Climate Change thread: tl; dr - We are so screwed

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Climate Change thread: tl; dr - We are so screwed

Spazzle: Jul 5, 2003

lapse posted:

I was going through my old poo poo and found a cool chart that shows the relative scale of different power sources and what we use the energy on.

Might have found this on SA originally, I don't remember. It's not actually labeled, but based on the size of the "nuclear" bar this appears to be US-only.

Also gives you an idea of why the auto fleet is one of the most effective targets for reducing emissions.

Those come from here. https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/

# ? Jul 28, 2012 15:26

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# ? May 30, 2024 03:52

NinjaPete: Nov 14, 2004; Hail to the speaker,
Hail to the knower,
Joy to him who has understood,
Delight to those who have listened.
- HÃ¡vamÃ¡l

Any reaction to the Watts paper?

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/07/29/press-release-2/#more-68286

I know nothing about climate change but I have relatives who are crowing about this on Facebook.

# ? Jul 30, 2012 22:55

duck monster: Dec 15, 2004

NinjaPete posted:

Any reaction to the Watts paper?

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/07/29/press-release-2/#more-68286

I know nothing about climate change but I have relatives who are crowing about this on Facebook.

It was written by watts. He's a notorious fraud. There isn't a need to read it or respond to it because you can determine in advance that its wrong because its written by him.

His job is to confuse people about science, just like con artists confuse people about money or phishers confuse people about identity. And he's good at it. But you dont have to fall for it if you dont wrong. Critical reasoning demands that known dishonest peoples truth claims be treated with the suspicion their malevolence deserves.

At the point when the climate denialists are so drat out of answers they start releasing papers saying that meteorologists are lying about the current temperature, its really obvious that they are essentially acknowledging defeat and can only convince the very stupidest.

Ignore that poo poo with prejudice.

duck monster fucked around with this message at 00:38 on Jul 31, 2012

# ? Jul 30, 2012 23:04

Fuck You And Diebold: Sep 15, 2004; by Athanatos

lapse posted:

I was going through my old poo poo and found a cool chart that shows the relative scale of different power sources and what we use the energy on.

Might have found this on SA originally, I don't remember. It's not actually labeled, but based on the size of the "nuclear" bar this appears to be US-only.

Also gives you an idea of why the auto fleet is one of the most effective targets for reducing emissions.

This is US only, it is ~~taken from~~ appears in the book Beyond Fossil Fools. It focuses on how nuclear power can be a very good, and probably necessary, component of replacing fossil fuels. I had to read it for a political science class (my professor edited the book), and got to talk to the author. It makes a great argument about how we don't even need to look to global warming as an argument against the continued use of fossil fuels. The chart is used in a context to explain how recycling can only do so much.

Fake edit: that chart makes an appearance in the book anyways.

# ? Jul 30, 2012 23:20

Ansar Santa: Jul 12, 2012

Today I was out biking just beyond a construction area on the edge of the suburbs, and I got caught in a storm. The wind whipped up the dust and in effect caused a miniature dust storm. Had to take shelter in the woods of the ravine.

Anyway, afterward I had a disturbing thought. If that could happen in a place where there has been heavy rain for the past month, and only one hot, rainless day to dry out the soil, what will happen in the US Midwest? Seems like the conditions are right for a new dust bowl.

# ? Jul 31, 2012 03:07

Yiggy: Sep 12, 2004; "Imagination is not enough. You have to have knowledge too, and an experience of the oddity of life."

NYTimes op-ed posted:

The Conversion of a Climate-Change Skeptic

By RICHARD A. MULLER

Berkeley, Calif.

CALL me a converted skeptic. Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I�m now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause.

My total turnaround, in such a short time, is the result of careful and objective analysis by the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, which I founded with my daughter Elizabeth. Our results show that the average temperature of the earth�s land has risen by two and a half degrees Fahrenheit over the past 250 years, including an increase of one and a half degrees over the most recent 50 years. Moreover, it appears likely that essentially all of this increase results from the human emission of greenhouse gases.

These findings are stronger than those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations group that defines the scientific and diplomatic consensus on global warming. In its 2007 report, the I.P.C.C. concluded only that most of the warming of the prior 50 years could be attributed to humans. It was possible, according to the I.P.C.C. consensus statement, that the warming before 1956 could be because of changes in solar activity, and that even a substantial part of the more recent warming could be natural.

Our Berkeley Earth approach used sophisticated statistical methods developed largely by our lead scientist, Robert Rohde, which allowed us to determine earth land temperature much further back in time. We carefully studied issues raised by skeptics: biases from urban heating (we duplicated our results using rural data alone), from data selection (prior groups selected fewer than 20 percent of the available temperature stations; we used virtually 100 percent), from poor station quality (we separately analyzed good stations and poor ones) and from human intervention and data adjustment (our work is completely automated and hands-off). In our papers we demonstrate that none of these potentially troublesome effects unduly biased our conclusions.

The historic temperature pattern we observed has abrupt dips that match the emissions of known explosive volcanic eruptions; the particulates from such events reflect sunlight, make for beautiful sunsets and cool the earth�s surface for a few years. There are small, rapid variations attributable to El Ni�o and other ocean currents such as the Gulf Stream; because of such oscillations, the �flattening� of the recent temperature rise that some people claim is not, in our view, statistically significant. What has caused the gradual but systematic rise of two and a half degrees? We tried fitting the shape to simple math functions (exponentials, polynomials), to solar activity and even to rising functions like world population. By far the best match was to the record of atmospheric carbon dioxide, measured from atmospheric samples and air trapped in polar ice.

Just as important, our record is long enough that we could search for the fingerprint of solar variability, based on the historical record of sunspots. That fingerprint is absent. Although the I.P.C.C. allowed for the possibility that variations in sunlight could have ended the �Little Ice Age,� a period of cooling from the 14th century to about 1850, our data argues strongly that the temperature rise of the past 250 years cannot be attributed to solar changes. This conclusion is, in retrospect, not too surprising; we�ve learned from satellite measurements that solar activity changes the brightness of the sun very little.

How definite is the attribution to humans? The carbon dioxide curve gives a better match than anything else we�ve tried. Its magnitude is consistent with the calculated greenhouse effect � extra warming from trapped heat radiation. These facts don�t prove causality and they shouldn�t end skepticism, but they raise the bar: to be considered seriously, an alternative explanation must match the data at least as well as carbon dioxide does. Adding methane, a second greenhouse gas, to our analysis doesn�t change the results. Moreover, our analysis does not depend on large, complex global climate models, the huge computer programs that are notorious for their hidden assumptions and adjustable parameters. Our result is based simply on the close agreement between the shape of the observed temperature rise and the known greenhouse gas increase.

It�s a scientist�s duty to be properly skeptical. I still find that much, if not most, of what is attributed to climate change is speculative, exaggerated or just plain wrong. I�ve analyzed some of the most alarmist claims, and my skepticism about them hasn�t changed.

Hurricane Katrina cannot be attributed to global warming. The number of hurricanes hitting the United States has been going down, not up; likewise for intense tornadoes. Polar bears aren�t dying from receding ice, and the Himalayan glaciers aren�t going to melt by 2035. And it�s possible that we are currently no warmer than we were a thousand years ago, during the �Medieval Warm Period� or �Medieval Optimum,� an interval of warm conditions known from historical records and indirect evidence like tree rings. And the recent warm spell in the United States happens to be more than offset by cooling elsewhere in the world, so its link to �global� warming is weaker than tenuous.

The careful analysis by our team is laid out in five scientific papers now online at BerkeleyEarth.org. That site also shows our chart of temperature from 1753 to the present, with its clear fingerprint of volcanoes and carbon dioxide, but containing no component that matches solar activity. Four of our papers have undergone extensive scrutiny by the scientific community, and the newest, a paper with the analysis of the human component, is now posted, along with the data and computer programs used. Such transparency is the heart of the scientific method; if you find our conclusions implausible, tell us of any errors of data or analysis.

What about the future? As carbon dioxide emissions increase, the temperature should continue to rise. I expect the rate of warming to proceed at a steady pace, about one and a half degrees over land in the next 50 years, less if the oceans are included. But if China continues its rapid economic growth (it has averaged 10 percent per year over the last 20 years) and its vast use of coal (it typically adds one new gigawatt per month), then that same warming could take place in less than 20 years.

Science is that narrow realm of knowledge that, in principle, is universally accepted. I embarked on this analysis to answer questions that, to my mind, had not been answered. I hope that the Berkeley Earth analysis will help settle the scientific debate regarding global warming and its human causes. Then comes the difficult part: agreeing across the political and diplomatic spectrum about what can and should be done.

Richard A. Muller, a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, and a former MacArthur Foundation fellow, is the author, most recently, of �Energy for Future Presidents: The Science Behind the Headlines.�

link

# ? Jul 31, 2012 03:09

UP AND ADAM: Jan 24, 2007; by Pragmatica

I don't understand skepticism of climate change. There are a grip of alarming graphs that all center around the industrial revolution. Fossil fuel usage, emissions, and none of it requires much serious scientific inquiry. Where do they think these gasses go? Have they witnessed any out-of-control vegetation feeding on the excess CO2? Note, I can't stand reading anything put forth by any "serious" anti-climate change organizations or individuals. It's so wretched and lacking in perspective.

# ? Jul 31, 2012 03:25

TyroneGoldstein: Mar 30, 2005

UP AND ADAM posted:

I don't understand skepticism of climate change. There are a grip of alarming graphs that all center around the industrial revolution. Fossil fuel usage, emissions, and none of it requires much serious scientific inquiry. Where do they think these gasses go? Have they witnessed any out-of-control vegetation feeding on the excess CO2? Note, I can't stand reading anything put forth by any "serious" anti-climate change organizations or individuals. It's so wretched and lacking in perspective.

Climate change and how we fix/cope with it is one of those issues that's so huge that its "somebody else's problem."

Kind of like poverty, why people abuse drugs, world hunger, world water scarcity...etc.

The problem is so big that the human mind would rather shut it out and/or rationalize it away than actually think about it.

Mechanism to guard against panic.

# ? Jul 31, 2012 04:11

Bilal X: Aug 20, 2007

UP AND ADAM posted:

I don't understand skepticism of climate change. There are a grip of alarming graphs that all center around the industrial revolution. Fossil fuel usage, emissions, and none of it requires much serious scientific inquiry. Where do they think these gasses go? Have they witnessed any out-of-control vegetation feeding on the excess CO2? Note, I can't stand reading anything put forth by any "serious" anti-climate change organizations or individuals. It's so wretched and lacking in perspective.

Naomi Klein had a really interesting article in the Nation about the motivations of deniers - it's not like the Koch brothers or fossil-fuel lobbyists are too dumb to understand the science, but fighting it is basically the most rational business decision in the short term.

quote:

The deniers did not decide that climate change is a left-wing conspiracy by uncovering some covert socialist plot. They arrived at this analysis by taking a hard look at what it would take to lower global emissions as drastically and as rapidly as climate science demands. They have concluded that this can be done only by radically reordering our economic and political systems in ways antithetical to their �free market� belief system. As British blogger and Heartland regular James Delingpole has pointed out, �Modern environmentalism successfully advances many of the causes dear to the left: redistribution of wealth, higher taxes, greater government intervention, regulation.� Heartland�s Bast puts it even more bluntly: For the left, �Climate change is the perfect thing�. It�s the reason why we should do everything [the left] wanted to do anyway.�

Here�s my inconvenient truth: they aren�t wrong. Before I go any further, let me be absolutely clear: as 97 percent of the world�s climate scientists attest, the Heartlanders are completely wrong about the science. The heat-trapping gases released into the atmosphere through the burning of fossil fuels are already causing temperatures to increase. If we are not on a radically different energy path by the end of this decade, we are in for a world of pain.

But when it comes to the real-world consequences of those scientific findings, specifically the kind of deep changes required not just to our energy consumption but to the underlying logic of our economic system, the crowd gathered at the Marriott Hotel may be in considerably less denial than a lot of professional environmentalists, the ones who paint a picture of global warming Armageddon, then assure us that we can avert catastrophe by buying �green� products and creating clever markets in pollution.

http://www.thenation.com/article/164497/capitalism-vs-climate

# ? Jul 31, 2012 05:11

duck monster: Dec 15, 2004

UP AND ADAM posted:

I don't understand skepticism of climate change. There are a grip of alarming graphs that all center around the industrial revolution. Fossil fuel usage, emissions, and none of it requires much serious scientific inquiry. Where do they think these gasses go? Have they witnessed any out-of-control vegetation feeding on the excess CO2? Note, I can't stand reading anything put forth by any "serious" anti-climate change organizations or individuals. It's so wretched and lacking in perspective.

Yeah its puzzling. Scientists where warning about the greenhouse effect in the 1870s. Thats how long we've known about CO2 and infrared absorbsion, and how long scientists have been worrying about it. Right back then, 140 years ago, scientists where actually demonstrating in laboratories poo poo heating up when pumped full of CO2. In fact its something gardeners have been exploiting ever since. Ask any dope grower, first thing you do is grab a CO2 canister and raise the CO2 in your hydro setup and you get lower heating costs and better yields.

To effectively deny it requires some serious overhauls of physics to account for exactly why all this CO2 isn't causing climate change, as well as accounting for some other reason for things heating up. And since the solar flare poo poo has been more or less debunked we're back to a massive question for the denialists, (1) What is the mechanism thats stopping CO2 from heating poo poo up in the atmosphere and (2) What IS the mechanism thats heating poo poo up in the atmosphere.

It involves some crazy leaps of faith to answer 1 and 2 and still sleep at night, in my view.

# ? Jul 31, 2012 06:00

ewe2: Jul 1, 2009

Re the Watts-Muller hoohaa: Crikey reports that neither scientist had their studies peer-reviewed and went publicity-hunting before even publishing. Our own village idiot Andrew Bolt even claims Muller was never a sceptic. Hilarity ensues.

# ? Jul 31, 2012 07:22

Necc0: Jun 30, 2005; by exmarx; Broken Cake

eh4 posted:

Re the Watts-Muller hoohaa: Crikey reports that neither scientist had their studies peer-reviewed and went publicity-hunting before even publishing. Our own village idiot Andrew Bolt even claims Muller was never a sceptic. Hilarity ensues.

All that's left now is to dig up skeptic's public support for Muller when he first started.

# ? Jul 31, 2012 07:46

duck monster: Dec 15, 2004

eh4 posted:

Re the Watts-Muller hoohaa: Crikey reports that neither scientist had their studies peer-reviewed and went publicity-hunting before even publishing. Our own village idiot Andrew Bolt even claims Muller was never a sceptic. Hilarity ensues.

I'm happy to let this poo poo play out. Mullers loving network of amateur thermometer molesters have provided so much crank-grief to the climate sciences over the last decade that having the denialists tear them to shred provides so many own-goals for the denialists its sort of awesome to see it happen, because its that poo poo filled bedrock that so much of watt's horseshit is based on.

This is shark on shark action here folks and even the sea shephards couldn't bail these motherfuckers out of this mess.

Mr Muller, thankyou for your honesty in returning to science. I'm afraid however you have made a very nasty bed to lie in now that your knife wielding loons are out for you too. The one thing a gangster hates more than an opponent, its a turncoat.

# ? Jul 31, 2012 07:52

Paper Mac: Mar 2, 2007; lives in a paper shack

Yiggy posted:

Hurricane Katrina cannot be attributed to global warming. The number of hurricanes hitting the United States has been going down, not up; likewise for intense tornadoes. Polar bears aren�t dying from receding ice, and the Himalayan glaciers aren�t going to melt by 2035. And it�s possible that we are currently no warmer than we were a thousand years ago, during the �Medieval Warm Period� or �Medieval Optimum,� an interval of warm conditions known from historical records and indirect evidence like tree rings. And the recent warm spell in the United States happens to be more than offset by cooling elsewhere in the world, so its link to �global� warming is weaker than tenuous.

For a guy who just ate a big ol loving crow, he's pretty sure of these claims. You'd figure after realising that he's been totally wrong for years he'd think that maybe the thousands of other scientists who've been telling him that actually know something about their field of study?

# ? Jul 31, 2012 16:35

Yiggy: Sep 12, 2004; "Imagination is not enough. You have to have knowledge too, and an experience of the oddity of life."

Yeah, his bristling on that bothered me too. He seems to be a rigorous and honest scientist, but he only trusts his own data and that seems a touch arrogant to me. Also, when he was on Maddow last night right at the end he made a little pitch for needing to expand natural gas which was setting off all sorts of bells in my head. He was defending it as the cheap option to move away from coal which is way dirtier, but carbon is carbon man. I don't see how you can sit there telling me how astonished you are about the fit between CO2 levels and global warming and then start pushing for natural gas instead of nuclear.

I'm glad he recanted on this hang up he had, but I think he's still missing the bigger picture.

Yiggy fucked around with this message at 16:44 on Jul 31, 2012

# ? Jul 31, 2012 16:42

duck monster: Dec 15, 2004

Hmm. A wholesale move away from coal to natural gas *WOULD* improve the situation, but its hard to know without doing the sum whether we are talking about a negligible or substantial improvement. We'd still be making GBS threads carbon into the atmosphere however and the problem would still exist. Its a band-aid over a gangrenous wound really.

I'm sort of hoping muller is getting some insights over just how dishonest and vicious the campaign against climate science is , now that his old goons are now attacking him, causing him to rethink some of these positions.

For now muller is in the "wait and see" category of reformed pseudoscience peddlers, in my view.

# ? Aug 1, 2012 08:33

FAUXTON: Jun 2, 2005; Can't post for 2 hours!

duck monster posted:

Hmm. A wholesale move away from coal to natural gas *WOULD* improve the situation, but its hard to know without doing the sum whether we are talking about a negligible or substantial improvement. We'd still be making GBS threads carbon into the atmosphere however and the problem would still exist. Its a band-aid over a gangrenous wound really.

I'm sort of hoping muller is getting some insights over just how dishonest and vicious the campaign against climate science is , now that his old goons are now attacking him, causing him to rethink some of these positions.

For now muller is in the "wait and see" category of reformed pseudoscience peddlers, in my view.

take on it is that it's a big plot engineered by the gas lobby to make gas extraction (fracking) seem like a positive thing. What better place to start than a big name in the denialist sphere having a 'come to Jesus' moment and telling everyone within reach that yes AGW is real and the thing we need to do NOW NOW NOW is frack all the gas out of the ground.

# ? Aug 1, 2012 09:18

TheFuglyStik: Mar 7, 2003; Attention-starved & smugly condescending, the hipster has been deemed by
top scientists as:
"The self-important, unemployable clowns of the modern age."

The Entire Universe posted:

My take on it is that it's a big plot engineered by the gas lobby to make gas extraction (fracking) seem like a positive thing. What better place to start than a big name in the denialist sphere having a 'come to Jesus' moment and telling everyone within reach that yes AGW is real and the thing we need to do NOW NOW NOW is frack all the gas out of the ground.

It's not difficult at all to believe his funding source switched from the coal industry to the natural gas racket. Lower CO2 emissions was just a minor bullet point for the natural gas folks until the past few years, and now they're on this big green push about it. Based on my personal experience with them, I wouldn't call the numerous folks I know from that industry environmentalists by any stretch of the imagination. But hell if they're not blabbering on about that bullet point now.

I did get a kick out of warm winters tanking the natural gas market in '08, though. :ironicat:

# ? Aug 1, 2012 15:24

zero alpha: Feb 18, 2012; by Y Kant Ozma Post

Sorry if I missed this in the past 15 pages, but what does everyone make of this? http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/08/01/us-climate-carbon-idUSBRE87014Z20120801
The headline seems like it will get spread around, with the bolded parts ignored. And the albedo changes and other feedback loops will probably counteract this quite a bit.

quote:

Oceans and land have more than doubled the amount of greenhouse gases they absorb since 1960 in new evidence that nature is helping to brake global warming, a study showed on Wednesday. Even though we have done very little to decrease our emissions, the Earth continues to lend us a helping hand," lead author Ashley Ballantyne of the University of Colorado told Reuters.

Carbon soaked up from the atmosphere by the seas and by plants and soil on land rose to an estimated 5 billion metric tons (1.1023 tons) in 2010 from 2.4 billion in 1960, according to the findings by his team of U.S.-based scientists in the journal Nature. ...

The report said: "Several recent studies suggest that rates of carbon uptake by the land and ocean have remained constant or declined in recent decades. Other work, however, has called into question the reported decline. "As of 2010 there is no empirical evidence that carbon uptake has started to diminish on the global scale."

While the uptake by the oceans and land has doubled, human emissions have quadrupled in the past 50 years. China, the United States, the European Union and India are top emitters. Le Quere, also director of the Tyndall Center in Britain, said the main point of controversy was how far nature's "sinks", like the oceans and forests, would keep on soaking up carbon.

But she said the new study "doesn't go very far" towards answering the question of when nature would be saturated. In a warmer world, changes in ocean chemistry or faster rotting of plants might stop overall carbon absorption. When that happens, heat-trapping emissions of CO2 to the atmosphere would stay there, accelerating warming.

Average world temperatures have risen by 0.8 degree Celsius (1.4 F) since the Industrial Revolution. The warmest 13 years since records began in the mid-19th century have been in the past 15, according to United Nations data. Ballantyne said his findings focused on the rising uptake by the oceans and the land. Other recent studies "suggest that sinks will become saturated within the coming century, maybe in the next 30 to 50 years," he said.

And there were signs of big oscillations in carbon uptake by nature in the past 20 years, perhaps linked to an eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991 and a strong El Nino warming in the Pacific Ocean in 1998, the study said.Ballantyne suggested the continued high rate of absorption could be a sign that some areas yet to be studied in detail, such as the Arctic, may be taking up more carbon. In the Arctic, summer sea ice is shrinking and permafrost is thawing.

zero alpha fucked around with this message at 00:39 on Aug 2, 2012

# ? Aug 2, 2012 00:36

Uranium Phoenix: Jun 20, 2007; Boom.

zero alpha posted:

Sorry if I missed this in the past 15 pages, but what does everyone make of this? http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/08/01/us-climate-carbon-idUSBRE87014Z20120801
The headline seems like it will get spread around, with the bolded parts ignored. And the albedo changes and other feedback loops will probably counteract this quite a bit.

Deniers will cherry pick text as they always do. As long as there is either a ideological or financial incentive to deny reality, it doesn't matter how much evidence you present to them.

The results of this study don't seem very surprising to me. As the ocean and atmosphere mix, the ocean absorbs basically a set percent of air. If that air has higher concentrations of CO2, then, yeah, ocean uptake of CO2 is going to increase.

The big problem though is the second part you've bolded: at a certain point, the ocean gets saturated with CO2. Then, suddenly, this huge carbon sink disappears, and warming accelerates. Meanwhile, as CO2 gets absorbed into the ocean, ocean acidity rises accelerating the ecological crisis there. Nevermind the rest of it, that the ocean is absorbing more CO2 than previous studies thought should be cause for alarm all by itself. Fish stocks, coral reefs, etc are already in distress--this only will speed up extinctions in the ocean.

# ? Aug 2, 2012 01:29

ANIME AKBAR: Jan 25, 2007; afu~

Saying "oh look the oceans are absorbing CO2 from the atmosphere isn't that great" is equivalent to saying "oh look the rivers are carrying away all the benzene from that chemical plant, how great."

# ? Aug 2, 2012 12:57

TheFuglyStik: Mar 7, 2003; Attention-starved & smugly condescending, the hipster has been deemed by
top scientists as:
"The self-important, unemployable clowns of the modern age."

ANIME AKBAR posted:

Saying "oh look the oceans are absorbing CO2 from the atmosphere isn't that great" is equivalent to saying "oh look the rivers are carrying away all the benzene from that chemical plant, how great."

This line of reasoning is more common than you would think with industrial interests. "The mine runoff will be carried away by rainfall and whisked out of Appalachia! :haw:

" is something the coal industry tries to pull with strip and mountaintop removal mining. Nevermind that the same runoff is poisoning wells and the waterways everywhere downstream.

I also recall this reasoning with the dispersant during the BP spill.

# ? Aug 2, 2012 16:12

karthun: Nov 16, 2006; I forgot to post my food for USPOL Thanksgiving but that's okay too!

Yiggy posted:

Yeah, his bristling on that bothered me too. He seems to be a rigorous and honest scientist, but he only trusts his own data and that seems a touch arrogant to me. Also, when he was on Maddow last night right at the end he made a little pitch for needing to expand natural gas which was setting off all sorts of bells in my head. He was defending it as the cheap option to move away from coal which is way dirtier, but carbon is carbon man. I don't see how you can sit there telling me how astonished you are about the fit between CO2 levels and global warming and then start pushing for natural gas instead of nuclear.

I'm glad he recanted on this hang up he had, but I think he's still missing the bigger picture.

I have absolutely no problem converting every single coal power plant to natural gas and encouraging developing countries to be building natural gas over coal over the very short term. Eventually I would like to see every natural gas plant replaced with nuclear but we need to have a seriously multiyear adult talk with the American people to address the stupidity with NIMBY. As a reminder it took three years for SA to go from "Nuclear power is unsafe and unstable and ATOMZ" and "a single gram of plutonium could kill all life on earth" to "Nuclear power is the only way of actually reducing the atmospheric CO2 levels on earth."

Also, it was Dr Muller's Physics for Future Presidents that made the Nuclear argument much easier for many people on SA. So lets give the man some credit here.

# ? Aug 3, 2012 06:17

SirPablo: May 1, 2004; Pillbug

Seems there is little concern for the impact of the oceans taking up all that carbon.

# ? Aug 3, 2012 07:15

Fuck You And Diebold: Sep 15, 2004; by Athanatos

zero alpha posted:

Sorry if I missed this in the past 15 pages, but what does everyone make of this? http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/08/01/us-climate-carbon-idUSBRE87014Z20120801
The headline seems like it will get spread around, with the bolded parts ignored. And the albedo changes and other feedback loops will probably counteract this quite a bit.

Ehh, there is already pushback against this with all the ocean acidification stuff that is happening. We've known that the ocean has been sequestering large amounts of CO2 for a while now, same with land vegetation. This just means that when those finite sequestration banks are full it will get that much worse that much faster. Not actually seeing much new in that article though, besides maybe the specific numbers being moved around a bit.

# ? Aug 3, 2012 07:45

duck monster: Dec 15, 2004

SirPablo posted:

Seems there is little concern for the impact of the oceans taking up all that carbon.

Ocean change scares me a lot more than climate change does. On some level, the quacks are right, we've had nasty climate change before, and we'll have it again. Truth is, we're almost certainly not going to venus the planet, though we could make it rather unpleasant.

However I have no idea what the impact of destroying the ocean and making GBS threads up the Ph is, but drat it I dont like the idea of peak fish. Thats mass starvation armagedon styles and best I can tell going to be one of the earlier problems we face.

As far as I'm concerned the ocean is the centerpiece of how the planet works, and if we gently caress that up, we're doomed

# ? Aug 3, 2012 17:59

Paper Mac: Mar 2, 2007; lives in a paper shack

duck monster posted:

However I have no idea what the impact of destroying the ocean and making GBS threads up the Ph is, but drat it I dont like the idea of peak fish.

That boat's gone and sailed, I think. A friend sent me this a little while ago:

# ? Aug 3, 2012 20:49

a lovely poster: Aug 5, 2011; by Pipski

Don't worry, most of the fish we eat are well on their way to extinction. With any luck they won't have to suffer through ocean acidification.

I've also seen a composite image of like 20-30 graphs with the fish we eat and they are already at fractions of what they used to be and are headed to zero. Don't remember where I saw it but that film gives you a pretty good overview of where we're at, which is pretty much hosed.

a lovely poster fucked around with this message at 21:27 on Aug 3, 2012

# ? Aug 3, 2012 21:24

Freezer: Apr 20, 2001; The Earth is the cradle of the mind, but one cannot stay in the cradle forever.

I believe fish stocks show better than anything else how we've managed to gently caress up the biosphere good and proper. I mean, yeah, hunting the mammoth and many other ground species to extinction is an achievement of its own, but nearly depleting the ocean has been one of our largest accomplishments.

Edit> Don't really mean to sound pompous, I realize fully that I'm part of the problem. It just saddens me immensely that my hypothetical grandchildren will probably never get to taste salmon, red snapper, etc.

Freezer fucked around with this message at 21:49 on Aug 3, 2012

# ? Aug 3, 2012 21:43

a lovely poster: Aug 5, 2011; by Pipski

Freezer posted:

I believe fish stocks show better than anything else how we've managed to gently caress up the biosphere good and proper. I mean, yeah, hunting the mammoth and many other ground species to extinction is an achievement of its own, but nearly depleting the ocean has been one of our largest accomplishments.

Let's be honest, eradicating most of the megafauna off the face of the Earth is probably a bigger accomplishment than what we've done to fish stocks at this point. The difference is that all the mammoths are already gone and we're getting to personally experience the depletion of fish stocks. That being said, the fact that it took thousands of years to hunt megafauna to extinction and we're eradicating most fish stocks in under 100 years is kind of impressive.

Then again, they're both really part of the same event

# ? Aug 3, 2012 21:49

TACD: Oct 27, 2000

a lovely poster posted:

Don't worry, most of the fish we eat are well on their way to extinction. With any luck they won't have to suffer through ocean acidification.

I've also seen a composite image of like 20-30 graphs with the fish we eat and they are already at fractions of what they used to be and are headed to zero. Don't remember where I saw it but that film gives you a pretty good overview of where we're at, which is pretty much hosed.

Turns out that documentary is on Netflix; very depressing. I wish we could move towards scientific advice being given less in the form of sterile reports and couched warnings, and start pointing fingers directly at politicians and demanding an explanation as to why they are actively supporting the destruction of the ecosystem. I just don't share the presenters' optimism that anything will change; it's probably time that somebody starts drafting action plans for 'what do we do after we have eaten literally all of the fish' - either it will get somebody's attention or we'll be getting prepared for the inevitable.

# ? Aug 4, 2012 01:48

Zelthar: Apr 15, 2004

How have those areas been effected with a top predator taken out? Are they capable of sustaining fish farming?

http://www.beluga.is/default.asp?Page=291

When done right it can easy curve the dependency of natural stocks. Maybe moved inland at some point with controlled water stocks and could become a closed system.

# ? Aug 4, 2012 21:34

Loel: Jun 4, 2012; "For the Emperor."

There was a terrible noise.
There was a terrible silence.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/...7350,b=facebook 46 square mile iceberg has broken off and is floating to sea.

"When the iceberg finally does emerge into the Nares Strait, it could pose problems for ships trying to navigate the narrow ocean channel, Muenchow said. "Without a break-up, it is big enough to block the channel as another large ice island did for almost 6 months in 1962," he wrote on July 31."

# ? Aug 5, 2012 06:55

Ccs: Feb 25, 2011

Decided to drop in on this thread to see if anyone has read this recent article from Rolling Stone: http://m.rollingstone.com/entry/view/id/29695/pn/all/p/0/?KSID=e00ec41471d2613b9b44f2a1a7392f8a&ints_viewed=1

It lays out, in incredibly clear (oversimplifying?) terms how close we are to completely screwing ourselves over. I'll quote some choice parts:

quote:

The accord did contain one important number, however. In Paragraph 1, it formally recognized "the scientific view that the increase in global temperature should be below two degrees Celsius." And in the very next paragraph, it declared that "we agree that deep cuts in global emissions are required... so as to hold the increase in global temperature below two degrees Celsius." By insisting on two degrees � about 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit � the accord ratified positions taken earlier in 2009 by the G8, and the so-called Major Economies Forum. It was as conventional as conventional wisdom gets. The number first gained prominence, in fact, at a 1995 climate conference chaired by Angela Merkel, then the German minister of the environment and now the center-right chancellor of the nation.

Some context: So far, we've raised the average temperature of the planet just under 0.8 degrees Celsius, and that has caused far more damage than most scientists expected. (A third of summer sea ice in the Arctic is gone, the oceans are 30 percent more acidic, and since warm air holds more water vapor than cold, the atmosphere over the oceans is a shocking five percent wetter, loading the dice for devastating floods.) Given those impacts, in fact, many scientists have come to think that two degrees is far too lenient a target. "Any number much above one degree involves a gamble," writes Kerry Emanuel of MIT, a leading authority on hurricanes, "and the odds become less and less favorable as the temperature goes up." Thomas Lovejoy, once the World Bank's chief biodiversity adviser, puts it like this: "If we're seeing what we're seeing today at 0.8 degrees Celsius, two degrees is simply too much." NASA scientist James Hansen, the planet's most prominent climatologist, is even blunter: "The target that has been talked about in international negotiations for two degrees of warming is actually a prescription for long-term disaster." At the Copenhagen summit, a spokesman for small island nations warned that many would not survive a two-degree rise: "Some countries will flat-out disappear." When delegates from developing nations were warned that two degrees would represent a "suicide pact" for drought-stricken Africa, many of them started chanting, "One degree, one Africa."

Despite such well-founded misgivings, political realism bested scientific data, and the world settled on the two-degree target � indeed, it's fair to say that it's the only thing about climate change the world has settled on. All told, 167 countries responsible for more than 87 percent of the world's carbon emissions have signed on to the Copenhagen Accord, endorsing the two-degree target. Only a few dozen countries have rejected it, including Kuwait, Nicaragua and Venezuela. Even the United Arab Emirates, which makes most of its money exporting oil and gas, signed on. The official position of planet Earth at the moment is that we can't raise the temperature more than two degrees Celsius � it's become the bottomest of bottom lines. Two degrees.

quote:

Scientists estimate that humans can pour roughly 565 more gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by midcentury and still have some reasonable hope of staying below two degrees. ("Reasonable," in this case, means four chances in five, or somewhat worse odds than playing Russian roulette with a six-shooter.)

This idea of a global "carbon budget" emerged about a decade ago, as scientists began to calculate how much oil, coal and gas could still safely be burned. Since we've increased the Earth's temperature by 0.8 degrees so far, we're currently less than halfway to the target. But, in fact, computer models calculate that even if we stopped increasing CO2 now, the temperature would likely still rise another 0.8 degrees, as previously released carbon continues to overheat the atmosphere. That means we're already three-quarters of the way to the two-degree target.

How good are these numbers? No one is insisting that they're exact, but few dispute that they're generally right. The 565-gigaton figure was derived from one of the most sophisticated computer-simulation models that have been built by climate scientists around the world over the past few decades. And the number is being further confirmed by the latest climate-simulation models currently being finalized in advance of the next report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. "Looking at them as they come in, they hardly differ at all," says Tom Wigley, an Australian climatologist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. "There's maybe 40 models in the data set now, compared with 20 before. But so far the numbers are pretty much the same. We're just fine-tuning things. I don't think much has changed over the last decade." William Collins, a senior climate scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, agrees. "I think the results of this round of simulations will be quite similar," he says. "We're not getting any free lunch from additional understanding of the climate system."

quote:

The Third Number: 2,795 Gigatons

This number is the scariest of all � one that, for the first time, meshes the political and scientific dimensions of our dilemma. It was highlighted last summer by the Carbon Tracker Initiative, a team of London financial analysts and environmentalists who published a report in an effort to educate investors about the possible risks that climate change poses to their stock portfolios. The number describes the amount of carbon already contained in the proven coal and oil and gas reserves of the fossil-fuel companies, and the countries (think Venezuela or Kuwait) that act like fossil-fuel companies. In short, it's the fossil fuel we're currently planning to burn. And the key point is that this new number � 2,795 � is higher than 565. Five times higher.

The Carbon Tracker Initiative � led by James Leaton, an environmentalist who served as an adviser at the accounting giant PricewaterhouseCoopers � combed through proprietary databases to figure out how much oil, gas and coal the world's major energy companies hold in reserve. The numbers aren't perfect � they don't fully reflect the recent surge in unconventional energy sources like shale gas, and they don't accurately reflect coal reserves, which are subject to less stringent reporting requirements than oil and gas. But for the biggest companies, the figures are quite exact: If you burned everything in the inventories of Russia's Lukoil and America's ExxonMobil, for instance, which lead the list of oil and gas companies, each would release more than 40 gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Which is exactly why this new number, 2,795 gigatons, is such a big deal. Think of two degrees Celsius as the legal drinking limit � equivalent to the 0.08 blood-alcohol level below which you might get away with driving home. The 565 gigatons is how many drinks you could have and still stay below that limit � the six beers, say, you might consume in an evening. And the 2,795 gigatons? That's the three 12-packs the fossil-fuel industry has on the table, already opened and ready to pour.

We have five times as much oil and coal and gas on the books as climate scientists think is safe to burn. We'd have to keep 80 percent of those reserves locked away underground to avoid that fate. Before we knew those numbers, our fate had been likely. Now, barring some massive intervention, it seems certain.

It's an incredibly frightening article, and makes any other information about climate change I've read seem positively optimistic. Wondering what you guys think.

# ? Aug 5, 2012 18:12

the kawaiiest: Dec 22, 2010; Uguuuu ~

There is also this: http://www.washingtonpost.com/opini...504a_story.html

It's a pretty scary article by a NASA guy.

quote:

This is not a climate model or a prediction but actual observations of weather events and temperatures that have happened. Our analysis shows that it is no longer enough to say that global warming will increase the likelihood of extreme weather and to repeat the caveat that no individual weather event can be directly linked to climate change. To the contrary, our analysis shows that, for the extreme hot weather of the recent past, there is virtually no explanation other than climate change.

# ? Aug 5, 2012 21:22

Ccs: Feb 25, 2011

Oy. It's all very overwhelming, but I hope these articles keep coming. People need to KNOW about climate change, and put it at the forefront of political issues. Otherwise I guess we can say goodbye to the Holocene and the world as we know it.
Scary as hell.

# ? Aug 6, 2012 02:27

Dubstep Jesus: Jun 27, 2012; by exmarx

That Rolling Stone Article somehow made global warming even more frightening for me.

To echo the thread title, we are so screwed.

# ? Aug 6, 2012 04:46

TACD: Oct 27, 2000

Ccs posted:

It's an incredibly frightening article, and makes any other information about climate change I've read seem positively optimistic. Wondering what you guys think.

That Rolling Stone article posted:

You can have a healthy fossil-fuel balance sheet, or a relatively healthy planet � but now that we know the numbers, it looks like you can't have both.

That right there pretty much sums up the whole issue. The economy as we know it is fundamentally incompatible with a sound environmental strategy. I can't think of any possible scenario that would convince the government and people of the US to radically change their economic expectations essentially overnight, and this is why I have to admit to being pretty fatalistic about all this.

Do what you can to move to somewhere out of the way with a close-knit community and become collectively self-sufficent. I'm open to better ideas.

# ? Aug 6, 2012 13:46

MotoMind: May 5, 2007

Ccs posted:

Decided to drop in on this thread to see if anyone has read this recent article from Rolling Stone: http://m.rollingstone.com/entry/view/id/29695/pn/all/p/0/?KSID=e00ec41471d2613b9b44f2a1a7392f8a&ints_viewed=1

It lays out, in incredibly clear (oversimplifying?) terms how close we are to completely screwing ourselves over. I'll quote some choice parts:

It's an incredibly frightening article, and makes any other information about climate change I've read seem positively optimistic. Wondering what you guys think.

My favorite part, about pricing carbon: "Consumers would get a strong signal to use less fossil fuel � every time they stopped at the pump, they'd be reminded that you don't need a semimilitary vehicle to go to the grocery store."

# ? Aug 6, 2012 16:59

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# ? May 30, 2024 03:52

Queering Wheel: Jun 18, 2011

This last page has made me pour a few stiff drinks. What, if anything, can we do at this point? We've started something that can't possibly be stopped even if we magically make all our emissions vanish tomorrow.

Our only hope at this point seems to be geoengineering. Using aerosols to block sunlight, or iron fertilization to stimulate phytoplankton which absorb CO2, or some sort of machinery that pulls CO2 directly out of the air. All of these things come with environmental and engineering challenges of their own though. I'm expecting that we'll attempt these things when the world finally realizes how hosed we are, but by that point it'll be too late, and/or we'll introduce new problems with any geoengineering attempts.

# ? Aug 7, 2012 06:49

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Climate Change thread: tl; dr - We are so screwed

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