, a few thousand planetary surfaces worth and we can only reforest a small part of one planetary surface which already has large areas taken up by woody timber (the Amazon basin frex).
The amount of fossil carbon we’ve dug up, pumped and burned over the past few hundred years (but mostly over that past century or so) is immense, so much it’s difficult to get your mind around it. Thinking that reforesting a few million square km of land surface will even nick the edge of that amount of CO2 is just wrong, sadly.
chopper
@Jay:
no such thing i’ve ever seen as a nuke plant that’s cheap to make, cheap to insure, and cheap to take apart when it’s all done. we were promised all that, but it’s never actually happened.
also, people talk about nuclear waste as if it’s only the used fuel. as if all the irradiated parts of the structure don’t count when it’s decommissioned.
Brachiator
I think future posts is a great idea.
I got nothing now. Tons of work. I have downloaded the “Summary for Policymakers” and the Headline summary from the IPCC site and am reading it as time permits.
I’m in California, and think our elected officials (vote! vote!) have outlined some good strategies. Retaking Congress will help from a political point of view.
@joel hanes:
Has there been a measurable impact on pollution?
Dan B
@Brickley Paiste: LGBTQ people, like me, have been facing impossible and catastrophic situations for decades. We got discouraged, then angry, made messy mistakes, got creative in mass messaging first with the AIDS quilt and theater, then with Marriage Equality ( not Gay Marriage because message discipline ). Other groups have fought the same battles and persevered.
I’m reminded of a rarely told story about Bloody Sunday (Edmund Pettis Bridge). Everyone gathered at a church after the police attack. They despaired over the movement and talked about their lost battle. The next day phones started to ring from all over the country. People had seen the TV coverage and wanted to come help. Hundreds arrived from all over the USA. And the tide turned.
With the right message , images, and creativity we can turn back the tide of despair. Some messages will be messy failures. Others will break through the gloom and rally the masses.
Jay
@Jeremy:
Dietary changes and cropping changes to livestock production methods reduce methane and CO2 emissions by 90%.
They also reduce costs and labour.
Toss in a carbon and methane tax, a price premium and you have a sucessful economic model that can change the industry.
15 years ago the ranchlands here were used for nurser herd cattle raising with the 2 year olds shipped off to feedlots. The cost of oil killed that model, because a feedlot cow is 90% oil or more.
Now, the cattle spend all their lives on grass, with some “finished” on recycled biosolids like winery and brewery waste.
Litlebritdifrnt
Trump is not going to give a shit until Mar A Largo is under water. And even when it is he will apply for Federal Aid to rebuild it, because that is how he rolls.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Mnemosyne: The logic goes like this…
1 God is all knowing and all powerful.
2 God knew who was damned and who was saved when God created the world.
3 Therefor one’s actions have no bearing on the out come (except it’s fun screaming repent at the unsaved, even though you know it doesn’t matter)
4 God shows who is saved or who is damned by how they fare in life. The saved are rich, white Republicans like God and Jesus is (just look at a religious painting) while the damned are poor minorities.
Then again these are people who also claim the world was created 4,000 years ago by a an invisible sky wizard and his pet talking snake and all evidence to contrary is manufactured by atheists scientists in sekret’ factories in China. So in a word, idiots.
Robert Sneddon
@jl: The Netherlands runs on natural gas, it’s in the top 25 consumers of NG in the world, a neat achievement for a country with only 17 million people, half that of California. It has/had North Sea gas fields and land-based fracking fields which have been used to fuel greenhouses to grow market produce as well as electricity generation — Britain buys in about a GW of NG-produced Dutch electricity pretty much all of the time. Sure they’ve got wind turbines and solar panels but they’ve also got those small industrial buildings with funny-looking chimneys in a field somewhere close to a grid interconnect with a fat NG pipeline running into them. When the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow the gas turbine inside the building spins up and makes electricity and dumps the resulting CO2 into the atmosphere.
Gelfling 545
@Brickley Paiste: Do you go to the doctor when you’re ill, even knowing you will eventually die? We do what we can and hold out the hope rhat what is unknown today may not be unknown tomorrow.
Jay
@chopper:
Yup, and because the mines and the polluted water isn’t in their backyard, or taps, it isn’t a problem.
https://www.google.ca/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/cities/2015/jul/06/radioactive-city-how-johannesburgs-townships-are-paying-for-its-mining-past
Doug R
Solar and wind double in capacity every 18 months. Which very soon is going to add up VERY quickly. Coupled with a major upgrade of the electrical infrastructure should enable charging stations as common as gas pumps. With fast chargers mostly charging your car in 20 minutes and over 3 hour ranges, we should see automobiles change over a short period of time, once the infrastructure is there. Eventually we’ll be designing for solar panels and be net zero. Hey, if Germany can do it for a day or so now, we can too.
Dan B
@Kraux Pas: I’ll sign a petition if it also includes a demand for funding for coal powered cars!! And Whale oil lamps!!!
Ah, the good old days!
(Can we add child labor? Please!)
Dan B
@Yutsano: Economic and educational opportunity for women is also the best bang-for-buck solution to Global Warming according to a study. I believe Al Gore talked about it at some time. It seemed counter intuitive but was the result of rigorous statistical analysis.
Kraux Pas
@Dan B:
What? And displace all our fine machines in their jobs? I can see the riots now…
“Kids will not replace us!!!”
Doug R
@Martin:
Why the F is there still gas powered lawn equipment in California? One nice side effect of lawn blower noise bylaws is more electric ones because it’s easier to meet the db targets.
Uncle Cosmo
@Major Major Major Major: Look at its history – Broccoli Pus has committed TONS of banworthy posts & should never have been allowed back.
I amend my previous request: Banhammer its worthless arse to the backwaters of the Coma Cluster. Even better, banhammer it into a coma.
Steve in the ATL
@Another Scott:
I did! Almost 20 years ago. People look at me like I’m crazy when I say it. They don’t understand that I’m a totally different type of crazy.
DHD
@Robert Sneddon: Sure, nobody in their right mind would argue that reforestation is a solution. The solution is not burning fossil fuels and not cutting down the forests in the first place.
That said, the carbon storage potential of forests and agricultural land is actually quite huge from what I’ve read. The challenge is turning both of them around from being carbon sources (which they are currently) to carbon sinks.
Jay
@Doug R:
Yup. In the past 20 years the cost of my solar/wind array has dropped by 2/3rds.
The 4 watt warm white MIR LED bulbs in my bathroom cost $125 each when I bought them 20 years ago, special order. I can buy their replacements at a box store now for $20 with at times, a $15 BC Hydro rebate. Similar bulbs from China are as little as $3.50.
Dan B
@Waynski: Food is likely to reach a crisis before sea level rise is significant reason to relocate. That plus water shortage mass migration will disrupt civilization and supply chains for fuel for that generator.
Sea level rise is over promoted as a major impact of Global Warming, although after 2100 it will be. On our present course I’m not sure how many people will be living or working in areas that are near any coast or floodplain. Insurance will vanish and panic will ensure that many places will be abandoned long before the disappear underwater.
Maps of areas where agriculture will cease or undergo dramatic changes would be enlightening. Panic in farm country might not be, however.
Kraux Pas
@Uncle Cosmo:
Then he changes his name and email and we start all over again. Banning isn’t an effective strategy, especially without login credentials. There are two possibilities I see, engage or ignore.
I’m not a big advocate of using the pie filter, but if that’s how you want to go, keeping him with the same name will help in that endeavor.
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
@Jeremy: Geez – I’m pretty sure that’s bullshit. Project Drawdown, for example, most definitely includes farming and meat production in its list. And I have been hearing suggestions to eat less/no meat to fight climate change from others for years. A huge cultural change regarding meat consumption is challenging but not impossible. It is also only one contributor to the problem.
Brickley Paiste
@Doug R:
I believe there are pretty tight restrictions on lawn equipment emissions in CA.
I was shopping for a new weed whacker last year and some of the top-rated models could not be shipped into CA.
Don’t know whether th restrictions are “enough” but they seem to more stringent than the nationwide standards- if there are any.
trollhattan
Channeling my inner Randy Newman.
“We’ll save Australia
Don’t wanna hurt no kangaroo”
Not helping, Bruce.
IIRC Australia is the 2nd largest exporter behind Indonesia, who are even closer to China.
Major Major Major Major
@Kraux Pas: this, plus it’s my understanding of Cole’s rules that short of bigoted slurs and stalking you’re allowed to say more or less anything here.
chopper
@Robert Sneddon:
i think you’re ignoring the amount of carbon that healthy soils store; restoring mass amounts of land to forest (or other appropriate biomes) would also increase the carbon storage in the soil below. how much i can’t tell you, and it isn’t a sole solution, but what is?
trollhattan
@Uncle Cosmo:
You should see things over at LGM where (methinks) BRINKS TRUCKS is busy crowing about fascist resurgence, getting banned 3x/day and reappearing with new nyms just as fast.
Midnight in St. Petersburg.
trollhattan
@chopper:
Also huge differences among impacts of tropical, temperate and boreal forests.
Brickley Paiste
@Major Major Major Major:
Uncle Cosmo enjoys watching young men, primarily African Americans. Inflict brain damage on one another on the football fields.
His weirdo animus towards me is largely explained by the fact that I question the morality of his entertainment choices
Ken Shabby
Watch this and get….a little excited and optimistic.
I’m new here. I hope this goes through. It can be done. Note testimony from various unexpected folks.
A half century from now, people will have their jaws on the floor that we burned …lubricants. When I look at all this, over the decades, the two biggest things that stand out are:
Irreplaceable lubricants and aircraft.
Everything else is somewhat replaceable. Burning fossil fuels is crazy on any number of levels unless that is your portfolio.
I am….Old. I have been watching this sh1t since high school.
Most of this is Not New.
Baud
@trollhattan: I’ve seen and other people have reported an increase in trolls and bots. I can only assume we’ll be inundated during the presidential primary and election.
Bill Arnold
@Brickley Paiste:
I’m not about to read 1,268 pages of gloom/suicide note. From the few reviews I just skimmed, it reasonably accurately presents one possible (and likely, true) subset of scenarios out of a vast sea of scenarios. (Also, I know much of this stuff.). For sure, we have some serious geoengineering in our future baring a full collapse of civilization or a population collapse due to a massively lethal pandemic or similar.
Anyway, I suggest keeping up on the decarbonization literature.
e.g. (2018 papers) https://scholar.google.ch/scholar?as_ylo=2018&q=decarbonization&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5
One increasing and important focus is on the politics. E.g. here are a few papers related to heterogeneity at multiple subnational scales as a way to defeat carbon lock-in:
The world has decided bottom-up is the way it’s going to stop climate change (Michael J. Coren, September 16, 2018)
Links this study (106 pages! PDF!):
GLOBAL CLIMATE ACTION FROM CITIES, REGIONS, AND BUSINESSES
and this is also interesting (less than half-baked), at least for the references (PDF!):
The politics of decarbonization and the catalytic impact of subnational climate experiments (7 march 2018)
One I just spotted and haven’t read (PDF!)
Electricity Markets and the Social Project of Decarbonization (MAY 2018)
And in general with the science; my feed is this (there are others): https://phys.org/earth-news/
And many of the academic papers are paywalled, so get access and/or learn how to acquire papers by other means (asking author, or cough sci-hub)
Dan B
@jonas: There are many Christian and Evangelical Christian leaders who are working to bring Christians into action to stop Global Warming. I’ve met a number of them through a Seattle group, Earth Ministry. We had great conversations about evangelical specific messaging. It was a bit surreal – me the gay atheist and them the “scary” evangelicals.
Evangelical specific messaging and leadership is key. They’re short on funding so are below the radar at the moment.
chopper
@Martin:
you can have my ’61 Vespa when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.
Bill Arnold
Cheryl, a comment with too many paper links wants to be freed. :-)
Major Major Major Major
@Baud: what if we already have? How do I know you’re the real Baud!?
Ruckus
@jonas:
Isn’t what you described, the whatever they call it when the “deserving” get called up? IOW how are you going to change one of their most “charished”positions, the rapture? (I remembered what the morons called it) Because that’s what they will think it is. All of it is god’s will is what they will claim.
Baud
@Major Major Major Major: You’re assuming there is a real Baud.
chopper
@Brickley Paiste:
normally this is the point where i’d tell you to go die in a fire, but that would add heat to the atmosphere which we don’t need.
Kraux Pas
@Brickley Paiste: Professional football is a mess of atrocities. Still, millions have grown up watching it and the atrocities aren’t inherent to the game, but to the implementation.
Your post is, however, the first mention of football on this thread and he isn’t the only one challenging you. I’m no stranger to contentious interactions with people on this site, but I would recommend you try to engage rather than pull out the ad hominem argumentation.
ETA: I can edit again!!!
jl
@Robert Sneddon: Thanks. But I was talking about indoor gardening in the Netherlands, not holding up there overall economy as an example. I’m well aware that the Netherlands produces and uses a lot of natural gas.
Ruckus
@Major Major Major Major:
Are you sure?
I have it’s name in the pie filter 3 times. Because I’d bet it’s changed it’s email to sidestep the filter. Not a bannable offense sure but it is getting close. And the other two or three people in the filter work normally.
r€nato
@Kraux Pas: it’s the last stage of climate change denial: “Oh well maybe the dirty fucking hippies were right, but too late to do anything now but make money off the inevitable.”
Fuck. That.
1) What role can natural gas and nuclear power play as transition energy sources? While NG is certainly a fossil fuel, it is much cleaner in every way than coal and America is swimming in NG now. Nuclear should hopefully be phased out over time but I absolutely see it playing a role until we figure out how to better store renewable energy for use when we need it. Seems to me that making room for natural gas can help make allies or at least not as many enemies.
2) What does a 21st-century national power grid look like? One that is accommodated to locally-produced green energy and is secure from cyberespionage and cyberattacks. Who pays for it? Ideally, how long to deploy it from start to finish?
3) What is to be done about the utilities, who are mostly dead-set against any changes to their business model? In my state they are mostly regulated by a statewide commission that the idiot voters keep fully (100%!!!) in GOP hands with candidates who are funded by dark money from the state’s largest power utility. That same commission recently approved a new rate plan partially based on a peak-usage charge – part of your bill is based on the one hour in a month you used the most electricity! I’m talking about Arizona, where an average homeowner uses quite a bit of power during the summer. This charged many residential significantly more for the same power usage as the year prior, and I do not see the utility doing anything with this new income other than distributing it to shareholders and executives and buying more politicians. They are definitely not using it to update the power distribution grid, they’ve already tried to make rooftop solar unaffordable by slapping a monthly surcharge on such users.
Arizona has on the ballot this fall a proposition that would mandate a 50% renewable energy goal for all utilities by 2024. Unfortunately, the voters here are very susceptible to an “OMG IT WILL COST YOU MORE MONEY! WE DON’T WANT TO BE LIKE CALIFORNIA!” message.
Brickley Paiste
@Bill Arnold:
Thanks for those links
Bill Arnold
@Brickley Paiste:
Here’s another with social science focus, haven’t read (html; pdf available, open access):
Is the 1.5°C target possible? Exploring the three spheres of transformation
(30 April 2018)
Dan B
@Mnemosyne: One of the central messages that evangelical climate change leaders use is “care for creation”. Here’s my muddled version: God granted us dominion over creation with the command that we care for it and tend the garden ( eden / earth ).
They’re going against the Prosperity Gospel types who claim that god will create more resources so that the chosen ones will never run out.
Some extremely reactionary evangelical leaders have signed onto a pledge to save creation. Most did so after leading climate scientist, and evangelical christian, Katharine Hayhoe met with them. She was able to speak their language.
Mary Ellen Sandahl
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: I would very much like to know more about your plastic cleanup effort. Do you have a website, twitter pg, or…?
Brickley Paiste
@Kraux Pas:
Meh, some people seem to get off on nursing grievances
I was giving some context for Cosmo’s unbalanced commentary
trollhattan
@Baud:
Pretty comfortable thinking that’s exactly what’s occurring. Trolls are a better predictor of fall than migrating birds.
Mary Ellen Sandahl
Collective action is the thing. Could there be an environmental equivalent (sort of) of ActBlue?
Kraux Pas
@Brickley Paiste:
Again, I understand. The best response is not necessarily to promote your own grievance narrative.
From my experience, the results aren’t pretty for anyone involved.
Cermet
I know a good bit on nuclear power and thermodynamics and while the Candu is no easy deal, it is realistic – solar isn’t. One can’t use solar for vehicles, jets or other high intensity fuels. Coal and nuclear plants use the exact same cooling systems so the issue of a nuclear plant in the interior is no different than a coal one. So, not an issue. AS for waste, it is a well understood problem as is decommissioning old reactors (has been done both for commercial , research and subs. While not easy, it can be done and is well understood.) As for cost, unlike light water reactors, these are vastly simpler. If we decided to mass produce them in a serious manner (a standardized design frozen like NASA does with probes) the cost would be significantly lower than any current commercial reactor – easily. Sorry, most objections are not serious issues nor is storage – no one needs to store this stuff for 10^5 years; that is nonsense. We, if we survive for another 100 or so years, will develop nuclear fusion and that can easily convert the fission waste into very short lived products that need only a few years of storage to render them safe. I believe there are very, very few options and this one – the heavy water fission plant, is beyond any doubt our best bet.
Rather than throw up nonsense that you have not really studied (except by others that are copying so-called experts (again, with an ax to grind)), do some real research on the subject – not people (even scientist) that also have an ax to grind. For instance, no amerikan trained nuclear reactor engineer can think outside what they are educated in the amerikan way – i.e. sub based light water reactors only (maybe a breeder but that is orders of magnitude more dangerous.) They are far more efficient – end story. The fact these reactors all require massive safety systems, can easily run away and required enriched fuel (costly and not safe) is just a ‘bug’ they live with and why we have no cost effective nuclear power! People who talk of thorium are silly and the facts prove it – there are zero for a good reason. AS for liquid metal reactors (LOLOL); again, trying to use complex light water sub based reactors yet again. Stupid. There is a reason these types of reactors were built and then abandoned – they are even more costly. Facts are facts. The Candu works, is the lowest cost reactor possible, uses the cheapest uranium based fuel and are easy to build with current technology.
Bill Arnold
@Doug R:
I don’t know if there is a local ordinance, but rented a house in Montpelier VT a weekend this last summer and there was no yard engine noise at all; one lonely chainsaw maybe 1/2 mile away. Everybody I saw mowing was using a electric lawnmower. Granted, doing the regular mass-grass-plant-decapitation thing (all grass plants and other naughty plant species should be exactly the same height!) on huge lawns does require power equipment.
Many don’t bother in that area, or cut once or twice a year, sometimes for hay.
trollhattan
@Cermet:
I’ll take issue with solar not providing energy for vehicles. It’s doing so right now. That “grid” thing is amazing!
Brickley Paiste
@Kraux Pas:
Point taken
Time to go clean out the chicken coop anyway
Dan B
@Luthe: Ocean cargo is huge. It has a big carbon footprint. There are solutions. Renewable Energy World has been covering them for years so are a good, but challenging resource. I don’t know how easy it is to do a search on specific topics.
Robert Sneddon
@chopper: You’re ignoring the amount of fossil carbon we’ve already extracted from where it was sequestered underground and burned and dumped into the atmosphere. Biochar is like blockchain, it can do ANYTHING except, well, resequester a few trillion tonnes of atmospheric CO2 at near-zero energy cost in under a century from a standing start.
Dealing with the climate change effects of CO2 in the atmosphere is, at its heart, an energy problem. We’ve enjoyed cheap energy from fossil fuels for centuries but to get the resulting CO2 back out of the atmosphere and resequestered is going to take more energy that we gained from burning it. The Second Law of Thermodynamics is not mocked. That is going to cost us in energy and wealth, it’s so much that talking about money terms is pointless, we’re talking years or decades of world GNP, not just a few measly trillions of dollars. Some folks are still thinking we can do this cheaply. We can’t.
Right now we (as in the planetary “we”) are piddling around just trying to reduce the increase in consumption and combustion of fossil carbon. We’ve not yet got to the point of burning less fossil carbon than the year before, as a third of the world’s population in China, India and Africa industrialises and want what we in the West have been enjoying for centuries. We’re nowhere near a point where infinitesimal amounts of fossil carbon (say, a million tonnes or so worldwide) are burned each day. What we need to be doing is extracting CO2 from the atmosphere at a rate of a billion tonnes a month and converting it to a stable form of carbon and storing it and not burning it again. That way we might stave of a 4 deg C increase in world temperatures by 2100.
That will take energy, a lot of energy, and none of it must come from burning fossil carbon. At the same time we need to eliminate energy poverty everywhere on the planet so that no-one anywhere will ever think that drilling and digging for fossil carbon and burning it will keep the lights on, the sewage plants running, the hospitals functioning, the railways moving goods and people around etc. etc. as it does today.
Philbert
Good ideas all. ++ for women’s education -> birth control. My tub to thump is carbon capture. The next Elon Musk (too bad about this one) should work to develop a renewably-powered CO2 capture system and automate its production. Joint effort by US China India EU, once they admit the horrors that lie ahead. I don’t think the human race has ever faced any such threat since the earlier climate change known as the Ice Ages.
A real big if, is whether science can regain support over bullshit.
Bill Arnold
Another paper from my (optimism) notes, also social sciences focused:
We must accelerate transitions for sustainability and climate change, experts say, paywalled paper Sociotechnical transitions for deep decarbonization (September 22, 2017)
Dan B
@Jay: Thanks for the reminders on reforestation. I read about a lot of the promise and the downsides years ago. I keep wondering if there’s an efficient method to produce biochar with some crop like hemp on marginal or degraded land. Places like India, China, and stretches of Africa sre so arid that one bad choice could produce crop / forest failure and desertification.
The Seattle Art Museum is having a major exhibit from Jodhpur, in the heart of Rajasthan. We visited 15 years ago. I coukd not fathom how people survive there. It’s a desert. A tiny shift in the monsoon would doom millions. We were there in a drought that had turned hundreds of thousands of acres of lakes and tanks into fields of dust. Unreal.
A Ghost To Most
@s: I am preparing for probably a futile and pointless gesture, but I owe some folks at least that much. Counter punch, if it comes to it. I hope not.
r€nato
@Robert Sneddon: this all sounds marvelous and that leads me to question #4 for Cheryl:
4) What is to be done about those whose livelihoods will be threatened by this New World Energy Order? Look how easily Trump demagogued the coal issue with coal miners. Now think about all the folks who make money in the petroleum business – from those who work in the oil fields to the refineries to the corporate offices and the gas station owners and all those retirees who look forward to their dividend checks every quarter from ExxonMobil. My retired father likes his regular dividend checks from Kinder-Morgan very much.
It doesn’t take much imagination to think of a GOP presidential candidate killing all of these best-laid plans by appealing to their fears that the globalist socialist Soros-funded green energy dirty fucking hippies will put them all in the poorhouse. The devil you know etc.
imonlylurking
I have found reddit to be a good source of positive news, oddly enough. I follow r/energy, r/Futurology, and r/Renewable. There are some overlaps, and r/Futurology is not just energy, but there is positive movement on many fronts.
The thing that scares me is ocean acidification. My brain shuts down when I try to think about fixes for that.
burnspbesq
My revised plan for retirement is to buy a couple hundred acres of land along I-81 between Syracuse and Binghamton and get rich growing avocados.
debbie
Some sort of recognition and memorialization of each island as it disappears. They should not be consigned to the dustbin of history.
Robert Sneddon
@Cermet: Most modern Candus use lightly-enriched fuel because they work better. They also use a lot of very expensive heavy water (D2O). Heavy water is expensive to produce since it’s energy-intensive — the Nazis tried to develop heavy-water moderated reactors and the cheapest place they could find to power the separation plants was in occupied Norway which had a lot of hydro power.
I’m not sure but I don’t think anyone’s building new Candus today — the last ones I heard of being completed were some unfinished units in Ontario which were brought into service to replace coal and gas-burning plants. The Saudis, UAE and Russians, all big oil and gas exporters are building more light-water reactors so they can export more of their fossil carbon to other renewables-heavy countries that want to keep their lights on, like Germany.
Breeders are a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist, a shortage of raw minehead uranium production. The engineering in breeders for energy production is a lot harder, there’s more happening in a small volume at elevated temperatures and odd radiochemistry compared to a large-volume steam-kettle light-water reactor which never goes much over 400 deg C anywhere in its structure.
Bill Arnold
@Dan B:
A poke with google scholar shows a bunch of academic work (and there is interesting engineering work as well). Here are a few from 2018:
(html, 29 June 2018)Decarbonization Pathways for International Maritime Transport: A Model-Based Policy Impact Assessment
(html, 19 Apr 2018) CO2 abatement goals for international shipping
Dan B
@Jeremy: I’ve gone through the grieving phase “Angry because we’re doomed!” I pulled through remembering how AIDS seemed like the end of the world and I only lost 36 friends and lovers. The miracle came out of nowhere but I lost a friend and a boyfriend who were too sick for the cure. We endured Reagan and Phyllis Schlafley, and Christianists who wanted us rounded up and exterminated.
We fought back and survived. We changed hearts and minds when it seemed impossible. Time to rinse and repeat!
Dan B
@Litlebritdifrnt: I hope for a mashup of Mar a Loco with Waterworld. Its an image! Anyone good with CGI?
Trump waves the new UN report and raves “Why didn’t they tell me about this Chinese plot?”
Bill Arnold
@imonlylurking:
Short term, nope. Hope that diatoms pick up the slack.
Mid-term, carbon sequestration. Either new biotech (sunlight powered) or vast numbers of nuclear powered carbon sequestration engines. Or maybe something better, but there is that pesky second law of thermodynamics problem that @Robert Sneddon mentions, so lots of carbon-neutral energy will be required.
I’ll presume that waiting for many thousands of years is not a viable option for humans.
Robert Sneddon
@r€nato:
My own solution, and I am not saying this entirely sarcastically is to string them all up as a warning to future generations. Declare total war on fossil carbon extraction, exterminate everyone who works in the fossil carbon extraction business. Make it a capital offence to work for Exxon-Mobil and Gazprom and BP and Shell and all the others, bomb every oilwell and gas plant from 10,000 metres up, machine-gun the survivors and plant the soil with salt (or nuclear reactors, my favoured solution).
That’s not going to happen so expect a 4 deg C rise in global temperatures by 2100 instead, along with more impotent Kyoto Protocols and Paris Declarations at irregular intervals.
chopper
@Robert Sneddon:
no i’m not. and i’m not talking about biochar. i’m talking about forest and prairie soils. point is that trees aren’t the only carbon sink in forests.
Ken Shabby
My link didn’t work.
James Redford, Happening. HBO, last December.
Clean energy. Solar, wind, Other. Republicans. Local level. DoD folk, scientists, people this blog would normally glance at and sniff. Folks like you and me. Folks.
I hold with Cheryl. Negativity is a loser.
There’s an example in this doco of a local Republican mayor. Kind most of us could smell from here, this blog. Great clothes, even better haircut, complete tool and….
He’s on fire because Budget, expenditure, efficiency, cost effectiveness, make a buck, save a buck, my constituents will love my fat ass – all that. He’s excited because….It works. That old school Republican everyone has been despairing about. The numbers tumble and the dollars support it and, on a local level. And, that means he can buy more ties and continue to fantasize about molesting people. Or, not. We win, in event.
That’s ….an ally. Except for the bad clothes and deviant fantasy part.
Two other people; a dude from The Nay-vee and, another dude with a crew cut were happy as h3ll to be at cutting effective, provable edge of this capability.
They’re from sunny climes. And, windy spots. And, once you pass investment, they’re looking at a future that isn’t burning things like f*cking apes in caves.
Nice to see –
James Redford. Go watch it. Cheryl is not an idle optimist.
After decades, I’m about worn slick by all this bullsh1t but, this doco had me sitting up in my chair. After 50 years, a sight for sore eyes. This sh1t ain’t new.
Dan B
@Kraux Pas: Displaced machines rioting! Ha!
Oh, nevermind.. That’s a scary scifi movie.
And the child laborers. Wasn’t there a zombie documentary about them? Something with radiation mutations ir comets?
Sam
@Dan B: loved your comment about the Syrian farmers. We will (are) seeing impacts throughout the Sahel and the Middle East. The Europeans are probably scared to death – a massive wave of refugees from North Africa. We will see these impacts and feel the effects. I read somewhere that 60% of Bangladesh is under water…
Raven Onthill
Could you cover the recommendations of the Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C? I have skimmed the Summary for Policy Makers, and found the language opaque and with extensive references to other documents. Or maybe could we read it, section by section?
Robert Sneddon
@chopper:
Scale. Tens of millions of years of sunlight-powered tree growth (lignin) over large parts of the planetary surface were sequestered underground and converted into fossil fuels. These fuels have been dug up and pumped up and burned and released as CO2 into the atmosphere over the past couple of hundred years. A modern forest represents a few decades of carbon-sinking and it’s limited by space and sunlight, the energy that’s needed to convert atmospheric CO2 into lignin. The further bad news is that fungi and insects have evolved to have a taste for lignin, converting it back into CO2 again over a period of a few decades before it can be sequestered underground. A big forest like the Amazon basin, already full of trees and stuff, it can’t grow much more than a few billion tonnes of timber over a period of thirty or forty years before it’s full up. We add ten billion tonnes of fossil-derived CO2 a year to the atmosphere right now and that rate’s increasing. We need, desperately, to reduce the current amount of CO2 in the atmosphere by something like five trillion tonnes or so before 2100.
TL:DR — reforestation is a neat cheap idea that won’t be more than a spit in a storm in terms of effectiveness but while folks are talking about it we can burn fossil carbon like there’s no tomorrow because there’s a Solution!
Bill Arnold
@Robert Sneddon:
Problem is that the big culprits, US, China, India, Russia (fossil fuel and propaganda superpower) are all-in on national selfishness, and nuclear-armed[0]. India, I don’t understand, and some of China will need to move North into Russia.
[0] Budget geoengineering. Cough.
Robert Sneddon
@jl: The Netherlands agricultural miracle is in part derived from their natural-gas supplies, they heat the greenhouses, power the grow-lights and make fertiliser using the “free” natural-gas under their feet — Google for Groningen gas field sometime, it’s the tenth-largest gas field in the world. Holland has other gas resources as well, including offshore in the North Sea. The bad news is that NG ends up (eventually) as CO2 in the atmosphere.
chopper
@Robert Sneddon:
worldwide, soils contain over 1500 gigatons of organic carbon. many soils worldwide are predicted, thanks to both warming and deforestation, to turn into carbon sources over the next so many decades as soil bacteria start to shift, like mother nature’s gut flora being mostly wiped out by some terrible antibiotic and the equivalent of c. diff taking over.
not all of that carbon gets released of course, but that’s more than twice the amount of carbon in the entire atmosphere. it’s a pretty big fuckin’ deal.
so no, it isn’t a drop in the bucket. climate change isn’t one of those issues where we solve it with ‘this one weird trick’. and no, ignoring soil mechanics and the absolute ruination of our natural ecosystems doesn’t help.
Bill Arnold
@Robert Sneddon:
Yeah. Not many people talk about that aspect of the problem. That lignase evolution was a big deal. Although I see some argument: Delayed fungal evolution did not cause the Paleozoic peak in coal production (1 March 2016)
chris
@Ken Shabby: To post a link in comments:
Click the link button
Hit backspace to remove the default https
Paste your link
And bob’s your uncle
Kayla Rudbek
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??: the first patent on artificial photosynthesis was issued in the 1960s. If there was a single rational organization anywhere on earth, we’d have moonshot programs going on 1) carbon dioxide capture 2) large-scale electrolysis of the captured carbon dioxide [run with carbon-zero sources of power] 3) photochemical conversion of CO2 into other compounds 4) photoelectrochemical conversion of CO2 into other compounds. Turn the chemical engineers loose, in other words!
chris
Dead thread but way to go, Cheryl! More please.
Dan B
@Cermet: It would be good to have a cost per KW comparison between Solar PV, wind, and Candu. Including the cost curve over the next 10 and 20 years. To be fair battery and other storage technologies should be included for PV.
It seems like it will be difficult for nuclear to keep up with the cost of solar and wind.
And there are firms building hybrid aircraft. Seems out-there but some people are betting real money on it. Battery improvements seem to be key but there are some promising developments.
Ken Shabby
Thank you, Chris.
I’ll get it sorted. There’s not much on this film but, I’ve watched it twice and, try as I might, there are damn few holes. Well. Except for folks on town councils, state legislature, federal legislature and, Jesus, who wanted us to destroy thing so that we could be happy.
1390Bananas
Longtime lurker here, happy to see someone treating this as a problem with a solution instead of inevitable impending doom.
The thing I haven’t seen mentioned already that I’d like to see more discussion of is geoengineering. Even if by some chance we (as a species) manage to get our shit together on emissions control, there’s a reasonable chance we’ve already triggered enough feedback effects to make it a moot point. At that point our choices become 1) re-enact the Mad Max movies, and 2) find a way to reverse some of the warming, even temporarily, to buy us time to pull carbon out of the atmosphere.
Most of the popular-sci coverage of geoengineering seems to treat it as either a magic bullet or sheer insanity that should never even be mentioned. I’d like to see some real talk about the feasibility, challenges, and tradeoffs of things like solar radiation management. Seems like we should be doing the R&D work to try to understand this stuff now, rather than when it’s (more of) an emergency, but if people are it’s not getting a lot of press coverage.
Dan B
@Bill Arnold: Thanks for the resources on ocean cargo solutions. I believe I’ve suddenly got weeks of reading material, counting all the other resources you’ve posted.
It’s an exciting transition period, especially if we make it in time.
jl
@Robert Sneddon: I was comparing indoor agriculture to outdoor agriculture. Outdoor agriculture uses a lot of fossil fuels in the US for truck farming crops and many fruits, Indoor farming comes out better compared to outdoor, from what I have read, both in US and Netherlands.
Dan B
@Robert Sneddon: Thanks for your info on Candu reactors. There always seem to be issues with “power too cheap to meter”.
And the idea we’ll crack fusion seems good for people who have purchased a bridge in Brooklyn. Centralized power seems like looking to the past.
Robert Sneddon
@chopper:
That’s wonderful news! Ah, scale. Oops.
That’s 1.5 teratonnes, 1.5 x 10^12 tonnes of “organic” soil carbon, right? And we’re putting about 2 x 10^10 tonnes of fossil-derived CO2 into the atmosphere each year so for this soil carbon uptake to keep up with the extra load we’d need to double the amount of soil carbon in a bit under 60 years by some (undefined) process. That doesn’t reduce the existing CO2 load, of course, it just keeps us on a 4 deg C temp increase by 2100, coincidentally just after the doubling of soil carbon worldwide has been achieved. Wonderful! We can all go home now, everything’s going to be A-OK after all.
Dan B
@Bill Arnold: Beijing and New Delhi residents will be accustomed to the smoke as the Siberian permafrost burns. I don’t know what they’ll make of the polynas.
Robert Sneddon
@jl: The Netherlands “agricultural miracle” is that it produces massive amounts of food, flowers etc. for its growing area and the limited amount of sunlight it gets each year — Holland is at about 52 deg N, well to the north of the Great Lakes. It’s warmer than southern Canada but the main driver for plant growth is sunlight and photosynthesis which can be compensated for using growlights powered by electricity from cheap natural gas. If and when the gas runs out the agricultural miracle stops, until then the miracle requires large CO2 emissions.
Robert Sneddon
@Dan B:
Don’t know about that since no-one’s got fusion working yet, at least to produce power to meter or not. The saying was about fusion, back in the 50s when early experiments suggested fusion would be easy and hence cheap, usually based on magnetic-mirror plasma systems which worked well enough at low plasma temps and densities. This didn’t happen because magnetic-mirror containment, well, doesn’t contain once the densities and energies rise. The Stellarator and the less-complex tokamak don’t have ends to leak so they took over but it was still an uphill task. ITER will be make-or-break for controlled fusion as in can it be achieved at all on terrestrial scales.
The anti-nuclear brigade repurposed the “too cheap to meter” statement and claimed it was said definitively about fission reactors because an untruth in a good cause is always tolerable and will be forgiven by other True Believers.
A simplified light-water reactor design with most of the redundant super-ultra-hyper-mega-safety systems discarded could be churned out by the thousands to take over from fossil fuels, keep the lights on, end energy poverty worldwide and start to decarbonise the atmosphere by brute force. It wouldn’t be cheap though, in effect we’d be paying the overdue bills for the past couple of hundred years of freeloading off the fossil fuel under our feet.
Jay
@Robert Sneddon:
With the right agricultural practices and “crop” mixes, farmers can not only earn income, but “grow” healthy topsoil at a rate of up to 6 inches a year. When I bought this farm/ranch 20 years ago, it had 4 inches of worn out topsoil. It now has 4 feet of topsoil in the shallow places and 6 feet in the meadows.
Steve in the ATL
Jesus, this thread took a turn to the hypertechnical! So, uh, go Red Sox!
jl
@Robert Sneddon:
@Jay:
I am comparing outdoor agriculture to indoor agriculture, anyplace. Growing food outdoors uses lots of fossil fuels for field work, and to move the water to where the crops are. The new developments that are profitable and savings lots of resources COMPARED to outdoor agriculture, just happen to be natural gas guzzling Netherlands. I don’t understand what is so hard about my point.
Ruckus
@burnspbesq:
Ahhhh, that seems, risky? Ridiculous? Fanciful? Tongue in cheek?
We used to grow avocados. My late uncle invested in them. I mean I get the concept, go where it’s warm……
Jay
@jl:
wasn’t commenting on indoor vs outdoor.
There are a large amount of agricultural practices, that negate a lot of the harm of common industrial agricultural practices.
Peruvian pit houses and cloud nets for example.
Insulated single pane, south slope, in ground, passively heated greenhouses, irrigated by netting and tubing designed to catch ground fogs and clouds, pushed up over the Andes, harvest their water and gravity feed the water to the greenhouses.
I have 4 inground greenhouses, constructed of straw bales and double layered poly, that allow me to grow winter crops, ( beets, spinach, carrots, kale, cabbage, parsnips, sometimes peas) in winter. 4 feet of snow and -25c. Overnight temps are 12c rising to as much as 20c on a sunny day with no wind.
J R in WV
Thank cleek and major major for the pie filter. and brickhead paste for his original humor about pie. And all the other folks talking with brickhead about pie humor.
I’m old. We work to elect smart people, and try to ignore the evangelistic moronie population that has conjured up the absurd rapture myths, which are not mentioned in the vast majority of their holy goat herd mythologie publication. But I don’t expect to see the end of the world in my lifetime, ’cause I’m old.
MobiusKlein
@chopper: I bike behind Vespas and their ilk.
If you had to breath that crap while exerting yourself, you would ban them before tea time.
Bill Arnold
@J R in WV:
I linked to 7 relevant resources in replies to BP, sigh. (And his reply was a thank you.)
Wondering now how many people are wrapped in such filter bubbles.
Uncle Cosmo
@Cermet:
Horseshit. The main reason no one’s funding molten salt reactors like LFTR is that the current “nuclear industry” now supports itself with fuel element fabrication, and MSRs would break their last remaining rice bowl. Check out the most-touted “Generation IV” designs – they all use solid fuel elements that must be fabricated.
The biggest issues with LFTR are essentially engineering a lot easier & less pricey to solve than goosing a tokamak. We USAns used to be good at that but no more, I guess. In 20 years US power companies will be buying LFTRs from the Chinese or the Indians while our radioactive buggy-whip manufacturers will go bankrupt anyway.
way2blue
I use the term’ rapid climate change’ as I find it’s something everyone has experienced, so seems to resonate in a less abstract way. Plus then I can emphasize how ecosystems are becoming off kilter, with food sources displaced from the animals that depend on them, et cetera.
Would love to see a graphic that breaks down how Americans consume energy, including the military and other gov’t agencies. So I can grasp where to focus change. e.g., does ‘buying local’, rather than say buying off-season blueberries from Chile make a difference in ship traffic, and is ship transportation factored into energy consumption estimates.
Robert Sneddon
@MobiusKlein: Weirdly enough the most efficient internal combustion engines on the planet are two-stroke cycle designs, marine diesels. They don’t have to be polluting but if they have variable output then that’s one of the results. It’s possible to make two-stroke engines a lot more efficient and less polluting than the older carburettor-based models but four-strokes are better in that regard and easier to make to fit within today’s more stringent fuel consumption and emission restrictions.
Robert Sneddon
@Uncle Cosmo: Thorium-fuelled reactors are actually uranium breeder reactors since thorium (Th-232) isn’t fissionable. The much-touted but never built and operated LFTR design requires a very hot (700 deg C plus) very dense core with very high neutron density to breed the thorium in the fuel stream up into U-233 which can then be fissioned for energy and more neutrons. Most thorium reactor advocates don’t like to admit that, indeed some will claim LFTRs are not “breeders”, they’re “converters”.
Most breeder reactors (meant for power generation and fuel surplus production) built until now have broken in odd ways, mostly due to the hot dense core designs and have been shut down, to be decommissioned. The few that worked as intended turned out to be un-economical to operate even after thee teething problems were solved. It might be we can do better today after fifty years of learning but it’s a leap in the dark, engineering-wise and steam-kettle-simple light-water reactors with cheap fixed fuel elements actually work today, producing affordable non-carbon electricity on demand and not just when the weather or the sun co-operates.
Robert Sneddon
@way2blue:
The last figure I saw suggested the US consumption of fossil fuels resulted in about 16 tonnes of CO2 per capita per annum. In comparison the French are about 7 tonnes and Germany about 11 or 12 tonnes. The US consumes more coal (about 2.3 tonnes per annum per capita) than the Germans (2.1 tonnes per annum per capita) or even China (about the same as Germany) but a big US consumer fossil fuel contribution is air travel — USians think nothing of flying several thousand kilometres round trip for Thanksgiving visits to family, for example, burning a half a tonne of kerosene to get there and back.
Robert Sneddon
@Jay:
So you get sun in winter? You must be in the Tropics, or close to it. I repeat, the Netherlands are at a latitude above the Great Lakes. In midwinter the sun is above the horizon for about 6 hours total, usually obscured by overcast and with a steep energy-absorbing slant through atmosphere. Total insolation will be on the order of 100W/m^2 or less at noon dropping off rapidly either side, and it’s insolation that drives plant growth. Warmth is necessary too but stuff won’t grow if the sun don’t shine. The Dutch replace that sunlight with natural-gas powered growlights to create the agricultural miracle that greenhouse fans love while they studiously ignore the extra CO2 it adds to the world’s atmosphere.
Oh, by the way don’t forget to thank Exxon-Mobil for the raw fossil-carbon feedstocks that made your double-layered poly greenhouse possible.
The Pale Scot
@Mnemosyne:
The problem is that with these people world disaster is a feature not a bug. Over 30% of Americans believe it’s likely that they will meet Jesus in their life time. The Abrahamic religions seem to have a tendency to render their adherents a bit insane.
chopper
@MobiusKlein:
i’ve been riding scooters for 20 years, you’re telling me i’ve never breathed the stuff? lolz.
chopper
@Robert Sneddon:
i’m not saying that reforestation is our only option or that it has to take care of everything on it’s own. you seem to be looking at this through a lens of ‘we can choose only one option’. the positive effect of slowing and stopping fossil carbon emissions is blunted when deforestation coupled with existing warming causes soils to start becoming net carbon emitters; we just watch as one carbon source gets slowly replaced by another.
let’s assume that the world comes together and in five years decides to transition off of fossil carbon in a really tight time frame, say 10 years. that means by the time we hit peak atmospheric CO2, around the 2030’s, we’ll still be looking at at least 450ppm CO2 levels (that ignores other gases). given the roughly 50-year lag time in the forcing effect of CO2, that means that temperatures keep going up until roughly 2083, which means another two degrees C will be already baked in. which will likely lead to some really bad land-based feedbacks.
at which point scientists will point out “unfortunately, even though we cut off carbon emissions, the increase in temperatures started feedbacks in the soil due in part to poor land use practices and we’re still boned”. and people will be all “well why didn’t we do something about land use 50 years ago? why didn’t we do something about soils??” and the scientists will be all “for some stupid reason society felt that the only thing we could focus on was eliminating fossil fuels”.
if you want to eliminate fossil carbon emissions, other things also need to be done to make sure that it has the positive effect it’s supposed to have.
The Pale Scot
@Bill Arnold:
Developing some sort of catalyst to split CO2 would be nice. IMHO materials science is the most important discipline for the times. We are so close to to creating seemingly magic molecules, Memory metals, room temp. superconductors etc.
The Pale Scot
Also, BJ is using over 300% of my CPU if I don’t turn off Javascript
chopper
@Jay:
exactly. think about how much soil was lost in the dust bowl (and how much we’ll lose when the next one comes). poor land use policies and practices, combined with the gutting of our prairies in the first place, eliminated a huge carbon sink, and in fact added a great deal of carbon to the atmosphere. just look at the huge amounts of forest and prairie that have been eliminated in america alone in the last 200 years, it’s astounding.
Kayla Rudbek
@The Pale Scot: As I said above: the first patent on artificial photosynthesis was US 3368954 issued in 1968. The next one was US 3573184 issued in 1971.
There is currently R&D in this area but IMAO there’s not nearly enough. Maybe Cheryl could discuss the artificial leaf technology in a future blog post?