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Anderson and company have been saying the same things for years now, if you look at the OP it's basically verbatim Klein's article including the comparison to the Soviet collapse.
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# ? Oct 29, 2013 22:02 |
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# ? May 30, 2024 12:04 |
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QUILT_MONSTER_420 fucked around with this message at 19:34 on Nov 28, 2013 |
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# ? Oct 29, 2013 23:58 |
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That makes sense, Anderson is one of the few climate scholars out there who's really pushing in the literature for realistic policy assessments and targeting of wealthy first world energy demand. Interesting to see the bit on Anderson's blog about Joe Romm. Party flacks like Romm will be (continue to be, maybe) a huge obstacle for the green movement.
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# ? Oct 30, 2013 00:57 |
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I'm having trouble reconciling some of the things that Klein is talking about in that excerpt with some of my preexisting knowledge. Specifically the incompatibility of GDP growth with climate mitigation. What about the Zero Carbon Australia plan? http://bze.org.au/zero-carbon-australia-2020 That's a ten year plan I believe, so you should be able to figure a 10 percent per year reduction in emissions. That plan also seems to promote GDP growth to me rather than hinder it. The questions I'm left with are is the BZE plan for Australia incompatible with capitalism because: 1.) The energy expended to implement the plan would offset the gains in the short term, violating our carbon budget, and/or 2.) The current capitalist system would never accept this plan because entrenched interests will prevent it?
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# ? Oct 30, 2013 17:29 |
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It's not a bad idea to drop Anderson a line and ask him what he thinks of the plan, whether it's feasible and so on. He's almost certainly aware of it. He's got twitter, too.
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# ? Oct 30, 2013 19:07 |
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TehSaurus posted:I'm having trouble reconciling some of the things that Klein is talking about in that excerpt with some of my preexisting knowledge. Specifically the incompatibility of GDP growth with climate mitigation. What about the Zero Carbon Australia plan? http://bze.org.au/zero-carbon-australia-2020 That's a ten year plan I believe, so you should be able to figure a 10 percent per year reduction in emissions. That plan also seems to promote GDP growth to me rather than hinder it. I think the basis of that (posited) incompatibility is more straightforward (or at least, broader) than that. I've seen the argument come up in a number of different forms from environmentalists, peak oil theorists etc., and I believe it does have some merit. In your basic macroecon classes you're taught that GDPpc growth comes from technological progress, efficiency improvements and so on. However, according to the "no growth" argument, most of that 'technological progress' has been the result of continually expanding use of fossil fuels. The industrial society we live in is entirely dependent on energy. To grow the economy, we need more energy. If we are significantly reducing our carbon emissions, it's going to be hard enough to even replace the energy we are using, let alone add more. I should point out that it's true that in a theoretical post-carbon ecotopia there would still be technological and efficiency improvements, and that would increase GDPpc. So I guess the key thing in this is that if we're ever to seriously cut our emissions (oh, and save the planet), we need to re-orient away from economic growth being the central goal of virtually all political policy, because otherwise it just isn't going to happen. Cutting carbon emissions quickly enough is going to require some hits to growth. And really, is GDP growth a particularly good measure of "progress"? I've not read the Zero Carbon Australia plan yet, think I'll read it later, I'm interested to see how feasible it is.
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# ? Oct 30, 2013 19:36 |
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The New Black posted:I think the basis of that (posited) incompatibility is more straightforward (or at least, broader) than that. I've seen the argument come up in a number of different forms from environmentalists, peak oil theorists etc., and I believe it does have some merit. The BZE plan is really thorough and aims to prove that the barriers to a zero carbon economy are neither technological or economic. You should take a look at it, it's pretty great. I'm sure I heard of it in a similar thread to this one somewhere in D&D. I believe it conflicts directly with a bunch of the statements you make here. I would certainly be interested in what Anderson thinks about it, but am I really going to get on Twitter for that? A quick google didn't turn anything up so I don't think he's addressed it previously. Maybe I will contact him through his website or something.
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# ? Oct 30, 2013 20:45 |
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In the steady state thinking one of the main things is 'carrying capacity'. Herman Daley specifically left the World Bank (supposedly) because he kept including economy contextualized by carrying capacity, finite thermodynamic system, 'environment' and though there was agreement all such references were systematically deleted from World Bank reports. The concept of GDP as a measure usually functions in the absence of considerations or measurement of carrying capacity, as I understand (or misunderstand) it.
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# ? Oct 30, 2013 22:22 |
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It's worth noting that Anderson's claims are much more narrow and merely indicate that many sub-2 deg C change emissions reductions paths are deemed to be incompatible with growth by economists. That's more a statement about current economic theory and its inability to deal with rapid economic state shifts than it is one about thermoeconomic limits to growth, although I generally agree with Klein.
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# ? Oct 30, 2013 23:13 |
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TehSaurus posted:The BZE plan is really thorough and aims to prove that the barriers to a zero carbon economy are neither technological or economic. You should take a look at it, it's pretty great. I'm sure I heard of it in a similar thread to this one somewhere in D&D. I believe it conflicts directly with a bunch of the statements you make here. The position against the compatibility of growth and climate mitigation isn't based on the idea that renewable energy doesn't exist or doesn't work or whatever. Abstractly, growth in present-day society is the outcome of a relentless process of ongoing profit-seeking, and if you shut off any particular source of profits, the marginally next-preferred investments logically tend to be less profitable, at least in the short term. The amount of growth necessary to keep capitalist economies in good health and the amount of profitable activity that has to be curtailed to avoid 2C are both very quantitatively large, and it's not unreasonable that many economists who look at the problem feel there's no solution that manages both simultaneously. In any case I'm not that interested in the argument, since it's somewhat easier and more obvious to make the case that political power in capitalist societies is structured such that popular interference with profit maximization is systematically excluded from public arenas, and whether the accompanying economic system is or is not technically capable of something that is politically impossible is sort of a philosophical discussion.
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# ? Oct 31, 2013 14:29 |
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TehSaurus posted:The BZE plan is really thorough and aims to prove that the barriers to a zero carbon economy are neither technological or economic. You should take a look at it, it's pretty great. I'm sure I heard of it in a similar thread to this one somewhere in D&D. I believe it conflicts directly with a bunch of the statements you make here. As I said, I hadn't at that time read the zero carbon plan and was merely outlining the broad idea of the "emissions reduction is incompatible with growth" argument. Having read their stationary energy plan, I'm now in a position to respond to it. The plan doesn't really have much to say about macroeconomics. That's not really a problem for me, I'm just pointing out that they mainly compare costs of their plan with business as usual, showing that it is affordable (though I'd bet it would end up costing more, if only because major infrastructure projects always do) and projecting a break even point in the 2040s. They do discuss broader perspectives briefly in the "the ZCA2020 Stationary Energy Plan investment in the Context of other Economic Activity" section, but again, only by contrasting expenditure with other forms in the economy. I don't see any consideration of opportunity costs. The higher energy prices are going to reduce household and business spending elsewhere, even if the rise is relatively affordable. Bear in mind too that the workforce and productive capacity used in the construction won't come only from currently unused capacity. It will be at least partly drawn from other more productive (in GDP terms) activity. Further, consider the impact on the companies currently making money from carbon emissions. These kinds of effects are going to tend to depress GDP growth. Certainly, the government subsidies or public spending required to implement the plan will have a stimulative effect. My position is that without broader macroeconomic modelling it's hard to say what the net effect on growth will be in the short term. All that said, if I were running Australia I'd start the plan tomorrow, because as I said I think it's more important than some arbitrary measure of economic activity. e: oh, the previous dude already said most of that better.
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# ? Oct 31, 2013 16:23 |
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QUILT_MONSTER_420 fucked around with this message at 19:34 on Nov 28, 2013 |
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# ? Oct 31, 2013 23:46 |
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Not that I don't think this is a serious problem, but this is where we need to really think carefully about the way we do projections of climate and economy without taking into account their interactions:quote:It said the combined GDP of the 67 countries classed as facing "high" or "extreme" risks was projected to nearly triple from $15 trillion to $44 trillion by 2025 -- meaning nearly a third of the global economy would be coming under increasing threat from extreme climate-related events. It seems less plausible that the GDP of these 67 countries is going to triple in ten years if they're also facing high to extreme risks from climate change.
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# ? Nov 1, 2013 00:24 |
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Doesn't that depend on whether those events occur within the next ten years though? I could see them tripling GDP in the short term without getting hit by anything serious enough to knock it back, and even if they do then repairing the damage will still contribute to GDP (possibly paid for through borrowing on the national account). I think the wider question is whether GDP is actually a useful measure for this kind of thing
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# ? Nov 1, 2013 01:16 |
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QUILT_MONSTER_420 fucked around with this message at 19:34 on Nov 28, 2013 |
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# ? Nov 1, 2013 01:33 |
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Paper Mac posted:Not that I don't think this is a serious problem, but this is where we need to really think carefully about the way we do projections of climate and economy without taking into account their interactions: this allusion meant fucked around with this message at 01:39 on Nov 1, 2013 |
# ? Nov 1, 2013 01:36 |
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It'd be hard to cite to that map as an argument against fighting climate change without looking like a giant racist rear end in a top hat. "Look, we all know no one give a poo poo about africa." They'll do it anyway of course.
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# ? Nov 1, 2013 01:37 |
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QUILT_MONSTER_420 fucked around with this message at 19:34 on Nov 28, 2013 |
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# ? Nov 1, 2013 01:46 |
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QUILT_MONSTER_420 fucked around with this message at 19:34 on Nov 28, 2013 |
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# ? Nov 1, 2013 02:43 |
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this allusion meant and The New Black posted:Hey thanks guys, these are exactly the kind of comments I was hoping to find. I guess in answer to my original question it's basically 'yes.' These kinds of plans are simply too disruptive and energy expensive to resolve the climate crisis without being disruptive to the political system, the climate, or both. QUILT_MONSTER_420 posted:Encouraging commentary. This is actually pretty encouraging. We've started a garden in our rented yard and I feel like that for the amount of cost involved it can't have been that efficient from a carbon perspective, but it has been educational at least. At least it's a symbol that I'm trying to be constructive and maybe it'll encourage my neighbors or something.
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# ? Nov 4, 2013 21:30 |
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TehSaurus posted:We've started a garden in our rented yard and I feel like that for the amount of cost involved it can't have been that efficient from a carbon perspective, but it has been educational at least. What did you do that you figure was carbon-intensive?
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# ? Nov 4, 2013 21:36 |
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I just have to guess based on what we spent. First the soil is terrible so we decided on a raised bed garden. Lots of people manage to do this with reclaimed lumber but we couldn't get our hands on anything suitable so we made them out of framing lumber. About 192 linear feet of 2x8 lumber along with some 4x4 and a bunch of deck screws. Since our own dirt is terrible we bought like three or four yards of soil from a local garden vendor. Then, since we are in Texas water efficiency was a big concern for us, so I decided to go with a subsurface irrigation as according to the ag extension sites I visited you wind up needing about half as much water that way. By itself that was easily a couple hundred in plastic and tools. All of this for about 64 square feet of garden. Granted it should be really productive once I learn how to manage all the native pests, but it was quite expensive, and I just sort of equate money with carbon footprint.
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# ? Nov 5, 2013 20:07 |
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TehSaurus posted:I just have to guess based on what we spent. First the soil is terrible so we decided on a raised bed garden. Lots of people manage to do this with reclaimed lumber but we couldn't get our hands on anything suitable so we made them out of framing lumber. About 192 linear feet of 2x8 lumber along with some 4x4 and a bunch of deck screws. Since our own dirt is terrible we bought like three or four yards of soil from a local garden vendor. Then, since we are in Texas water efficiency was a big concern for us, so I decided to go with a subsurface irrigation as according to the ag extension sites I visited you wind up needing about half as much water that way. By itself that was easily a couple hundred in plastic and tools. Oh hey, where in Texas are you? I did the same for my folks, and they live in North Texas. Ma grew up as a subsistence farmer, and has been gardening in Texas for the past decade or so with me and my sister as her help, so if you have any questions, feel free to PM me, I know (or know who to ask) for growing in North Texas. Protip: Corn is not worth it.
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# ? Nov 5, 2013 21:47 |
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Claverjoe posted:Oh hey, where in Texas are you? I did the same for my folks, and they live in North Texas. Ma grew up as a subsistence farmer, and has been gardening in Texas for the past decade or so with me and my sister as her help, so if you have any questions, feel free to PM me, I know (or know who to ask) for growing in North Texas. At the risk of derailing - we're in Central Texas, so probably a pretty similar climate. I'm curious to see if my winter vegetables are going to do anything. I've got some beets, onions, carrots and the like. They all seem to be taking off very slowly, so I'm not terribly optimistic. For content is anyone actually paying attention to AR5? It seems to have come and gone without any policy makers addressing it beyond mentioning that it is a thing that happened.
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# ? Nov 7, 2013 15:06 |
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TehSaurus posted:For content is anyone actually paying attention to AR5? It seems to have come and gone without any policy makers addressing it beyond mentioning that it is a thing that happened. I think what we have now is pretty much the level of action we get in exchange for unanimous scientific consensus of the planet's fate. For greater action, we don't need better projections or more facts; we need something else.
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# ? Nov 7, 2013 16:32 |
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TehSaurus posted:At the risk of derailing - we're in Central Texas, so probably a pretty similar climate. I'm curious to see if my winter vegetables are going to do anything. I've got some beets, onions, carrots and the like. They all seem to be taking off very slowly, so I'm not terribly optimistic. They should all grow well enough, just remember that they aren't going to be mutant huge like the ones in the supermarkets, which is probably coloring your perception. I know kale runs riot here in the winter. But yeah, good on you for starting a garden. We (Americans) will probably get more action once we see a reversed trend in worldwide food production. I see that as a huge "ohshitoshitoshit" watermark that will get everybody to wake up. Of course that means way past too late, but hey it'll be something.
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# ? Nov 7, 2013 20:08 |
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QUILT_MONSTER_420 fucked around with this message at 19:35 on Nov 28, 2013 |
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# ? Nov 9, 2013 06:24 |
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QUILT_MONSTER_420 posted:I don't know how much of a potential "real bad thing" this is for national climate policies vs. just your run of the mill erosion of capacity to regulate, but I've had both Canadians and Euros get all about how gruesome and antidemocratic these measures are: It sounds like all of that could be solved by "Sovereign immunity, bitches".
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# ? Nov 9, 2013 15:24 |
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computer parts posted:It sounds like all of that could be solved by "Sovereign immunity, bitches". ...no. It couldn't. Or rather, it won't. Looking at recent history regarding the EEA, for example, governments have tended to fold rather than insist on their sovereignty in these matters. Trade agreements quickly become too vital to simply scrap; if Norway, for instance, left the EEA today, the export sector would be basically obliterated and the economy would take a huge and noticable hit. No politician is willing to deliberately unleash those kinds of consequences. These free-trade agreements have to be met with vociferous opposition before they're implemented or they end up further hollowing out national sovereignty, handing power directly to international capital. Most European countries are nowhere near strong enough to even attempt to oppose an agreement like this.
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# ? Nov 9, 2013 18:02 |
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The bad news;- Solar activity playing a minimal role in global warming, research suggests http://phys.org/news/2013-11-solar-minimal-role-global.html We're not going to get better by waiting for flares to go away or any dumb poo poo like that. The good news;- Ozone pact helped cool the planet, study reports http://phys.org/news/2013-11-ozone-pact-cool-planet.html But we can demonstrate that doing poo poo about polution actually works.
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# ? Nov 11, 2013 04:24 |
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duck monster posted:Ozone pact helped cool the planet, study reports duck monster posted:"Paradoxically, the recent decrease in warming, presented by global warming sceptics as proof that humankind cannot affect the climate system, is shown to have a direct human origin," according to the paper, published in the journal Nature Geoscience. This is as close as it gets to "gently caress you, idiots" in the pages of a Nature journal..
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# ? Nov 11, 2013 04:41 |
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Remember Naderev Saño? He's the Philippines' delegate for climate conferences, and you may know him from such impassioned speeches as this one at Doha 2012: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpI-PD6weG8 Well, he made another speech in Poland yesterday where, in the wake of the devastation wrought by typhoon Haiyan, he announced his intention to go on hunger strike until something gets done: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yITq61XedI The Guardian has an abridged transcript of the whole statement (the video above is cut even further): quote:It was barely 11 months ago in Doha when my delegation appealed to the world to open our eyes to the stark reality that we face, as we confronted a catastrophic storm that resulted in the costliest disaster in Philippine history. Less than a year after, we could not imagine that a disaster much bigger would come. I don't really know what to say about this... this is the desperation of the countries we're destroying TACD fucked around with this message at 16:13 on Nov 12, 2013 |
# ? Nov 12, 2013 16:08 |
Woof, that is heart-wrenching to read, I can't imagine having heard him deliver it live. Have we discussed Mike Davis' Late Victorian Holocausts in here? His coverage of the ENSO oscillation is excellent and he does a great job of connecting climatological events to economic impacts in understandable ways. I may have brought this up in here before, sorry to be repetitive if so. Highly recommended read, in any case.
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# ? Nov 12, 2013 19:53 |
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mdemone posted:Have we discussed Mike Davis' Late Victorian Holocausts in here? His coverage of the ENSO oscillation is excellent and he does a great job of connecting climatological events to economic impacts in understandable ways. I may have brought this up in here before, sorry to be repetitive if so. Highly recommended read, in any case. I don't know, but if you have some comments on the contents, I'd definitely appreciate it.
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# ? Nov 12, 2013 21:54 |
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Late Victorian Holocausts is a really useful book for informing how we think about climate impacts in a lot of ways. A familiarity with the history of what happened the last time most of the world was 1) controlled by an empire that opened the markets of subject nations, and 2) was beset by extreme droughts and subsequent crop failures, is pretty much indispensable for approaching the question of how those circumstances might play out in the future. The discussion of the role of ideology in the British Raj is particularly helpful, I feel, in establishing some starting points for discussing the role of modern market fundamentalism in interpreting the significance of the agricultural consequences of climatic disturbance and in producing the social consequences thereof. Some points in the book that are especially pertinent in my mind include the effect of market pressures and policies in reducing the resilience that previous social systems had developed, the destruction of the remaining ability of the environment to provide for human needs by the acts of desperate farmers made unable to survive sustainably, and the tendency for marginalization and hunger in ordinary times to pass by with relatively little notice, but to produce extraordinary catastrophe in times of unusual stress, which are inevitable in the variability of natural systems. For the history enthusiasts, the book provides a very good account of how these events decisively sealed the victory of Europe over Asia when the latter had long had the "advantage" by several metrics. It did take me a really long time to get through the section that just talks about the ENSO phenomenon. There's only a single paragraph talking about speculative effects that global warming might have on the ENSO cycle, but in conjunction with the rest of the book, what is predicted about the range of climate variability as warming continues, and what most of us might know about the discussed countries today (such as their medium-term water usage sustainability issues), it is rather concerning.
this allusion meant fucked around with this message at 07:10 on Nov 13, 2013 |
# ? Nov 13, 2013 07:08 |
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QUILT_MONSTER_420 fucked around with this message at 19:35 on Nov 28, 2013 |
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# ? Nov 13, 2013 21:55 |
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So this is sort of weird, we hear that the slowed rise in surface temperatures is partly because more heat is going into the oceans, and also that the effect of the Montreal Protocol on minor GHGs should have produced something around that magnitude, and now apparently the rise in surface temperatures has not slowed down much at all once gaps in the data are plugged? So does that mean the actual level of heat entering the system over this period is considerably higher than would have been predicted? Or is all the reporting on these disparate explanations somewhat exaggerating the effect of each on the data? They all appear to be mechanisms that certainly must be in play to some extent, but if each can "explain" statistically speaking most of the discrepancy, does that leave us with a discrepancy in the other direction to be explained?
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# ? Nov 14, 2013 03:16 |
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QUILT_MONSTER_420 posted:"Whhopsy doddle" I mean, I guess that's possible, but it's a pretty extreme result.
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# ? Nov 14, 2013 03:26 |
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The problems with HadCRUT aren't limited to geographical surface covered, the realclimate article explicitly addresses some of the other corrections they made.
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# ? Nov 14, 2013 04:35 |
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# ? May 30, 2024 12:04 |
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Paper Mac posted:The problems with HadCRUT aren't limited to geographical surface covered, the realclimate article explicitly addresses some of the other corrections they made.
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# ? Nov 14, 2013 04:59 |