VectorSigma posted:

I would have loved to see the look on Trump's face when his military intelligence briefing told him that climate change is real and that it's a major national security issue and of great strategic importance.

VectorSigma posted:

I would have loved to see the look on Trump's face when his military intelligence briefing told him that climate change is real and that it's a major national security issue and of great strategic importance.

Telephones posted:

This thread has scared me more than anything in my life. Holy. loving. poo poo.

parcs posted:

Telephones posted:

This thread has scared me more than anything in my life. Holy. loving. poo poo.

RasperFat posted:

Not sure if it's been covered yet, but what are the environmental consequences of Trump actually following through on his pet project of a giant wall across the Mexican border?

I mean animal migration and whatever else building a massive physical barrier across 1000s of miles would impact.

I mean hopefully this is just a stupid Trump pipe dream but I'm curious.

Rime posted:

This was what the Northabout found in the Northwest Passage this year: 17 degrees and no ice for the entire trip:



A stark contrast to what Rutherford encountered a mere four years prior. Or what killed two experienced royal navy crews a century ago.

Telephones posted:

This thread has scared me more than anything in my life. Holy. loving. poo poo.

Forever_Peace posted:

Thanks man .

His point that California, New York, Illinois, Colorado, Washington, Oregon, Minnesota and the New England states alone make up roughly half the U.S. economy really resonated with me. These are places where I have roots, know that it would be easy to find allies, and likely would encounter sympathetic local and state politicians.

Paradoxish posted:

Not only that, but they make up about half of the US economy while only having about ~42% of the US population. Take NY and a handful of surrounding states (say NJ, MA, and CT) and you end up with an even bigger economy than CA with a lower population spread out over a smaller land area. In other words, Clinton won the most economically productive parts of the country. There's definitely hope that if Democrats can hold onto local control in these areas that we can potentially offset some of the damage that will be done at the federal level.

Stallion Cabana posted:

is this one of those things that 'States rights' can end up backfiring on Republicans as the blue states with powerful economies turn Green and the Federal government has issues stopping it?

parcs posted:

quote:

We are some 500k km2+ below the record low and over 1mln km2 below 2007 for Nov 9.

quote:

The chart below shows the mean temperature anomaly for these 19 stations in each October since 1971. Remarkably, the 19-station mean temperature in October 2016 was 5.6°C above the 1981-2010 normal and more than 2°C above the 2012 record. October 2016 was the second most anomalous calendar month in the data since 1971 - only January 2016 was warmer relative to normal, at +6.5°C.

parcs posted:

quote:

Looking at recent daily temperature anomalies for the same 19 stations, it is amazing to see that the warmth has become even more pronounced since the end of October; the 19-station mean anomaly reached +9.6°C last Thursday (November 3), and on Friday the coolest of the stations was 5.4°C warmer than normal. In terms of standard deviations, Thursday's mean anomaly was the highest of any day from 1971-present.

quote:

As negotiators headed to Copenhagen in December 2009 to forge a global climate pact, concerned U.S. business leaders and liberal luminaries took out a full-page ad in the New York Times calling for aggressive climate action. In an open letter to President Obama and the U.S. Congress, they declared: “If we fail to act now, it is scientifically irrefutable that there will be catastrophic and irreversible consequences for humanity and our planet.”

One of the signatories of that letter: Donald Trump.

Also signed by Trump’s three adult children, the letter called for passage of U.S. climate legislation, investment in the clean energy economy, and leadership to inspire the rest of the world to join the fight against climate change.

“We support your effort to ensure meaningful and effective measures to control climate change, an immediate challenge facing the United States and the world today,” the letter tells the president and Congress. “Please allow us, the United States of America, to serve in modeling the change necessary to protect humanity and our planet.”

In every conceivable way, the letter contradicts Trump’s current stance on climate policy. On the campaign trail, Trump has said he is “not a big believer in man-made climate change.” Last fall, after Obama described climate change as a major threat to the United States and the world, Trump said that was “one of the dumbest statements I’ve ever heard in politics — in the history of politics as I know it.”

The 2009 ad also argues that a shift to clean energy “will spur economic growth” and “create new energy jobs.” But these days, Trump contends that U.S. action to limit greenhouse gas emissions would put the country at a competitive disadvantage. In 2012, he went so far as to claim: “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.”

The Copenhagen conference that inspired the open letter was part of the same two-decade-long U.N. negotiating process that led to a global climate deal in Paris last year. But whereas in 2009 Trump supported the process via the ad, now he wants to sabotage it, promising recently to “cancel” the Paris accord.

The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.

Trump’s signature on the ad, which ran in the Times on Dec. 6, 2009, stands out on a list dominated by liberal media and business figures, including the founder of Patagonia, the cofounders of Ben & Jerry’s, the president of CREDO Mobile, the executive producer of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, celebrity chef Tom Colicchio, actors Kate Hudson and Adrian Grenier, media heavyweights Martha Stewart and Graydon Carter, and New Age author Deepak Chopra.

None of the signers that Grist interviewed this week could recall who had organized the letter or knew who had asked Trump to sign. The website of the group listed on the ad, businessleaders4environmentalchange.us, is now defunct, and no information was available on who had registered it.

trump-letterBeyond the Times ad, Trump has supported climate causes and expressed concern about global warming at least twice before. In 2014, Trump sent a $5,000 check to Protect Our Winters, a climate advocacy nonprofit for skiers and snowboarders, after a Celebrity Apprentice contestant requested his support.

The second time was when climate change hit The Trump Organization’s bottom line: His golf course in Ireland is threatened by coastal erosion, so the company recently applied for a permit to build a seawall to protect the property from “global warming and its effects.”

Other than that, Trump has been fairly consistent in his views on climate change — or consistent for Trump. Two months after signing the open letter, he told members of the Trump National Golf Club that Al Gore should be stripped of his Nobel Prize because that winter had been cold. “Gore wants us to clean up our factories and plants in order to protect us from global warming, when China and other countries couldn’t care less,” he said. “It would make us totally noncompetitive in the manufacturing world, and China, Japan and India are laughing at America’s stupidity.”

Now that sounds more like the Republican nominee.

yellowyams posted:

I really don't want to loving die, why isn't anyone doing anything? What can I do? Please don't respond to this with a joke, I'm loving terrified and sick to my stomach.

Potato Salad posted:

pm me

yellowyams posted:

I really don't want to loving die, why isn't anyone doing anything? What can I do? Please don't respond to this with a joke, I'm loving terrified and sick to my stomach.

GlyphGryph posted:

Heres what you can do: Be wealthy, head north to decent future climate, live a ways above sea level. Buy lots of property that will be valuable arable land in 40 years just in case currencies do poorly.

Figure out how, when the dust settles, you and your family and descendents can come out on top, and someone else does the dying.

yellowyams posted:

I really don't want to loving die,

quote:

why isn't anyone doing anything?

quote:

What can I do? Please don't respond to this with a joke, I'm loving terrified and sick to my stomach.

zxqv8 posted:

So, become a prepper?

zxqv8 posted:

I've missed chunks of this thread, so apologies if it's been linked prior, but are there real plans in the works for massive scale geoengineering or weather-control solutions to climate change that aren't just the realm of conspiracy theory? I know weather-control has been tainted by that community for a long time, which makes it hard to know if there are any legitimate scientific studies into the possibility of real large scale solutions that don't just involve walking back the amount of ongoing damage we're inflicting.

zxqv8 posted:

I've missed chunks of this thread, so apologies if it's been linked prior, but are there real plans in the works for massive scale geoengineering or weather-control solutions to climate change that aren't just the realm of conspiracy theory? I know weather-control has been tainted by that community for a long time, which makes it hard to know if there are any legitimate scientific studies into the possibility of real large scale solutions that don't just involve walking back the amount of ongoing damage we're inflicting.

quote:

A United Nations body is investigating controversial methods to avert runaway climate change by giving humans the go-ahead to re-engineer the Earth’s oceans and atmosphere.

So-called geoengineering is seen as necessary to achieve the COP21 Paris agreement clinched in December, when 197 countries pledged to keep global temperatures rises below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), according to researchers who produced a report for the UN Convention on Biological Diversity.

“Within the Paris agreement there’s an implicit assumption that there will need to be greenhouse gases removed,” said Phil Williamson, a scientist at the U.K.’s University of East Anglia, who worked on the report. “Climate geoengineering is what countries have agreed to do, although they haven’t really realized that they’ve agreed to do it.”

Large-scale geoengineering may include pouring nutrients into oceans to save coral habitats or spraying tiny particles into the Earth’s atmosphere to reflect sun rays back into space. Geoengineering proposals have been shunned because of their unpredictable consequences on global ecosystems.

The University of East Anglia released a study in February that concluded geoengineering ideas were hazardous, costly or unrealistic. The Convention on Biodiversity has approached geoengineering with caution, seeking to constrain the development unless there is effective global governance, Williamson said.

“Risks of having local imbalances of climate are quite high, we’re not quite sure how it would turn out,” Williamson said. “If you have a climate catastrophe, a flood or storm, the accusation will be that it resulted from your action in the atmosphere.”
Some minds have nevertheless been changing when confronted with the scale of the climate change problems to be solved. Monday’s report makes clear that while geoengineering still entails environmental, political and economic risks, it’s worth considering as long as potentially unintended consequences can be pinpointed and minimized.

Carbon capture and storage is one of the more viable options going forward, Williamson said. Costs for machines that suck carbon dioxide out of the air, known as the direct air capture method, are falling as the technology becomes more efficient. The government of Norway recently committed $160 million to fund projects that will collect pollution from three industrial sites and extend its research program.

World leaders will be meeting in Marrakesh from Nov. 7 to 20 for the COP22 conference to bang out more details on the implementation of climate deal and discuss concrete plans. To date, 87 countries have ratified the Paris agreement, including China, the U.S. and the European Union. It will enter into force Nov. 4.

The geoengineering report will be presented at a UN Convention on Biodiversity Conference in Cancun, Mexico in December.

Stallion Cabana posted:

Geoengineering kind of sounds like

'If we do this we may completely gently caress everything, but if we don't do anything we're totally hosed'.

I can understand being iffy on it when there's still a chance for us to fix it 'normally' and without catastrophic changes like that, but given those graphs from earlier, it seems like it really is 'either we're hosed 100% of the time or we might be hosed on some vague chance we aren't sure of'.

What I'm saying is I support Geoengineering in this logic.

NewForumSoftware posted:

Geoengineering is inevitable, it's just hard to imagine that society will be able to hold itself together alongside the political turmoil that climate change is going to entail. It's worth mentioning that aerosals (pretty much the "best" solution realistic today) would stop cooling the atmosphere effectively instantly the minute we stopped doing it, that sort of "slingshot" effect could end up being more devastating than nature letting its run it course. Basically what I'm saying is enjoy the ride because it's happening regardless.

TildeATH posted:

That's the comically wrong jet stream guy, right?

Please tell me this is some kind of comically wrong graph.

Because, poo poo, man, I liked polar bears.

Gamma Nerd posted:

And anyways, pulling out of Paris will have severe diplomatic consequences.

Fansy posted:

Can we talk about denialists on the other side for a moment, "NTHE" facebook support groups and 2030 doomsday quacks like Guy McPherson - who does a lot of self promotion for a guy who only has a decade or so to live.

They're doing the exact same harm deniers do, getting people to do nothing, but they target those on the left who would otherwise be very helpful.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_McPherson