WTF Climate Change News

[Beebo Brink]

I'm baaaack!

ARCTIC CAULDRON
Across the Arctic, lakes are leaking dangerous greenhouse gases. And one lake is behaving very strangely

Katey Walter Anthony has studied some 300 lakes across the tundras of the Arctic. But sitting on the mucky shore of her latest discovery, the Arctic expert said she’d never seen a lake like this one.

Set against the austere peaks of the Western Brooks Range, the lake, about 20 football fields in size, looked as if it were boiling. Its waters hissed, bubbled and popped as a powerful greenhouse gas escaped from the lake bed. Some bubbles grew as big as grapefruits, visibly lifting the water’s surface several inches and carrying up bits of mud from below.

This was methane.

 

[Kara Spengler]

Ok, that one is odd ...

 

[Kara Spengler]

New one from Trump .... we are fracked anyway (they predict 4' C rise, well above the 2) so plan to eat, drink, and be merry while they can.

Trump administration sees a 7-degree rise in global temperatures by 2100

 

[Jorus Xi]

Welp gonna start welding a stand on the hood of my truck for the flame throwing guitar player.

 

[danielravennest]

New one from Trump .... we are fracked anyway (they predict 4' C rise, well above the 2) so plan to eat, drink, and be merry while they can.

Trump administration sees a 7-degree rise in global temperatures by 2100

It is not really from the Trump Administration. There are 2.1 million people in the Federal civil service. They far outweigh the few hundred political appointees, a number of which can't tell their ass from their elbows. The civil service folks do their jobs and write honest reports. The appointees are too busy installing soundproof booths and meeting with lobbyists to keep up with the internal workings of the agencies they supposedly run. So the truth leaks out, despite their best efforts.

Meanwhile, coal sets new lows about every month, and renewables set new highs. Even Trump and his cronies can't win against the profit motive. That's what's driving a shift to cleaner energy. The one nuclear plant still under construction (Vogtle, on the GA-SC border) can barely hold the utilities that own it together. The costs keep getting higher, while renewables keep getting cheaper. The other projects already got shut down due to cost. Money talks louder than words.

 

[Kara Spengler]

Unfortunately on the org charts the politicals are in charge. So, no, they can not personally doublecheck every scrap of paper someone puts out but they are using this thing for their own policies.

 

[Tigar]

Meh. We’re fuckin’ doomed.

 

[Sid]

Dutch appeals court upholds landmark climate change ruling | The Guardian
I think it is about time that courts start to order their governments to take serious actions against environmental issues.
Everybody keeps talking and talking and researching. It is time for concrete action.

A court in The Hague has upheld a historic legal order on the Dutch government to accelerate carbon emissions cuts, a day after the world’s climate scientists warned that time was running out to avoid dangerous warming.

Appeal court judges ruled that the severity and scope of the climate crisis demanded greenhouse gas reductions of at least 25% by 2020 – measured against 1990 levels – higher than the 17% drop planned by Mark Rutte’s liberal administration.

 

[Beebo Brink]

Meanwhile, coal sets new lows about every month, and renewables set new highs. Even Trump and his cronies can't win against the profit motive. That's what's driving a shift to cleaner energy.

If we had a hundred years for economic forces to shift change, we'd be golden, right?

We might have had half a fighting chance if we'd done this back in the 1950s, cutting off dependencies that now run very deep and take time to dismantle and replace. We didn't. And now we don't have TIME for market forces to gently nudge us in a non-disruptive pattern of change. These renewable efforts are laudable, they have great benefits in the short-term, but they will make little to no difference in the longer term because they're happening way too slowly. Enjoy them for what they are -- quality improvements on the life we have now, but irrelevant to averting climate change.

We are in for a world of hurt even if we stopped every single greenhouse emission right now, this very minute. The existing CO2 and the feedback loops already whirring in motion from thawing permafrost and methane emissions are not going to stop. And we're not stopping. Rates may drop here and there, but that's only the rate of increase, not the output. We are not taking CO2 down, and there's no guarantee that doing so would help us anyway. There may be no Reverse on this train, even if there's a Stop.

I just get so damn tired of all the Pollyanna optimism that glosses over the harsh reality that we're not even CLOSE to averting the disasters ahead. It creates a false sense of complacency: we'll figure it out, we're making progress, see all these tin cups of water that we're throwing on the howling firestorm!

We're locked in small financial/economic/institutional/political systems that simply aren't scaled for the kind of draconian change that might save our bacon. As a species, we simply don't have the psychological or logistical mechanisms to turn our entire global community around on a dime. You can call it horrible, evil, deluded, stupid, whatever, but I'm more inclined to acknowledge it's just the limits of our species, any species, to self-organize. Scaling from tribe to country to region to globe is just too far beyond our hunter-gatherer origins.

</rant>

 

[Beebo Brink]

Okay, now that one specific rant is over, I can start another.

On a practical level, review and prepare for this cloudy future based on some fairly predictable challenges that will be mixed in with the curveballs.

Reality check -- How much is this going to affect you? If you're in your 60s or 70s, just go on with your life. Chances are you're going to check out from other causes before climate change gets you. Unless you live along the coast. You might want to move away from low-lying ground. Seriously. Move.

Prepare for chaos -- If you're in your 20s or 30s, start preparing now. You've got time, but not much, so make the best use of it. This means everything from where you choose to live (move AWAY from the coasts, folks, and away from the deserts) to keeping an emergency/bug out kit stocked. Keep down debt, pare away possessions. Above all, though, make connections. You'll survive best if you have a network of family and/or friends. Loners are vulnerable.

Go green any way you can -- It won't avert climate change, but it could help you survive the stresses of a changing climate. Reliable energy, food and clean water are all going to be affected by climate change in one way or another: droughts, floods, storm surges, grid breakdowns.

Shore up weak spots -- Assess the most likely dangers of where you live and how you live and make contingency plans. If, for example, you live in Europe and you've never needed an air-conditioner before, get one now. Before the rush. If you can't leave a floodplain/coastal area, find the high spots and where you'd go if you needed to. If you live in fire areas, study up.

General Principle - Don't let fear rule your life, but don't ignore this. Prepare. Predictions are we'll really start to feel the effects by 2040, but I'm betting it's sooner. That's about 20 years away. Keep a wary eye out as stresses intensify, make short term plans as needed but keep your eye on how these affect longer term goals. Pay attention!

 

[danielravennest]

If we had a hundred years for economic forces to shift change, we'd be golden, right?

These renewable efforts are laudable, they have great benefits in the short-term, but they will make little to no difference in the longer term because they're happening way too slowly. Enjoy them for what they are -- quality improvements on the life we have now, but irrelevant to averting climate change.

</rant>

You are implicitly assuming that the rate of change towards renewables is static. It isn't. Solar panel production has grown by a factor of 100 from 2007 (1 GW) to 2018 (100 GW). Wind capacity grew by 20 GW in 2007 and 52 GW in 2017. But the later turbines are about 1/3 more efficient, so equivalent to 70 GW of 2007 vintage. The reason both have been accelerating is they have been getting a lot cheaper. Therefore their ability to displace fossil plants has been getting better. There is every reason to expect their costs to continue going down, and installation rates to keep going up.

Worldwide electric car production was 320,000 in 2014. It is heading towards 1.75 million this year. Again, the acceleration is because they are getting less expensive, and their performance is going up. So their ability to compete with internal combustion engine cars is increasing.

 

[Sid]

The neighborhood where I live is one of the 27 pilot projects that are appointed last week in The Netherlands, where the local and national governments, (together with the population of course) try to make the whole neighborhood free from the use of gas, so that heating and cooking energy will come completely from green sources.
For the heating in my neighborhood they are studying and experimenting to use earth heat by using the warm ground water that filled the tunnels from the former underground coal mines in this region. My electricity is already 100% green.
It will probably take years and years before such a project is ready. Money will be a huge factor. Who is willing and able to pay for it all.
But at least we are trying something.

 

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

I made the mistake of looking for this thread in the science forum.

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

@Kamilah Hauptmann: I've read the Foundation series, and the tweet get's the story of it horribly wrong in my opinion.

The main arch is not that scientists are being listened to, but this: a galactic empire is in decline, and a scientist forecasts this, also how long at least it is going to take if there will be there something else to replace it equally. So he rises up through the ranks, and works in the shadows in a conspirational way to plant the seed for the next empire after the interregnum, never telling the still existing empire his real motivations and plans.

So in short its not politics listen to scientists, but scientists conspirationally working behind the politicians for the time after the decline.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

Who drew it? Trump asks of dire climate report, appearing to mistrust 91 scientific experts

ETA:

 

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Here's a take.

The Rude Pundit: UN Climate Report: Mother Nature Is About to Fuck Us Raw

 

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

 

[detrius]

@Kamilah Hauptmann: I've read the Foundation series, and the tweet get's the story of it horribly wrong in my opinion.

The main arch is not that scientists are being listened to, but this: a galactic empire is in decline, and a scientist forecasts this, also how long at least it is going to take if there will be there something else to replace it equally. So he rises up through the ranks, and works in the shadows in a conspirational way to plant the seed for the next empire after the interregnum, never telling the still existing empire his real motivations and plans.

Spoiler

At the end it's actually revealed that it was a plot devised by R. Daneel Olivaw, the robot from "The Caves of Steel ", and Hari Seldon was just another unwitting pawn.

 

[Isabeau]

Who the hell cares what old people think about climate change?

I couldn't decide which part to quote. But this line made me laugh:

''Make no mistake: older generations living in the developed world are part of history’s most under-appreciated death cult. ''

 

[Innula Zenovka]

Trouble brewing: climate change to cause 'dramatic' beer shortages