Orange Sunshine posted:

There are forums and threads all over the internet full of space exploration fans who are preaching the necessity of colonizing other planets. These people are convinced that it will not be all that difficult to establish a permanent human presence on Mars, and that will we be able to terraform it in some fashion.

Meanwhile, in climate change discussions, everyone is convinced that the human race will die out if the Earth warms up by 5 degrees.

Paradoxish posted:

This is a global problem, not just a US one. That said, if what you're saying is actually true (and I don't believe it is) then we are completely hosed because we definitely do not have time to wait. It doesn't matter how optimistic or pessimistic you are, there is literally no valid, evidence based position where it's okay to sit around and wait for a couple of decades. We will blow through our carbon budget in that time and be forced to resign ourselves to increasingly horrific outcomes both in terms of long term consequences and the drastic mitigation strategies that we'll be forced to employ.

Paradoxish posted:

Waiting for the olds to die is never, ever a useful approach for any problem. It doesn't work, and in this specific instance we won't even really be dealing with the same problem by then.

Nocturtle posted:

People's brains get less flexible as they age and they become less likely to adopt new beliefs, it happens.

Orange Sunshine posted:

There are forums and threads all over the internet full of space exploration fans who are preaching the necessity of colonizing other planets. These people are convinced that it will not be all that difficult to establish a permanent human presence on Mars, and that will we be able to terraform it in some fashion.

Meanwhile, in climate change discussions, everyone is convinced that the human race will die out if the Earth warms up by 5 degrees.

I'd like to see these two groups meet up and talk. "We can live on a sterile ball of rock with no atmosphere or magnetic field" and "If the delicate balance on earth is disrupted we're all going to die" should go together like potassium and water.

self unaware posted:

You think people deny climate change because they lack brain flexibility? Seems a bit... bullshit imo

The Washington Post posted:

Two years ago, former NASA climate scientist James Hansen and a number of colleagues laid out a dire scenario in which
gigantic pulses of fresh water from melting glaciers could upend the circulation of the oceans, leading to a world of fast-rising
seas and even superstorms.

Hansen’s scenario was based on a computer simulation, not hard data from the real world, and met with skepticism from a
number of other climate scientists. But now, a new oceanographic study appears to have confirmed one aspect of this picture —
in its early stages, at least.

The new research, based on ocean measurements off the coast of East Antarctica, shows that melting Antarctic glaciers are
indeed freshening the ocean around them. And this, in turn, is blocking a process in which cold and salty ocean water sinks
below the sea surface in winter, forming “the densest water on the Earth,” in the words of study lead author Alessandro
Silvano, a researcher with the University of Tasmania in Hobart.

This Antarctic bottom water has stopped forming in two key regions of Antarctica, the research shows — the West Antarctic
coast and the coast around the enormous Totten glacier in East Antarctica.

These are two of Antarctica’s fastest-melting regions, and no wonder: When cold surface water no longer sinks into the depths,
a deeper layer of warm ocean water can travel across the continental shelf and reach the bases of glaciers, retaining its heat as
the cold waters remain above. This warmer water then rapidly melts the glaciers and the large floating ice shelves connected to
them.

In other words, the melting of Antarctica’s glaciers appears to be triggering a “feedback” loop in which that melting, through its
effect on the oceans, triggers still more melting. The melting water stratifies the ocean column, with cold fresh water trapped at
the surface and warmer water sitting below. Then, the lower layer melts glaciers and creates still more melt water — not to
mention rising seas as glaciers lose mass.

“What we found is not only a modeling study but is something that we observed in the real ocean,” said Silvano, who conducted
the research in Science Advances with colleagues from several other institutions in Australia and Japan. “Our study shows for
the first time actual evidence of this mechanism. Our study shows that it is already happening.”

Hansen said that “this study provides a nice small-scale example of processes that we talk about in our paper.”
“On the large-scale issue, it is too early to say how these feedback processes will play out, based on empirical evidence,” Hansen
said by email. “If we stay on business-as-usual [greenhouse gas] emissions rates, so that global warming continues to increase,
I expect that the freshwater injection rate will increase (mainly via ice faster ice shelf breakup and underwater melt) and sea ice
area will increase. This experiment will be playing out over the next years and decades.”

According to Matthew Long, an oceanographer at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the study “is consistent with a
large body of existing literature that shows warming and freshening of the deep ocean in the southern hemisphere.”
“The fact that we see consistent warming and freshening indicates that the processes we expect to play out over the next
century are already underway,” Long said. “Indeed, this study is part of a growing body of evidence suggesting that the world’s
oceans are changing — and that the pace of change is beginning to accelerate.”

If the process of Antarctic bottom water formation is being impaired, at least in some regions, then it would be a Southern
Hemisphere analogue of a process that has already caused great worry and drawn considerably more attention — a potential
slowdown of the overturning circulation in the North Atlantic Ocean, thanks to freshening of the ocean from the melting of
Greenland.

“Of those two key areas of deep water formation, the northern Atlantic one has been widely considered more vulnerable to
global warming,” said Stefan Rahmstorf, a scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, who says he has
found changes to the formation of dense deep water in the North Atlantic. “It is therefore of some concern that we now see
increasing signs that the deep water formation around Antarctica is already being affected.”
Rahmstorf pointed to additional studies that also suggest Antarctic bottom water formation is changing. In one case, a 2017
study relying on measurements from the Southern Indian Ocean, where Antarctic bottom water travels after leaving the
Southern Ocean, found that this deep water has been growing fresher over time, especially in the past decade.

One limitation with the current study, however, is that although the researchers have found that deep water is not forming in
two key Antarctic regions, they cannot say when a change in these regions occurred. Measurements do not go back far enough
for that, study author Silvano said. Thus, it’s possible that deep water formation in these regions shut off a long time ago, well
before the modern period of intense climate warming. That would make it harder to pin current events on human-caused
climate change. Still, the mechanism detected by the study, in which freshening water from glaciers inhibits the sinking of colder waters at the
surface, would presumably continue to apply.

Silvano said his main worry is that in addition to melting by the ocean, Antarctica could also start melting on its surface more if
the climate warms further — leading to far more melt water forming in the ocean. So far, unlike in Greenland, this is mostly not
happening in Antarctica. But it could. Silvano also said that if the formation of Antarctic bottom water slows, the global consequences could be massive. The process
buries heat and carbon dioxide deep beneath the ocean surface — without that process, the heat and carbon dioxide could
remain in the atmosphere. And then, there’s the problem of rising sea levels if the feedback between the ocean and the glaciers continues.

“The idea is that this mechanism of rapid melting and warming of the ocean triggered sea level rise at other times, like the last
glacial maximum, when we know rapid sea level rise was five meters per century,” Silvano said. “And we think this mechanism
was the cause of rapid sea-level rise.”

In the future, he said, “it’s possible that with global warming, some other areas of Antarctica will see a complete inhibition of
bottom water formation, and then this feedback will kick off.”

Arkane posted:

Nic Lewis and Judith Curry out with another climate sensitivity paper, and again estimate that ECS/TCS will be half of what climate models assume:

https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/10.1175/JCLI-D-17-0667.1

Would be great news!

call to action posted:

Superstorms.

Ssthalar posted:

quote:

“We’re doomed,” says Mayer Hillman with such a beaming smile that it takes a moment for the words to sink in. “The outcome is death, and it’s the end of most life on the planet because we’re so dependent on the burning of fossil fuels. There are no means of reversing the process which is melting the polar ice caps. And very few appear to be prepared to say so.”

Hillman, an 86-year-old social scientist and senior fellow emeritus of the Policy Studies Institute, does say so. His bleak forecast of the consequence of runaway climate change, he says without fanfare, is his “last will and testament”. His last intervention in public life. “I’m not going to write anymore because there’s nothing more that can be said,” he says when I first hear him speak to a stunned audience at the University of East Anglia late last year.

From Malthus to the Millennium Bug, apocalyptic thinking has a poor track record. But when it issues from Hillman, it may be worth paying attention. Over nearly 60 years, his research has used factual data to challenge policymakers’ conventional wisdom. In 1972, he criticised out-of-town shopping centres more than 20 years before the government changed planning rules to stop their spread. In 1980, he recommended halting the closure of branch line railways – only now are some closed lines reopening. In 1984, he proposed energy ratings for houses – finally adopted as government policy in 2007. And, more than 40 years ago, he presciently challenged society’s pursuit of economic growth.

When we meet at his converted coach house in London, his classic Dawes racer still parked hopefully in the hallway (a stroke and a triple heart bypass mean he is – currently – forbidden from cycling), Hillman is anxious we are not side-tracked by his best-known research, which challenged the supremacy of the car.

“With doom ahead, making a case for cycling as the primary mode of transport is almost irrelevant,” he says. “We’ve got to stop burning fossil fuels. So many aspects of life depend on fossil fuels, except for music and love and education and happiness. These things, which hardly use fossil fuels, are what we must focus on.”

While the focus of Hillman’s thinking for the last quarter-century has been on climate change, he is best known for his work on road safety. He spotted the damaging impact of the car on the freedoms and safety of those without one – most significantly, children – decades ago. Some of his policy prescriptions have become commonplace – such as 20mph speed limits – but we’ve failed to curb the car’s crushing of children’s liberty. In 1971, 80% of British seven- and eight-year-old children went to school on their own; today it’s virtually unthinkable that a seven-year-old would walk to school without an adult. As Hillman has pointed out, we’ve removed children from danger rather than removing danger from children – and filled roads with polluting cars on school runs. He calculated that escorting children took 900m adult hours in 1990, costing the economy £20bn each year. It will be even more expensive today.

Our society’s failure to comprehend the true cost of cars has informed Hillman’s view on the difficulty of combatting climate change. But he insists that I must not present his thinking on climate change as “an opinion”. The data is clear; the climate is warming exponentially. The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that the world on its current course will warm by 3C by 2100. Recent revised climate modelling suggested a best estimate of 2.8C but scientists struggle to predict the full impact of the feedbacks from future events such as methane being released by the melting of the permafrost.

Hillman is amazed that our thinking rarely stretches beyond 2100. “This is what I find so extraordinary when scientists warn that the temperature could rise to 5C or 8C. What, and stop there? What legacies are we leaving for future generations? In the early 21st century, we did as good as nothing in response to climate change. Our children and grandchildren are going to be extraordinarily critical.”

Global emissions were static in 2016 but the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was confirmed as beyond 400 parts per million, the highest level for at least three million years (when sea levels were up to 20m higher than now). Concentrations can only drop if we emit no carbon dioxide whatsoever, says Hillman. “Even if the world went zero-carbon today that would not save us because we’ve gone past the point of no return.”

Although Hillman has not flown for more than 20 years as part of a personal commitment to reducing carbon emissions, he is now scornful of individual action which he describes as “as good as futile”. By the same logic, says Hillman, national action is also irrelevant “because Britain’s contribution is minute. Even if the government were to go to zero carbon it would make almost no difference.”

Instead, says Hillman, the world’s population must globally move to zero emissions across agriculture, air travel, shipping, heating homes – every aspect of our economy – and reduce our human population too. Can it be done without a collapse of civilisation? “I don’t think so,” says Hillman. “Can you see everyone in a democracy volunteering to give up flying? Can you see the majority of the population becoming vegan? Can you see the majority agreeing to restrict the size of their families?”

Hillman doubts that human ingenuity can find a fix and says there is no evidence that greenhouse gases can be safely buried. But if we adapt to a future with less – focusing on Hillman’s love and music – it might be good for us. “And who is ‘we’?” asks Hillman with a typically impish smile. “Wealthy people will be better able to adapt but the world’s population will head to regions of the planet such as northern Europe which will be temporarily spared the extreme effects of climate change. How are these regions going to respond? We see it now. Migrants will be prevented from arriving. We will let them drown.”

A small band of artists and writers, such as Paul Kingsnorth’s Dark Mountain project, have embraced the idea that “civilisation” will soon end in environmental catastrophe but only a few scientists – usually working beyond the patronage of funding bodies, and nearing the end of their own lives – have suggested as much. Is Hillman’s view a consequence of old age, and ill health? “I was saying these sorts of things 30 years ago when I was hale and hearty,” he says.

Hillman accuses all kinds of leaders – from religious leaders to scientists to politicians – of failing to honestly discuss what we must do to move to zero-carbon emissions. “I don’t think they can because society isn’t organised to enable them to do so. Political parties’ focus is on jobs and GDP, depending on the burning of fossil fuels.”

Without hope, goes the truism, we will give up. And yet optimism about the future is wishful thinking, says Hillman. He believes that accepting that our civilisation is doomed could make humanity rather like an individual who recognises he is terminally ill. Such people rarely go on a disastrous binge; instead, they do all they can to prolong their lives.

Can civilisation prolong its life until the end of this century? “It depends on what we are prepared to do.” He fears it will be a long time before we take proportionate action to stop climatic calamity. “Standing in the way is capitalism. Can you imagine the global airline industry being dismantled when hundreds of new runways are being built right now all over the world? It’s almost as if we’re deliberately attempting to defy nature. We’re doing the reverse of what we should be doing, with everybody’s silent acquiescence, and nobody’s batting an eyelid.”

TACD posted:

Here's some straight–talking doom for you on this fine morning

'We're doomed': Mayer Hillman on the climate reality no one else will dare mention
Can't say I disagree with him.

Nice piece of fish posted:

I believe that mechanisms such as these are the ones that ultimately prevent us reacting to global warming fast enough and maintains the capitalist consumer society paradigm. That's a concrete, shared root cause there and it's a motherfucker of a problem to handle. Until someone finds a way to revolutionize our thinking, change the paradigm completely to adress those basic human psychological mechanics, there's no way we'll do anything significant in time for it to matter. It's not the flash heat but the slow boil that's going to cook this frog.

MiddleOne posted:

I got into an argument the other day about what the net-negatives of surveillance capitalism (Google, Facebook, etc) actually are and one of the points I kept hammering down is the immense amounts of resources these institutions basically waste. Hundreds of billions dollars and some of the brightest minds of several generations are all being pivoted to:

Making people on the internet be influenced by ads to buy things they do not want.

The most valuable companies of the 21th century all specialize in increasing consumption and wasting personal time and energy in the process of it. Free-market capitalism is so cancerous as a political ideology that it completes stutters the ability of most of our economy to act in its own long-term self-interest. We're all trapped in this bubble of bad 1980's macro-economics and from within it is completely impossible to vocalize how an economy addressing climate change would even look. For all our advancements we're still heading the path of every other old civilization to collapse from rapid climate change, we can't envision a world different from the one we live in.

TACD posted:

Here's some straight–talking doom for you on this fine morning

'We're doomed': Mayer Hillman on the climate reality no one else will dare mention
Can't say I disagree with him.

El Grillo posted:

I haven't followed any developments in the science for the past few years. Is he right to say that if we stopped all fossil fuel emissions right now, we're still screwed? That seems like a pretty bold claim given it seems we're pretty bad at predicting how the multifarious feedback loops, carbon sinks etc actually work?

El Grillo posted:

I haven't followed any developments in the science for the past few years. Is he right to say that if we stopped all fossil fuel emissions right now, we're still screwed? That seems like a pretty bold claim given it seems we're pretty bad at predicting how the multifarious feedback loops, carbon sinks etc actually work?

El Grillo posted:

I haven't followed any developments in the science for the past few years. Is he right to say that if we stopped all fossil fuel emissions right now, we're still screwed? That seems like a pretty bold claim given it seems we're pretty bad at predicting how the multifarious feedback loops, carbon sinks etc actually work?

quote:

The new study relied on four global climate models, which the researchers used to simulate the effects of removing all human-caused emissions of the major aerosols, including sulfate and carbon-based particles like soot. The resulting global warming, they concluded, would be anywhere from 0.5 to 1.1 degrees Celsius.

Thug Lessons posted:

When someone is making statements like that it's a good clue they're not worth listening to on climate.

TACD posted:

Hillman is a social scientist so sure, let's not lean too much on a one-line, probably hyperbolic statement that's outside of his field of expertise.

But I do think he's right to point out, for example, that it's not healthy for climate researchers to treat 2100 as if it's the end of history, especially since a lack of long-term thinking is pretty foundational to this whole mess.

He's right that individual contributions are meaningless, which is the source of much angst in this thread and elsewhere. And he's right that political leaders have never been honest about what needs to happen to seriously reduce emissions, either on a national or individual level.

None of the entities large enough to really make a difference are actually doing anything. There's lots of individuals and groups moving in the right direction but the science has been pretty clear for a while that we need massive, paradigm–shifting changes in how things are run and that just isn't happening.

El Grillo posted:

I haven't followed any developments in the science for the past few years. Is he right to say that if we stopped all fossil fuel emissions right now, we're still screwed? That seems like a pretty bold claim given it seems we're pretty bad at predicting how the multifarious feedback loops, carbon sinks etc actually work?

TACD posted:

None of the entities large enough to really make a difference are actually doing anything. There's lots of individuals and groups moving in the right direction but the science has been pretty clear for a while that we need massive, paradigm–shifting changes in how things are run and that just isn't happening.

TACD posted:

But I do think he's right to point out, for example, that it's not healthy for climate researchers to treat 2100 as if it's the end of history, especially since a lack of long-term thinking is pretty foundational to this whole mess.

El Grillo posted:

I haven't followed any developments in the science for the past few years. Is he right to say that if we stopped all fossil fuel emissions right now, we're still screwed? That seems like a pretty bold claim given it seems we're pretty bad at predicting how the multifarious feedback loops, carbon sinks etc actually work?

TACD posted:

Here's some straight–talking doom for you on this fine morning

'We're doomed': Mayer Hillman on the climate reality no one else will dare mention
Can't say I disagree with him.

quote:

The CarbFix2 pilot program can remove an estimated 50 metric tons of CO2 from the air each year, eliminating more CO2 than it produces. Climeworks’ engineers want the testing to show that similar projects could be used globally, though cost is among the issues—Climeworks estimates it costs $600 to extract one ton of CO2 from the air.

The capacity of the plant is expected to be 900 metric tons annually by year-end 2017, which the company notes is equivalent to the annual emissions of about 45 people in the U.S. Climeworks’ founder and CEO Christoph Gebald said, “The potential of scaling-up our technology in combination with CO2 storage is enormous.”

The company’s goal is to cut costs to $100 per metric ton by 2025, and capture 1% of global manmade carbon emissions each year. The company has not released details on how to move forward, but investors in the technology include the European Space Agency and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, one of the world’s richest people.

Arkane posted:

Not only would I say that is just completely wrongheaded thinking belied by the past few hundred years of our existence, but the example he gives is just plain factually incorrect. In fact, there's a project in Iceland which has shown what was once thought nigh impossible (sequestering carbon in solidified form) is doable, and might even become inexpensive. They already succeeded a couple years ago with the first iteration and are now onto the second:

Thug Lessons posted:

When someone is making statements like that it's a good clue they're not worth listening to on climate.

Arkane posted:

ignorance

Thug Lessons posted:

you'd be better off taking a skeptical eye.

Thug Lessons posted:

Several prominent climatologists released a book today presenting a model that suggests that warming can be limited to 2 degrees by keeping to the emissions limits set in the Paris Agreement and by producing at least 50% of the world's energy from zero-emissions sources by 2060.

http://www.springer.com/us/book/9783319469386#aboutBook

Thug Lessons posted:

you'd be better off taking a skeptical eye.

Arkane posted:

Nah, pre-industrial CO2 levels were about 280ppm, we're at 409 right now. The IPCC's "best guess" at the equilibrium climate sensitivity, which is the rise in temperature based upon a doubling of CO2, is that temperatures would increase by 1.5C-4.5C (and there's been papers in the few years since AR5 which have suggested the higher bounds of that range are very unlikely). As you can see from the ppm incraese, we're not even close to a doubling yet. So in the fantasy scenario where all emissions stopped right now, temperature would continue to rise very minimally and very slowly over the next few hundred years, but a "doomsday" would be extremely unlikely.


I think this sentence kind of encapsulates the ignorance of alarmists: "Hillman doubts that human ingenuity can find a fix and says there is no evidence that greenhouse gases can be safely buried."

Not only would I say that is just completely wrongheaded thinking belied by the past few hundred years of our existence, but the example he gives is just plain factually incorrect. In fact, there's a project in Iceland which has shown what was once thought nigh impossible (sequestering carbon in solidified form) is doable, and might even become inexpensive. They already succeeded a couple years ago with the first iteration and are now onto the second:


http://www.powermag.com/test-of-carbon-capture-technology-underway-at-iceland-geothermal-plant/?mypower
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CarbFix

And that's just one example of what one company has accomplished.

Serious_Cyclone posted:

I don't know if there's any more value in optimism than there is in pessimism about carbon sequestration as a solution. Even if this company can get the cost down to $100 per metric ton, there's no economic incentive for industry to bother. Even if it's $1 per metric ton, that's $1 per metric ton of emission that industry is not going to pay for. Impose requirements in one place and high-emission industry will move to another. The problem being faced is Tragedy of the Commons, and it's much older than the Industrial Age carbon issue. We haven't discovered a solution for Tragedy of the Commons in any form.

I think it's fair to say that we have ideas, but no solutions.

Arglebargle III posted:

There are types of industrial facilities that the wealthy countries of the world generally agree should not be built. When they are built, they get bombs dropped on them. We can do this if we try.

self unaware posted:

*in other countries, we let them keep building them if they already have them

i'd like to see someone try to bomb the US for continuing the burn coal, or even building a doomsday weapon that could turn the entire earth into strawberry jam

Accretionist posted:

Any recommended reading/watching on geoengineering?

Accretionist posted:

I've seen discussion about a blog from Argentinia's economic collapse. Did anyone ever find it?

People were discussing how winners were communities (rural towns and urban neighborhoods) and losers were loners, especially rich loners in compounds whom raiders would hit like pinatas.