Climate Change: Post up your Phd. dissertation, coward

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Climate Change: Post up your Phd. dissertation, coward

«‹›2 »

Mat Cauthon: Jan 2, 2006; The more tragic things get,
the more I feel like laughing.

Great OP, thanks for taking the time to write that up. Very informative and manages to not be too negative while also reinforcing the seriousness of the topic.

Kassad posted:

I joke, but another French TV channel showed a report on the impact of climate change on agricultural yields (in France) in the future. It's all going downhill except for (maybe) rice. The production of wheat, for instance, will decrease by 6% for each degree above present temperatures . The anchorperson followed that up by saying that truffles would spread northward. Yay.

That's a quote from the old thread, but I'm really curious what the source is for the italicized text? Because holy poo poo.

# ¿ Nov 9, 2015 18:30

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 21:02

Mat Cauthon: Jan 2, 2006; The more tragic things get,
the more I feel like laughing.

Even the most prestigious, most well informed climate researchers will tell you that:

1. We're almost guaranteed to gently caress it up, either though unintended or intended consequences.
2. There are still aspects of earth ecosystems that we don't fully understand and therefore can't model or predict for right now, let alone what might happen with some halfass idea to throw sulfates in the ocean or trigger volcanoes or whatever.
3. See number 1.

Really man, it's a bad idea. Which is why I'm 100% sure that as soon as the Western world starts looking some real climate consequences dead in the eye, it'll be the first thing to get attempted.

On a somewhat more constructive note, I just got a job with a political org that is focusing on doing some campaigns around climate change, environmental justice, etc. What are some solid academic journals that I can tell my bosses to purchase access to for climate research?

# ¿ Nov 23, 2015 22:44

Mat Cauthon: Jan 2, 2006; The more tragic things get,
the more I feel like laughing.

The reports on the COP21 agreement say that governments have agreed to work towards a limit of 2 degrees celsius of warming maximum, but I thought that the scientific consensus was that we're already locked in for a minimum of that much? Also it looks like the pledge to provide $100 billion USD per year appears only in the text�s preamble and isn't in the binding part of the pledge.

I mean, it's progress of a sort, but I'm very very dubious.

# ¿ Dec 12, 2015 20:43

Mat Cauthon: Jan 2, 2006; The more tragic things get,
the more I feel like laughing.

Inglonias posted:

You're starting to make me not want to come to this thread for good news and cheery thoughts, you know that?

Is there ANY good news from this deal at all? Does anybody have good news whatsoever (on the topic of climate change)

Peter Thiel has been pushing molten salt reactors pretty hard recently, which may or may not be good news depending where you stand on the nuclear question:

http://www.popsci.com/peter-thiel-goes-nuclear

http://www.forbes.com/sites/markrogowsky/2015/11/30/one-tech-billionaire-sees-nuclear-as-the-path-to-clean-energy-but-is-he-right/

Which is cool, but we're 10-20 years from a working prototype of MSRs, so not exactly a saving grace especially since angel investors are notoriously fickle with their flavor of the month tech projects.

Mat Cauthon fucked around with this message at 04:11 on Dec 15, 2015

# ¿ Dec 15, 2015 04:06

Mat Cauthon: Jan 2, 2006; The more tragic things get,
the more I feel like laughing.

Gizmodo posted:

Now, an independent team of researchers at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory has come to the same conclusion, by looking at a much longer historic record. Their analysis, which appears this week in Nature Climate Change, puts the current ocean warming situation in dramatic relief: over the last 18 years, the oceans absorbed roughly the same amount of heat from global warming as they did over the entire 20th century. What�s more, the rate of deep ocean warming is fast accelerating. That could impact everything from marine ecosystems to global sea level.

It�s easy to overlook the deeper layers of the ocean, beyond the zone where light can penetrate. Yet this murky region of our biosphere has a key role to play in regulating Earth�s thermostat, by carrying currents that redistribute heat and energy everywhere. Even small changes in the temperature of the deep ocean could have dramatic global feedbacks�which is why scientists recently started asking whether anything has changed.

Pulling together data from diverse sources, including the 19th century Challenger expedition and a new fleet of monitoring devices called deep Argo floats, climatologist Peter Gleckler and his colleagues have now tracked changes in the energy balance of the ocean over the past 150 years, creating the longest continuous record of what�s happening at different depths.

Overall, they found that nearly half of the industrial era-increase in global ocean heat has accumulated in the last 18 years. That may sound pretty dramatic, but according to study co-author Gregory Johnson of the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration, it�s perfectly in keeping with the rise in fossil fuel emissions over the 21st century.

What�s more, a full 35 percent of that heat has sunk to below 700 meters in depth� eluding measurements and inciting claims of a warming �hiatus.�

�The heat that entered the atmosphere is now accounted for, and this means that impacts are reaching deeper into the water column,� Glen Gawarkiewicz of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute told Gizmodo in an email. �It is fairly incredible how much how much heat has gone into the oceans over the last 20 years or so.�

Post is here: http://gizmodo.com/we-know-exactly-where-all-the-heat-from-the-global-warm-1753818194
Paywalled research article here: http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nclimate2915.html

Basically the "climate hiatus" was just the ocean absorbing a massive amount of heat energy and we can only guess how bad the effects are going to be. Given how long it took us to reach the tiniest level of political consensus via the Paris Accords, I'm looking forward to seeing this addressed in...50 years or so.

# ¿ Jan 21, 2016 04:55

Mat Cauthon: Jan 2, 2006; The more tragic things get,
the more I feel like laughing.

You're underestimating him. If I had to guess, I'd say that Arkane will be back with the argument that since the oceans are acting as a heat sink with a capacity that matches whatever heat energy we throw at it as a byproduct of global warming then it should be full steam ahead to burn all the gas we want. Also maybe a misconstrued study or two to make it seem like the oceanic acidity and food chain collapse is naturally cyclical and therefore we shouldn't be concerned about it because the system will balance itself out.

I went into the wrong line of work, coming up with vaguely scientific anti-climate myths is so simple.

# ¿ Jan 21, 2016 05:38

Mat Cauthon: Jan 2, 2006; The more tragic things get,
the more I feel like laughing.

Prolonged Priapism posted:

Fair enough. You're right that I'm not really knowledgeable about the human cost of the Soviet collapse.

And I wasn't really trying to be glib, but the whole "flag change" thing was meant to cover not just these most recent collapses, but all of them throughout history. Many of which, I think, would probably have been gradual to the point of almost not being noticeable to many of the people living through them. At the extreme end there's the case of the Native Americans in North America, where Europeans came in and destroyed basically everything that had been there in a century or two. A continent depopulated. But still, it took several generations. Individuals certainly saw their tribes/alliances decimated, but no one individual saw the complete collapse from pre-contact society to scattered populations on reservations. That's not to minimize the genocide, but I think doomsayers are imagining witnessing destruction on that scale. It's not likely, and when it's happened in the past, it usually hasn't been fast enough to see in one lifetime. I guess the closest thing to that would be the Black Plague, where significant fractions of national populations died in just a few years. But as awful as that was, life went on. Civilization as a whole didn't end.

And he brought up Rome, with the pivotal political/moral collapse around Caesar's time, and the end of the Republic. Big events in quick succession looking back two thousand years later. But for the general population all around the Mediterranean? We can say their civilization went in to decline right then and there, but for the common person was the establishment of the Empire the defining moment of their lives? They all saw it going down hill right then (once they heard it had happened, of course)? Or did mundane concerns like tax policy changes and military reorganization end up being the biggest changes they saw in their towns and villages? I'm not saying there weren't uprisings and famines etc. There were. But not everywhere. Not most places.

The point is that human societies and civilizations have been through a lot of shocks. I'm not trying to trivialize any of them. But "collapse of civilization" is vague to the point of uselessness. If we're going to talk about it, we need to say what it actually means. Otherwise people will project whatever random poo poo they have in their head - whether it's a too-rosy idea of what happened in the former USSR, or an exaggerated collapse of Rome.

Pre-colonization North America had better wildlife and land management than the modern day US park system. When Europeans came, part of the reason that they were able to survive and so deeply explore is that the land had been managed so well that trees were spaced out wide enough for wagons to pass through, livestock was plentifully managed and encouraged, and soil health had been carefully maintained in order to ensure a consistent scheme of crop growth and renewal. In a generation, most of that was gone from what we would today consider the Eastern Seaboard, either depleted to the point of severely diminishing returns or overplanted so that the forests began to resemble the thickets and clusters that were most familiar to colonists and therefore dramatically less valuable for agrarian culture or exploration.

We romanticize collapse as a time for humanity to refine our skills and the most hardy or ingenious to soldier on, but honestly in those tumultuous periods we most as far back as we do forward and there's an unmeasureable amount of suffering involved. Yes, we get through it, but that doesn't rationalize the poor rationale that leads to those situations, or the hubristic belief that we can simply invent our way out of these problems. If anything, the examples that have been cited so far should be doubly terrifying, because those were on a regional or continental scale and humanity survived mostly by accident. We're facing global extinction now, however bad you think things can get is probably very much an underestimation.

Mat Cauthon fucked around with this message at 03:45 on Apr 10, 2016

# ¿ Apr 10, 2016 03:41

Mat Cauthon: Jan 2, 2006; The more tragic things get,
the more I feel like laughing.

A staff writer at the Atlantic is crowdsourcing ideas on how to use game theory to formulate large scale responses to climate change:

http://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2016/04/game-theory-climate-change/476517/

My gut feeling says that game theory is probably not the best framework to use for a problem of this magnitude, but interesting thought experiment if nothing else.

# ¿ Apr 13, 2016 01:17

Mat Cauthon: Jan 2, 2006; The more tragic things get,
the more I feel like laughing.

Everyone's favorite Quaker Oats cosplayer published an interesting paper on how the government is the perfect entity to spur renewable energy development: http://pdfsr.com/pdf/reprint-242-wc.pdf

# ¿ Apr 21, 2016 02:22

Mat Cauthon: Jan 2, 2006; The more tragic things get,
the more I feel like laughing.

Banana Man posted:

Could you expand on this

If you were born and/or are alive today in the US, Western Europe, and smatterings of Asia, Africa, or South America, you probably have a standard of living higher than the vast majority of humanity that ever lived prior to ~1950 could even conceive of. You probably have a quality of life better than what 2/3rds of people alive TODAY will ever experience or know. Even though your influence on government or society might be minute, you still have the access and the opportunity to shift thinking or policy in a way that can eventually support a societal shift towards more sustainable practices of consumption and living.

Or you can quibble on the internet about who has the better intentions and the more environmentally friendly carbon footprint among first worlders, while worrying yourself into an unstable mental state over minutiae and hypotheticals.

Pick one.

Mat Cauthon fucked around with this message at 21:45 on Apr 23, 2016

# ¿ Apr 23, 2016 21:41

Mat Cauthon: Jan 2, 2006; The more tragic things get,
the more I feel like laughing.

Should perma-link that in the OP.

Also as someone who does similar research on the intersection of climate change and social instability I'd love to read your paper, published or not.

# ¿ May 5, 2016 02:02

Mat Cauthon: Jan 2, 2006; The more tragic things get,
the more I feel like laughing.

gradenko_2000 posted:

His political background as a long-time mayor of a major city that rose to political prominence only very recently as an anti-establishment figurehead is somewhat closer to the UK's Boris Johnson, but otherwise, he is very much a preview for Trump, except the lack of racial tensions in the Philippines means the "otherized" group here is druggies and drug-lords rather than Mexicans and Muslims.

Ho boy, if you think the Philippines doesn't have a problem with Muslims and foreigners. The Boris Johnson comparison is apt though.

The news about Duerte disdaining the Paris Accords stings especially when you consider the delegation from the Phillippines openly weeping when talking about the devastation of Typhoon Haiyan (sp?) and their fears of how climate change would further harm the nation on the floor of the UN a few years back. But then again, the Paris Accords aren't worth the paper they're written on, so :shrug:

Mat Cauthon fucked around with this message at 23:56 on Jul 18, 2016

# ¿ Jul 18, 2016 23:53

Mat Cauthon: Jan 2, 2006; The more tragic things get,
the more I feel like laughing.

This article about desalination in Israel seems to be a bit of positive news, but I feel like something is being omitted:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/israel-proves-the-desalination-era-is-here/?WT.mc_id=SA_TW_ENGYSUS_NEWS

Anyone with more subject matter expertise want to take a crack at it?

# ¿ Jul 30, 2016 06:18

Mat Cauthon: Jan 2, 2006; The more tragic things get,
the more I feel like laughing.

Yeah, on second read my hunch is that it has to do with per capita water usage in Israel and specific climatic conditions, as well as subsidizing of desalination production or R&D costs due to Israel's "special relationship" with the US. The article doesnt delve deeper though, so I'll have to do some independent digging.

# ¿ Jul 30, 2016 16:38

Mat Cauthon: Jan 2, 2006; The more tragic things get,
the more I feel like laughing.

Trabisnikof posted:

The fact that goons condemn Obama for some pipelines while ignoring the Clean Power Plan, the Paris Agreement, our bi-lateral China agreement, the fact we got renewables subsidies extended and while ignoring other positive actions like California's new aggressive climate policy part of why this thread gets buried.

If anything less than a perfect solution is met with "who cares that's not good enough," that will shutdown half the discussion for decades. Instead this thread because the "climate impact thread" which just won't be as active.

The Clean Power Plan is stuck in judicial fights and might get completely thrown out depending on who the next POTUS is or who fills the empty SCOTUS spot. Everyone KNOWS that we're already on track to overshoot the Paris Accords target, and some of the developing countries that signed up to cap their emissions are already balking because rich countries aren't paying up. That agreement with China was made before their economy started nosediving. The renewable subsidy extension and the California climate policy are really the only two things that are definitively good.

It's not that we need "perfect" solutions, it's that toting half-assed and spinning them as concrete action can create a sense that we're actually solving the problem when that couldn't be further from the truth at the moment.

# ¿ Sep 24, 2016 02:32

Mat Cauthon: Jan 2, 2006; The more tragic things get,
the more I feel like laughing.

I have no doubt that a lot of hard work and effort went into all of those policies. But do I believe for a second that their effectiveness in the face of the sheer immensity of the challenge we're facing is in any way proportional or even reflective of those efforts? No.

As a whole they comprise a lot of little steps in the right direction that can easily backslide if we don't realistically assess them in relation to what science is telling us, which is that we need radical change sooner rather than later. If people think that stop gaps like the Paris Accords are solving the problem, they won't be motivated to support anything beyond that, certainly not the sort of lifestyle- and society-altering upheaval (even in developed nations) that will be necessary.

In other news: https://newrepublic.com/article/136987/recalculating-climate-math

quote:

But the new new math is even more explosive. It draws on a report by Oil Change International, a Washington-based think tank, using data from the Norwegian energy consultants Rystad. For a fee�$54,000 in this case�Rystad will sell anyone its numbers on the world�s existing fossil fuel sources. Most of the customers are oil companies, investment banks, and government agencies. But OCI wanted the numbers for a different reason: to figure out how close to the edge of catastrophe we�ve already come.

�Managed decline� means we don�t have to grind everything to a halt tomorrow; we can keep extracting fuel from existing oil wells and gas fields and coal mines. But we can�t go explore for new ones. We can�t even develop the ones we already know about, the ones right next to our current projects.

In the United States alone, the existing mines and oil wells and gas fields contain 86 billion tons of carbon emissions�enough to take us 25 percent of the way to a 1.5 degree rise in global temperature. But if the U.S. energy industry gets its way and develops all the oil wells and fracking sites that are currently planned, that would add another 51 billion tons in carbon emissions. And if we let that happen, America would single-handedly blow almost 40 percent of the world�s carbon budget.

For understandable reasons, the unions whose workers build pipelines and drill wells also resist attempts to change. Consider the current drama over the Dakota Access oil pipeline. In September, even after pipeline security guards armed with pepper spray and guard dogs attacked Native Americans who were nonviolently defending grave sites from bulldozers, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka called on the Obama administration to allow construction to proceed. �Pipeline construction and maintenance,� Trumka said, �provides quality jobs to tens of thousands of skilled workers.� The head of the Building Trades Unions agreed: �Members have been relying on these excellent, family-supporting, middle-class jobs with family health care, pensions, and good wages.� Another union official put it most eloquently: �Let�s not turn away and overregulate or just say, �No, keep it in the ground.� It shouldn�t be that simple.�

I still can't believe the AFL-CIO came out in support of a pipeline that would create all of 10 permanent jobs, despite mass indigenous protest and opposition from basically every other progressively aligned group, but that's modern US labor I guess.

Mat Cauthon fucked around with this message at 21:02 on Sep 24, 2016

# ¿ Sep 24, 2016 21:00

Mat Cauthon: Jan 2, 2006; The more tragic things get,
the more I feel like laughing.

NewForumSoftware posted:

Get ready for the new normal, where we start treating developing countries as if their impacts on the climate are acts of aggression. There's a really great chart out there that has the cumulative emissions by country since 1900, anyone have it?

NewForumSoftware posted:

The developing world simply will not watch the US play protectionist with climate policies and try to push all impacts onto their own populations.

NewForumSoftware posted:

This is where the discussion starts and ends, anything else is bullshit. It only gets worse from there if you start to consider the fact that a lot of the emissions in developing countries are the direct result of western imperialism to transform their economy to fit our needs.

He's right. This is where the whole India & HFCs discussion, and the larger controversy around similar events, starts and ends. You think someone like Modi is going to give two shits about Paris if it means that he has to go back on his promise to bring India into the first world? The wave of the future is the global south looking at the global north and figuring out that rather than them kneecapping their own development, maybe we should reducing our ridiculous consumption levels first. And that means more than electric vehicles or recycling or vague promises to hit 50% renewables by 20XX. I'm not looking forward to what HRC reacts when folks that we used to be able to cow with threats decide they have less to lose by telling the US to gently caress off rather than waiting for some 'progressive' environmental policy to trickle down.

call to action posted:

It's so hopelessly naive to think that anyone's going to stick to these agreements when not doing so provides massive economic advantages. Cheating will always be the best option, just like any Tragedy of the Commons situation.

This is actually backwards, the best option is always to NOT cheat because doing so fucks over you, everyone else, and generations to come, the mess we're in should be evidence enough of that.

Mat Cauthon fucked around with this message at 05:07 on Oct 13, 2016

# ¿ Oct 13, 2016 04:53

Mat Cauthon: Jan 2, 2006; The more tragic things get,
the more I feel like laughing.

How do I ensure that I never have to see the words "the Great Barrier Reef is dead" again, short of blinding myself?

# ¿ Oct 14, 2016 15:55

Mat Cauthon: Jan 2, 2006; The more tragic things get,
the more I feel like laughing.

call to action posted:

edit: Hahah I loving love the people who whine about clickbait around the Great Barrier Reef. "GOD GUYS, it's not dead it's just MOSTLY DEAD and is on a trajectory to complete destruciton within our lives. Stupid clickbait sheep."

Yeah, except that the issue in this case isn't that the Great Barrier Reef is suddenly clickbait, it's that the gossip mag that kicked off this whole thing got a huge amount of information completely wrong. The only one ranting about the gullibility of the general populace here is you. Also:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/scientists-take-on-great-barrier-reef-obituary_us_57fff8f1e4b0162c043b068f posted:

Terry Hughes, director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, said in an email to HuffPost that he was �not impressed by the [article�s] message that we should give up on the [Great Barrier Reef], or that it is already dead.�

�We can and must save the Great Barrier Reef ― it supports 70,000 jobs in reef tourism,� he said. �Large sections of it (the southern half) escaped from the 2016 bleaching, and are in reasonable shape. The message should be that it isn�t too late for Australia to lift its game and better protect the GBR, not we should all give up because the GBR is supposedly dead.�

Additionally, Hughes said, the article is �full of mistakes.� It states that the Great Barrier Reef experienced its first mass-bleaching event in 1981. But Hughes said the first was in 1998. Additionally, the article mentions �the winter of 1997�98,� which of course would have been summer in the southern hemisphere.

Above all, Brainard and Hughes stressed the importance of optimism when it comes to facing such a global crisis. As Brainard wrote in a comment on Outside Magazine�s Facebook post, �this sort of over-to-top [sic] story makes the situation much worse by conveying loss of hope rather than a need for global society to take actions to reverse these discouraging downward trends.�

As has been said many times over in this thread, it's important to be specific and precise when we talk about the effects of climate change because false information just makes climate denier's jobs easier and because (as we've seen ITT time and time again) people start to do really dumb, stupid poo poo when they resign themselves to nothing but pessimistic outcomes rooted in a belief that we're so far down the hole that no action can save us.

I'm glad that the GBR is getting people's attention, better late than never, but tell me how this is any different from the furor over polar bears, the Amazon, the Gulf of Mexico dead zone, the icecaps, etc. This could be another global event to mobilize around (and hopefully the planners for the 2017 People's Climate March are paying attention), but the value of simply "getting people to take notice" or "starting a conversation" is nearly nonexistent at this point.

# ¿ Oct 14, 2016 23:14

Mat Cauthon: Jan 2, 2006; The more tragic things get,
the more I feel like laughing.

Forever_Peace posted:

Science actually just published a really good discussion of Carbon sequestration technologies that are most often present in climate models. http://science.sciencemag.org/content/354/6309/182.full

Technically doesn't officially come out until tomorrow but you can (and should) read it now.

There was also a pretty good article in WaPo about this:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2016/10/13/were-placing-far-too-much-hope-in-pulling-carbon-dioxide-out-of-the-air-scientists-warn/?utm_term=.801bd36fd202 posted:

The idea sounds like a win-win on paper, allowing for both the removal of carbon dioxide and the production of energy. But while more than a dozen pilot-scale BECCS projects exist around the world, only one large-scale facility currently operates. And scientists have serious reservations about the technology�s viability as a global-scale solution.

First, the sheer amount of bioenergy fuel required to suit the models� assumptions already poses a problem, Peters told The Washington Post. Most of the models assume a need for an area of land at least the size of India, he said, which prompts the question of whether this would reduce the area available for food crops or force additional deforestation, which would produce more carbon emissions.

When it comes to carbon capture and storage, the technology has been used already in at least 20 plants around the world, not all of them devoted to bioenergy. In fact, carbon capture and storage can be applied in all kinds of industrial facilities, including coal-burning power plants or oil and natural gas refineries. But the technology has so far failed to take off.

�Ten years ago, if you looked at the International Energy Agency, they were saying by now there would be hundreds of CCS plants around the world,� Peters said. �And each year the IEA has had to revise their estimates down. So CCS is one of those technologies that just never lives up to expectations.�

# ¿ Oct 16, 2016 03:35

Mat Cauthon: Jan 2, 2006; The more tragic things get,
the more I feel like laughing.

I can't believe y'all spent most of the last 7 pages arguing with an Arkane parachute account with a reg date from this month.

Lemming posted:

I feel like the chances are very high that we're going to end up trying to do some geoengineering band aid patch that ends up with bad unintended consequences

This is almost inevitable at this point.

# ¿ Oct 21, 2016 02:06

Mat Cauthon: Jan 2, 2006; The more tragic things get,
the more I feel like laughing.

Telephones posted:

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

Welcome to having even a modicum of awareness about climate issues.

I used to wonder why almost all of my mentors or professors who studied environmental science, geology, climate, etc suffered from some form of depression. I don't any more.

Mat Cauthon fucked around with this message at 17:36 on Nov 13, 2016

# ¿ Nov 13, 2016 17:21

Mat Cauthon: Jan 2, 2006; The more tragic things get,
the more I feel like laughing.

Hollismason posted:

So what happens when the ice disappears completely.

A shutdown of the thermohaline circulation in the north Atlantic due to a massive influx of freshwater, leaving Europe to simultaneously freeze and drown as the rest of the world broils to death and scurries inland to fight over rapidly desertifying farmland.

# ¿ Nov 18, 2016 03:07

Mat Cauthon: Jan 2, 2006; The more tragic things get,
the more I feel like laughing.

Banana Man posted:

for someone more involved in the science of it, how much did the "hiatus" throw off estimates once it was discovered all the heat was getting absorbed by the oceans?

Depends on who you ask and what projection method the model in question uses, but general consensus is that overlooking the hiatus threw off our predictions by a 2-3 degrees C difference between now and 2100. The Paris Accords upper limit of 2 degrees C max of warming was already kind of far fetched before we figured out the hiatus, now it's just laughable.

Nice piece of fish posted:

Yeah, but surely that's still going to be happening over a significant amount of time? I mean, we're talking next century at the minimum, regardless of the inevitability of it.

But yeah, northern europe is at the same latitude as most of Siberia, which means it might just be going to suuuuuck for the Nordic countries at that point.

As Evil_Greven said, we don't really know. The last time it happened (Younger Dryas), the time scale was 1000s of years. Given how much we're warming the planet and frontloading immense amounts of heat energy into planetary cycles that we don't fully understand, it could happen a lot faster this time. Could be centuries, could be decades, could be months if we get another 3-4 year run of progressively warmer "hottest years ever". Thing is, once it starts, we won't be able to stop it.

cheese eats mouse posted:

Speaking of local changes we are under a red flag warning. We never get these in winter and pretty much never in the summer. I'm in Louisville, Kentucky, not some fire prone western state.

We haven't had a day below freezing. Today it's going to push 80.

Something is really hosed up.

It was 70 F today in upstate NY. Night time temps have been hovering around the 40s and 50s. We might get below freezing by Thanksgiving. Maybe. The writing is on the wall, but no one wants to read it.

# ¿ Nov 19, 2016 02:09

Mat Cauthon: Jan 2, 2006; The more tragic things get,
the more I feel like laughing.

Creating artificial albedo (reflection) is something that we could (and should) be doing, but it's a moot point if we're not actively reducing emissions on a timeline that gets us to zero by, oh say, 2050 or so.

There's no reason to not have solar panels on every building in the country, even accounting for the middling efficiency of solar cells and energy storage at the current moment, except that people just don't give a poo poo. Hell, even putting solar panels, or those new Tesla roofing tiles, on every government building in the country would make a huge difference.

When a major American city falls into the sea or suffers a catastrophic disaster directly tied to climate change, we might see some serious movement in that direction. Until then, well, good luck. Do what you can to support green policy and action on a local level.

# ¿ Nov 19, 2016 02:22

Mat Cauthon: Jan 2, 2006; The more tragic things get,
the more I feel like laughing.

BattleMoose posted:

Temperature spiral, is apparently an effective way of communicating how our climate changes. In the sense that it actually changes peoples perspectives, apparently.

I love this gif. You show this to people in a presentation and the change in attitude is almost palpable.

In other good news.

[quote="http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-dead-trees-20161118-story.html" post=""""]
The number of dead trees in California�s drought-stricken forests has risen dramatically to more than 102 million in what officials described as an unparalleled ecological disaster that heightens the danger of massive wildfires and damaging erosion.

Officials said they were alarmed by the increase in dead trees, which they estimated to have risen by 36 million since the government�s last survey in May. The U.S. Forest Service, which performs such surveys of forest land, said Friday that 62 million trees have died this year alone.

�The scale of die-off in California is unprecedented in our modern history,� said Randy Moore, the forester for the region of the U.S. Forest Service that includes California. Trees are dying �at a rate much quicker than we thought.�

Scientists say five years of drought are to blame for much of the destruction. The lack of rain has put California�s trees under considerable stress, making them more susceptible to the organisms, such as beetles, that can kill them. Unusually high temperatures have added to the trees� demand for water, exacerbating an already grim situation.
[/quote]

Add forests to the list of things that used to exist we'll be telling our grandkids about.

# ¿ Nov 21, 2016 03:24

Mat Cauthon: Jan 2, 2006; The more tragic things get,
the more I feel like laughing.

Accretionist posted:

Tell them global warming will cook the United States and send 50,000,000 Republicans screaming across the border.

It will impel northward population migrations around the world, and I see no reason to exempt Canada.

Edit: There's already talk of California building a pipeline to take Washington's water. When the entire United states needs water, who do you think we'll take it from?

ProPublica did a pretty good series on the legislative water wars happening between various states in the American southwest right now, which is probably a good portent of things to come.

# ¿ Nov 23, 2016 03:17

Mat Cauthon: Jan 2, 2006; The more tragic things get,
the more I feel like laughing.

I think it was the "Killing the Colorado" series:

https://projects.propublica.org/killing-the-colorado/story/what-you-need-to-know

https://www.propublica.org/series/killing-the-colorado

ProPublica has been doing a lot of great investigative research into environmental issues in the US over the last few years, especially around water access. Well worth your time to look over.

Mat Cauthon fucked around with this message at 04:55 on Nov 23, 2016

# ¿ Nov 23, 2016 04:22

Mat Cauthon: Jan 2, 2006; The more tragic things get,
the more I feel like laughing.

Captain Scandinaiva posted:

If NASA's climate research is gutted, would the Chinese be able to pick up where they left? I seems every other science piece presented here was based on NASA research.

Not really. IIRC, the US spends an inordinate amount of money on R&D (in various forms and through various departments or programs), far outpacing the next handful of countries behind us. And that's even after a huge reduction in the amount of cash we spend on R&D in real dollars compared to the last few decades. There aren't many nations that could take our spot, and the few that could are currently facing similar right wing austerity pushes or desperately trying to keep their economy out of the gutter with all manner of arcane financial machinations.

Cutting NASA's budget will be bad, but it is most likely the tip of the iceberg as far as eroding funding for scientific research. This will probably cause the current "publish or perish" problem to get worse, because when government funding dries up then academics will have to turn to corporations or other private actors for funding, and those folks will 1) try to influence the results of studies to lean in their favor or 2) only fund research that they see having lucrative direct potential. If Trump follows through on his pledge to cut climate funding to international efforts like the UN, then you can expect the same sort of problems to start creeping up outside the US.

Fun times ahead.

# ¿ Nov 23, 2016 23:13

Mat Cauthon: Jan 2, 2006; The more tragic things get,
the more I feel like laughing.

Rastor posted:

West Antarctic ice shelf is breaking up from the inside out
https://news.osu.edu/news/2016/11/28/pineisland/

Collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet would cause a sea-level rise of nearly 10 feet in one shot.

Was ice shelf break up of this magnitude factored into studies that predicted we'd have until ~2100 before something like this started happening?

I mean, it seems like this isn't particularly surprising but the timeframe is much sooner than anyone would've thought feasible.

# ¿ Nov 29, 2016 02:26

Mat Cauthon: Jan 2, 2006; The more tragic things get,
the more I feel like laughing.

Yep, that's about what I figured from what I remember of my undergraduate studies but it's been a few years since I had to read a peer-reviewed paper on sea level rise so I just wanted to be sure.

Guess I picked a good time to move from the Mid-Atlantic region to somewhere further inland.

# ¿ Nov 29, 2016 03:56

Mat Cauthon: Jan 2, 2006; The more tragic things get,
the more I feel like laughing.

Yeah, people are overestimating how much effort it takes to cause a disruptive, violent event. I mean, we (Americans) live in a country where there's are multiple mass shootings every month and where there have been several armed fringe groups squaring up with the government on a small scale basis. Combine a bunch of political and social unrest with an aging, decrepit infrastructure and a soon-to-be dismantled or privatized government, then throw in a handful of climate events and it's easy to see things popping off.

Although when people talk about eco-terrorism I think we mostly envision Greenpeace ramming whaling boats or whatever. I think we're more likely to see the opposite sort of action, i.e. people violently disrupting adaptation or mitigation efforts because it would diminish their privileged little corner of the world.

# ¿ Nov 30, 2016 03:04

Mat Cauthon: Jan 2, 2006; The more tragic things get,
the more I feel like laughing.

khwarezm posted:

One thing I've become curious about recently is whether or not animal cognition has been on a rough but continuous upward rise since the major animal groups evolved. Like I'm pretty sure everything was a whole lot dumber back in the Cambrian period, but even going back to the times of dinosaurs scientists don't usually seem to have very flattering estimates of the mental capacities of early dinos. But they also seem to consider the brain sizes of later dinosaurs like Troodon TRex to be quite a bit more impressive than similar dinosaurs ages before them, like Allosaurus. And compared to animals today, Troodon, the dinosaur stereotypically seem as 'the smart one' wasn't much better than a modern day Opossum(which is a dumb animal), it would be totally outclassed in the brains department by current day dinos like Crows and Parrots. So maybe the next civilization creating creature is just around the corner, on a geological timescale anyway.

This is hard to gauge because we usually equate intelligence to how much a non-human thing can act like a human. We consider modern animals to be "smart" because they've adapted to our presence. Short of some as yet undiscovered species of frog in the Amazon or Cthulu-esque thing on the bottom of the ocean, every animal, insect, etc on this planet has had to figure out how to exist around us. Primates, domesticated animals, and any species that we live in close proximity to for agricultural reasons (cows, horses, birds, etc) are a bit "better" at it for obvious reasons.

Basically using human cognition as the yardstick for anything else is not the best metric. Even if any species can adapt fast enough and live long enough to develop advanced cognitive capacity (and that's a big if), it might look so alien to us as to not even be recognized as cognition.

# ¿ Nov 30, 2016 04:59

Mat Cauthon: Jan 2, 2006; The more tragic things get,
the more I feel like laughing.

You can do a lot of good if you're in public health or biomed, mostly because having folks who can put complex concepts into layman's terms is always useful. The latter especially needs more folks who have a good grasp on both the technical stuff and historical or societal contexts, because in the past decade or so there's been some disturbing trends towards genetic determinism that basically echo eugenics and other gross racist science rhetoric, which will wreak untold havoc if they don't get some sustained opposition within the academy. Generally though the best thing you can do is get involved in local activist groups, both on and off campus, and get used to doing the grunt work of organizing (i.e. canvassing, polling, speaking where necessary, etc).

If you really want to combine environmental studies with a more sociological bent, I would recommend taking some courses in Human Geography, or possibly pursuing it as a major course of study. Plenty of environmental programs incorporate some measure of humanities focus these days but it doesn't hurt to delve deeper. I was lucky enough to take a handful of Human Geography-type courses during my undergraduate studies and it made a huge difference in how I approach my work now.

Mat Cauthon fucked around with this message at 01:56 on Dec 1, 2016

# ¿ Dec 1, 2016 01:53

Mat Cauthon: Jan 2, 2006; The more tragic things get,
the more I feel like laughing.

One of the authors of that Nature article on carbon emissions from soil did a pretty nifty explainer video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrKOpPJIbXA.

More stuff like this would be great in communicating complex issues to folks without a lot of scientific background. There's even a Dutch language version!

# ¿ Dec 1, 2016 03:40

Mat Cauthon: Jan 2, 2006; The more tragic things get,
the more I feel like laughing.

You can't really blame it solely on Trump appointees, given that people like Lamar Smith have been on the war path against any sort of progressive environmental policy for years. Credit where credit is due, although the fake news and climate denial will undoubtedly get worse as time marches on.

For example, today the official Twitter account for the House Science committee tweeted out a link to a Breitbart article casting doubt on climate change because it's cold outside.

The account has had an anti-Obama, anti-regulation, climate skeptic bent for a while, but I guess they're kicking things up a notch now.

# ¿ Dec 1, 2016 22:07

Mat Cauthon: Jan 2, 2006; The more tragic things get,
the more I feel like laughing.

Who's ready for more good news from the political front?

Trump to name Scott Pruitt, Oklahoma attorney general suing EPA on climate change, to head the EPA posted:

Pruitt, who has written that the debate on climate change is �far from settled,� joined a coalition of state attorneys general in suing the agency�s Clean Power Plan, the principal Obama-era policy aimed at reducing U.S. greenhouse gas emissions from the electricity sector. He has also sued, with fellow state attorneys general, over the EPA�s recently announced regulations seeking to curtail the emissions of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, from the oil and gas sector.

On his Linked In page, Pruitt boasts of being �a leading advocate against the EPA�s activist agenda.�

From here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...m=.fcaf1cce036e

# ¿ Dec 8, 2016 01:01

Mat Cauthon: Jan 2, 2006; The more tragic things get,
the more I feel like laughing.

Deadly Ham Sandwich posted:

I am in Houston, TX. Anything I can do to help out? I feel like I have to do something. Donate to a green advocacy group, get involved in local politics, or something.

I'm working in environmental justice organizing at the moment while I save money and get my ducks in a row for grad school. There are some fairly big climate-centric, anti-Trump events being planned right now by various groups that will start actively recruiting folks after the new year, both for decentralized local action and for large coordinated events like a protest in DC. I'll share info as I get it.

In the meantime, get involved locally. Sierra Club and other progressive environmental groups have chapters everywhere. If you can't find one, look for a political group that seems on the level and is organizing around the issues you care about. Getting organized is the only way we lessen or outright prevent the impending madness and maybe motivate people to prioritize climate action.

# ¿ Dec 10, 2016 00:50

Mat Cauthon: Jan 2, 2006; The more tragic things get,
the more I feel like laughing.

Discendo Vox posted:

The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation has an uneven reputation and track record in terms of their intervention work abroad- so we'll have to see how effective this proposal actually is.

This is the correct response. The Gates' are some of noblest intentioned billionaires around to be sure, but their philanthropy relies on the same sort of disproportionate government influence and shady financial dealings that someone like Trump benefits from. Not to mention that their chosen causes, whether at home (charter schools) or abroad (health programs) are a mixed bag at best.

It's great to see money being thrown at the problem, but don't get your hopes up. As has been mentioned in the thread before, expecting some technological solution to magically appear is not a winning strategy.

# ¿ Dec 12, 2016 16:51

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 21:02

Mat Cauthon: Jan 2, 2006; The more tragic things get,
the more I feel like laughing.

BattleMoose posted:

This is absolutely not true and has already been explained, these issues aren't for sale. They cannot be solved by naively throwing money at them. Charity is actually very difficult to do well. Its great that Bill is an exceptionally competent individual.

Except that it's not.

World hunger? Pay to ship and distribute food to people who can't afford it (we already grow enough for everyone on the planet, let alone the US)

Child poverty? Give a stipend to every parent who makes less than the median income.

Homelessness? Buy up the uninhabited housing stock, give them to homeless people, and fund the infrastructure to have them operated as locally run housing cooperatives.

Throwing money at social problems actually works very well. The issue is that people expect a return on their investment, which means solutions get watered down or structured in a way that prioritizes profit over people and further reinforces harm. Bill Gates is not the exception to that rule, I promise you.

Wakko posted:

Soooooo methane release into the atmosphere is starting to spike exponentially and we don't really know why.

I'm not ready to go full Arctic News yet, but this seems not great re: the future.

The curse of living on interesting times strikes again.

# ¿ Dec 12, 2016 18:21

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Climate Change: Post up your Phd. dissertation, coward

«‹›2 »