It may very well be game over.
November 10, 2016 9:13 PM Subscribe
Recent climate studies predict that global temperatures could raise as much as 7C within our lifetimes, putting Earth on the fast track to a full Venus atmosphere.
Geoengineering seems terribly irresponsible. However, if it's our only shot...
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 9:25 PM on November 10, 2016 [7 favorites]
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 9:25 PM on November 10, 2016 [7 favorites]
Too soon.
posted by St. Peepsburg at 9:27 PM on November 10, 2016 [15 favorites]
posted by St. Peepsburg at 9:27 PM on November 10, 2016 [15 favorites]
Well, we can't say we didn't have fun! Guess I might as well quit my job and write that book
posted by clockzero at 10:00 PM on November 10, 2016 [6 favorites]
posted by clockzero at 10:00 PM on November 10, 2016 [6 favorites]
Well, humanity is long overdue for a good culling...
posted by jim in austin at 10:09 PM on November 10, 2016 [3 favorites]
posted by jim in austin at 10:09 PM on November 10, 2016 [3 favorites]
I read this earlier today. Even Clinton's measures towards climate change seemed conservative and weak to me, but the alternative... I'm glad that I don't have children.
posted by codacorolla at 10:11 PM on November 10, 2016 [26 favorites]
posted by codacorolla at 10:11 PM on November 10, 2016 [26 favorites]
Other research says a 6C temperature rise in the oceans will halt oxygen production by phytoplankton, killing us all: Global warming disaster could suffocate life on planet earth [2015].
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 10:17 PM on November 10, 2016 [4 favorites]
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 10:17 PM on November 10, 2016 [4 favorites]
Is it possible that the oxygen levels are already low enough to explain the entirety of WTF-Is-Happening-2016?
posted by erratic meatsack at 10:58 PM on November 10, 2016 [45 favorites]
posted by erratic meatsack at 10:58 PM on November 10, 2016 [45 favorites]
Is it possible that the oxygen levels are already low enough to explain the entirety of WTF-Is-Happening-2016?
posted by erratic meatsack
Epony...forget it, this is too much work.
posted by Literaryhero at 11:01 PM on November 10, 2016 [13 favorites]
posted by erratic meatsack
Epony...forget it, this is too much work.
posted by Literaryhero at 11:01 PM on November 10, 2016 [13 favorites]
brb,drawing up designs for floating habitats.
posted by figurant at 11:05 PM on November 10, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by figurant at 11:05 PM on November 10, 2016 [1 favorite]
yaaaaaaaaaaaaaay!!!!!!!!!
posted by not_on_display at 11:06 PM on November 10, 2016 [7 favorites]
posted by not_on_display at 11:06 PM on November 10, 2016 [7 favorites]
On the upside, now Elon gets to terraform a handier planet.
posted by flabdablet at 11:10 PM on November 10, 2016 [16 favorites]
posted by flabdablet at 11:10 PM on November 10, 2016 [16 favorites]
You joke but it seems obvious to me that the only way we're going to survive is with some sort of climate engineering mega project. I mean, we'll probably fuck it up and die anyway, but clearly reducing emissions is not going to work. Well, engineering and reducing emissions in the long term.
CO2 sequestration? Giant friggin' solar shades? I have no idea. But what we're doing isn't working.
posted by Justinian at 11:24 PM on November 10, 2016 [1 favorite]
CO2 sequestration? Giant friggin' solar shades? I have no idea. But what we're doing isn't working.
posted by Justinian at 11:24 PM on November 10, 2016 [1 favorite]
Also, maybe the burning of fossil fuels leading to runaway climate change is the answer to the Fermi Paradox.
posted by Justinian at 11:26 PM on November 10, 2016 [50 favorites]
posted by Justinian at 11:26 PM on November 10, 2016 [50 favorites]
So I guess all those hand-wringing think pieces about how to talk to your children about Trump have an easy answer:
Hahahahaha, of course not. Especially not the white evangelicals that are doing the heavy lifting in this campaign against humanity. They basically just worship Moloch and Mammon now.
posted by [expletive deleted] at 11:30 PM on November 10, 2016 [71 favorites]
There are no adults in charge, only bigger children, and lots of them are very poorly behaved. They have decided for selfish, ignorant, and hateful reasons that your future should be a gradual descent into a nightmare that only death will free you from. Goodnight sweetheart.I mean, yeah, that's gallows humour, but what do you tell a child of ten or older? Is there a good argument for shielding them from the truth: that the adults in charge are perpetrating on them history's greatest crime? No, they deserve to know, and know now. Maybe the glaring, judging eyes of all the children who know their futures are being robbed will guilt enough people into action.
Hahahahaha, of course not. Especially not the white evangelicals that are doing the heavy lifting in this campaign against humanity. They basically just worship Moloch and Mammon now.
posted by [expletive deleted] at 11:30 PM on November 10, 2016 [71 favorites]
Last one left alive, turn out the lights.
posted by corb at 11:32 PM on November 10, 2016 [12 favorites]
posted by corb at 11:32 PM on November 10, 2016 [12 favorites]
So after reading TFA, there's nothing in there to actually tie present trends to the Venus scenario. The linked NASA article is about how runaway global warming on Venus was triggered by it's proximity to the sun, causing the shallow oceans to evaporate completely. I realize we're all feeling apocalyptic right now for completely different reasons, but this article seems pretty thin sauce dressed up with a clickbait title.
posted by AdamCSnider at 11:53 PM on November 10, 2016 [101 favorites]
posted by AdamCSnider at 11:53 PM on November 10, 2016 [101 favorites]
Guys, don't believe the hype. It's all just a Chinese hoax. The president of the united states told me so.
posted by dazed_one at 11:54 PM on November 10, 2016 [9 favorites]
posted by dazed_one at 11:54 PM on November 10, 2016 [9 favorites]
I'm pretty sure the linked article doesn't say 7 degrees within our lifetimes. It says somewhere between 4.78 and 7.36 degrees by 2100. That's potentially civilization destroying, yes, but unless you're planning to live for another eighty-four years then it's the next generation's lifetime.
That's obviously not acceptable, but it's different from what the FPP says.
posted by Kevin Street at 12:03 AM on November 11, 2016 [5 favorites]
That's obviously not acceptable, but it's different from what the FPP says.
posted by Kevin Street at 12:03 AM on November 11, 2016 [5 favorites]
I don't want to derail, but 84 years is a good amount of time for medical advances to get to a place where it could viably be in our lifetimes.
posted by gucci mane at 12:12 AM on November 11, 2016 [5 favorites]
posted by gucci mane at 12:12 AM on November 11, 2016 [5 favorites]
Sure, and I hope that happens. But we shouldn't lose sight of what this means for most people. We're not the ones who are losing out. We're robbing our children (real and metaphorical) of their golden years, and totally robbing their children of any long life at all. It has to be stopped for their sake.
posted by Kevin Street at 12:20 AM on November 11, 2016 [4 favorites]
posted by Kevin Street at 12:20 AM on November 11, 2016 [4 favorites]
I do research in one of the poorest countries on Earth. Most of the population are subsistence farmers. It's a transitional region and the climate is already inherently unpredictable. There is substantial food insecurity.
This year, the harvest wasn't very good. The rains stopped early. And this isn't the first bad year. People who follow the news know about climate change, and are talking about it.
Most people in this country don't have a car, and access to electricity is limited. They've had no part in building this disaster. Their experience with the industrialized world has been at best ambivalent, given the history of colonialization and exploitation here.
When I imagine them starving, suffocating, or boiling alive because the developed world can't get its shit together I want to throw things. Generally in the direction of climate change deniers.
They will probably starve first. Good job, us.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 12:24 AM on November 11, 2016 [79 favorites]
This year, the harvest wasn't very good. The rains stopped early. And this isn't the first bad year. People who follow the news know about climate change, and are talking about it.
Most people in this country don't have a car, and access to electricity is limited. They've had no part in building this disaster. Their experience with the industrialized world has been at best ambivalent, given the history of colonialization and exploitation here.
When I imagine them starving, suffocating, or boiling alive because the developed world can't get its shit together I want to throw things. Generally in the direction of climate change deniers.
They will probably starve first. Good job, us.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 12:24 AM on November 11, 2016 [79 favorites]
AdamCSnider, unfortunately there are two papers discussed, and the horrible one is definitely about earth.
Roughly speaking I think it says that the temperature sensitivity to CO2 increases with temperature more than previously assumed in IPCC modelling, so it will get hotter quicker the hotter it becomes.
Hopefully it is wrong.
posted by larkery at 12:26 AM on November 11, 2016 [4 favorites]
Roughly speaking I think it says that the temperature sensitivity to CO2 increases with temperature more than previously assumed in IPCC modelling, so it will get hotter quicker the hotter it becomes.
Hopefully it is wrong.
posted by larkery at 12:26 AM on November 11, 2016 [4 favorites]
Gwynne Dyer gave this lecture on the geopolitics of climate change back in 2010. What was a series of grim predictions is now mostly a checklist of notable trends since then. Among the things he predicts, more or less:
Superstorm Sandy: he points out the vulnerability of DC, Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York to a combination of high tide, modest sea level rise, and climate change amplified hurricane, and how unprepared these cities are for such a disaster.
US border war: Demands to actually totally close the southern border of US will grow. He convincingly argues it's perfectly feasible if done like the Iron Curtain: you just need to be willing to kill people who try to cross it. He notes that if business as usual emissions continue, likely by mid century there will be so many starving people trying to enter the US from the southern border large scale killing of these people will be more or less inevitable, as it's likely that the effects of subtropical aridification will be hurting the US as well, and it simply won't be possible to feed everyone if they were let in. So now you have the US government responsible for mass killings of starving refugees from Mexico and Central America, and a population that will be over 20% Hispanic with relatively recent ancestry in either Mexico or Central America, creating the sharpest civil divide in US since the fight over slavery.
Mediterranean droughts, grain price spikes, leading to failed states in North Africa, the Levant, and eventually Southern Europe: He speculates that if Iraq was a stronger state, there would be a war between them and Turkey before too long over how much water Turkey can divert from the tributaries of the Tigris and Euphrates, so I guess he doesn't quite nail down the character of the conflict, but he accurately predicts where it happened.
This leads of course, to the current migrant crisis, which Dyer insists will steadily get worse as droughts in the subtropics continue, and will eventually expand into southern Europe.
This leads to a conflict between Greece, Italy, Spain on one side, northern Europe on the other, pressure to close EU internal borders.
UK jumps first, bails out of Schengen Agreement and closes its border to the rest of Europe. So I guess that gets us to the present day.
From there, we get into dwindling Himalayan glaciers and growing population building to a crisis as there is no longer enough water in the Indus for both the Indians and Pakistanis to grow sufficient food. India, being upstream, will appropriate all the water rather than let people starve. Pakistan will start a war rather than let their people starve. It rapidly escalates into an unrestricted exchange of nuclear weapons.
From there, the ongoing collapse of agriculture in the tropics and subtropics will eventually lead to billions of deaths through starvation, war, etc.
This is what the business-as-usual scenario gets you. It's clearer by the minute.
Thanks Trump!
posted by [expletive deleted] at 12:38 AM on November 11, 2016 [126 favorites]
Superstorm Sandy: he points out the vulnerability of DC, Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York to a combination of high tide, modest sea level rise, and climate change amplified hurricane, and how unprepared these cities are for such a disaster.
US border war: Demands to actually totally close the southern border of US will grow. He convincingly argues it's perfectly feasible if done like the Iron Curtain: you just need to be willing to kill people who try to cross it. He notes that if business as usual emissions continue, likely by mid century there will be so many starving people trying to enter the US from the southern border large scale killing of these people will be more or less inevitable, as it's likely that the effects of subtropical aridification will be hurting the US as well, and it simply won't be possible to feed everyone if they were let in. So now you have the US government responsible for mass killings of starving refugees from Mexico and Central America, and a population that will be over 20% Hispanic with relatively recent ancestry in either Mexico or Central America, creating the sharpest civil divide in US since the fight over slavery.
Mediterranean droughts, grain price spikes, leading to failed states in North Africa, the Levant, and eventually Southern Europe: He speculates that if Iraq was a stronger state, there would be a war between them and Turkey before too long over how much water Turkey can divert from the tributaries of the Tigris and Euphrates, so I guess he doesn't quite nail down the character of the conflict, but he accurately predicts where it happened.
This leads of course, to the current migrant crisis, which Dyer insists will steadily get worse as droughts in the subtropics continue, and will eventually expand into southern Europe.
This leads to a conflict between Greece, Italy, Spain on one side, northern Europe on the other, pressure to close EU internal borders.
UK jumps first, bails out of Schengen Agreement and closes its border to the rest of Europe. So I guess that gets us to the present day.
From there, we get into dwindling Himalayan glaciers and growing population building to a crisis as there is no longer enough water in the Indus for both the Indians and Pakistanis to grow sufficient food. India, being upstream, will appropriate all the water rather than let people starve. Pakistan will start a war rather than let their people starve. It rapidly escalates into an unrestricted exchange of nuclear weapons.
From there, the ongoing collapse of agriculture in the tropics and subtropics will eventually lead to billions of deaths through starvation, war, etc.
This is what the business-as-usual scenario gets you. It's clearer by the minute.
Thanks Trump!
posted by [expletive deleted] at 12:38 AM on November 11, 2016 [126 favorites]
But the tardigrades will be ok? yes?
posted by mazola at 12:42 AM on November 11, 2016 [16 favorites]
posted by mazola at 12:42 AM on November 11, 2016 [16 favorites]
"Last one left alive, turn out the lights."
You want it darker?
posted by iamkimiam at 12:42 AM on November 11, 2016 [29 favorites]
You want it darker?
posted by iamkimiam at 12:42 AM on November 11, 2016 [29 favorites]
I never thought I'd say that the movie Children of Men portrayed an overly optimistic scenario.
posted by benzenedream at 1:01 AM on November 11, 2016 [12 favorites]
posted by benzenedream at 1:01 AM on November 11, 2016 [12 favorites]
A version of Children of Men that instead of a depopulation MacGuffin just had the predictable and inevitable consequences of doing nothing about climate change as the backdrop of the "lifeboat Britain" scenario would be too unremittingly bleak to make a movie out of.
Worth considering that in such a scenario, in order to keep refugees from swamping southern England, the UK would likely have needed to preemptively struck France with nuclear weapons to prevent them for forcing UK to accept people neither state could feed. Better to ensure the French state is destroyed first.
In a world where humanity is nowhere near able to feed itself, is there a more humane alternative to wars that quickly kill huge numbers of civilians? Would a global superstate that dispassionately administers a euthanasia lottery while keeping peace and good order be better? I don't even know if morality can be said to even exist in a world like that, just a physically manifested nihilism instead.
posted by [expletive deleted] at 1:32 AM on November 11, 2016 [2 favorites]
Worth considering that in such a scenario, in order to keep refugees from swamping southern England, the UK would likely have needed to preemptively struck France with nuclear weapons to prevent them for forcing UK to accept people neither state could feed. Better to ensure the French state is destroyed first.
In a world where humanity is nowhere near able to feed itself, is there a more humane alternative to wars that quickly kill huge numbers of civilians? Would a global superstate that dispassionately administers a euthanasia lottery while keeping peace and good order be better? I don't even know if morality can be said to even exist in a world like that, just a physically manifested nihilism instead.
posted by [expletive deleted] at 1:32 AM on November 11, 2016 [2 favorites]
Winterhill, despite the horrific picture I paint in the description, that is only one of the paths that Dyer discusses in the lecture I posted. Geoengineering is beyond risky, but we basically have no choice at this point, and it's inevitable. He points out that seeding the stratosphere with sulfur sufficient to reduce temperatures by 2°C is something well within the means of even very poor countries. He relays a chat he had with a Bangladeshi official that seems to imply that they are prepared to do this on their own if need be. They could easily afford it. More importantly, it is cheaper for Bangladesh than not doing it, if there is no alternative.
So basically, these plans may be able to buy the world some time, maybe enough time to avoid the looming disaster scenario.
I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed, but I do say ten to twenty million killed tops...uh, depending on the breaks.
posted by [expletive deleted] at 1:47 AM on November 11, 2016 [22 favorites]
So basically, these plans may be able to buy the world some time, maybe enough time to avoid the looming disaster scenario.
I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed, but I do say ten to twenty million killed tops...uh, depending on the breaks.
posted by [expletive deleted] at 1:47 AM on November 11, 2016 [22 favorites]
Winterhill, (which autocorrect just tried to change to Summerhill, btw)
Art? Love? Kindness? Beauty?
I have to convince myself most days that one of those things matter enough to keep going.
Mainly the thing that keeps me here is my friends. If I'm gone, there's one fewer person to help them get through it all. I decided to couple years ago that was the point of my life. To make things a little bit better for the people I care about.
posted by greermahoney at 1:58 AM on November 11, 2016 [6 favorites]
Art? Love? Kindness? Beauty?
I have to convince myself most days that one of those things matter enough to keep going.
Mainly the thing that keeps me here is my friends. If I'm gone, there's one fewer person to help them get through it all. I decided to couple years ago that was the point of my life. To make things a little bit better for the people I care about.
posted by greermahoney at 1:58 AM on November 11, 2016 [6 favorites]
In all honesty, when I look at small children, all cute and adorable and innocent, and I think about how much I've had to enjoy in even a limited liftetime, and how little we're potentially leaving for them - that's how I know we've got to beat this. To give them a world as good as the one we had.
posted by Kevin Street at 2:17 AM on November 11, 2016 [13 favorites]
posted by Kevin Street at 2:17 AM on November 11, 2016 [13 favorites]
We've just elected a government with a special connection to the Almighty himself.
Surely, they'll call him up and discuss a remedy?
posted by oxidizer at 2:32 AM on November 11, 2016 [1 favorite]
Surely, they'll call him up and discuss a remedy?
posted by oxidizer at 2:32 AM on November 11, 2016 [1 favorite]
It's ironic to me, as a child of the Cold War, that we spent so long in utter terror of imminent nuclear death and now it would seem to be a merciful and sweet relief compared to slow and prolonged suffocation.
posted by Ghostride The Whip at 2:32 AM on November 11, 2016 [10 favorites]
posted by Ghostride The Whip at 2:32 AM on November 11, 2016 [10 favorites]
It's ironic to me, as a child of the Cold War, that we spent so long in utter terror of imminent nuclear death and now it would seem to be a merciful and sweet relief compared to slow and prolonged suffocation.
Well, that scenario has just become a lot more probable too.
I'm not saying it's likely, but definitely more probable.
posted by oxidizer at 2:36 AM on November 11, 2016 [6 favorites]
Well, that scenario has just become a lot more probable too.
I'm not saying it's likely, but definitely more probable.
posted by oxidizer at 2:36 AM on November 11, 2016 [6 favorites]
Is there a more humane alternative to wars that quickly kill huge numbers of civilians?
It's kind of sad that progressives have spent the past few decades blasting China's one-child policy, isn't it?
That would have been your most kind alternative right there.
posted by steady-state strawberry at 2:50 AM on November 11, 2016 [16 favorites]
It's kind of sad that progressives have spent the past few decades blasting China's one-child policy, isn't it?
That would have been your most kind alternative right there.
posted by steady-state strawberry at 2:50 AM on November 11, 2016 [16 favorites]
It's ironic to me, as a child of the Cold War, that we spent so long in utter terror of imminent nuclear death and now it would seem to be a merciful and sweet relief compared to slow and prolonged suffocation.
With the election of Trump, that merciful and sweet relief seems more likely now.
posted by ogooglebar at 3:04 AM on November 11, 2016
With the election of Trump, that merciful and sweet relief seems more likely now.
posted by ogooglebar at 3:04 AM on November 11, 2016
That would have been your most kind alternative right there.
If the goal is population decline through sub-replacement birthrates, the kindest way to do that is through the economic and social liberation of women.
That's harder than a law, though, I guess.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 3:11 AM on November 11, 2016 [113 favorites]
If the goal is population decline through sub-replacement birthrates, the kindest way to do that is through the economic and social liberation of women.
That's harder than a law, though, I guess.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 3:11 AM on November 11, 2016 [113 favorites]
Yes, the tardigrades will be absolutely fine.
posted by brambleboy at 3:51 AM on November 11, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by brambleboy at 3:51 AM on November 11, 2016 [1 favorite]
We've just elected a government with a special connection to the Almighty himself.
Surely, they'll call him up and discuss a remedy?
Discuss? You mean make a deal. America has been cheated by the almighty because we didn't have a businessman to talk to Him.
posted by Obscure Reference at 4:06 AM on November 11, 2016 [4 favorites]
Surely, they'll call him up and discuss a remedy?
Discuss? You mean make a deal. America has been cheated by the almighty because we didn't have a businessman to talk to Him.
posted by Obscure Reference at 4:06 AM on November 11, 2016 [4 favorites]
Why would an all-knowing God make a deal with a contract-breaker like Trump?
posted by Kirth Gerson at 4:17 AM on November 11, 2016 [6 favorites]
posted by Kirth Gerson at 4:17 AM on November 11, 2016 [6 favorites]
The world is being held at gun point, and earlier this year I was actually cheered that we'd managed to negotiate a lower calibre bullet.
Can we at least work out how to build a monument that will survive it so there's a chance someone will know we were here?
posted by lucidium at 4:44 AM on November 11, 2016 [2 favorites]
Can we at least work out how to build a monument that will survive it so there's a chance someone will know we were here?
posted by lucidium at 4:44 AM on November 11, 2016 [2 favorites]
Those who voted Trump in made a deal with a contract breaker. A good deal maker knows how to present it in a way that you feel he's on your side.
posted by Obscure Reference at 4:51 AM on November 11, 2016 [3 favorites]
posted by Obscure Reference at 4:51 AM on November 11, 2016 [3 favorites]
I think the world is more optimized for being interesting than for kindness.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 5:08 AM on November 11, 2016 [11 favorites]
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 5:08 AM on November 11, 2016 [11 favorites]
Can we at least work out how to build a monument that will survive it so there's a chance someone will know we were here?
I understand there are plans for some sort of wall?
posted by No-sword at 5:11 AM on November 11, 2016 [13 favorites]
I understand there are plans for some sort of wall?
posted by No-sword at 5:11 AM on November 11, 2016 [13 favorites]
this stuff never plays out like it does in the movies does it? They predicted massive superstorms, mass refugees which will lead to totalitarian governments. Check, check, check. It just doesn't seem as real without the ominous movie music.
posted by any major dude at 5:12 AM on November 11, 2016 [3 favorites]
posted by any major dude at 5:12 AM on November 11, 2016 [3 favorites]
What is the reason my presence on the planet isn't just a complete waste of resources that could be put to better use elsewhere?
Don't do that. Find some small way to put your resources to good use, even if it is just supporting others in the same boat.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 5:18 AM on November 11, 2016 [3 favorites]
Don't do that. Find some small way to put your resources to good use, even if it is just supporting others in the same boat.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 5:18 AM on November 11, 2016 [3 favorites]
Is it possible that the oxygen levels are already low enough to explain the entirety of WTF-Is-Happening-2016? -
posted by erratic meatsack
Not the oxygen levels. It's the CO2 that's making us stupid and angry.
posted by MrVisible at 5:26 AM on November 11, 2016 [6 favorites]
posted by erratic meatsack
Not the oxygen levels. It's the CO2 that's making us stupid and angry.
posted by MrVisible at 5:26 AM on November 11, 2016 [6 favorites]
Geo-engineering really is the only real viable solution long term. Like others have said seeding the atmosphere with particulates is well within the grasp of most nation states and other large scale projects to tackle carbon sequestration are definitely possible.
The reality is that the US was at best a reluctant partner in climate change negotiations and there really is only limited appetite in the US to abandon our fossil fuel driven economy.
Can our science and engineering capabilities catch up with the scope of the problem? Maybe but we need to buy people time. If Republicans need to hear that climate change is a real problem even if the want to believe that it's not human caused then fine as long as they commit to actions to help reverse climate change.
posted by vuron at 5:39 AM on November 11, 2016 [3 favorites]
The reality is that the US was at best a reluctant partner in climate change negotiations and there really is only limited appetite in the US to abandon our fossil fuel driven economy.
Can our science and engineering capabilities catch up with the scope of the problem? Maybe but we need to buy people time. If Republicans need to hear that climate change is a real problem even if the want to believe that it's not human caused then fine as long as they commit to actions to help reverse climate change.
posted by vuron at 5:39 AM on November 11, 2016 [3 favorites]
“Genes are changing, species’ physiology and physical features such as body size are changing, species are shifting their ranges and we see clear signs of entire ecosystems under stress, all in response to changes in climate on land and in the ocean.”
posted by MrVisible at 5:44 AM on November 11, 2016 [7 favorites]
posted by MrVisible at 5:44 AM on November 11, 2016 [7 favorites]
At this point the only possibility of averting catastrophe can't depend on the US reducing emissions, because there's no way to do that without regulation and regulation is definitively off the table for the foreseeable future (even if Trump is kicked out in 2020, the next sane president would have to start the multi-year process from scratch). So our hopes are (a) cheap clean energy that can quickly supplant fossil fuels; or (b) a way to efficiently remove ambient CO2 from the atmosphere. Every group and company and rich person that cares about the climate needs to stop lobbying, stop suing the government to force stronger regulations, and pour their funds into one of those options.
The "nice" part about this, and I use the word very loosely, is that we're past the point where externalities are a concern. If (a) turns out to be a huge push for nuclear power, meltdowns and nuclear waste disposal issues are still better than global suffocation. In TV Tropes terms, we've reached the Godzilla Threshold.
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 5:46 AM on November 11, 2016 [7 favorites]
The "nice" part about this, and I use the word very loosely, is that we're past the point where externalities are a concern. If (a) turns out to be a huge push for nuclear power, meltdowns and nuclear waste disposal issues are still better than global suffocation. In TV Tropes terms, we've reached the Godzilla Threshold.
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 5:46 AM on November 11, 2016 [7 favorites]
For the good of the entire world, any leader who denies climate change or who isn't prepared to take drastic measures about it has to be removed from power by any means necessary. Seriously, we're out of time to play nice with monsters, and our children will suffer the consequences if we don't take action immediately.
posted by IAmUnaware at 5:47 AM on November 11, 2016 [9 favorites]
posted by IAmUnaware at 5:47 AM on November 11, 2016 [9 favorites]
What the fuck were we thinking, bringing children into this world.
What the fuck were we thinking.
posted by edheil at 5:48 AM on November 11, 2016 [11 favorites]
What the fuck were we thinking.
posted by edheil at 5:48 AM on November 11, 2016 [11 favorites]
Yes, the tardigrades will be absolutely fine.Funny little organisms aren't they. They've been described as both robust and cute, and whilst one can certainly agree with the former, the latter is decidedly subjective.
Tardigrades make a fine foil to posit the argument that anthropogenic climate change – burning fuel and releasing waste heat and gasses into the atmosphere – largely affects human life, with secondary effects on other highly-evolved life forms. Specifically, the more evolved a life form becomes, generally the more specialised it also becomes. When we look at large mammals (like bears or elephants), we see small ranges. When we look at smaller mammals (like wolves, dogs, cats, rats), we see larger rangers. When we look at tiny animals – like mosquitos and ants – we see tremendously large ranges. Finally, when we look at bacteria, we see near-infinite ranges.
Thus the argument that stable environments enable greater specialisation, but simultaneously also reduce adaptability. And the counter argument that unstable environments drives less specialisation and increased adaptability. Relevant because climate change will not 'destroy the earth', but rather it will destroy the present human conception of earth – and potential the earth's ability to sustain a large human population.
Humans broke the cognitive barrier to use tools – tools that enabled us to simultaneously become more specialised and more adaptable. There's brilliant work in both The Gene and Homo Deus, which leads to the conclusion that human's increasing dominance of the environment leads to a fine balance between specialisation and adaptability. Unlike many other mammals, humans have preciously little innate behavioural programming. Rather, we are born with a nearly-unlimited capacity to learn and adapt to using tools. We are in essence specialised to be adaptable – and it has served us eminently well.
However. That presumes that we are born into an environment that supports the use of our tools and systems – both social and otherwise. While we as a species are more robust than perhaps any other form of complex life on earth, as individuals we are generally less robust.
The great error is to presume that humans are divorced from the environment, or even worse that we dominate it. While we may exercise the greatest amount of control over the environment – as climate change now proves – we do not exercise that control consciously. Rather our effects on the climate are an indirect effect of our economic system, which is at present predicated on narrow measures of financial value, with climate as the externality.
The bolster of fossil stocks yesterday, and the hit of renewables was a good opportunity to reflect on the role of investors in relation to the climate problem. Perhaps we would like to think that investors drive the worldwide markets – that the investor is primary in shaping things. However, the great dislocation between Obama's policies and Trump's reported policies show in fact that investors largely respond to perceived opportunities. Far from driving effects into the world, investors may well report potential futures of those effects. It is easy to malign fund managers for chasing carbon returns now that we have a carbon president, but the reality is that they are simply responding to the market created by policy.
There may be exceptions to that, like the Norwegian SWF intentionally moving out of fossil stocks, but generally, investors will assess likelihood of returns and invest accordingly. This is a fresh reminder of the entwinement between governments and markets – that in fact markets do not exist naturally, but rather are fundamental creations of policy. That markets largely cannot exist without governments, and therefore the primary driver and shaper of markets is governance and policy. In recent times, it has seems like the tail wagging the dog – that markets may well be creating governments – but today we have a very clear illustration that in fact policy commands markets.
Trump's plan represents a woeful disconnect from the prior economic policy toward climate change, which was to use fossil fuels only as long as required to transition to low carbon sources. That we cannot simply turn off fossil fuel production, for the economy rests on it, but that new investment should largely go into sustainable sources. As those sustainable sources scaled, we begin transitioning off of them – toward a crossover point, where we maintain economic growth while also decreasing emissions. The ultimate goal of humanity – make the transition to again break the rules, increased growth and decreased toxic consumption.
Sadly, we are largely achieving that point, first in Europe and now in the United States. Where carbon emissions flatten while economic productivity continues to rise. The great disconnection point of economic growth from carbon consumption... within our grasp now. Or at least it was.
That requires tremendous political will, for that investment reorganises old supply chains and creates new winners and losers. It would be a different comment to discuss supply chain and employment impact, however we now see that its there. Our gains in efficiency resulting in tremendous economic instability for individuals.
What this climate news really shows is the limits of tribalism, nationalism, and potentially democracy itself. As Americans vote, they "vote the economy stupid". Yet, the economic revitalisation they have now voted for may well increase environmental degradation and not only imperil themselves, but also billions of other people around the world. We remain slavishly devoted to measuring our lives by the economy, and therefore the environment remains a faraway externality.
If the vote had been based on "vote the environment stupid", there would have been no contest, but then that's the point of the externality. That the environmental degradation is not yet as visible as economic degradation.
Not yet, which is the point of this paper. That actually for all our modelling, we may be already grossly under representing climate change – and that's before the United States backs off of carbon reduction commitments and embarks on fossil policy. That should not be surprising – that we've under modelled it, for climate science is less than 50 years old, while our form of economics is at least 500 years old.
We may well be incapable as individuals from managing the policies required to address climate change, precisely due to its externalities. We cannot ask a group of people to vote against their own economy goodwill today, to reduce a coming ecological threat tomorrow. Simple hyperbolic discounting make that a relatively irrational choice. Thus, we somehow need to connect the economy and the environment in a positive feedback loop – however that is not something that we have been able to do.
If democracy is based on the wisdom of crowds – that the masses will align to vote their best interests – we have reached a limitation, which is that their economic best interests are very clear, but their climate best interests remain distant and in many cases simply ideological. The fact that scientists are establishing increasingly robust climate models while the political arguments still oscillate around the fundamental reality of climate change means that we may be quickly reaching an impasse. Where the greatest threat to climate change is policy, and policy is underpinned by democracy.
A success return to fossil fuels by the United States may start a movement around the world of returning to fossil fuels. Unlike economic and human activities, climate impact cannot be controlled by treaties or other human systems. Therefore, if the United States becomes more competitive in the global economy through increased fossil fuel production and consumption, it will be impossible to restrict the impact of that outcome from other countries. How quickly to we reach a downward spiral that makes +7C not only possible, but likely?
Unfortunately, given this outcome and Trump's stated ambitions, the message may be that climate change and democracy – or at least American democracy – may not be compatible. That is a chilling thought, because it essentially means that the people are unable to govern themselves in relation to the survival of the human species as a whole. That our tribal leanings and limits of our perceptions do not allow us to collectively decide what is best for ourselves in the long-term.
First, I posit that as limited to American democracy, because it is impossible to separate our experience of democracy down to its core components. Education, media, campaigning, voting, etc.
Based on THIS view of climate change, how long is it before climate change becomes a military issue? If we are incapable to stopping it simply with economics (which we have seen fail) and now we are incapable of stopping it with policy (which is under threat of failing), at which point does the United States' fossil fuel consumption and emissions become a global human rights issue?
If we say that the United States will unilaterally move away from the climate change standards that ensure the viability of the earth for all human people, then we also say the United States is moving away from those standards because it experiences more of the benefits and less of the risks. Commensurately, that means someone else, somewhere else, will experience more of the risks and less of the benefits.
First of all, I cannot see this plan economically working, for there is enough data to show that fossil fuels create exponentially greater impact on underlying economic systems. That the costs of climate change will increase exponentially, and therefore fossil fuel consumption is an extremely high interest loan. The demand note comes due randomly – and exacts increasing costs.
Secondly, if the United States does pursue a climate-hostile energy path based solely on its own economic interests, it will become increasingly clear that far from American democracy taking an isolationist turn, it has taken a turn openly hostile to the rest of the world's citizens. As the effects compound, the rest of the world may have little other choice but to treat America as a climate aggressor who acts solely in its own interests. I shudder to think of what happens after that.
The most rational outcome of this election is simply that the American people are too ill-informed to govern themselves in a world threatened by intertwined externalities. If that is a trend that continues around the Western world, we may well see the international order collapse into local orders, each which deals with the effects of climate change in its own way – for climate change impact is exceeding local. A drought here. A tornado there. A hurricane there.
This is damning news for the American electorate and Donald Trump and it should be taken as such. In fact, the risk of climate change is so great, the Electoral College in the United States and Parliament in Great Britain may well best refuse the populist leanings of Brexit and this vote under the very real threat that stated plans to withdraw from international climate treaties is an untenable position for a species increasingly threatened by climate change. That the necessity of humans overrules the will of the people – especially in contests where the public was so poorly informed as to the climatic risks of their votes, that they are effectively incapable of making a rational decision on the matter.
posted by nickrussell at 5:55 AM on November 11, 2016 [46 favorites]
me, wednesday: i don't want to live on this planet anymore
earth, today: i got u fam
posted by entropicamericana at 5:56 AM on November 11, 2016 [81 favorites]
earth, today: i got u fam
posted by entropicamericana at 5:56 AM on November 11, 2016 [81 favorites]
He notes that if business as usual emissions continue, likely by mid century there will be so many starving people trying to enter the US from the southern border large scale killing of these people will be more or less inevitable, as it's likely that the effects of subtropical aridification will be hurting the US as well, and it simply won't be possible to feed everyone if they were let in.
At what point does Canada build a wall to keep US citizens out as aridification makes Canada the last patch of fertile soil left in the Western Hemisphere? Or, do we simply "Shock-and-Awe" Ottawa and then march in?
posted by Thorzdad at 6:03 AM on November 11, 2016
At what point does Canada build a wall to keep US citizens out as aridification makes Canada the last patch of fertile soil left in the Western Hemisphere? Or, do we simply "Shock-and-Awe" Ottawa and then march in?
posted by Thorzdad at 6:03 AM on November 11, 2016
So our hopes are (a) cheap clean energy that can quickly supplant fossil fuels...
If (a) turns out to be a huge push for nuclear power, meltdowns and nuclear waste disposal issues are still better than global suffocation.
From a safety perspective, I have zero objections to more nuclear. It's clear that even with Soviet levels of carelessness, it would still be preferable to the status quo. For this reason, I fully support maintaining existing nuclear capacity as long as possible.
The problem is new nuclear capability is neither cheap, nor can it be deployed quickly. The people lobbying for new nuclear capacity are just representing the interests of gigantic construction conglomerates that rely on public money obtained through graft and bid-rigging to survive, like Bechtel and SNC-Lavalin. Money for new capacity would be more efficiently spent on wind and solar, with a much earlier return on investment. Baseload stability can be achieved through more HVDC long distance transmission lines, and large-scale energy storage like pumped hydro, compressed air, molten salt, etc.
posted by [expletive deleted] at 6:09 AM on November 11, 2016 [12 favorites]
If (a) turns out to be a huge push for nuclear power, meltdowns and nuclear waste disposal issues are still better than global suffocation.
From a safety perspective, I have zero objections to more nuclear. It's clear that even with Soviet levels of carelessness, it would still be preferable to the status quo. For this reason, I fully support maintaining existing nuclear capacity as long as possible.
The problem is new nuclear capability is neither cheap, nor can it be deployed quickly. The people lobbying for new nuclear capacity are just representing the interests of gigantic construction conglomerates that rely on public money obtained through graft and bid-rigging to survive, like Bechtel and SNC-Lavalin. Money for new capacity would be more efficiently spent on wind and solar, with a much earlier return on investment. Baseload stability can be achieved through more HVDC long distance transmission lines, and large-scale energy storage like pumped hydro, compressed air, molten salt, etc.
posted by [expletive deleted] at 6:09 AM on November 11, 2016 [12 favorites]
not a single question on climate change during presidential debates. I hope all of you reading this will boycott cable news now that you will finally see what they have always been - the enemy of human progress. I called my cable company today to cancel and when they asked why I told them "irresponsible election coverage"
posted by any major dude at 6:16 AM on November 11, 2016 [24 favorites]
posted by any major dude at 6:16 AM on November 11, 2016 [24 favorites]
So our hopes are (a) cheap clean energy that can quickly supplant fossil fuels ... If (a) turns out to be a huge push for nuclear power, meltdowns and nuclear waste disposal issues are still better than global suffocation
Nukes are too expensive to build and too slow to deploy. Accelerating the existing ramp-up of efficiency and renewables will get us where we need to be both faster and more profitably.
posted by flabdablet at 6:17 AM on November 11, 2016 [3 favorites]
Nukes are too expensive to build and too slow to deploy. Accelerating the existing ramp-up of efficiency and renewables will get us where we need to be both faster and more profitably.
posted by flabdablet at 6:17 AM on November 11, 2016 [3 favorites]
Since 2000 to the total time devoted to climate change in presidential debates in has been a little over a third of the running time of An Inconvenient Truth. I'd love to see what it looks like compared to the running time of conversations about "rebuilding" the largest most powerful military in the history of the world.
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 6:22 AM on November 11, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 6:22 AM on November 11, 2016 [1 favorite]
Geo-engineering is a route to avoid any Venus-like scenarios, vuron. Geo-engineering represents its own form of climate change though, meaning you're making possibly unpredictable choices about destroying agriculture in different places.
I've no idea if Venus-like scenarios really lie in the cards, although I'd be interested in trying to read some papers on that maybe. I think ethically we're obligated to avoid a Venus-like scenario by whatever means necessary, including causing starvation for billions.
It's infinitely easier to drastically reduce emissions now though, whatever the means. In particular, India and Indonesia have an awful lot of red on this map, so these countries should consider climate change to be the sort of national security issue that warrants assassinations.
posted by jeffburdges at 6:25 AM on November 11, 2016 [2 favorites]
I've no idea if Venus-like scenarios really lie in the cards, although I'd be interested in trying to read some papers on that maybe. I think ethically we're obligated to avoid a Venus-like scenario by whatever means necessary, including causing starvation for billions.
It's infinitely easier to drastically reduce emissions now though, whatever the means. In particular, India and Indonesia have an awful lot of red on this map, so these countries should consider climate change to be the sort of national security issue that warrants assassinations.
posted by jeffburdges at 6:25 AM on November 11, 2016 [2 favorites]
Recent climate studies predict that global temperatures could raise as much as 7C within our lifetimes, putting Earth on the fast track to a full Venus atmosphere.
In a psychological sense, this is how Trump got elected, but not just about climate change, also over-population and free trade and health care. Denial is a natural impulse among the least self-aware.
posted by Brian B. at 6:26 AM on November 11, 2016 [3 favorites]
In a psychological sense, this is how Trump got elected, but not just about climate change, also over-population and free trade and health care. Denial is a natural impulse among the least self-aware.
posted by Brian B. at 6:26 AM on November 11, 2016 [3 favorites]
At what point does Canada build a wall to keep US citizens out as aridification makes Canada the last patch of fertile soil left in the Western Hemisphere? Or, do we simply "Shock-and-Awe" Ottawa and then march in?
Dyer touches on this in the lecture (it was given in Vancouver, after all). As he sees it, Canada has two choices: huge numbers of undocumented immigrants from the US, or selling them a lot of our water. He seems to prefer option B.
There are a number of proposals on how this could be done on the massive scale necessary, none of them without profound effects on Canadian ecosystems, but by then we are looking at extremely radical changes anyway. My favorite plan for its sheer manic grandiosity is the Great Recycling and Northern Development (GRAND) Canal. In short, it is a plan to cut James Bay off from the rest of Hudson's Bay, creating a massive freshwater lake. Then, a series of massive pumps powered by huge nuclear generating stations sends 2.5 times the flow of the Niagara River up a canal that drains into Georgian Bay on Lake Huron. From there, it can be sold to the US and diverted into the Mississippi basin through the Chicago River.
posted by [expletive deleted] at 6:28 AM on November 11, 2016 [1 favorite]
Dyer touches on this in the lecture (it was given in Vancouver, after all). As he sees it, Canada has two choices: huge numbers of undocumented immigrants from the US, or selling them a lot of our water. He seems to prefer option B.
There are a number of proposals on how this could be done on the massive scale necessary, none of them without profound effects on Canadian ecosystems, but by then we are looking at extremely radical changes anyway. My favorite plan for its sheer manic grandiosity is the Great Recycling and Northern Development (GRAND) Canal. In short, it is a plan to cut James Bay off from the rest of Hudson's Bay, creating a massive freshwater lake. Then, a series of massive pumps powered by huge nuclear generating stations sends 2.5 times the flow of the Niagara River up a canal that drains into Georgian Bay on Lake Huron. From there, it can be sold to the US and diverted into the Mississippi basin through the Chicago River.
posted by [expletive deleted] at 6:28 AM on November 11, 2016 [1 favorite]
The only reason this makes me sad is because those who are already oppressed and suffering will take the worst of it before those in power notice any effects. I yearn for an evenly distributed apocalypse.
posted by Faint of Butt at 6:34 AM on November 11, 2016 [13 favorites]
posted by Faint of Butt at 6:34 AM on November 11, 2016 [13 favorites]
I don't want to derail, but 84 years is a good amount of time for medical advances to get to a place where it could viably be in our lifetimes.
Why on EARTH would anyone WANT to live that long? Who could afford to? Who would actually be allowed access to those medical advances?
posted by dlugoczaj at 6:37 AM on November 11, 2016 [5 favorites]
Oddly, I'm feeling a little better about my prospects for old age under a Trump Regime and afterwards (not great) after reading this. My condolences to anyone who has children.
posted by Halloween Jack at 6:39 AM on November 11, 2016
posted by Halloween Jack at 6:39 AM on November 11, 2016
Why on EARTH would anyone WANT to live that long? Who could afford to? Who would actually be allowed access to those medical advances?
Work for another 84 years because social security and medicare are gutted, deeper in debt all the time, working a series of ever-worsening jobs due to age discrimination? Yeah, no thanks, I'm already thinking that I don't really want to live much longer anyway - I've had my innings.
posted by Frowner at 6:39 AM on November 11, 2016 [8 favorites]
Work for another 84 years because social security and medicare are gutted, deeper in debt all the time, working a series of ever-worsening jobs due to age discrimination? Yeah, no thanks, I'm already thinking that I don't really want to live much longer anyway - I've had my innings.
posted by Frowner at 6:39 AM on November 11, 2016 [8 favorites]
Why on EARTH would anyone WANT to live that long? Who could afford to? Who would actually be allowed access to those medical advances?
A girl born today has a 1 in 3 chance of living to 100, a boy 1 in 4 (in the U.K. In the US more like 1 in 10), so another 84 years is not at all inconceivable for a youngish adult today.
posted by rodlymight at 6:47 AM on November 11, 2016 [4 favorites]
A girl born today has a 1 in 3 chance of living to 100, a boy 1 in 4 (in the U.K. In the US more like 1 in 10), so another 84 years is not at all inconceivable for a youngish adult today.
posted by rodlymight at 6:47 AM on November 11, 2016 [4 favorites]
the only way we're going to survive is with some sort of climate engineering mega project
I love you, but we don't actually have anything close to a technological fix for this.
posted by aspersioncast at 7:04 AM on November 11, 2016 [3 favorites]
I love you, but we don't actually have anything close to a technological fix for this.
posted by aspersioncast at 7:04 AM on November 11, 2016 [3 favorites]
So an all out nuclear war and a resulting The Road style nuclear winter is actually a best case scenario? I wonder that climate engineering doesn't include releases of smallpox and manufactured flus.
posted by Bee'sWing at 7:04 AM on November 11, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by Bee'sWing at 7:04 AM on November 11, 2016 [1 favorite]
Is there anything in the paper that really indicates Venus ?
The fact remains CO2 has reached 800PPM in the past, and the climate was certainly a major threat to human civilization, but it was not Venus.
posted by ocschwar at 7:08 AM on November 11, 2016 [3 favorites]
The fact remains CO2 has reached 800PPM in the past, and the climate was certainly a major threat to human civilization, but it was not Venus.
posted by ocschwar at 7:08 AM on November 11, 2016 [3 favorites]
I'd been contemplating how the future dystopia would look back on this year and this election and be all ''wtf was wrong with them. Right in front of their faces and they, for all pratically did nothing' just like we do looking back at other historical times. Which led to me contemplate people in those times and ponder the people that must of existed who could see what was happening and for want of power and circumstance couldn't make it not happen. Did they feel like this and many of us are now feeling?
And now I read that really that doesn't matter because there hey, awesome no future human dystopia to look back.
What in the hell do we do with this knowledge? What do you do on a personal level just to cope and what do you do on a political level.
I want to be optimistic here but it's not just about people understanding and not denying it exists in the first place. In my opinion it's the human reaction to deny bad things because it's a way of coping that's the biggest problem. I'm convinced based on my own experience a lot of climate change denialism stems from people not being able to contemplate it because it's so big, so overwhelming and terrifying and the reaction is disbelief and no it's not true because the truth is just to hard to deal with. 'God would never let it happen (and it's versions)' are versions of this type of coping.
How radical do you get? Like isn't this the time to pull out all the stops, through caution to the wind a go for it? You would think so. People in light of the stakes should be out screaming. But screaming is annoying. "Go away, you're just exagerating and I need to finish watching the game'
I'm at a loss as to what to do.
My only solace is the hope that some 'big guns' step up to the plate, realize the stakes and start using their power, money and influence. Elites vs elites.
Come on elites. Please and thank you.
posted by Jalliah at 7:11 AM on November 11, 2016 [8 favorites]
I don't know the quality of the research or the likelihood that this single paper reflects reality. But I can evaluate the the Independent article, and it is one piece of crap science reporting. So I'll stick with pre-existing levels of panic for a while.
posted by mark k at 7:14 AM on November 11, 2016 [7 favorites]
posted by mark k at 7:14 AM on November 11, 2016 [7 favorites]
Summer is coming.
posted by brevator at 7:16 AM on November 11, 2016 [10 favorites]
posted by brevator at 7:16 AM on November 11, 2016 [10 favorites]
Also, maybe the burning of fossil fuels leading to runaway climate change is the answer to the Fermi Paradox.
Seems to me the 20th and 21st Centuries are providing us with plenty of possibilities to explain the Fermi Paradox, sad to say (total war, ethnic genocide, industrial climate change, exploitative capitalism and progress/growth, obsessive consumer media, ideological siloing, kids on my lawn, etc.)
posted by aught at 7:21 AM on November 11, 2016 [1 favorite]
Seems to me the 20th and 21st Centuries are providing us with plenty of possibilities to explain the Fermi Paradox, sad to say (total war, ethnic genocide, industrial climate change, exploitative capitalism and progress/growth, obsessive consumer media, ideological siloing, kids on my lawn, etc.)
posted by aught at 7:21 AM on November 11, 2016 [1 favorite]
James Burke's After The Warming 1989 ~2hr essay was linked in another thread here yesterday and I just sit her mouth agape having inhaled it.
Amazingly prescient, and more than that, so well constructed. (The Day The Universe Changed blew me away back in '86, too).
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 7:22 AM on November 11, 2016 [7 favorites]
Amazingly prescient, and more than that, so well constructed. (The Day The Universe Changed blew me away back in '86, too).
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 7:22 AM on November 11, 2016 [7 favorites]
Recent climate studies predict that global temperatures could raise as much as 7C within our lifetimes, putting Earth on the fast track to a full Venus atmosphere.
Okay, so while drastic measures clearly need to be made to address climate change to avoid any human suffering we can and limit further loss of animal species, uninformed comparisons and hyperbole don't serve anyone's interest. Venus's atmosphere is something like 970000 ppm and its average surface temperature is more like 480 degrees C above the Earth's.
posted by aught at 7:27 AM on November 11, 2016 [2 favorites]
Okay, so while drastic measures clearly need to be made to address climate change to avoid any human suffering we can and limit further loss of animal species, uninformed comparisons and hyperbole don't serve anyone's interest. Venus's atmosphere is something like 970000 ppm and its average surface temperature is more like 480 degrees C above the Earth's.
posted by aught at 7:27 AM on November 11, 2016 [2 favorites]
Now that the election's over it's okay to go back to climate panic stories and the accompanying self-righteous sadism masquerading as scientific realism.
posted by No Robots at 7:36 AM on November 11, 2016 [4 favorites]
posted by No Robots at 7:36 AM on November 11, 2016 [4 favorites]
The Earth is very different to Venus - we're further away from the sun, and our planet enjoys global tectonics and magnetic fields that work to counter much of the mechanisms creating the hellscape that is our not-so-lovely sister. Nothing humans currently do will wreak that kind of planetary-scale madness.
We are however entirely capable of taking this optimal set of initial conditions completely for granted and royally f*cking the climate in which we evolved to the point that we can't exist in it anymore. The planet will likely be glad to have shot of us. It's just a shame we're taking half the biosphere down too.
posted by freya_lamb at 7:42 AM on November 11, 2016 [5 favorites]
We are however entirely capable of taking this optimal set of initial conditions completely for granted and royally f*cking the climate in which we evolved to the point that we can't exist in it anymore. The planet will likely be glad to have shot of us. It's just a shame we're taking half the biosphere down too.
posted by freya_lamb at 7:42 AM on November 11, 2016 [5 favorites]
I just saw this video of Gwynne Dyer from 2010: Geopolitics in a Hotter World
The predictions he makes, after talking to military leaders around the world, seem to match the sort of scenario laid out by this paper. **it's scary**
posted by kuatto at 7:47 AM on November 11, 2016 [3 favorites]
The predictions he makes, after talking to military leaders around the world, seem to match the sort of scenario laid out by this paper. **it's scary**
posted by kuatto at 7:47 AM on November 11, 2016 [3 favorites]
Just two links from the previous climate thread :
- Want to Slow Climate Change? Stop Having Babies
- Should We Be Having Kids In The Age Of Climate Change?
As I wrote there, there is a common position that rich countries should bolster their population through immigration rather than raising kids themselves. It's clearly less CO2 if a worker in the west grew up in the developing world and immigrated to the west, but it's nothing like 9,441 metric tons less. In fact, if the immigrant has one more child in the western country than the western born citizen, then the table gets flipped. We should reduce our population base across the board in the west, and focus on eliminating unnecessary jobs and on carbon neutral automation to avoid needing so much labor at all.
posted by jeffburdges at 8:09 AM on November 11, 2016 [3 favorites]
- Want to Slow Climate Change? Stop Having Babies
- Should We Be Having Kids In The Age Of Climate Change?
As I wrote there, there is a common position that rich countries should bolster their population through immigration rather than raising kids themselves. It's clearly less CO2 if a worker in the west grew up in the developing world and immigrated to the west, but it's nothing like 9,441 metric tons less. In fact, if the immigrant has one more child in the western country than the western born citizen, then the table gets flipped. We should reduce our population base across the board in the west, and focus on eliminating unnecessary jobs and on carbon neutral automation to avoid needing so much labor at all.
posted by jeffburdges at 8:09 AM on November 11, 2016 [3 favorites]
Ok, so I hate to actually ask this, but how much would a nuclear winter incurred by an unrestricted use of nuclear weapons between Pakistan and India do to slow global warming? Are we looking at only a few years here, or would it be long term? If the US and China and Russia all go nuked flat, how much would that do to slow global warming, both in terms of the nuclear winter and in terms of the stopping of carbon emissions?
I am by no means proposing this, but I see it as a possibility that might just save the world.
posted by Hactar at 8:19 AM on November 11, 2016
I am by no means proposing this, but I see it as a possibility that might just save the world.
posted by Hactar at 8:19 AM on November 11, 2016
You need U.S. vs China if you want to solve global warming with nuclear war. Just move Elon Musk and Tesla elsewhere first, like Europe.
There is a handy graph of different countries carbon emissions in my previous link. India is increasing, but not so crazily considering their population. And Europe's conservation completely offsets them. I donno if their total failure to institute population controls bodes ill though. If so, you might want U.S. vs China vs India or similar.
China is now the biggest current culprit. And the U.S. is not helping. If you want total historical culprit instead of current culprit, then you should integrate those graphs, which leaves the U.S. only slightly worse than the E.U. and both worse than China, but that's not relevant to your question.
posted by jeffburdges at 8:27 AM on November 11, 2016 [1 favorite]
There is a handy graph of different countries carbon emissions in my previous link. India is increasing, but not so crazily considering their population. And Europe's conservation completely offsets them. I donno if their total failure to institute population controls bodes ill though. If so, you might want U.S. vs China vs India or similar.
China is now the biggest current culprit. And the U.S. is not helping. If you want total historical culprit instead of current culprit, then you should integrate those graphs, which leaves the U.S. only slightly worse than the E.U. and both worse than China, but that's not relevant to your question.
posted by jeffburdges at 8:27 AM on November 11, 2016 [1 favorite]
I'll echo Kutsuwamushi - all the talk over slowing global population growth should just make us more committed to supporting women's education and health initiatives, world-wide. Policy change is the only thing that will make a difference in the scale we need.
Don't spend your time wringing your hands - commit to supporting those policies which will make a difference. The biggest thing you can do to help is be able to articulate the benefits of these policies, and stand up to people who are repeating misinformation. (FWIW this is part of my continuing effort to define my own response to our recent tragedy.)
posted by ianhattwick at 8:33 AM on November 11, 2016 [14 favorites]
Don't spend your time wringing your hands - commit to supporting those policies which will make a difference. The biggest thing you can do to help is be able to articulate the benefits of these policies, and stand up to people who are repeating misinformation. (FWIW this is part of my continuing effort to define my own response to our recent tragedy.)
posted by ianhattwick at 8:33 AM on November 11, 2016 [14 favorites]
Bah, JeffBurdges is a pessimist. From everything I've read the situation is much better; it would only take 100-200 modern nuclear weapons exploded over cities in order to place enough soot and ash into the upper atmosphere to block out 99% of sunlight for ~2 weeks. This would be enough to reduce global high temperatures to around 0C, and would completely destroy the biosphere/food crops, and in short order the rest of humanity too. Global warming would be solved within the year, though it might take a few millenia for the bio-sphere to recover and stabilize.
posted by Balna Watya at 8:36 AM on November 11, 2016 [5 favorites]
posted by Balna Watya at 8:36 AM on November 11, 2016 [5 favorites]
I feel that we need to rely on the Chinese to really step to the plate here and combat climate change.
They have exactly the kind of authoritarian government needed to enact reforms without input from the uneducated people that elected Trump.
Hopefully, they're pragmatic enough to realize that it really is an all-or-nothing game and that if things get really dire, their geopolitical goals are going to be threatened (to say the least).
Once American businessmen see how much control the Chinese are taking over renewable energy, that might incentivize them into investing more in it here at home for the sake of energy independence, which could help reduce US energy emissions as well.
Admittedly, this is all highly hypothetical, but clearly we can't rely on the US tacking this issue until its hand is forced by terms that they accept and understand, namely financial ones. The Chinese are the only ones that we can hope are capable of doing this.
posted by Fister Roboto at 8:40 AM on November 11, 2016 [2 favorites]
They have exactly the kind of authoritarian government needed to enact reforms without input from the uneducated people that elected Trump.
Hopefully, they're pragmatic enough to realize that it really is an all-or-nothing game and that if things get really dire, their geopolitical goals are going to be threatened (to say the least).
Once American businessmen see how much control the Chinese are taking over renewable energy, that might incentivize them into investing more in it here at home for the sake of energy independence, which could help reduce US energy emissions as well.
Admittedly, this is all highly hypothetical, but clearly we can't rely on the US tacking this issue until its hand is forced by terms that they accept and understand, namely financial ones. The Chinese are the only ones that we can hope are capable of doing this.
posted by Fister Roboto at 8:40 AM on November 11, 2016 [2 favorites]
ianhattwick, while I agree with you that we ought to do everything possible to improve the educational prospects of women, it takes a generation (of time) to educate an entire generation (of people).
We don't have a that long.
posted by ragtag at 8:43 AM on November 11, 2016
We don't have a that long.
posted by ragtag at 8:43 AM on November 11, 2016
Dormant Supervolcano Underneath Yellowstone Figures Now As Good A Time As Any
I laughed. Oh, Onion, is there any scenario you can't imagine more darkly?
posted by fungible at 8:44 AM on November 11, 2016 [18 favorites]
I laughed. Oh, Onion, is there any scenario you can't imagine more darkly?
posted by fungible at 8:44 AM on November 11, 2016 [18 favorites]
You cannot go looking for bio-weapons as a solution either, Hactar. Those are just imaginary plot devices for scare mongers. We've had plagues that killed off 70% of the population in the distant past, but modern hygiene limits microbes spread.
posted by jeffburdges at 8:45 AM on November 11, 2016 [2 favorites]
posted by jeffburdges at 8:45 AM on November 11, 2016 [2 favorites]
We do not have that long, but the whole world is developing, ragtag. We need to educate women all over the world, so that places like Africa and India can reduce their population before they do what China did when thet develop in earnest. And the Catholic church can partially be blamed for Africa.
posted by jeffburdges at 8:48 AM on November 11, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by jeffburdges at 8:48 AM on November 11, 2016 [1 favorite]
Okay, so while drastic measures clearly need to be made to address climate change to avoid any human suffering we can and limit further loss of animal species, uninformed comparisons and hyperbole don't serve anyone's interest. Venus's atmosphere is something like 970000 ppm and its average surface temperature is more like 480 degrees C above the Earth's.
This misunderstands the mechanism by which the transition happens. A few climate scientists feel this kind of scenario, usually referred to as runaway climate change, is well within the range of possibility for a business as usual emissions profile. James Hansen is probably the most notable of these. Most climate scientists feel that it is vanishingly unlikely, but the huge uncertainties around feedback effects at the very high end make it difficult to rule out completely.
As the sun moves through its main sequence life, it has been, and will continue to get gradually brighter. There is something called the Faint Young Sun Paradox, which was how to reconcile the paleoclimate data with a sun that should not have been bright enough to keep Earth from being completely covered in ice. The most widely accepted theory is that most of the additional heating necessary came from very high carbon dioxide concentrations caused when the Earth went into a "snowball" phase, when tidewater glaciers extended down into the tropics. The covering of the landmasses in ice slowed the process by which rock weathering scrubbed CO2 from the atmosphere, causing volcanic emissions to accumulate, eventually leading to enough warming to melt the ice, which then allowed weathering to remove the carbon from the atmosphere, and the cycle starts again. A compelling argument can be made that this pair of negative feedbacks prevented the early Earth from having a runaway albedo cooling effect that could have permanently encased the Earth in ice like Europa.
The runaway feedback loop on the high end has to do with the role water vapour plays as a greenhouse gas. Water vapour is not only a potent greenhouse gas, but its concentration at these temperatures is basically a direct function of temperature. This actually causes water vapour to act as a multiplier on the CO2 forcing. The reason it doesn't cause runaway feedback is the forcing from increased water vapour content is quickly overwhelmed by the increase in heat the Earth radiates into space as it warms due to the Stefan—Boltzmann law, since heat loss due to radiation increases with the fourth power of temperature. The problem is, as temperature rises, so does the gain from water vapour, meaning there is a point at which the concentration of water vapour in the atmosphere forces enough of a temperature rise that shallow tropical seas can boil, at which point it is game over, and the oceans rapidly boil away into an atmosphere that is basically now all incredibly dense superheated steam, with surface temperatures on Earth easily twice that on Venus.
There is evidence that this same process happened to Venus as the sun warmed, and in a few billion years, this process will inevitably happen on Earth as well. The most compelling piece of evidence that it was seas boiling away that led to the current Venusian atmosphere is a very high deuterium to hydrogen ratio on Venus, which is the expected consequence of an upper atmosphere of almost all water vapour being UV dissociated into oxygen and hydrogen with the lighter isotope preferentially escaping into space.
The debate that climate scientists are having as to the likelihood of humans causing this nightmare scenario by burning fossil fuels isn't can it happen at all, but is there enough fossil fuel in the Earth that burning it all will do this. The consensus is currently no, but there are very reputable scientists who disagree, and the consensus has been moving more towards their position than away from it lately.
posted by [expletive deleted] at 8:57 AM on November 11, 2016 [25 favorites]
This misunderstands the mechanism by which the transition happens. A few climate scientists feel this kind of scenario, usually referred to as runaway climate change, is well within the range of possibility for a business as usual emissions profile. James Hansen is probably the most notable of these. Most climate scientists feel that it is vanishingly unlikely, but the huge uncertainties around feedback effects at the very high end make it difficult to rule out completely.
As the sun moves through its main sequence life, it has been, and will continue to get gradually brighter. There is something called the Faint Young Sun Paradox, which was how to reconcile the paleoclimate data with a sun that should not have been bright enough to keep Earth from being completely covered in ice. The most widely accepted theory is that most of the additional heating necessary came from very high carbon dioxide concentrations caused when the Earth went into a "snowball" phase, when tidewater glaciers extended down into the tropics. The covering of the landmasses in ice slowed the process by which rock weathering scrubbed CO2 from the atmosphere, causing volcanic emissions to accumulate, eventually leading to enough warming to melt the ice, which then allowed weathering to remove the carbon from the atmosphere, and the cycle starts again. A compelling argument can be made that this pair of negative feedbacks prevented the early Earth from having a runaway albedo cooling effect that could have permanently encased the Earth in ice like Europa.
The runaway feedback loop on the high end has to do with the role water vapour plays as a greenhouse gas. Water vapour is not only a potent greenhouse gas, but its concentration at these temperatures is basically a direct function of temperature. This actually causes water vapour to act as a multiplier on the CO2 forcing. The reason it doesn't cause runaway feedback is the forcing from increased water vapour content is quickly overwhelmed by the increase in heat the Earth radiates into space as it warms due to the Stefan—Boltzmann law, since heat loss due to radiation increases with the fourth power of temperature. The problem is, as temperature rises, so does the gain from water vapour, meaning there is a point at which the concentration of water vapour in the atmosphere forces enough of a temperature rise that shallow tropical seas can boil, at which point it is game over, and the oceans rapidly boil away into an atmosphere that is basically now all incredibly dense superheated steam, with surface temperatures on Earth easily twice that on Venus.
There is evidence that this same process happened to Venus as the sun warmed, and in a few billion years, this process will inevitably happen on Earth as well. The most compelling piece of evidence that it was seas boiling away that led to the current Venusian atmosphere is a very high deuterium to hydrogen ratio on Venus, which is the expected consequence of an upper atmosphere of almost all water vapour being UV dissociated into oxygen and hydrogen with the lighter isotope preferentially escaping into space.
The debate that climate scientists are having as to the likelihood of humans causing this nightmare scenario by burning fossil fuels isn't can it happen at all, but is there enough fossil fuel in the Earth that burning it all will do this. The consensus is currently no, but there are very reputable scientists who disagree, and the consensus has been moving more towards their position than away from it lately.
posted by [expletive deleted] at 8:57 AM on November 11, 2016 [25 favorites]
Why on EARTH would anyone WANT to live that long? Who could afford to?
Peter Thiel. He's a Transhumanist who plans to live forever. There's quite a few people like him out there.
posted by happyroach at 8:58 AM on November 11, 2016 [1 favorite]
Peter Thiel. He's a Transhumanist who plans to live forever. There's quite a few people like him out there.
posted by happyroach at 8:58 AM on November 11, 2016 [1 favorite]
Peter Thiel. He's a Transhumanist who plans to live forever. There's quite a few people like him out there.
Ray Kurzweil too. He's on a severe caloric restriction diet. which is known to extend mouse lifespans, in hopes that he can live long enough for organ banks or personhood uploads or whatever.
posted by thelonius at 9:02 AM on November 11, 2016
Ray Kurzweil too. He's on a severe caloric restriction diet. which is known to extend mouse lifespans, in hopes that he can live long enough for organ banks or personhood uploads or whatever.
posted by thelonius at 9:02 AM on November 11, 2016
Here's a simple first step: ban all commercial flights. Alternately, price in all the externalitites and make it unaffordable. Your incruledity is how far we have to come as a people to act on this.
posted by Strange_Robinson at 9:12 AM on November 11, 2016 [4 favorites]
posted by Strange_Robinson at 9:12 AM on November 11, 2016 [4 favorites]
Sorry, something in my rambling above is not quite right. The boiling of the seas is typically referred to as runaway greenhouse effect. Runaway climate change is the kind of extremely strong positive feedback loops that could happen once the temperature rises above a certain level. Runaway climate change is a much more likely scenario, one that only with the most pessimistic assumptions eventually results in a runaway greenhouse effect.
posted by [expletive deleted] at 9:12 AM on November 11, 2016 [6 favorites]
posted by [expletive deleted] at 9:12 AM on November 11, 2016 [6 favorites]
I'm pretty unhappy about the fact that I'm going to die so soon, actually. I don't want to live forever but a lifetime in measured decades seems entirely too short to me.
I don't think it's actually that weird. I've wanted to die before, but I got better. I find simple pleasure in many small things. I want to continue doing that as long as my circumstances are comfortable enough.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 9:12 AM on November 11, 2016 [3 favorites]
I don't think it's actually that weird. I've wanted to die before, but I got better. I find simple pleasure in many small things. I want to continue doing that as long as my circumstances are comfortable enough.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 9:12 AM on November 11, 2016 [3 favorites]
Can our science and engineering capabilities catch up with the scope of the problem?
Ohhai, the Republicans are about to end all basic research.
posted by T.D. Strange at 9:28 AM on November 11, 2016 [4 favorites]
Ohhai, the Republicans are about to end all basic research.
posted by T.D. Strange at 9:28 AM on November 11, 2016 [4 favorites]
Ohhai, the Republicans are about to end all basic research.
The Defense Department funds a lot of research. Surely some of that will remain. Of course I think they have already been ordered not to even fund studies of how to react to climate change.
posted by thelonius at 9:42 AM on November 11, 2016 [2 favorites]
The Defense Department funds a lot of research. Surely some of that will remain. Of course I think they have already been ordered not to even fund studies of how to react to climate change.
posted by thelonius at 9:42 AM on November 11, 2016 [2 favorites]
Every so often I need a news break to keep the anxiety levels low enough to function. i think I'm gonna need a year off after this week.
I watch my 5 year old daughter being awesome the way 5 year olds are and it saddens me that I actually can't see a future for her. I've lost the ability to dream.
It didn't have to be like this, that's the worst bit of it.
posted by twistedonion at 9:49 AM on November 11, 2016 [8 favorites]
I watch my 5 year old daughter being awesome the way 5 year olds are and it saddens me that I actually can't see a future for her. I've lost the ability to dream.
It didn't have to be like this, that's the worst bit of it.
posted by twistedonion at 9:49 AM on November 11, 2016 [8 favorites]
The Defense Department funds a lot of research. Surely some of that will remain. Of course I think they have already been ordered not to even fund studies of how to react to climate change.
Yep.
posted by T.D. Strange at 9:52 AM on November 11, 2016 [6 favorites]
Yep.
posted by T.D. Strange at 9:52 AM on November 11, 2016 [6 favorites]
This is fine.
posted by Cookiebastard at 9:58 AM on November 11, 2016 [3 favorites]
posted by Cookiebastard at 9:58 AM on November 11, 2016 [3 favorites]
ban all commercial flights
big jets are pretty efficient, 1 gallon per second to move hundreds of people where they want to go.
ban wasteful sub-40mpg cars first, eh.
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 10:05 AM on November 11, 2016 [9 favorites]
big jets are pretty efficient, 1 gallon per second to move hundreds of people where they want to go.
ban wasteful sub-40mpg cars first, eh.
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 10:05 AM on November 11, 2016 [9 favorites]
I watch my 5 year old daughter being awesome the way 5 year olds are and it saddens me that I actually can't see a future for her. I've lost the ability to dream.
Mine's six, I feel the same way.
When is she old enough for me to tell her that all of the grownups failed her at the most fundamental level, that we can't even leave her a world with enough air and fertile soil to live?
posted by murphy slaw at 10:15 AM on November 11, 2016 [3 favorites]
Mine's six, I feel the same way.
When is she old enough for me to tell her that all of the grownups failed her at the most fundamental level, that we can't even leave her a world with enough air and fertile soil to live?
posted by murphy slaw at 10:15 AM on November 11, 2016 [3 favorites]
Air vs car travel for long distance voyages seems rather complex, but yes cars are much easier to reform than planes. All the obvious solutions like taxing gasoline, banning sub 40 mpg cars, etc. help massively. Jet fuel costs are only a minor part of the flight, so taxes do almost nothing. And airline customers can easily afford to pay more. You could maybe reduce flights by closing the check-in desk, and access to security, two hours before flights though, thus making business travelers squander an extra hour at the airport, but that's annoying so everyone will hate you.
posted by jeffburdges at 10:25 AM on November 11, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by jeffburdges at 10:25 AM on November 11, 2016 [1 favorite]
I dunno Murphy slaw. I get her books on the planet, try ensure she understands we need to look after it. That's easy though. Ask any child if they should look after the things they love and they get it. It's the grown ups that need a talking too.
I'm hardly an optimist but I'm sure as hell going to protect her innocence as long as I can. the world is a beautiful place. Enjoy the moment I guess.
posted by twistedonion at 10:25 AM on November 11, 2016 [2 favorites]
I'm hardly an optimist but I'm sure as hell going to protect her innocence as long as I can. the world is a beautiful place. Enjoy the moment I guess.
posted by twistedonion at 10:25 AM on November 11, 2016 [2 favorites]
You could impose a payroll tax on labor that does not count as telecommuting, including attending face-to-face meetings, like those you fly to.
posted by jeffburdges at 10:28 AM on November 11, 2016
posted by jeffburdges at 10:28 AM on November 11, 2016
If I can provide a glimmer of hope, which is not in my character so bear with me:
The federal level was always going to be an unwieldy scale at which to effect the change that is needed to even half tackle this problem. After this week's debacle those chances will decrease drastically, certainly in the near term, and the near term is all we have left. But there is a scale between international climate agreements and driving your Prius to work where positive change can happen, and happen relatively quickly with strong leadership and citizen action: cities.
It's cities that will likely bear the brunt of the impacts of climate change due to migrations, unrest, and, in many cases, coastal proximity. It's cities that require energy and are the source of most CO2 emissions. It's cities, therefore, where adaptation and mitigation will need to take place. It's cities that almost saved us from Trump, on the coasts, in the midwest, and in the deep south. It's cities where our neighbors are unavoidable and community bonds are often strongest, and it's cities where people have been rising up in protest since Wednesday morning.
The federal government is going to be weakened over the next four years and that will dramatically reduce the availability of funding for local governments to implement the needed changes to slow this train down. But federal funding cuts for local government have been happening for a while, and the federal process is a slow behemoth, and as a result, all over the country, cities and mega-regions are proving more agile in the climate change planning and activism arena. Widening a highway is incredibly expensive, cities can only do that with federal assistance. Improving bus transit, installing bikeways, developing land-uses that fosters accessibility, affordability, and livability over mobility, incentivizing alternative modes of transportation, improving building codes: these are things that can and are done locally.
Not easily, but I promise you that it is likely easier to contact your council member than it is your congressperson or your terrible president. It's easier to bring a group to a council meeting or get appointed to a position on your planning commission. It's easier to participate in Park(ing) Day, easier to get involved in a bicycle or transit advocacy group. It's probably easier to get a job in city planning (though having done that, not sure I'd recommend?).
Easiest of all is to give up, and trust me I am right at that line. Right now I am full of despair, but I can't let it paralyze me because I can't not have children now, and having met my children and I can't wish I never had done so or collapse into tears every time they stumble into the room. I suspect many of you are in the same boat. The worse it yet to come but this isn't the time to give up.
Some books in your local bookstore or library: "Walkable Cities: How Downtown Can Save America One Step at a Time" by Jeff Speck, "Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution" by Janette Sadik Khan; "Happy Cities: Transforming our Lives Through Urban Design" by Charles Montgomery; "The Metropolitan Revolution: How Cities and Metros Are Fixing Our Broken Politics and Fragile Economy" by Bruce Katz and Jennifer Bradley.
posted by gordie at 10:54 AM on November 11, 2016 [50 favorites]
The federal level was always going to be an unwieldy scale at which to effect the change that is needed to even half tackle this problem. After this week's debacle those chances will decrease drastically, certainly in the near term, and the near term is all we have left. But there is a scale between international climate agreements and driving your Prius to work where positive change can happen, and happen relatively quickly with strong leadership and citizen action: cities.
It's cities that will likely bear the brunt of the impacts of climate change due to migrations, unrest, and, in many cases, coastal proximity. It's cities that require energy and are the source of most CO2 emissions. It's cities, therefore, where adaptation and mitigation will need to take place. It's cities that almost saved us from Trump, on the coasts, in the midwest, and in the deep south. It's cities where our neighbors are unavoidable and community bonds are often strongest, and it's cities where people have been rising up in protest since Wednesday morning.
The federal government is going to be weakened over the next four years and that will dramatically reduce the availability of funding for local governments to implement the needed changes to slow this train down. But federal funding cuts for local government have been happening for a while, and the federal process is a slow behemoth, and as a result, all over the country, cities and mega-regions are proving more agile in the climate change planning and activism arena. Widening a highway is incredibly expensive, cities can only do that with federal assistance. Improving bus transit, installing bikeways, developing land-uses that fosters accessibility, affordability, and livability over mobility, incentivizing alternative modes of transportation, improving building codes: these are things that can and are done locally.
Not easily, but I promise you that it is likely easier to contact your council member than it is your congressperson or your terrible president. It's easier to bring a group to a council meeting or get appointed to a position on your planning commission. It's easier to participate in Park(ing) Day, easier to get involved in a bicycle or transit advocacy group. It's probably easier to get a job in city planning (though having done that, not sure I'd recommend?).
Easiest of all is to give up, and trust me I am right at that line. Right now I am full of despair, but I can't let it paralyze me because I can't not have children now, and having met my children and I can't wish I never had done so or collapse into tears every time they stumble into the room. I suspect many of you are in the same boat. The worse it yet to come but this isn't the time to give up.
Some books in your local bookstore or library: "Walkable Cities: How Downtown Can Save America One Step at a Time" by Jeff Speck, "Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution" by Janette Sadik Khan; "Happy Cities: Transforming our Lives Through Urban Design" by Charles Montgomery; "The Metropolitan Revolution: How Cities and Metros Are Fixing Our Broken Politics and Fragile Economy" by Bruce Katz and Jennifer Bradley.
posted by gordie at 10:54 AM on November 11, 2016 [50 favorites]
thank you gordie.
posted by sallybrown at 11:01 AM on November 11, 2016 [2 favorites]
posted by sallybrown at 11:01 AM on November 11, 2016 [2 favorites]
You could maybe reduce flights by closing the check-in desk, and access to security, two hours before flights though, thus making business travelers squander an extra hour at the airport, but that's annoying so everyone will hate you.
oh my god the TSA is an environmental program
posted by the agents of KAOS at 11:14 AM on November 11, 2016 [9 favorites]
oh my god the TSA is an environmental program
posted by the agents of KAOS at 11:14 AM on November 11, 2016 [9 favorites]
I've thought about a bit and... maybe we should just try talking to Trump about the issue? Gather up all of the world's top climate scientists, do whatever it takes to get some of his time, sit down, and try to convince him? He's a poorly attached part of the republican machine, at best. Getting all of those scientists together would give him a ego rush and possibly make him listen. If he made progress, he could be a big hero on the global scale. He could use it as a program to provide jobs to all of the people he promised them to. Maybe it's worth a shot?
posted by Mitrovarr at 11:14 AM on November 11, 2016 [20 favorites]
posted by Mitrovarr at 11:14 AM on November 11, 2016 [20 favorites]
I mean outright banning. Not reform. Reform would happen in laboratories. Here's some numbers.
There is a need for common sacrifice here. Much talk is wasted trying to preserve privileges for folks higher up the chain.
posted by Strange_Robinson at 11:23 AM on November 11, 2016
There is a need for common sacrifice here. Much talk is wasted trying to preserve privileges for folks higher up the chain.
posted by Strange_Robinson at 11:23 AM on November 11, 2016
I hadn't heard much about this idea of seeding the atmosphere with particles. It sounds as if it is going to be necessary. I hope it works.
posted by showbiz_liz at 11:23 AM on November 11, 2016
posted by showbiz_liz at 11:23 AM on November 11, 2016
Yeah, Trump remains profoundly dangerous, but that's mostly because of his relatively small and angry base. If a larger movement can catch his attention and convince him that he has this idea to do something about climate change, it could work. It seems to me that Trump is the kind of person you can get to do anything if you can convince him it was his idea all along.
posted by [expletive deleted] at 11:24 AM on November 11, 2016 [6 favorites]
posted by [expletive deleted] at 11:24 AM on November 11, 2016 [6 favorites]
If a larger movement can catch his attention and convince him that he has this idea to do something about climate change, it could work. It seems to me that Trump is the kind of person you can get to do anything if you can convince him it was his idea all along.
What if we just sent Leonardo DiCaprio and the gang to Inception him?
posted by Strange Interlude at 11:30 AM on November 11, 2016 [5 favorites]
What if we just sent Leonardo DiCaprio and the gang to Inception him?
posted by Strange Interlude at 11:30 AM on November 11, 2016 [5 favorites]
I hadn't heard much about this idea of seeding the atmosphere with particles. It sounds as if it is going to be necessary. I hope it works.
We know it works because it is basically directly copying a well-understood mechanism by which very large volcanic eruptions cause the average temperature to cool. Also the side effects are at least somewhat understood. Most importantly it's cheap, well within the means of all but the poorest nations to keep us under 2°C warming for another decade at least. It's even within the means of wealthy individuals. The logistics of it are dead simple, and the startup time is negligible. Gates or Buffet could start tomorrow and be operational next week if they wanted.
A country that has everything to lose from climate change, Bangladesh is the perfect example, will inevitably do this or something similar once their backs are up against the wall. It's important to remember though that it's just a tourniquet to stop the bleeding, not a permanent solution.
posted by [expletive deleted] at 11:34 AM on November 11, 2016 [1 favorite]
We know it works because it is basically directly copying a well-understood mechanism by which very large volcanic eruptions cause the average temperature to cool. Also the side effects are at least somewhat understood. Most importantly it's cheap, well within the means of all but the poorest nations to keep us under 2°C warming for another decade at least. It's even within the means of wealthy individuals. The logistics of it are dead simple, and the startup time is negligible. Gates or Buffet could start tomorrow and be operational next week if they wanted.
A country that has everything to lose from climate change, Bangladesh is the perfect example, will inevitably do this or something similar once their backs are up against the wall. It's important to remember though that it's just a tourniquet to stop the bleeding, not a permanent solution.
posted by [expletive deleted] at 11:34 AM on November 11, 2016 [1 favorite]
If you hit the back arrow when you saw the hour and a half running time of that Gwynne Dyer talk, there is a 30 minute (for the actual talk) Harvard bookstore version of it that covers all the main points. It is well worth a listen.
posted by Bee'sWing at 11:43 AM on November 11, 2016 [2 favorites]
posted by Bee'sWing at 11:43 AM on November 11, 2016 [2 favorites]
Alternately, we could always set off a couple dozen nukes in sparsely inhabited areas. That would cool things off pretty well. For the ones who are still alive.
posted by Justinian at 12:06 PM on November 11, 2016
posted by Justinian at 12:06 PM on November 11, 2016
If a larger movement can catch his attention and convince him that he has this idea to do something about climate change, it could work. It seems to me that Trump is the kind of person you can get to do anything if you can convince him it was his idea all along.
That might have been true two years ago, but nothing outside of the FOX/Koch/Brietbart universe is ever going to make it to him now.
posted by T.D. Strange at 12:10 PM on November 11, 2016 [1 favorite]
That might have been true two years ago, but nothing outside of the FOX/Koch/Brietbart universe is ever going to make it to him now.
posted by T.D. Strange at 12:10 PM on November 11, 2016 [1 favorite]
hippie based apocalypse:
Day after day, more people come to L... A...
Don't you tell anybody, the whole place's slipping away
Where can we go, when there's no San Francisco?
Better get ready to tie up the boat in Idaho
posted by mule98J at 12:11 PM on November 11, 2016
Day after day, more people come to L... A...
Don't you tell anybody, the whole place's slipping away
Where can we go, when there's no San Francisco?
Better get ready to tie up the boat in Idaho
posted by mule98J at 12:11 PM on November 11, 2016
Joe Romm: Will Trump go down in history as the man who pulled the plug on a livable climate? The fate of humanity is in the hands of a denier who pledged to kill domestic and global climate action and all clean energy research.
posted by homunculus at 12:20 PM on November 11, 2016 [4 favorites]
posted by homunculus at 12:20 PM on November 11, 2016 [4 favorites]
I wonder if Ivanka could be at all convinced to help work on this.
posted by lisa g at 12:31 PM on November 11, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by lisa g at 12:31 PM on November 11, 2016 [1 favorite]
That might have been true two years ago, but nothing outside of the FOX/Koch/Brietbart universe is ever going to make it to him now.
Putin could. I'm only half-joking.
posted by Jalliah at 12:33 PM on November 11, 2016 [2 favorites]
Putin could. I'm only half-joking.
posted by Jalliah at 12:33 PM on November 11, 2016 [2 favorites]
I'll post this here as we were talking about population control :
Planned Parenthood is looking to hire a director of information security, based in NYC
There are some issues with this job posting though, like a certification sounds like a sign of incompetence, rather than ability.
posted by jeffburdges at 12:57 PM on November 11, 2016 [3 favorites]
Planned Parenthood is looking to hire a director of information security, based in NYC
There are some issues with this job posting though, like a certification sounds like a sign of incompetence, rather than ability.
posted by jeffburdges at 12:57 PM on November 11, 2016 [3 favorites]
I said it in a another thread but I'll say it again here-
The beef with 'Climate change' is that it's a money grab. The implicit complaint here being that they (deniers) are not the ones grabbing the money.
So, let them in on the money grab. If nothing else, let them think they are in on the money grab.
Trump is for sale, so, let's buy him. There'll be the most excellent PV cells in the whole world, producing the most fantastic energy man has ever seen... The best electricity is from our PV cells...
posted by From Bklyn at 1:00 PM on November 11, 2016 [9 favorites]
The beef with 'Climate change' is that it's a money grab. The implicit complaint here being that they (deniers) are not the ones grabbing the money.
So, let them in on the money grab. If nothing else, let them think they are in on the money grab.
Trump is for sale, so, let's buy him. There'll be the most excellent PV cells in the whole world, producing the most fantastic energy man has ever seen... The best electricity is from our PV cells...
posted by From Bklyn at 1:00 PM on November 11, 2016 [9 favorites]
Anyone know Putin's views on climate change? I'd think mild climate change largely benefits Russia, and oil sales definitely benefit Russia, but maybe Putin could be convinced about the risks of run away climate change. I ask only because among powerful world leaders he might've remarkable freedom of movement.
posted by jeffburdges at 1:01 PM on November 11, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by jeffburdges at 1:01 PM on November 11, 2016 [1 favorite]
Over-land shipping is actually just as much of a contributor to greenhouse gases as airplane travel. Time to re-invigorate the train network. Improving the communications infrastructure would also go a long way in transforming our work culture into a work-remotely culture. It's stupid that we spend so much time driving to a central building just to sit at a desk (for those whose jobs take place in that kind of setting).
I don't see appeasing Trump on the issue (or any issue) because his narcissism and lack of self-control drive his behavior. He makes agreements and signs contracts, and then fucks people over just because he feels like it--it doesn't matter if it's his own campaign staff, the party that nominated him for candidacy, his business partners, his contractors, his employees, even his own spouse(s). He has no conscience, and certainly no interest in putting himself as a lower priority for any reason at all. Even if the best scientists lined up and literally kissed Trump's ass and gave him a trillion dollars to be Climate Change Jesus, he would throw it all away days later because of some petty bullshit reason, like someone said something mean on Twitter. That's who he is, he's a petty tyrant who doesn't give a shit. That's why he sucks.
However, there are tons of far more reasonable world leaders, and a great many companies in the US are owned or headquartered elsewhere in the world, so there's no reason we couldn't appeal to THOSE leaders and convince *them* to drive the climate change bus. If a side effect is that the US becomes a broke-ass country because our own leadership refuses to innovate, until our land and workforce are so cheap that we become the new cool place to outsource tech support to the first world, so be it. It beats killing the planet and all of humanity.
posted by Autumnheart at 1:24 PM on November 11, 2016 [5 favorites]
I don't see appeasing Trump on the issue (or any issue) because his narcissism and lack of self-control drive his behavior. He makes agreements and signs contracts, and then fucks people over just because he feels like it--it doesn't matter if it's his own campaign staff, the party that nominated him for candidacy, his business partners, his contractors, his employees, even his own spouse(s). He has no conscience, and certainly no interest in putting himself as a lower priority for any reason at all. Even if the best scientists lined up and literally kissed Trump's ass and gave him a trillion dollars to be Climate Change Jesus, he would throw it all away days later because of some petty bullshit reason, like someone said something mean on Twitter. That's who he is, he's a petty tyrant who doesn't give a shit. That's why he sucks.
However, there are tons of far more reasonable world leaders, and a great many companies in the US are owned or headquartered elsewhere in the world, so there's no reason we couldn't appeal to THOSE leaders and convince *them* to drive the climate change bus. If a side effect is that the US becomes a broke-ass country because our own leadership refuses to innovate, until our land and workforce are so cheap that we become the new cool place to outsource tech support to the first world, so be it. It beats killing the planet and all of humanity.
posted by Autumnheart at 1:24 PM on November 11, 2016 [5 favorites]
jeffburdges what a great idea! If there's anything activist and progressive orgs need right now it's competent infosec and opsec people. Political campaigns too. Desired qualifications include being able to root out state level APTs from your org's network, and detect police informant infiltration into your membership.
posted by Joe Chip at 1:32 PM on November 11, 2016
posted by Joe Chip at 1:32 PM on November 11, 2016
Over-land shipping is actually just as much of a contributor to greenhouse gases as airplane travel. Time to re-invigorate the train network.
Also, this will give us a head start on building Snowpiercers if our other efforts to combat climate change end up freezing the Earth.
posted by Strange Interlude at 1:37 PM on November 11, 2016 [4 favorites]
Also, this will give us a head start on building Snowpiercers if our other efforts to combat climate change end up freezing the Earth.
posted by Strange Interlude at 1:37 PM on November 11, 2016 [4 favorites]
Food for five years. A thousand gallons of gas, air filtration, water filtration, Geiger counter. Bomb shelter....
climate change ... God. damn. deniers.
posted by Smedleyman at 1:37 PM on November 11, 2016 [3 favorites]
climate change ... God. damn. deniers.
posted by Smedleyman at 1:37 PM on November 11, 2016 [3 favorites]
Anyone know Putin's views on climate change? I'd think mild climate change largely benefits Russia, and oil sales definitely benefit Russia, but maybe Putin could be convinced about the risks of run away climate change. I ask only because among powerful world leaders he might've remarkable freedom of movement.
He seemed to be in denial mode till last year. Then he switched it 'grave danger' mode. They are part of the Paris Accords
The Putin Puzzle
How to decipher the Russian president’s mystifying statements on global warming.
Which is why I'm only half-joking about Putin influencing Trump on change considers Donald's apparent Russia love. Of course Putin would have other strategic and self interested goals as well. That is just a given.
posted by Jalliah at 1:52 PM on November 11, 2016 [3 favorites]
He seemed to be in denial mode till last year. Then he switched it 'grave danger' mode. They are part of the Paris Accords
The Putin Puzzle
How to decipher the Russian president’s mystifying statements on global warming.
Which is why I'm only half-joking about Putin influencing Trump on change considers Donald's apparent Russia love. Of course Putin would have other strategic and self interested goals as well. That is just a given.
posted by Jalliah at 1:52 PM on November 11, 2016 [3 favorites]
I think it's just adorable how everyone believes that the people funding and promulgating climate change denial are dumb enough to actually believe that climate change isn't happening. That we can talk to world leaders, show them the evidence, and they'll see the light and be converted.
They have the evidence. The level of idiocy that it would take to maintain the delusion of climate stability in an environment with access to good information is simply incompatible with things like being able to drive a car, or dress yourself in the morning, let alone run a corporation or a public office. Certainly, some of the climate deniers at the highest levels are that kind of idiot, but how have people become convinced that all of them are?
Sure, sure, never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by stupidity. But this can no longer be adequately explained by stupidity. The intelligence necessary to mount a stunningly successful campaign to discredit global warming isn't capable of ignoring the evidence on climate change.
They're not stupid. They're lying.
Really, consider that as a possibility. Let it sink in. I know, it's upsetting to think that your public officials and corporate overlords might mislead you, but it's not without precedent. So consider it for a while.
Now ask yourself, why would they do that? What if it's a conscious, deliberate strategy?
posted by MrVisible at 2:24 PM on November 11, 2016 [10 favorites]
They have the evidence. The level of idiocy that it would take to maintain the delusion of climate stability in an environment with access to good information is simply incompatible with things like being able to drive a car, or dress yourself in the morning, let alone run a corporation or a public office. Certainly, some of the climate deniers at the highest levels are that kind of idiot, but how have people become convinced that all of them are?
Sure, sure, never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by stupidity. But this can no longer be adequately explained by stupidity. The intelligence necessary to mount a stunningly successful campaign to discredit global warming isn't capable of ignoring the evidence on climate change.
They're not stupid. They're lying.
Really, consider that as a possibility. Let it sink in. I know, it's upsetting to think that your public officials and corporate overlords might mislead you, but it's not without precedent. So consider it for a while.
Now ask yourself, why would they do that? What if it's a conscious, deliberate strategy?
posted by MrVisible at 2:24 PM on November 11, 2016 [10 favorites]
Now ask yourself, why would they do that? What if it's a conscious, deliberate strategy?
I got involved in dealing with climate change almost 20 years ago and we knew this.
It's adorable that you think people don't know this and haven't known this for a very long time.
posted by Jalliah at 2:29 PM on November 11, 2016 [8 favorites]
I got involved in dealing with climate change almost 20 years ago and we knew this.
It's adorable that you think people don't know this and haven't known this for a very long time.
posted by Jalliah at 2:29 PM on November 11, 2016 [8 favorites]
I got involved in dealing with climate change almost 20 years ago and we knew this.
Then why is every strategy used in dealing with climate change deniers based on educating them?
posted by MrVisible at 2:32 PM on November 11, 2016 [3 favorites]
Then why is every strategy used in dealing with climate change deniers based on educating them?
posted by MrVisible at 2:32 PM on November 11, 2016 [3 favorites]
The point of public, performed education on climate change isn't to convince the professional deniers, it's targeted at swaying the people they've fooled.
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 2:36 PM on November 11, 2016 [4 favorites]
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 2:36 PM on November 11, 2016 [4 favorites]
Then why is every strategy used in dealing with climate change deniers based on educating them?
They're not.
posted by Jalliah at 2:37 PM on November 11, 2016 [1 favorite]
They're not.
posted by Jalliah at 2:37 PM on November 11, 2016 [1 favorite]
Climate change is political problem, so every sort political strategy and tactic that people use to try to get something to happen.
posted by Jalliah at 2:47 PM on November 11, 2016
Does this mean I don't have to worry about Roko's Basilisk anymore?
Phew.
posted by ejs at 3:54 PM on November 11, 2016 [3 favorites]
Phew.
posted by ejs at 3:54 PM on November 11, 2016 [3 favorites]
Ok, so I hate to actually ask this, but how much would a nuclear winter incurred by an unrestricted use of nuclear weapons between Pakistan and India do to slow global warming? Are we looking at only a few years here, or would it be long term? If the US and China and Russia all go nuked flat, how much would that do to slow global warming, both in terms of the nuclear winter and in terms of the stopping of carbon emissions?
You're releasing a lot of CO2 into the atmosphere with fires and ecosystem collapse and that will last far longer than any cooling.
But if you are thinking of last ditch cooling efforts, there is a better option to study. A peacefully deployed sulfate aerosol spray might achieve reasonable cooling without actually causing mass destruction. This is why volcanoes cool things short term. The time they spend in the air is only a few years so it would have to be constantly maintained, but with current estimates the cost to do so is reasonable.* The fact that it's not permanent and is easily undone is actually a plus.
This would need far more study and experiment to sort it out. It might not work as planned and could have side effects, like providing surface areas where the ozone layer can be chewed up again. For good reason an approach like this has been unpopular with environmentalists (including me) for a long time and pretty much ignored but I'm desperate enough now that my approach is "whatever helps even a little." It's also conceivable that you could do this with like 80% of the world agreeing to go along.
* Far, far cheaper than full scale overhaul of current power generation, but only a fossil fuel executive wants to do this instead of overhauling current power. It slows down warming, but isn't a long term solution. So you can't really argue "cost savings" only "more time."
posted by mark k at 5:59 PM on November 11, 2016 [2 favorites]
You're releasing a lot of CO2 into the atmosphere with fires and ecosystem collapse and that will last far longer than any cooling.
But if you are thinking of last ditch cooling efforts, there is a better option to study. A peacefully deployed sulfate aerosol spray might achieve reasonable cooling without actually causing mass destruction. This is why volcanoes cool things short term. The time they spend in the air is only a few years so it would have to be constantly maintained, but with current estimates the cost to do so is reasonable.* The fact that it's not permanent and is easily undone is actually a plus.
This would need far more study and experiment to sort it out. It might not work as planned and could have side effects, like providing surface areas where the ozone layer can be chewed up again. For good reason an approach like this has been unpopular with environmentalists (including me) for a long time and pretty much ignored but I'm desperate enough now that my approach is "whatever helps even a little." It's also conceivable that you could do this with like 80% of the world agreeing to go along.
* Far, far cheaper than full scale overhaul of current power generation, but only a fossil fuel executive wants to do this instead of overhauling current power. It slows down warming, but isn't a long term solution. So you can't really argue "cost savings" only "more time."
posted by mark k at 5:59 PM on November 11, 2016 [2 favorites]
I've been extremely worried about this, specially since the election. The new head of the EPA is a nightmare come true, for all of humanity. The paper is specially worrying. We are looking at the hottest climate in 800.000 years.
What plan of action, can we as civilians, take?
I know a few, but i'd love to know more, and share around. If we can viralilze this enough we can get some grass roots motion, and maybe get some international pressure on the US.
-donating and sharing around carbontax.org, and talking about consumption of red meat. (As an argentinian, this hurts.)
-I'm writing to my national UN representative, since I'm not american.
-talk, talk talk. Every single political discussion that pops out, this goes on the front and center. Meme the fuck out of this. Every circle you know should be talking about it. Make them worry for the life of their children, it is literally what's at stake.
-and that's it. I'm out of ideas. I only use bikes or public transport, and travelled by plane very little. Aside from the meat think, i think i've kept my carbon footprint at a minimum.
Are there any plans, or any lobby group that is pushing Musk's batteries and panels? Economic sanctions on dirty energy? I feel lost.
posted by _Synesthesia_ at 7:51 PM on November 11, 2016 [9 favorites]
What plan of action, can we as civilians, take?
I know a few, but i'd love to know more, and share around. If we can viralilze this enough we can get some grass roots motion, and maybe get some international pressure on the US.
-donating and sharing around carbontax.org, and talking about consumption of red meat. (As an argentinian, this hurts.)
-I'm writing to my national UN representative, since I'm not american.
-talk, talk talk. Every single political discussion that pops out, this goes on the front and center. Meme the fuck out of this. Every circle you know should be talking about it. Make them worry for the life of their children, it is literally what's at stake.
-and that's it. I'm out of ideas. I only use bikes or public transport, and travelled by plane very little. Aside from the meat think, i think i've kept my carbon footprint at a minimum.
Are there any plans, or any lobby group that is pushing Musk's batteries and panels? Economic sanctions on dirty energy? I feel lost.
posted by _Synesthesia_ at 7:51 PM on November 11, 2016 [9 favorites]
What about skyscraper greenhouses or other indoor ways of growing food? We've seen some pilot programs and they seem to solve many issues of transportation chains, (being local to those they feed) protection from weather and greatly reduced water use. And can use solar and wind energy.
We could save a lot of lives with a program like that. Every time I bring it up people pooh pooh it, but if drought is the new normal, how the fuck else do we expect to grow food?
Question: if the most cynical view is, our leaders know but do nothing, is the theory that they also have a death wish/don't care or have some sort of survival plan they're not going to share with us?
I can only barely stand to think about this, as I type I am listening to my husband read my son stories.
If they are just going to leave us to die the least they could do is give us all good euthanasia pills, for Christ's sake.
posted by emjaybee at 8:31 PM on November 11, 2016
We could save a lot of lives with a program like that. Every time I bring it up people pooh pooh it, but if drought is the new normal, how the fuck else do we expect to grow food?
Question: if the most cynical view is, our leaders know but do nothing, is the theory that they also have a death wish/don't care or have some sort of survival plan they're not going to share with us?
I can only barely stand to think about this, as I type I am listening to my husband read my son stories.
If they are just going to leave us to die the least they could do is give us all good euthanasia pills, for Christ's sake.
posted by emjaybee at 8:31 PM on November 11, 2016
As I linked upthread, If you can talk one American into having one fewer child, then you can eat all the meat you want, Synesthesia. It's nowhere near as effective to have one fewer child in Brazil, but those add up too.
I'd think immigrants to the U.S. add considerable carbon too, especially if they go on to raise American kids, driving em' around to soccer practice, etc. Ergo, it might help if you can talk your tech entrepreneur friends into making a go of their start up ideas in Brazil instead of moving to SF.
posted by jeffburdges at 8:53 PM on November 11, 2016 [1 favorite]
I'd think immigrants to the U.S. add considerable carbon too, especially if they go on to raise American kids, driving em' around to soccer practice, etc. Ergo, it might help if you can talk your tech entrepreneur friends into making a go of their start up ideas in Brazil instead of moving to SF.
posted by jeffburdges at 8:53 PM on November 11, 2016 [1 favorite]
Anyone know Putin's views on climate change? I'd think mild climate change largely benefits Russia, and oil sales definitely benefit Russia, but maybe Putin could be convinced about the risks of run away climate change. I ask only because among powerful world leaders he might've remarkable freedom of movement.
I made an FPP last month from a couple of recent documentary clips I came across that show apparent Russian preparations in the last several years to take advantage of the opening of the Northern Sea Route through the Russian Arctic.
posted by XMLicious at 9:15 PM on November 11, 2016 [1 favorite]
People don't swarm the streets for this because we don't understand leaders who would sentence humanity to death, we assume as humans they also want to live. And if they don't why would protest change their minds? This is literally why we have leaders, to handle basic big picture survival stuff.
posted by emjaybee at 9:20 PM on November 11, 2016 [4 favorites]
posted by emjaybee at 9:20 PM on November 11, 2016 [4 favorites]
Somebody asked what it would be like if we just did the whole Nuclear Winter thing. VSauce3 did a video about nuclear winter which is excellent, and if you'd rather not watch, they cite their sources in the description. (Spoiler: It's not good, but even more not good than you thought.)
posted by reluctant early bird at 10:37 PM on November 11, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by reluctant early bird at 10:37 PM on November 11, 2016 [1 favorite]
a series of massive pumps powered by huge nuclear generating stations sends 2.5 times the flow of the Niagara River up a canal that drains into Georgian Bay on Lake Huron
This is piss-poor system design.
If you're going to build pumps and plumbing capable of lifting such ridiculous volumes of water that they need "huge nuclear generating stations" to power them, you've got a huge potential energy storage facility.
Scratch the huge nukes, spend what you budgeted for those on wind generators with 6-7x their nameplate capacity, and use your pumps and lakes to make the resulting wind power 70% dispatchable.
For the same money, you're now lifting all that water and making vast amounts of zero-emissions, zero-waste-storage, zero-terrorist-target baseload power available to the grid.
posted by flabdablet at 10:53 PM on November 11, 2016 [3 favorites]
This is piss-poor system design.
If you're going to build pumps and plumbing capable of lifting such ridiculous volumes of water that they need "huge nuclear generating stations" to power them, you've got a huge potential energy storage facility.
Scratch the huge nukes, spend what you budgeted for those on wind generators with 6-7x their nameplate capacity, and use your pumps and lakes to make the resulting wind power 70% dispatchable.
For the same money, you're now lifting all that water and making vast amounts of zero-emissions, zero-waste-storage, zero-terrorist-target baseload power available to the grid.
posted by flabdablet at 10:53 PM on November 11, 2016 [3 favorites]
some sort of survival plan they're not going to share with us?
Being exceedingly wealthy and well-connected is scarcely a secret survival advantage.
posted by flabdablet at 10:55 PM on November 11, 2016 [4 favorites]
Being exceedingly wealthy and well-connected is scarcely a secret survival advantage.
posted by flabdablet at 10:55 PM on November 11, 2016 [4 favorites]
we assume as humans they also want to live.
The thing about ultra-wealthy and well-connected people is that they move in circles where matters of basic survival are simply over their personal horizons. They know perfectly well that fucking over the entire ecology will kill billions; they just don't expect any of those billions to be them or their progeny.
That, of course, is not counting the substantial minority who actually believe that these are the End Times and so God will obviously be looking after anybody who pretends to put money in the collection plate.
posted by flabdablet at 10:58 PM on November 11, 2016 [5 favorites]
The thing about ultra-wealthy and well-connected people is that they move in circles where matters of basic survival are simply over their personal horizons. They know perfectly well that fucking over the entire ecology will kill billions; they just don't expect any of those billions to be them or their progeny.
That, of course, is not counting the substantial minority who actually believe that these are the End Times and so God will obviously be looking after anybody who pretends to put money in the collection plate.
posted by flabdablet at 10:58 PM on November 11, 2016 [5 favorites]
All we ever hear is doom, but some things are moving in the right direction, even without political intervention:
Carbon emissions in the US have been dropping for the last few years, because the price of natural gas has dropped to be less than the price of coal, and burning natural gas releases about half the CO2 that burning coal releases. There's a virtuous cycle here - the low demand for coal pushes the price of coal down, and the low price of coal causes means coal mines cannot run at a profit, so less coal is produced. Whenever some other market force causes the price of coal to go up, then more energy production switches to natural gas.
Wind power keeps getting cheaper, and, as of the last year or two, it is cheaper than natural gas. As of sometime earlier this year, the price of solar panels has dropped enough that solar power is also cheaper than natural gas. During the sunny parts of the day, solar power dramatically outcompetes natural gas in many states, but for now we still run gas generators in most places in the evenings. Even so, this is putting pressure on the price of natural gas, such that we're actually doing less fracking than we were a couple years ago. It's the beginning of another virtuous cycle.
Attaching battery storage to the grid will mean that we can run for 24 hours on sunlight. Battery tech has been getting better and better - thank the cellphone industry for pushing the technology forward! It's hard to compare the cost of storing energy in batteries versus generating it at the moment, but it should be cost effective to build large battery facilities in the next couple years. These will displace burning natural gas during peak power usage right after sunset.
In the next five years, electric cars will cost about the same as gas cars, even without a tax break.
If the economy crashes, as some people are predicting, emissions will go down significantly for the duration. Technological process will not stop. Also, solar scales down to small, cheap installations much better than fuel-burning power plants do.
Even as we've been emitting more CO2, the biosphere and oceans have managed to grow how much carbon they absorb to continue to offset about half of our emissions. Global carbon emissions may have peaked already (emissions in 2015 were lower than in 2014). If so, there's no reason that the rate carbon absorption from the biosphere and oceans will also drop. I speculate that the percent of carbon emissions that are absorbed will go up.
I cannot predict whether these effects are fast enough to prevent a catastrophe, but it seems like a lot of the models are not taking them into account.
posted by jes5199 at 11:01 PM on November 11, 2016 [14 favorites]
Carbon emissions in the US have been dropping for the last few years, because the price of natural gas has dropped to be less than the price of coal, and burning natural gas releases about half the CO2 that burning coal releases. There's a virtuous cycle here - the low demand for coal pushes the price of coal down, and the low price of coal causes means coal mines cannot run at a profit, so less coal is produced. Whenever some other market force causes the price of coal to go up, then more energy production switches to natural gas.
Wind power keeps getting cheaper, and, as of the last year or two, it is cheaper than natural gas. As of sometime earlier this year, the price of solar panels has dropped enough that solar power is also cheaper than natural gas. During the sunny parts of the day, solar power dramatically outcompetes natural gas in many states, but for now we still run gas generators in most places in the evenings. Even so, this is putting pressure on the price of natural gas, such that we're actually doing less fracking than we were a couple years ago. It's the beginning of another virtuous cycle.
Attaching battery storage to the grid will mean that we can run for 24 hours on sunlight. Battery tech has been getting better and better - thank the cellphone industry for pushing the technology forward! It's hard to compare the cost of storing energy in batteries versus generating it at the moment, but it should be cost effective to build large battery facilities in the next couple years. These will displace burning natural gas during peak power usage right after sunset.
In the next five years, electric cars will cost about the same as gas cars, even without a tax break.
If the economy crashes, as some people are predicting, emissions will go down significantly for the duration. Technological process will not stop. Also, solar scales down to small, cheap installations much better than fuel-burning power plants do.
Even as we've been emitting more CO2, the biosphere and oceans have managed to grow how much carbon they absorb to continue to offset about half of our emissions. Global carbon emissions may have peaked already (emissions in 2015 were lower than in 2014). If so, there's no reason that the rate carbon absorption from the biosphere and oceans will also drop. I speculate that the percent of carbon emissions that are absorbed will go up.
I cannot predict whether these effects are fast enough to prevent a catastrophe, but it seems like a lot of the models are not taking them into account.
posted by jes5199 at 11:01 PM on November 11, 2016 [14 favorites]
And let's also not forget the tech bros who believe, on no better basis than that they were once employed to do a bit of stats for a finance outfit, that all the climate modelling can simply be disregarded because the models have "no predictive skill".
posted by flabdablet at 11:02 PM on November 11, 2016 [2 favorites]
posted by flabdablet at 11:02 PM on November 11, 2016 [2 favorites]
The stuff that jes5199 discusses is good. But it is incumbent on us to work to keep up the popular appeal of solar, wind, and other clean energy sources. Perhaps Trump will notice that. Perhaps not. So we must work at the local and state level to keep up pressure for renewables, electric cars, and energy efficiency.
Clean energy is something any American can get behind. The inventors of the wind turbine and photovoltaic cell were both Christian. James Brush, the inventor of "the world's first automatically operated wind turbine generator" was an American from a farm near Cleveland Ohio. These men were scientists and engineers. Blyth and Brush both had farming in their background and seemed humble men.
Wind energy should be something American farmers take pride in, especially since many wind farms are leased by actual farmers. Solar power, especially home solar, should be something Americans want because it makes them more independant.
As a Christian and Texan born American myself, I think the grounding of history in each is worth reminding fellow Christians of all stripes, particularly those felt left out by Obama's presidency. Clean energy should belong to all the people of the United States. There's a sense that clean energy is a cause that just belongs to liberals and progressives, but I've seen the west Texan wind farms in my birth state and I think, "this should belong to the every people of this nation too." I think it's worth a shot to tell and talk about these things.
I was raised in a small community of a small town. My friends came from all economic statuses and class. I think we rural raised Americans should want and get to have pride in building renewable power regardless of belief/disbelief in climate change. You could scream all you want about the death of us all, but that ain't going to reach someone who don't believe it. So give 'em something to be proud of. Give me something to be proud of. Scientific explanation is good, but sometimes it has gotta take a back seat to plain emotion.
Sorry if this all seems to be a simple viewpoint, but sometimes that's all you can go for with people.
posted by Mister Cheese at 12:42 AM on November 12, 2016 [17 favorites]
Clean energy is something any American can get behind. The inventors of the wind turbine and photovoltaic cell were both Christian. James Brush, the inventor of "the world's first automatically operated wind turbine generator" was an American from a farm near Cleveland Ohio. These men were scientists and engineers. Blyth and Brush both had farming in their background and seemed humble men.
Wind energy should be something American farmers take pride in, especially since many wind farms are leased by actual farmers. Solar power, especially home solar, should be something Americans want because it makes them more independant.
As a Christian and Texan born American myself, I think the grounding of history in each is worth reminding fellow Christians of all stripes, particularly those felt left out by Obama's presidency. Clean energy should belong to all the people of the United States. There's a sense that clean energy is a cause that just belongs to liberals and progressives, but I've seen the west Texan wind farms in my birth state and I think, "this should belong to the every people of this nation too." I think it's worth a shot to tell and talk about these things.
I was raised in a small community of a small town. My friends came from all economic statuses and class. I think we rural raised Americans should want and get to have pride in building renewable power regardless of belief/disbelief in climate change. You could scream all you want about the death of us all, but that ain't going to reach someone who don't believe it. So give 'em something to be proud of. Give me something to be proud of. Scientific explanation is good, but sometimes it has gotta take a back seat to plain emotion.
Sorry if this all seems to be a simple viewpoint, but sometimes that's all you can go for with people.
posted by Mister Cheese at 12:42 AM on November 12, 2016 [17 favorites]
Woke up this morning thinking about the people in power in my own country (Northern Ireland) and how they mirror to an extent those that will be in power in the US. The DUP are a regressive, conservative, climate change denying bunch. Fortunately for the planet they are only the voice of less than two million people.
The rub for me is you can't actually debate climate change with them. They believe to a large extent that the world is only 6000 years old.
Are there any young earth believers amongst the people taking charge of the US? If so I think I should just go back to bed. There is no way these people can be convinced of the dangers of climate change when their core belief system would need challenged. It's not a case of laying out reality in front of them and they back down (as may be the case with Trump rolling back on certain pledges like parts of Obamacare).
Maybe instead of focusing on the facts of climate change we focus on something tangible. The elite are poisoning us with co2? Pollution is killing 200,000 Americans a year, that kind of thing.
Just changing the mindset from coal is good etc. may be enough to get them on side without having to disregard their own values, however misguided they are.
I know, there's straw in my hand and I'm clutching tightly.
posted by twistedonion at 3:08 AM on November 12, 2016 [1 favorite]
The rub for me is you can't actually debate climate change with them. They believe to a large extent that the world is only 6000 years old.
Are there any young earth believers amongst the people taking charge of the US? If so I think I should just go back to bed. There is no way these people can be convinced of the dangers of climate change when their core belief system would need challenged. It's not a case of laying out reality in front of them and they back down (as may be the case with Trump rolling back on certain pledges like parts of Obamacare).
Maybe instead of focusing on the facts of climate change we focus on something tangible. The elite are poisoning us with co2? Pollution is killing 200,000 Americans a year, that kind of thing.
Just changing the mindset from coal is good etc. may be enough to get them on side without having to disregard their own values, however misguided they are.
I know, there's straw in my hand and I'm clutching tightly.
posted by twistedonion at 3:08 AM on November 12, 2016 [1 favorite]
Wow ok mr cheese, I should have read your comment. That's along the lines of what I mean. Make people proud to be invested in beautiful clean cheap energy instead of "forcing" it on them.
posted by twistedonion at 3:10 AM on November 12, 2016
posted by twistedonion at 3:10 AM on November 12, 2016
Yes, exactly, twistedonion. My birth state, Texas, is the leading producer of wind power in the US? 9.98% of it's energy in 2015 was wind power. It ain't hard to find the info, I'm quoting wikipedia. The Texas Renewable Portfolio Standard was signed by George W. Bush. This so called red state so often maligned as ignorant and backwards "set a target of reaching 10,000 MW of renewable energy capacity by 2025." Maybe it can get more with better awareness and pride in all that clean energy. I encourage anyone here on MeFi with a Christian background, Catholic, Protestant, and especially Protestant-evangelical to look at the rhetoric they use to discuss clean energy. It is a matter of pride and patriotism. It is a matter of claiming Christianity's part and the role if the farmer and individual in bringing clean energy to his home land. That may not sit well with liberal minded MeFites, but there you are. It's called knowing your audience, we were taught that in grade school.
Trump is Trump. He's part of the Federal institution now, has become an insider. Maybe a strong popular desire and state led movement fornclean energy can convince him that it is good for the US and something not only the people of this nation can be proud of but him as well. We need the jobs renewables can create. Bring solar panel and wind turbine manufacture back into the USA. Look how many non-US manufacturers of wind turbines are on this list for major Texan wind farms. Nationalism is good when we are using it to build the future of energy. Look at the Chevy Bolt. It's not a sexy car, but it's made by a US company. Michigan should be proud of this innovation.
If you feel like you're grasping a straws here for how to talk about this stuff, MeMail me and maybe we can discuss...how to discuss. I believe it's God's work. If you ain't down with God that's okay, I won't hold it against you. But it's the 25% of voters the who you got to reach if you want the rest of voters on board with renewables.
posted by Mister Cheese at 6:05 AM on November 12, 2016 [8 favorites]
Trump is Trump. He's part of the Federal institution now, has become an insider. Maybe a strong popular desire and state led movement fornclean energy can convince him that it is good for the US and something not only the people of this nation can be proud of but him as well. We need the jobs renewables can create. Bring solar panel and wind turbine manufacture back into the USA. Look how many non-US manufacturers of wind turbines are on this list for major Texan wind farms. Nationalism is good when we are using it to build the future of energy. Look at the Chevy Bolt. It's not a sexy car, but it's made by a US company. Michigan should be proud of this innovation.
If you feel like you're grasping a straws here for how to talk about this stuff, MeMail me and maybe we can discuss...how to discuss. I believe it's God's work. If you ain't down with God that's okay, I won't hold it against you. But it's the 25% of voters the who you got to reach if you want the rest of voters on board with renewables.
posted by Mister Cheese at 6:05 AM on November 12, 2016 [8 favorites]
this will give us a head start on building Snowpiercers if our other efforts to combat climate change end up freezing the Earth.
That's a serious argument against pumping geoengineering chemicals into the atmosphere: if there are unintended side effects we can't quickly reverse course.
That's one reason why my favorite geoengineering proposal is a sunshield, a massive constellation of satellites positioned at the Lagrange point between the earth and the sun as a physical umbrella to reduce the amount of sunlight we receive. It's a more expensive proposition, but we can dial the effect up or down at will.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 7:27 AM on November 12, 2016
That's a serious argument against pumping geoengineering chemicals into the atmosphere: if there are unintended side effects we can't quickly reverse course.
That's one reason why my favorite geoengineering proposal is a sunshield, a massive constellation of satellites positioned at the Lagrange point between the earth and the sun as a physical umbrella to reduce the amount of sunlight we receive. It's a more expensive proposition, but we can dial the effect up or down at will.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 7:27 AM on November 12, 2016
has become an insider
He wishes.
Gonna piss him off bigtime once he figures out that none of the actually-rich respect him either.
posted by flabdablet at 7:35 AM on November 12, 2016
He wishes.
Gonna piss him off bigtime once he figures out that none of the actually-rich respect him either.
posted by flabdablet at 7:35 AM on November 12, 2016
That's a serious argument against pumping geoengineering chemicals into the atmosphere: if there are unintended side effects we can't quickly reverse course.
That is not actually born out AFAIK. The lifespan of sulfates in the atmosphere means its a few years to start up and to turn off. That's why the cooling effect of volcanoes is limited--we're back on trend quite quickly after each big cooling eruption. If you start slowly and compare effects to models you can turn off with minimal direct effect. Contrast that with the century plus lifespan of temperature effects from carbon emissions. The real problem is there's no back up plan I know of--if you stop you get the temperature rise you would have had anyway.
There is a risk that has nothing to do with being able to stop what we're doing, and that is if you are mistaken it can disrupt the ecosystem in a way that does not reverse quickly. The indirect effects cause issues. For me this was a compelling argument against it, but now it's clear we're not going to be able to avoid unpredictable damage to ecosystems from carbon.
Please note that this logic, as I see it--long lock in times after emitting greenhouse gases and short ones for cooling aerosols--means no matter what you need to reduce carbon emissions as fast as reasonably possible. The question is whether doing more than that is going to be necessary and if so what are the options.
posted by mark k at 11:38 AM on November 12, 2016
That is not actually born out AFAIK. The lifespan of sulfates in the atmosphere means its a few years to start up and to turn off. That's why the cooling effect of volcanoes is limited--we're back on trend quite quickly after each big cooling eruption. If you start slowly and compare effects to models you can turn off with minimal direct effect. Contrast that with the century plus lifespan of temperature effects from carbon emissions. The real problem is there's no back up plan I know of--if you stop you get the temperature rise you would have had anyway.
There is a risk that has nothing to do with being able to stop what we're doing, and that is if you are mistaken it can disrupt the ecosystem in a way that does not reverse quickly. The indirect effects cause issues. For me this was a compelling argument against it, but now it's clear we're not going to be able to avoid unpredictable damage to ecosystems from carbon.
Please note that this logic, as I see it--long lock in times after emitting greenhouse gases and short ones for cooling aerosols--means no matter what you need to reduce carbon emissions as fast as reasonably possible. The question is whether doing more than that is going to be necessary and if so what are the options.
posted by mark k at 11:38 AM on November 12, 2016
nickrussell, et al: It is highly unlikely that Trump will manage to make things significantly worse in terms of US carbon emissions. Even with the falling price of fuel, it is simply uneconomical at this point to build new coal power plants. They are simply far more expensive and less flexible than gas turbine plants. Utilities weren't, by and large, building them even before the recent EPA regulation changes. It would take massive new subsidies to change that.
Regarding long lead time for nuclear plants, a large part of that is that we are presently in the process of rediscovering how to build them. Between the lost institutional memory caused by the decades-long hiatus in constructing new reactors and the fact that the new plants are significantly different in design than what we have previously built (the basic principle of operation is similar, but the details are quite different), it is slow going.
If we decided to build more, future plants would likely have less in the way of schedule and budget overruns compared to the ones currently under construction. The problem is that it isn't particularly economic compared to keeping existing coal, hydro, or other baseload online or importing baseload power from Canada. Unfortunately, building new hydro is counterproductive due to the massive carbon emissions from using that much concrete and, worse, the vast amount of methane that ends up being released after flooding the reservoir. Equally unfortunate is that the increased variability of reservoir levels compared to a purely flood control dam in and of itself causes significant methane release.
All that said, to make nuclear as good as a massive investment in rooftop solar and wind, we would have to pull our heads out of our asses and stop wasting the 90+% of usable uranium we throw away because of our refusal to reprocess "spent" fuel.
On the gripping hand, the rooftop solar and wind would require that we build an awful lot of batteries and an awful lot more inter-regional transmission to get the reliability as high as we have come to expect. However, much of that money and embedded carbon needs to be spent anyway to replace infrastructure that is rapidly reaching the end of its useful lifetime. It's a sticky problem all around.
If I were king, I'd build a bunch of nuclear, remove regulatory impediments to rooftop solar, which at this point makes economic sense for most homeowners to buy anyway, create low/zero interest loan programs for people who can't otherwise afford the initial outlay to put solar on their roof, and dump a metric fuckton of money into fusion research (there are some fantastic new ideas that will likely make it doable on a smaller scale than what ITER will be demonstrating, thus making fusion economically viable) and into carbon capture to directly remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere whether through chemical scrubbing or growing algae and/or whatever else works.
If we don't do something in terms of removing carbon from the atmosphere in the next decade or so, the droughts in the Amazon will lead to the whole thing basically burning up and turning to arid savannah at best or full on desert at worse, which will itself release catastrophic amounts of CO2 and methane into the atmosphere and eliminate one of the largest land-based carbon sinks on Earth. Rain forests create their own climate. The clearing of land has already upset the balance, but not yet irreversibly. Drought-induced burning of much of what remains will finish it off permanently.
To bring it back to the emissions situation in the US, we're fucked whether we reduce them now or keep them steady for the next 4 years. Even a drastic reduction is already too late to prevent enough sea level rise to inundate large amounts of our coast and displace millions. A drastic reduction in emissions would at best buy us some time to deal with the problem by slowing it somewhat.
No, at this point active scrubbing of carbon from the atmosphere is our only option. Thankfully, nature did it millions of years ago, so we have a blueprint for a workable system. Maybe after we build a wall and make Mexico pay for it Canada can build a massive carbon sink and make us pay for it. (Or maybe they can stop mining tar sands, which are pretty much the most carbon intensive energy source in existence)
posted by wierdo at 1:54 PM on November 12, 2016 [2 favorites]
Regarding long lead time for nuclear plants, a large part of that is that we are presently in the process of rediscovering how to build them. Between the lost institutional memory caused by the decades-long hiatus in constructing new reactors and the fact that the new plants are significantly different in design than what we have previously built (the basic principle of operation is similar, but the details are quite different), it is slow going.
If we decided to build more, future plants would likely have less in the way of schedule and budget overruns compared to the ones currently under construction. The problem is that it isn't particularly economic compared to keeping existing coal, hydro, or other baseload online or importing baseload power from Canada. Unfortunately, building new hydro is counterproductive due to the massive carbon emissions from using that much concrete and, worse, the vast amount of methane that ends up being released after flooding the reservoir. Equally unfortunate is that the increased variability of reservoir levels compared to a purely flood control dam in and of itself causes significant methane release.
All that said, to make nuclear as good as a massive investment in rooftop solar and wind, we would have to pull our heads out of our asses and stop wasting the 90+% of usable uranium we throw away because of our refusal to reprocess "spent" fuel.
On the gripping hand, the rooftop solar and wind would require that we build an awful lot of batteries and an awful lot more inter-regional transmission to get the reliability as high as we have come to expect. However, much of that money and embedded carbon needs to be spent anyway to replace infrastructure that is rapidly reaching the end of its useful lifetime. It's a sticky problem all around.
If I were king, I'd build a bunch of nuclear, remove regulatory impediments to rooftop solar, which at this point makes economic sense for most homeowners to buy anyway, create low/zero interest loan programs for people who can't otherwise afford the initial outlay to put solar on their roof, and dump a metric fuckton of money into fusion research (there are some fantastic new ideas that will likely make it doable on a smaller scale than what ITER will be demonstrating, thus making fusion economically viable) and into carbon capture to directly remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere whether through chemical scrubbing or growing algae and/or whatever else works.
If we don't do something in terms of removing carbon from the atmosphere in the next decade or so, the droughts in the Amazon will lead to the whole thing basically burning up and turning to arid savannah at best or full on desert at worse, which will itself release catastrophic amounts of CO2 and methane into the atmosphere and eliminate one of the largest land-based carbon sinks on Earth. Rain forests create their own climate. The clearing of land has already upset the balance, but not yet irreversibly. Drought-induced burning of much of what remains will finish it off permanently.
To bring it back to the emissions situation in the US, we're fucked whether we reduce them now or keep them steady for the next 4 years. Even a drastic reduction is already too late to prevent enough sea level rise to inundate large amounts of our coast and displace millions. A drastic reduction in emissions would at best buy us some time to deal with the problem by slowing it somewhat.
No, at this point active scrubbing of carbon from the atmosphere is our only option. Thankfully, nature did it millions of years ago, so we have a blueprint for a workable system. Maybe after we build a wall and make Mexico pay for it Canada can build a massive carbon sink and make us pay for it. (Or maybe they can stop mining tar sands, which are pretty much the most carbon intensive energy source in existence)
posted by wierdo at 1:54 PM on November 12, 2016 [2 favorites]
This leads to a conflict between Greece, Italy, Spain on one side, northern Europe on the other, pressure to close EU internal borders.
what does france do in this scenario though? does it just sit there like an awkward third wheel between italy and spain?
posted by poffin boffin at 2:11 PM on November 12, 2016
what does france do in this scenario though? does it just sit there like an awkward third wheel between italy and spain?
posted by poffin boffin at 2:11 PM on November 12, 2016
No, at this point active scrubbing of carbon from the atmosphere is our only option. Thankfully, nature did it millions of years ago, so we have a blueprint for a workable system.
Assuming we're targeting the Paris accord levels, nature has never removed carbon in the amounts we need on the timescale we need. If we take the direct removal approach we'll be coming up with our own blueprint.
posted by mark k at 4:05 PM on November 12, 2016 [1 favorite]
Assuming we're targeting the Paris accord levels, nature has never removed carbon in the amounts we need on the timescale we need. If we take the direct removal approach we'll be coming up with our own blueprint.
posted by mark k at 4:05 PM on November 12, 2016 [1 favorite]
Sure, we'd have to go more quickly then the Earth ever has in its own, but my point was that nature provides some decent ideas about how to build a carbon dioxide scrubber, and there are many possibilities beside.
The problem is almost entirely economic...who pays for it?
posted by wierdo at 6:43 PM on November 12, 2016
The problem is almost entirely economic...who pays for it?
posted by wierdo at 6:43 PM on November 12, 2016
The problem is almost entirely economic...who pays for it?
Stimulus spending! (crying softly)
posted by T.D. Strange at 8:26 PM on November 12, 2016 [2 favorites]
Stimulus spending! (crying softly)
posted by T.D. Strange at 8:26 PM on November 12, 2016 [2 favorites]
This thread and the Venus climate claim actually got me off on a calcium-cycle rabbit hole. My (paraphrased) understanding of why Venus got that way and we didn't is, in part, because on Earth we were able to create limestone in the early oceans. Venus, for whatever reason, didn't, and lots of its CO2 was able to remain volatile, and heat up.
The calcium cycle comes into play here because limestone is calcium carbonate, which precipitates out of the oceans as Ca+2 ions, weathered out of rock, which binds with carbonate ions formed when atmospheric CO2 dissolves in seawater. Some carbon capture systems rely on chemical systems like this, sequestering carbon by fixing it with CaO (aka "lime"), basically making synthetic limestone. The problem is that most feedstock lime comes from calcined limestone, and recarbonizing the CaO leads to net zero carbon capture. So carbon capture systems that source their calcium from limestone do nothing -- indeed are worse than neutral, as it takes (probably natural gas derived) power to heat up that limestone hot enough to calcine.
So how can we do any kind of carbon capture, at industrial scale, if we're just doing the chemical equivalent of digging a hole and filling it in again? Granites, and other feldspathic rocks, are sources of Ca silicates. Weathering feldspars releases Ca+2 ions (as well as others), and leaves behind clay. The Ca+2 can be a feedstock from this process to sequester carbon into calcium carbonate, like above. The trick to maximizing the captured carbon here would be to source the power needed for the mining and artificial weathering from low-carbon sources, like wind or solar.
Basically what I'm saying is: Metafilter, for Christmas, I'd like a wind turbine that eats granite and shits limestone. And then several thousand more.
posted by wormwood23 at 8:26 PM on November 12, 2016 [6 favorites]
The calcium cycle comes into play here because limestone is calcium carbonate, which precipitates out of the oceans as Ca+2 ions, weathered out of rock, which binds with carbonate ions formed when atmospheric CO2 dissolves in seawater. Some carbon capture systems rely on chemical systems like this, sequestering carbon by fixing it with CaO (aka "lime"), basically making synthetic limestone. The problem is that most feedstock lime comes from calcined limestone, and recarbonizing the CaO leads to net zero carbon capture. So carbon capture systems that source their calcium from limestone do nothing -- indeed are worse than neutral, as it takes (probably natural gas derived) power to heat up that limestone hot enough to calcine.
So how can we do any kind of carbon capture, at industrial scale, if we're just doing the chemical equivalent of digging a hole and filling it in again? Granites, and other feldspathic rocks, are sources of Ca silicates. Weathering feldspars releases Ca+2 ions (as well as others), and leaves behind clay. The Ca+2 can be a feedstock from this process to sequester carbon into calcium carbonate, like above. The trick to maximizing the captured carbon here would be to source the power needed for the mining and artificial weathering from low-carbon sources, like wind or solar.
Basically what I'm saying is: Metafilter, for Christmas, I'd like a wind turbine that eats granite and shits limestone. And then several thousand more.
posted by wormwood23 at 8:26 PM on November 12, 2016 [6 favorites]
One thing I've never understood is why excess solar/wind/tide electricity isn't captured using something else than costly, energy-intensive and non-carbon-neutral batteries.
Why not use the daylight excess to heat water, or just produce hydrogen. The latter has the added bonus that it can now be used as an energy carrier in for example engines or even used to produce electricity at night.
Then, on the nuclear front: anyone who knows anything in this area knows that current reactor designs are inherently safe: they will shut down in ways Chernobyl and Fukushima, with their 40 year old unsafe designs, can't/won't/haven't.
Furthermore, the only reason I have come across to deterr us from using Thorium reactors is supposedly the fact that the process is highly corrosive. But I spent an evening looking at this and there are plastics which can withstand the temperature easily and thus withstand the corrosive effects: Thorium should be well within our capacity RIGHT NOW.
And then there is the always-twenty years away fussion: this needs a global Manhatten project. Now. Small-ish, local fussion will be the final solution to our energy problems ... if we can use all our current energy to develop it in a timely fashion.
And in the meantime we have to sink carbon. Scrub it, sequester it, render it innert. There are ways to create building materials out of it. We can put massive taxes on meat. We can do indoor, local/urban farming to lower transportation costs.
And all of this will create massive jobs and economic activity, vastly offsetting that lost with the demise of the fossil fuel economy.
The only thing we need is to actually do it.
Hell, we combatted acid rain and the hole in the ozone layer: we have the roadmap.
The real question is why we are not focussing on this above all else?
Qui bono?
posted by MacD at 10:20 PM on November 12, 2016 [1 favorite]
Why not use the daylight excess to heat water, or just produce hydrogen. The latter has the added bonus that it can now be used as an energy carrier in for example engines or even used to produce electricity at night.
Then, on the nuclear front: anyone who knows anything in this area knows that current reactor designs are inherently safe: they will shut down in ways Chernobyl and Fukushima, with their 40 year old unsafe designs, can't/won't/haven't.
Furthermore, the only reason I have come across to deterr us from using Thorium reactors is supposedly the fact that the process is highly corrosive. But I spent an evening looking at this and there are plastics which can withstand the temperature easily and thus withstand the corrosive effects: Thorium should be well within our capacity RIGHT NOW.
And then there is the always-twenty years away fussion: this needs a global Manhatten project. Now. Small-ish, local fussion will be the final solution to our energy problems ... if we can use all our current energy to develop it in a timely fashion.
And in the meantime we have to sink carbon. Scrub it, sequester it, render it innert. There are ways to create building materials out of it. We can put massive taxes on meat. We can do indoor, local/urban farming to lower transportation costs.
And all of this will create massive jobs and economic activity, vastly offsetting that lost with the demise of the fossil fuel economy.
The only thing we need is to actually do it.
Hell, we combatted acid rain and the hole in the ozone layer: we have the roadmap.
The real question is why we are not focussing on this above all else?
Qui bono?
posted by MacD at 10:20 PM on November 12, 2016 [1 favorite]
One blueprint for carbon sequestration from millions of years ago we have is the Azolla event. Temperatures were increased 5–8 °C during the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum due to a atmospheric carbon injection that took place over 200,000 years. The Azolla event is posited to be one of the causes of carbon dixoide draw-downs that cooled the Earth down...basically the continents were formed such that the Arctic were freshwater oceans that Azolla grew in like crazy, died, sank, and sequestred carbon over an 800,000 year period. So mark k is correct in terms of timespans. However weirdo has it with the possibilities. There's actually a group, Ocean Foresters, that has research and a proposal that could reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide over a period of 200 years by growing seaweed forests covering 5-9% of the ocean. It requires harvesting and sequestering that carbon. The proposal has built in plans for making it economically sustainable. The goal is to have the farms and technology in place by 2050. It's a longshot in a bunch of longshots, but that's what we need. I plan on contacting them myself to ask how things are looking in 2016. The Marine Agronomy group out of University of Hawaii at Hilo has many of the same goals.
The biggest problem, of course, is who's going to pay for it? Not the US government right now, so its got to be coastal state governments. Investors and businesses need to be interested. Public interest needs to be generated. Personally, along with working to make renewables something all Americans can take pride in, this is what I will focus on working towards with my own meagre time and resources.
It is important not to despair. This leads to paralysis. We all will die, including our loved ones and children. The stars themselves will flicker and fade by God's will. As a Christian, my worry is more the suffering that climate change will cause across the globe. Even in the face of inevitable failure we must continue to work for each other and to alleviate suffering. If you can't hope, take determination instead and keep fighting.
posted by Mister Cheese at 10:28 PM on November 12, 2016 [4 favorites]
The biggest problem, of course, is who's going to pay for it? Not the US government right now, so its got to be coastal state governments. Investors and businesses need to be interested. Public interest needs to be generated. Personally, along with working to make renewables something all Americans can take pride in, this is what I will focus on working towards with my own meagre time and resources.
It is important not to despair. This leads to paralysis. We all will die, including our loved ones and children. The stars themselves will flicker and fade by God's will. As a Christian, my worry is more the suffering that climate change will cause across the globe. Even in the face of inevitable failure we must continue to work for each other and to alleviate suffering. If you can't hope, take determination instead and keep fighting.
posted by Mister Cheese at 10:28 PM on November 12, 2016 [4 favorites]
At what point does Canada build a wall to keep US citizens out as aridification makes Canada the last patch of fertile soil left in the Western Hemisphere? Or, do we simply "Shock-and-Awe" Ottawa and then march in?
Thorzdad, I wonder how well that's going to work. Parts of southern Canada are going to be able to grow more crops, subject to available water and weather patterns. Lots of people seem to think we're just going to move north and plant more wheat, but that's not realistic. Much of the northern half of Canada is Canadian Shield granite, and the part that's Boreal Forest is more or less waterlogged, acidic soils. There's not much you can do with granite, even if the climate is much warmer, and the processes that would naturally change acidic soils into arable land could take thousands of years.
There's a case to be made for artificially speeding up the selection and movement of crops and native plants to higher latitudes to take advantage of warmer summers and longer growing seasons, and planning for better management of water and soil. On the other hand, the political balance here in Alberta seems headed back towards the Trump/Bundy pole, so I wouldn't count on any of these things being politically palatable. Plus we'll all be too busy in the Water Wars to notice.
Writing to you from Calgary, where we're in the midst of a November that's been warmer than most Septembers...
There is a tiny, tiny piece of potential good news on the horizon. (I haven't read the Nature article yet.)
posted by sneebler at 10:53 PM on November 12, 2016 [1 favorite]
Thorzdad, I wonder how well that's going to work. Parts of southern Canada are going to be able to grow more crops, subject to available water and weather patterns. Lots of people seem to think we're just going to move north and plant more wheat, but that's not realistic. Much of the northern half of Canada is Canadian Shield granite, and the part that's Boreal Forest is more or less waterlogged, acidic soils. There's not much you can do with granite, even if the climate is much warmer, and the processes that would naturally change acidic soils into arable land could take thousands of years.
There's a case to be made for artificially speeding up the selection and movement of crops and native plants to higher latitudes to take advantage of warmer summers and longer growing seasons, and planning for better management of water and soil. On the other hand, the political balance here in Alberta seems headed back towards the Trump/Bundy pole, so I wouldn't count on any of these things being politically palatable. Plus we'll all be too busy in the Water Wars to notice.
Writing to you from Calgary, where we're in the midst of a November that's been warmer than most Septembers...
There is a tiny, tiny piece of potential good news on the horizon. (I haven't read the Nature article yet.)
posted by sneebler at 10:53 PM on November 12, 2016 [1 favorite]
MacD: The real question is why we are not focussing on this above all else?
This is a good question and it probably just boils down to not enough people agitating for it. According to the poll discussed in this Scientific American article from 2016, its only sixth on the list of major concerns for Democrats, and much lower for Republicans. I'm on vacation with family right now, but I plan to use my free time to compile a list of organizations, agencies, and legislators (I live in California) that I want to contact and then actually do so during lunch or break time. My first planned contact is the Ocean Forester group. Next I hope to find a Christian group that is dedicated to fighting climate change. What I don't know is if there is any group encouraging the reclamation in pride of renewables for all Americans, especially Christians who've been left out of calls to this cause. I know being a Christian here on MeFi works against me, but I've got to try.
I'd be willing to help organize a group of MeFites here to do the same sort of thing, though I don't have much experience in organizing. Hit me up by MeMail if you're interested. We may not become an advocacy group ourselves, but at least we can share info and help each other find organizations working on climate change to join. I may MeMail the participants in this thread directly to ask to help out, but ya'll don't be shy about contacting me first. Only reason I'm waiting 'til after Sunday is 'cause touchscreen typing takes so long.
Often on MeFi we speculate and research but take no action. I'll report back in this thread what I've done by next Saturday.
posted by Mister Cheese at 11:02 PM on November 12, 2016 [2 favorites]
This is a good question and it probably just boils down to not enough people agitating for it. According to the poll discussed in this Scientific American article from 2016, its only sixth on the list of major concerns for Democrats, and much lower for Republicans. I'm on vacation with family right now, but I plan to use my free time to compile a list of organizations, agencies, and legislators (I live in California) that I want to contact and then actually do so during lunch or break time. My first planned contact is the Ocean Forester group. Next I hope to find a Christian group that is dedicated to fighting climate change. What I don't know is if there is any group encouraging the reclamation in pride of renewables for all Americans, especially Christians who've been left out of calls to this cause. I know being a Christian here on MeFi works against me, but I've got to try.
I'd be willing to help organize a group of MeFites here to do the same sort of thing, though I don't have much experience in organizing. Hit me up by MeMail if you're interested. We may not become an advocacy group ourselves, but at least we can share info and help each other find organizations working on climate change to join. I may MeMail the participants in this thread directly to ask to help out, but ya'll don't be shy about contacting me first. Only reason I'm waiting 'til after Sunday is 'cause touchscreen typing takes so long.
Often on MeFi we speculate and research but take no action. I'll report back in this thread what I've done by next Saturday.
posted by Mister Cheese at 11:02 PM on November 12, 2016 [2 favorites]
Often on MeFi we speculate and research but take no action.
Actually, I want to apologize for this generalization because I don't actually know. That statement is probably more about myself, so I want to fix that and get something going here.
posted by Mister Cheese at 11:10 PM on November 12, 2016 [1 favorite]
Actually, I want to apologize for this generalization because I don't actually know. That statement is probably more about myself, so I want to fix that and get something going here.
posted by Mister Cheese at 11:10 PM on November 12, 2016 [1 favorite]
Reuters: "Trump looking at fast ways to quit global climate deal"
(to withdraw from the Paris accords, per an anonymous source)
posted by XMLicious at 12:20 AM on November 13, 2016 [1 favorite]
(to withdraw from the Paris accords, per an anonymous source)
posted by XMLicious at 12:20 AM on November 13, 2016 [1 favorite]
The problem is almost entirely economic...who pays for it?
That's true, but it goes beyond that. Money is a symbol for labor and resources. Where are we going to get the labor and resources to build something that will suck more than forty billion tons of carbon a year out of the atmosphere?
We're talking about industry on a scale that's never been attempted for a single objective before. The machines being proposed would be unimaginably massive.
We'd need to build them out of something. Even if we use recycled materials, that's a huge investment in energy and processing. We need to power them, as power is getting more and more expensive. And we'd need to build them, which means transporting enormous amounts of materials and parts and labor to the sites.
And then we need to figure out what to do with forty billion tons of waste product per year, minimum. To quote the Bad Astronomer:
It’s almost impossible to grasp what 40 billion tons means. A cubic kilometer of water weighs a billion tons, but it’s hard to imagine a cube 3.5 kilometers (2.2 miles) on a side—the equivalent amount of water weighing 40 billion tons. The largest class of aircraft carrier weighs about 100,000 tons, but picturing 400,000 of them still strains the imagination (not to mention vaporizing them into the air every year).
Even if we did get it out of the atmosphere, what are we going to do with it?
If anyone thought this was at all possible, the preparations would be unmistakable. Even if it was twenty years out, the planning would have to have begun by now.
The reality is, it's impossible. Everything we do to get energy from fossil fuels generates carbon dioxide, and in order to get that back, it'll take at least the same amount of energy.
And the era of cheap energy is over.
As a planet, we simply can't afford this. Nobody has the resources to build a device that will suck more carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere than our entire civilization puts into it.
posted by MrVisible at 8:46 AM on November 13, 2016 [1 favorite]
That's true, but it goes beyond that. Money is a symbol for labor and resources. Where are we going to get the labor and resources to build something that will suck more than forty billion tons of carbon a year out of the atmosphere?
We're talking about industry on a scale that's never been attempted for a single objective before. The machines being proposed would be unimaginably massive.
We'd need to build them out of something. Even if we use recycled materials, that's a huge investment in energy and processing. We need to power them, as power is getting more and more expensive. And we'd need to build them, which means transporting enormous amounts of materials and parts and labor to the sites.
And then we need to figure out what to do with forty billion tons of waste product per year, minimum. To quote the Bad Astronomer:
It’s almost impossible to grasp what 40 billion tons means. A cubic kilometer of water weighs a billion tons, but it’s hard to imagine a cube 3.5 kilometers (2.2 miles) on a side—the equivalent amount of water weighing 40 billion tons. The largest class of aircraft carrier weighs about 100,000 tons, but picturing 400,000 of them still strains the imagination (not to mention vaporizing them into the air every year).
Even if we did get it out of the atmosphere, what are we going to do with it?
If anyone thought this was at all possible, the preparations would be unmistakable. Even if it was twenty years out, the planning would have to have begun by now.
The reality is, it's impossible. Everything we do to get energy from fossil fuels generates carbon dioxide, and in order to get that back, it'll take at least the same amount of energy.
And the era of cheap energy is over.
As a planet, we simply can't afford this. Nobody has the resources to build a device that will suck more carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere than our entire civilization puts into it.
posted by MrVisible at 8:46 AM on November 13, 2016 [1 favorite]
I realize this is more expensive (both in terms of requiring more fuel and in terms of needing more material), but I wonder if you could get some TiO2 up to geosynchronous orbit so it stays up there for longer than you'd get from volcanic cooling. Extra points if you can fabricate it into little three-planes-intersecting shapes for maximum reflectivity.
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 9:48 AM on November 13, 2016
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 9:48 AM on November 13, 2016
As a planet, we simply can't afford this.
Why not? We can afford a vast and wasteful transportation system that people use to drive to the store to buy a pack of smokes. We can afford an economy that's heavily biased towards consumerist "choices" that drives a whole series of wasteful cascades of energy and materials, and turns them into mountains of garbage. We can afford giant corporations that vacuum up huge chunks of available resources and transforms them into capital for the 1%.
We could just... stop feeding this system. Start by stopping doing the top five most energy-consuming things, spend some of the savings on insulation and solar power, and use our spare time to plant trees. In a nutshell, we could stop acting like The Economy is some kind of universal natural force that entitles everyone to the standard of living they see on tv, while ignoring the fact that much of the world, and our ancestors, managed with a tiny percentage of the material wealth we take for granted. But you know all this.
Trump's win is a segment of our civilization screaming, "I don't want to change! I can't change! And you can't make me!!" I know we're not going to stop doing the things above, but we could. Instead we're going to wait for Nature to do it for us, which will be far less boring.
posted by sneebler at 11:28 AM on November 13, 2016 [2 favorites]
Why not? We can afford a vast and wasteful transportation system that people use to drive to the store to buy a pack of smokes. We can afford an economy that's heavily biased towards consumerist "choices" that drives a whole series of wasteful cascades of energy and materials, and turns them into mountains of garbage. We can afford giant corporations that vacuum up huge chunks of available resources and transforms them into capital for the 1%.
We could just... stop feeding this system. Start by stopping doing the top five most energy-consuming things, spend some of the savings on insulation and solar power, and use our spare time to plant trees. In a nutshell, we could stop acting like The Economy is some kind of universal natural force that entitles everyone to the standard of living they see on tv, while ignoring the fact that much of the world, and our ancestors, managed with a tiny percentage of the material wealth we take for granted. But you know all this.
Trump's win is a segment of our civilization screaming, "I don't want to change! I can't change! And you can't make me!!" I know we're not going to stop doing the things above, but we could. Instead we're going to wait for Nature to do it for us, which will be far less boring.
posted by sneebler at 11:28 AM on November 13, 2016 [2 favorites]
>As a planet, we simply can't afford this.
No, you don't understand.
It's not like we have the money but don't want to spend it. The money doesn't exist.
With all of the political will in the world, if everyone was united together, holding hands and ready to build whatever it took to make everything right, we don't have the materials or the energy to do it. It would take more energy than we can produce, and mining or processing the materials necessary to build what we need would emit enough carbon to doom the planet.
We're talking about building a device that would suck more carbon out of the atmosphere than is emitted by our entire society. We emit over forty billion tons of carbon dioxide a year.
Even if we stopped emitting carbon dioxide now, there's a lag between emitting carbon and its full warming impact. We would still have to build the impossible giant carbon-sucking machine. The giant carbon-sucking machine is built into all the IPCC projections that involve us avoiding global catastrophe.
Our ancestors may have managed with a tiny portion of the material wealth we had, but they weren't faced with having to suck forty billion tons of carbon out of the atmosphere a year just to break even. And we've emitted that much for decades; if we want things to get better, we have to suck out a lot more carbon than that. Then we have to find something to do with billions of tons of waste product.
And even if we could figure out a way do all that impossible stuff, it won't help the ocean.
It's not that I don't want to change. This isn't a little kid whining that he can't go to school today because he has a stomach ache. This is a little kid who can't go to school because he's terminally ill.
There really are things we can't fix. We're not gods. The idea that we can re-engineer the atmosphere of the planet is ludicrous, it's the ultimate in hubris.
The scale of this problem is beyond us, and we have to start planning for what happens when we fail.
So let me revise my thesis statement.
There aren't enough resources on the planet to build a device that will suck more carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere than human civilization puts into it.
posted by MrVisible at 1:52 PM on November 13, 2016 [5 favorites]
No, you don't understand.
It's not like we have the money but don't want to spend it. The money doesn't exist.
With all of the political will in the world, if everyone was united together, holding hands and ready to build whatever it took to make everything right, we don't have the materials or the energy to do it. It would take more energy than we can produce, and mining or processing the materials necessary to build what we need would emit enough carbon to doom the planet.
We're talking about building a device that would suck more carbon out of the atmosphere than is emitted by our entire society. We emit over forty billion tons of carbon dioxide a year.
Even if we stopped emitting carbon dioxide now, there's a lag between emitting carbon and its full warming impact. We would still have to build the impossible giant carbon-sucking machine. The giant carbon-sucking machine is built into all the IPCC projections that involve us avoiding global catastrophe.
Our ancestors may have managed with a tiny portion of the material wealth we had, but they weren't faced with having to suck forty billion tons of carbon out of the atmosphere a year just to break even. And we've emitted that much for decades; if we want things to get better, we have to suck out a lot more carbon than that. Then we have to find something to do with billions of tons of waste product.
And even if we could figure out a way do all that impossible stuff, it won't help the ocean.
It's not that I don't want to change. This isn't a little kid whining that he can't go to school today because he has a stomach ache. This is a little kid who can't go to school because he's terminally ill.
There really are things we can't fix. We're not gods. The idea that we can re-engineer the atmosphere of the planet is ludicrous, it's the ultimate in hubris.
The scale of this problem is beyond us, and we have to start planning for what happens when we fail.
So let me revise my thesis statement.
There aren't enough resources on the planet to build a device that will suck more carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere than human civilization puts into it.
posted by MrVisible at 1:52 PM on November 13, 2016 [5 favorites]
Right, but there are huge differences between climate change killing off 2 billion people due to regional starvation, 7 billion people due to planetary starvation, or killing us all due to passing some tipping point of the sort that created Venus.
Also, it's worth recalling xkcd #1732 when posting about climate change elsewhere.
posted by jeffburdges at 2:31 PM on November 13, 2016
Also, it's worth recalling xkcd #1732 when posting about climate change elsewhere.
posted by jeffburdges at 2:31 PM on November 13, 2016
Please keep in mind that the scenarios at the end of that XKCD comic are based on the IPCC projections, which include the massive carbon capture and storage projects mentioned above.
posted by MrVisible at 3:24 PM on November 13, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by MrVisible at 3:24 PM on November 13, 2016 [1 favorite]
If I were king, I'd build a bunch of nuclear
That's about the only way it ever does get built, for what it's worth. Unlike wind, it's uneconomic without subsidy.
Amory Lovins: “Nuclear power actually retards climate protection because it is so expensive and slow to deploy that you ultimately get less climate solution per dollar and per year. Each dollar spent on a new nuclear reactor yields 10 to 40 times less carbon savings per year, and two to 10 times less per dollar based on relative prices and deployment rates as compared to the same dollar spent on efficiency and renewables. We need to buy the biggest solution per dollar, per year.”
posted by flabdablet at 4:52 PM on November 13, 2016 [1 favorite]
That's about the only way it ever does get built, for what it's worth. Unlike wind, it's uneconomic without subsidy.
Amory Lovins: “Nuclear power actually retards climate protection because it is so expensive and slow to deploy that you ultimately get less climate solution per dollar and per year. Each dollar spent on a new nuclear reactor yields 10 to 40 times less carbon savings per year, and two to 10 times less per dollar based on relative prices and deployment rates as compared to the same dollar spent on efficiency and renewables. We need to buy the biggest solution per dollar, per year.”
posted by flabdablet at 4:52 PM on November 13, 2016 [1 favorite]
The idea that we can re-engineer the atmosphere of the planet is ludicrous, it's the ultimate in hubris.
We've done it once.
posted by flabdablet at 4:54 PM on November 13, 2016 [1 favorite]
We've done it once.
posted by flabdablet at 4:54 PM on November 13, 2016 [1 favorite]
We've done it once.
We've unintentionally released huge quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, massively altering the climate, sure.
It took about a trillion tons of oil to do that, over the course of two centuries. Untold amounts of coal and natural gas. Mountains of concrete and steel.
We no longer have the energy, the resources, or the time.
posted by MrVisible at 5:11 PM on November 13, 2016 [2 favorites]
We've unintentionally released huge quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, massively altering the climate, sure.
It took about a trillion tons of oil to do that, over the course of two centuries. Untold amounts of coal and natural gas. Mountains of concrete and steel.
We no longer have the energy, the resources, or the time.
posted by MrVisible at 5:11 PM on November 13, 2016 [2 favorites]
One thing I've never understood is why excess solar/wind/tide electricity isn't captured using something else than costly, energy-intensive and non-carbon-neutral batteries.
Why not use the daylight excess to heat water, or just produce hydrogen. The latter has the added bonus that it can now be used as an energy carrier in for example engines or even used to produce electricity at night.
Broadly speaking the answer is we don't use batteries to store renewables; we don't store it at all. Batteries are used when we want portable energy not connected to a generator, such as phones and in vehicles.
This is slightly less true than it was but storage is a big problem. You have good ideas but the issue is scale and efficiency. Converting it to hydrogen is one of my favorite conceptual ideas, but we don't know how to do it on scale because electrodes have rare materials; we'd probably be worse off than batteries using existing tech. Heating something (water or better yet salt) is quite feasible but thermal solar is way less efficient than PV. I believe the cheapest storage is still some variation on "pump water uphill during the day" but the ability to do so depends on local geography. If you care for my layman's opinion, I'd put money on flow batteries or something similar opening up our options; they aren't a good option for "portable" but may eventually be perfected for grid storage.
Lots of active research and development on all of these. If I was starting out my career I'd try to work at a storage startup (or similar project at a big company).
posted by mark k at 5:29 PM on November 13, 2016
Why not use the daylight excess to heat water, or just produce hydrogen. The latter has the added bonus that it can now be used as an energy carrier in for example engines or even used to produce electricity at night.
Broadly speaking the answer is we don't use batteries to store renewables; we don't store it at all. Batteries are used when we want portable energy not connected to a generator, such as phones and in vehicles.
This is slightly less true than it was but storage is a big problem. You have good ideas but the issue is scale and efficiency. Converting it to hydrogen is one of my favorite conceptual ideas, but we don't know how to do it on scale because electrodes have rare materials; we'd probably be worse off than batteries using existing tech. Heating something (water or better yet salt) is quite feasible but thermal solar is way less efficient than PV. I believe the cheapest storage is still some variation on "pump water uphill during the day" but the ability to do so depends on local geography. If you care for my layman's opinion, I'd put money on flow batteries or something similar opening up our options; they aren't a good option for "portable" but may eventually be perfected for grid storage.
Lots of active research and development on all of these. If I was starting out my career I'd try to work at a storage startup (or similar project at a big company).
posted by mark k at 5:29 PM on November 13, 2016
One thing I've never understood is why excess solar/wind/tide electricity isn't captured using something else than costly, energy-intensive and non-carbon-neutral batteries.
Battery manufacture isn't inherently non-carbon-neutral. Sure, it needs energy to do, but that can be renewably sourced. Gigafactory 1, for example, is explicitly designed to emit no carbon when operating.
Also, the vast majority of today's stored electricity is in fact not stored in batteries. Most of it is pumped hydro.
Why not use the daylight excess to heat water
Because if hot water is what you need, heating it directly with a solar thermal collector is far more cost-effective than using electricity for that job.
or just produce hydrogen. The latter has the added bonus that it can now be used as an energy carrier in for example engines
Hydrogen has a better stored energy to mass ratio than batteries do, which could potentially make it interesting as a mobile fuel. Unfortunately once you add the weight of the fuel cells and of the ultra-high-pressure storage tank you need to get its energy to volume ratio down to reasonable proportions, it doesn't look quite so attractive. It's also a complete bastard to contain because the molecules are so small they tend to seep through practically anything especially under extreme pressure, as well as being reactive as hell. Even so, hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are under active development. It remains to be seen whether they will find market niches in which they're competitive with battery EVs.
or even used to produce electricity at night.
Any kind of electricity storage technology can do that. Molten-salt solar thermal has it built in to the generation process.
posted by flabdablet at 1:15 AM on November 14, 2016
Battery manufacture isn't inherently non-carbon-neutral. Sure, it needs energy to do, but that can be renewably sourced. Gigafactory 1, for example, is explicitly designed to emit no carbon when operating.
Also, the vast majority of today's stored electricity is in fact not stored in batteries. Most of it is pumped hydro.
Why not use the daylight excess to heat water
Because if hot water is what you need, heating it directly with a solar thermal collector is far more cost-effective than using electricity for that job.
or just produce hydrogen. The latter has the added bonus that it can now be used as an energy carrier in for example engines
Hydrogen has a better stored energy to mass ratio than batteries do, which could potentially make it interesting as a mobile fuel. Unfortunately once you add the weight of the fuel cells and of the ultra-high-pressure storage tank you need to get its energy to volume ratio down to reasonable proportions, it doesn't look quite so attractive. It's also a complete bastard to contain because the molecules are so small they tend to seep through practically anything especially under extreme pressure, as well as being reactive as hell. Even so, hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are under active development. It remains to be seen whether they will find market niches in which they're competitive with battery EVs.
or even used to produce electricity at night.
Any kind of electricity storage technology can do that. Molten-salt solar thermal has it built in to the generation process.
posted by flabdablet at 1:15 AM on November 14, 2016
I called my cable company today to cancel and when they asked why I told them "irresponsible election coverage"
Good for you!! (I realize that may "sound" like sarcasm, but I assure you, it's not.) If I still had cable, I'd follow suit.
posted by greermahoney at 1:28 AM on November 14, 2016
Good for you!! (I realize that may "sound" like sarcasm, but I assure you, it's not.) If I still had cable, I'd follow suit.
posted by greermahoney at 1:28 AM on November 14, 2016
Massive report details the energy economy that limits warming to 2℃
The International Energy Agency takes a look at what to expect out to 2040.
posted by XMLicious at 7:03 AM on November 17, 2016
The International Energy Agency takes a look at what to expect out to 2040.
posted by XMLicious at 7:03 AM on November 17, 2016
From everything I've read the situation is much better; it would only take 100-200 modern nuclear weapons exploded over cities in order to place enough soot and ash into the upper atmosphere to block out 99% of sunlight for ~2 weeks. This would be enough to reduce global high temperatures to around 0C, and would completely destroy the biosphere/food crops, and in short order the rest of humanity too. Global warming would be solved within the year, though it might take a few millenia for the bio-sphere to recover and stabilize.
Don't nuclear weapons also produce electromagnetic pulses? Could cripple electronics outside of the blast radii.
posted by ZeusHumms at 7:13 AM on November 17, 2016
Don't nuclear weapons also produce electromagnetic pulses? Could cripple electronics outside of the blast radii.
posted by ZeusHumms at 7:13 AM on November 17, 2016
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