No, the climate models the businesses and politicians found acceptable are watered down models that showed that we had a lot of time before we needed to make changes, thus letting the businesses and politicians pass the buck.
The more aggressive models and the scientists that supported those models lost funding and were shouted down. Some of the models that got buried fully expected the changes to be happening at the pace we are witnessing. Some of those models said that once the permafrost started to thaw that it would release so much carbon, methane and nitrious oxide withing 10-15 years that the earth it's self would surpass human generated output. If those models are correct then it means we've passed a climate tipping point and nothing humans can do will reverse what's been set in motion. Event if human greenhouse gas output is reduced to zero overnight, the earth itself is now driving the changes to the climate.
in the 2007 time-frame, the US National Snow and Ice Science Center showed up en-masse in California and were flipping out about ice changes, semi-desperate to find some way to communicate to the public about it. Post-"Inconvenient Truth" and early days of Twitter, the idea that if "somehow, someway, people could know about this" things would get better faster, was the knee-jerk idea amongst people who were immersed in details.
Twelve years later.. and .. recurrent headlines on YNews ? US EPA being dismantled, with the legal authority to regulate air pollution at the center of it.. Mixed signals from the other world economies, while posturing for trade routes through the Northern passage, and billions bet on small changes in oil prices each day .. Whats to worry about.
Is it that goof founder of 360-dot-org that said something like "Do something, just do something" ? Panic and gossip are clearly not enough.
Unless you're in a position to personally bankroll the research and buildout of fusion power (hi, Jeff) the only thing you can do at this late date is get in the face of your government representatives: Jam up their phone lines, sit in at their offices, back primary challengers who will address the problem.
I’ve been to a number of museum presentations, general audience scientific talks, etc recently where the speaker presents the evidence for climate change, future predictions, etc., and their main takeaway is “try to drive your car less and check out this website to see how you can curb your CO2 emissions!”.
I agree that changing your lifestyle is not terribly useful compared to pestering politicians, but you can actually do a number of things to delay the catastrophe. The easiest are probably eating less beef and flying less. Not taking that transatlantic flight saves about as much carbon as the average European emits in a year.
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.
Man hands on misery to man.
It *melts off* like *an artic* shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.
So, breed a future full of inconsiderate people, I guess? If there's one best point thoughtful conservatives have, it's that for a sustainable planet, we need to value good people producing and raising the next generation.
The inability to understand this (ending in antinatalism at the extreme) is perhaps the root of my problems with the left side of politics. It's hard to get behind a side that is mathematically predestined to disappear completely.
We could just build fission power plants, they're reasonably safe, not too expensive and we know how to store the waste safely, heck - we've built a place to store it, but until there is political will to overcome the NIMBYism of not wanting to live in the next potential Pripyat (no matter how remote that risk is) nothing will change, except the climate of course.
I was mostly being facetious. We probably don't have enough time left to build fission power plants (and certainly not fusion) before the level of CO2 in the atmosphere will lead inevitably to catastrophic consequences.
According to the IPCC, we have to cut global CO2 emissions by 50% before 2030. So your vast fleet of nuclear power plants might just barely be coming online by then. Maybe. If you started getting regulatory approval yesterday and nothing goes wrong at all.
The answer is some sort of sequestration tbh, I've long felt that the idea (even in say, 2005) that we could reduce our carbon output by 50% was unworkable - the only thing that is easy to move to zero carbon is electricity generation, everything else is an order of magnitude harder.
> We could just build fission power plants, they're reasonably safe, not too expensive and we know how to store the waste safely
I'm not convinced this is true. Obviously there is Chernobyl, but the failures and shortcomings seem to not only be understood but popularized by Western media and we can say "oh that was just the Soviet Union." Then Fukushima happened, in a country which seems to be far better than the US at building efficient, safe infrastructure. We could say that was a fluke and we will learn from it (and I'm sure we will), but how many more times will we need to learn to avoid the literal fallout of another nuclear disaster? Shit goes wrong sometimes and you can't predict it.
You can argue that it's still safer (obviously there are lots of nuclear power plants in the US that have had no huge disasters), but why not look at alternatives that are even safer?
The fukushima plant had a poor safety factor, in re the backup cooling power source. It's not as if the disaster happened in a vacuum, there was also a tsunami and the plant was not build outside of a potential tsunami zone.
What in America's past suggests that we would build and maintain plants better than Fukushima? Is it our mismanagement of waterways? Our disaster preparedness and response as evidenced after Hurricane Katrina? Our laser-sharp focus on energy policy in government?
Yes, Chernobyl was especially bad, and yes there were issues at Fukushima. I think we would avoid Chernobyl-level disasters, but I'm not convinced we would avoid Fukushima-level disasters.
All are systems engineering failures, we have a pretty good history of building resilient systems. I won't say that a fukushima couldn't happen in the US, but I'd say that the particulars of that disaster are unlikely to happen here (or anywhere else again).
We have very few nuclear plants in areas that are even seismically active anymore, much less have any meaningful tsunami risk.
As another commenter pointed out, a lot of the knowledge for developing nuclear power plants has faded since they were mostly built decades ago. And while they're smaller projects, looking around where I live (San Francisco) I see a leaning skyscraper, a bridge that was way, way overbudget and many years late and an ongoing debate about its longterm safety, and a transit center (also late and overbudget) that still hasn't opened due to safety concerns.
It seems obvious that it's possible to build safe nuclear power plants - we've done it. But I think it's like building airplanes. Despite flying being the safest way to travel, all the planes were built decades ago and our attempts to change that in the US, ie the 737-MAX, have shown obvious examples of corruption and incompetence that have led to unnecessary deaths.
I think where we disagree is whether or not the US government is competent enough to build a nuclear power plant today, not whether or not the project itself is viable. I realize my original comment doesn't reflect that, so I apologize for the poor communication on my part.
The evidence does not bear out this part, unfortunately. It's not NIMBYism that has killed the reactors in South Carolina, or is on the way to killing Vogtle's expansion in George, that's just mere construction incompetence.
The time to start building nuclear was in 2000-2010; we started, perhaps too small to make a big difference, but in the end it was good that more weren't attempted because it was a gigantic failure and drew far too much money away from better projects.
The problem with nuclear power aren't accidents during operation, or NIMBYism, the problem is that we no longer know how to build it. (And once you start looking into the history of construction in the US, it was also often the case that we didn't know how to build them 40 years ago.)
The trouble is that if the "we" who are doing something does not include China and the rest of the world in coordination, then it is just sacrificing local economics in vain.
The idea that the rest of the world is going to follow suit automatically based only on morals is far from obvious.
It doesn't seem that anyone in the mainstream has really found a way to come to grips with this, that at its core any solution is a global coordination problem. (Even putting aside that half the US has found it more politically useful to deny the problem entirely.)
This sounds entirely tractable. Institute a carbon tax. In addition, create a tariff on all imports from countries that don’t have an equivalent bona fide carbon tax at the same or higher rate, and set the tariff such that it recovers 150% of the deficiency in taxes vs emissions. The tax needs to be transitive: if countries A and B don’t cooperate and country A reexports something from country B, the tariff needs to account for B’s failure as well.
Make the carbon tax revenue neutral, and pitch it as leveling the playing field and a boon to the local economy.
Sure, there are tons of details to work out, but I think this should be doable.
How do you decide the baseline emissions for the tax and tariffs, internationally? China emits about half the carbon as the USA, per capita. So is the USA willing to pay tax to China unidirectionally, until we get to their level? Does China need to keep their current per capita levels to avoid extra tariffs?
How, roughly, could this work politically at a global level, in a way that also works within the politics of each individual country?
china measured emission are about half of usa measured emission. china non measured emissions are another story. soot is yet another story, because not all co2 is created equally efficiently.
If that is true, then the situation seems intractable. The Chinese government won't want to pay for anything beyond it's official figures, but the rest of the world has no interest in those bogus figures being used.
There are no payments between countries. It's a tax and an import tariff on countries that don't have the tax (or an equivalent like tax and trade).
William Nordhaus has done the math, you can read his papers for more details and appropriate levels. Of course the fact that we didn't implement in 2015 when he did his calculations means that the appropriate levels are higher than they were then.
You can start blaming China once there is a single country on Earth on track to stay within the 1.5° carbon budget. Until then you should talk to your own politicians why they aren't doing anything.
I don't think blame is a useful concept at all. The question is, within the complex world of economics and politics, starting from the point we are at today, what would a pragmatic solution look like, that is actually possible?
It is far from obvious that the best solution is to make local sacrifices, then hoping the world will follow. It might be that we all (in the world) need to agree to make sacrifices together first, put some rules and treaties in place, and then start improving together in coordination.
It sounds so Machiavellian but, if we are already making the economic sacrifices (that other countries aren't, but would like us to), I wonder if we aren't even losing potential bargaining power in coordinating globally?
net result: local decade long slump plus most heavy industry moved to countries that have less energy cost and less regulation, so it's not clear if the world is actually better off, since you also get pollution from naval transport
I believe in China and India they would point out that the West allowed itself to emit pollutants unchecked during its period of rapid economic growth, and it would be ridiculous to ask the East not to do the same. It's more complicated than just passing the buck.
Can we stop with this "growing phase" mythology of high carbon emissions? The US didn't "grow out of it" we out-sourced it to China and India. China and India can't "grow out of it" unless they find someone else that can take it over for them (and I don't think there's enough production capacity in the remaining parts of the world to do this). This article[1] does a pretty good job showing the complexity of this.
The idea that eventually every industrial nation can mature and "grow out of" carbon production makes the ludicrous claim that somehow industrial production magically requires less CO2 over all in the long run. Sure this would be possible if processes could all become more efficient and overall output experience 0 growth, but continued growth is essential for current economic models.
We all know we are living in a global economy, but then talk about resources and waste as if they are local problems. The truth is modern global Capitalism requires perpetual growth and increase production and consumption. We all like getting paid and living in a prosperous society but that money cannot come in a sustainable world. Where do you derive profit from a truly sustainable system?
Depends on what you mean I think. Yes growing out of pollutants is a myth. But it's not wrong to say that India and China are in a period of rapid economic growth where they catch up to their industrialized peers. You might argue that the West never went through such a phase at all, because it was ahead of the rest of the world for all of modern history, but I think that's splitting hairs. In any case, my point was trying to be descriptive about what arguments I think you'd realistically hear, rather than to stake a position either way on the arguments.
IMHO, local sacrifices is a dead end approach because it expects coordinated good will from billions of people. This won't happen: people are as bad as they are allowed to be. The solution should be going after the popular business model that makes consumers buy new items because the old ones break: this applies to everything, from cars to toothbrushes; it even seems to apply to newly built houses now. The manufacturer can't care less if an average buyer has to leave 3 cars behind because those cars were designed to break, as long as it brings profit. Axe this business model, bankrupt these manufacturers by holding them accountable to how much of their products end up thrown away and we'll see how reliable products will take their spot. No more useless waste, no more icebergs of plastic in the ocean, no more need to burn gigatons of coal to make all these intentionally flawed items. I'm sure everybody sees this solution, but nobody has balls to implement it because blaming individual people is easy and safe.
Please donate $1 to the Jay Inslee campaign, he's the only American Democratic candidate that has dedicated his campaign to fighting the climate crisis. Unfortunately, he's down in the polls and needs more supporters to keep him in the debates.
He hasn’t really been an effective governor of Washington, and his biggest legislative accomplishment is the largest tax break ever given to a corporation (til possibly Amazon) to a company that still ended up sending jobs away.
He talks a lot of talk but he doesn’t walk the walk.
Jay Inslee forcing the issue three times has mostly soured Washington voters on carbon taxes for the foreseeable future.
The hard work is going to be passing a carbon tax or climate package and getting it to stick instead of fighting another decade long fight against gutting it like Obamacare. But Jay Inslee is not good at convincing people who don’t already agree with him.
inslee is too worried about his political future to defy the DNC's restriction on "sanctioned" debates to include climate ones, so there's absolutely no reason to believe that he'll do anything to stand up to people with a lot more power and influence.
It's scary, but there's nothing I can do. We need approachingly authoritarian action on this issue by world leaders. They've had the data for decades. And the longer they wait, the more dramatic the changes to everything will be. Certainly economic freedoms taken for today will be a thing of legend (and possibly horror.)
> We need approachingly authoritarian action on this issue by world leaders.
No we don't.
FYI, there are no "world leaders" and whatever corrupt bureaucrats they come up with to fake that, they have absolutely no right to force me to do anything about it.
Try to drive less, plant more, look for renewable electricity (CleanChoice or personal solar if possible), and vote the corrupt political shitheads out of office :-)
Dumping a trillion dollars over twenty years into wind turbines, solar panels, batteries and power-to-gas would go a pretty long way without draconian measures. Providing strong monetary incentives to insulate buildings and install heat pumps doesn't have to be authoritarian either.
If I'm reading these charts right, we currently invest roughly $300 billion per year in renewables. And more in networks, at least some of which must be for renewables.
And global carbon emissions are at their highest ever.
It's good we've built renewables rather than fossil. But the scale of the problem is WAY bigger than 1 trillion over 20 years.
None of these will work because a significant portion of the population in countries with elective governments do not believe in climate change at all. This means they will viciously oppose all climate change action plans so long as they are allowed a voice. Authoritarian measures become necessary (even if I don't necessarily advocate for it) when a large portion of the population are too short-sighted to decide what's best for themselves.
That's what taxes are there for. E.g. in Germany we managed to implement a system to increase the share of renewables. That it wasn't perfect to begin with and was then screwed up but successive governments is a different story. What matters is that it worked.
I have the impression that most people opposing clinate change are afraid that the will loose something by the necessary changes, their cars, their perceived life style,... That's where politics come into play. Politicians have to communicate the necessary changes and come up with ways to manage the change without screwing the average Joe over. They found ways to divert billions to corporations with the best lobbyists, so there should be enough funds to combaz climate change. And once the western world started we are already half way there. The Paris accords used to be a global treaty, so there can be a global approach.
Hallo Leute. Believe me I would really like nothing more than for you to be right when you write:it worked
The share of renewables may have risen, but at huge costs, and most importantly the installed capacity of non renewable plants has not been reduced, mostly because of intermittency of renewables. The net result: all the plants, just with lower utilisation.
For nuclear this is a tragedy because the marginal costs of production are minimal, lower utilisation just hits profitability, which may indirectly be raising risks.
For coal, well just look up how much the Energiewende Germany still mines...
More on this here: https://jancovici.com/en/energy-transition/societal-choices/...
Increasing taxes is exactly what people would oppose, and a party that promises to scrap/not implement the tax will take opportunity to capture votes. This shouldn't be hard to understand.
I can't imagine building subsidies and alternative fuels will undo the last 200 years of emissions. Structural changes that will reorganize our lives will be necessary. We are in a privileged position, in that we can make these structural changes in a favorable way now before we're faced with a reality that forces these changes on us.
Despite all I said above, I'm sceptical. People have an ugly and annoying tendency to ignore the truth until reality bites them into their asses. They neglect cancer prevention because the risks of getting are so low while in rwality they are just afraid of the results. And that is just one example.
This! If we, the US, have the money to spend trillions to spend subsidizing the fossil fuel industry and the military industrial complex behind it, we have the money to green the economy, rebuild infrastucture and develop countless new industries and technologies.
There is so much upside and opportunity in attacking climate change and pollution, I cannot understand why so many are willing to bury their heads in the sand. Decarbonization and undoing the damage we done is the chance for a second industrial revolution, with a much higher quality of life.
" Certainly economic freedoms taken for today will be a thing of legend (and possibly horror.)"
We already have plenty of rules that restrict economic freedom like not being allowed to steal or to kill people or thousands of others. If we have rules that limit the freedom to pollute there is plenty of economic freedom left. People and businesses would adapt quickly.
Many big impacts are controlled at the local level: infill development, for example, is one of the best ways for the Bay Area to reduce its emissions. Statewide, 41% of California emissions come from transportation, more than any other source.
That is only going to change through local action, which means going to city council and planning meetings and being willing to be yelled at and lied about by those who oppose all new housing.
So it's not enough just to go alone, you need to find local friends, get them to go too, and to make sure that this viewpoint is represented in these highly undemocratic forums in which local decisions are made.
Absolutely agreed. IMHO the only way we avoid the worst calamity is with a good 33% of our energy going to active sequestration of oceanic and atmospheric carbon after 2050. And I think the best way to get there is to have solar and wind and storage technology continue to beat the best predictions possible.
But we also need to change the local as much as possible. Every single ton of CO2 we can avoid now is one less that we'll have to pull out later.
Yes agreed. People don't realize the magnitude at which we need to change our whole world to get there and how urgent we need to start that change.
It seems that efficiency isn't enough because people will just use up more energy. Growth and how we think about the economy is incompatible with what needs to be done.
I'm in a lucky position where I can walk to work, bike for local shopping, buy an electric car for the few times that I go on trips, etc.
IMHO, the problem isn't as much individuals not choosing to do that, but a system that prevents these choices from ever being made.
Also, not all spending is equal; buying propane or gasoline or airline tickets are clearly worse than buying a share of community solar; or buying new insulation for your home, or building new high-density apartment buildings next to a train station.
I don't think that we will ever win over climate change by championing austerity; rather we need to champion change in the system, and that takes lots of spending.
Furthermore, we are now at a point that it's going to be absolutely necessary to start pulling CO2 out of the ocean or atmosphere and sequestering it. Without a whole bunch more prosperity and cheap energy, we will never be able to do that, so building a future with super cheap and abundant solar and wind energy is pretty much the only way I can imagine us avoiding > 2C climate change.
Yes the system was aimed at more consumption and more mileage. It's hard to unplug one self from this. For some it will be impossible even, to those well don't sweat it if you're stuck.
I think that unplugging may not be enough, we need to smash the systems that disallow people from unplugging. My partial unplugging may let me feel slightly less guilty, but on the absolute scale it does nothing at all to help the climate. I can wash my hands a bit morally, but the world is none the better for it. So what have I done, really? Not much. The people who have done something are the people who have made solar super cheap, who have mode wind super cheap, those that are building the battery technology that will help get to a carbonless grid, and the politicians that have enabled the tech growth through tax subsidies. My personal contribution is nothing, and it makes me sad.
Our electrical grid is slightly behind pace for decarbonization, but nowhere near as far behind as all the rest of society.
The bad part of society that has my greatest attention lately is single family zoning; this necessitates massive energy use, massive car use, and disallows anybody from creating a low-energy alternative that has all the amenities that people need in order to live. Single family zoning should be illegal. Nobody should be prevented from building an apartment building next to a small grocery store. Big-box stores should be highly restricted, instead of highly restricting apartment buildings.
The amount of emissions reduced by these acts, multiplied by the tiny portion of the society that actually bothers to do these, is so insignificant compared to overall carbon emissions that it may as well be a rounding error. I use to believe doing my part helps the planet -- I still try to be as environmentally-conscious as possible, but I no longer believe it has an effect on the fate of our society. What one/dozen/thousands of people do is absolutely insignificant as long as these people aren't the decision-makers.
you're right, it will do something, it just won't do very much. it's sort of like voting - important to do, just doesn't matter very much statistically speaking.
people aren't willing to talk about the heavy stuff... yet. we'll get there, but until people start talking about painful solutions - technology running daylight hours only, order of magnitude reduction in oceanic shipping, etc. - it's just feel good type stuff.
Authoritarian rule sure looks attractive in situations like that. On the surface. Maybe I'm too much liberal and democrat (in the non-US political sense, but it doesn't seem that any of authoritarian rulers we have is doing anything about it.
Without a democratic consense and legislation we won't manage to fight climate change because people won't support it and the industrialized world that is not authoritarian ruled won't buy into a climate dictatorship.
That being said, nothing good comes from dictatorship and authoritarian systems, never. If we atart to unilaterally dicide what is good and bad there is no way to tell when and where to stop. Or when we ourselves end up on the "wrong" side.
it's true that individuals aren't at fault, and that it's largely energy business and politicians who are at fault.
but, to be honest, i think that's shirking your responsibility. it's just giving up in a slightly different way - "can't do anything about this any more, need authoritarianism; my hands are clean!"
we know a small % of people can enact revolutionary change. many people are afraid, comfortable, or unable to do something like sitting in front of $national_capital, risking their jobs, etc. until that change comes.
it's unfortunate but this idea that "the people" can't enact change is silly; there's just not (yet) enough willingness to really sacrifice to get it done.
Honest question. If during the warmest periods ice melts all over the planet, wouldn't ice cores lack carbon measurements for those periods? I'd love an answer from someone with some expertise.
That article says that the oldest ice in the core was 2.7 million years old. It actually mentions gaps in the record and ability to date ice only with a 100k year margin of error. This does not imply that we have a continuous record of carbon levels for the past 2.7M years.
Advocate that governments cut down on soot emissions.
This accounts for a significant portion of the current temperature rise in the Arctic -- but, most importantly -- an unknown amount of the loss of snow and ice cover.
Unfortunately, this form of carbon (soot) is not as useful for funds transfer...
Between cutting down soot (all Chinese power plants could be outfitted with soot collectors in one year), and planting trees (which is the least expensive, most accessible option for sequestering carbon dioxide at planetary scale), we could actually start to impact arctic snow cover and permafrost within a couple of years, within a budgetary envelope that every developed country could easily manage.
But, once again -- unfortunately, neither of these options appear to be politically attractive, because the primary goal seems to be wealth transfer, not actual harm mitigation...
Advocate that governments cut down on soot emissions.
i.e. vote. There are extremely important elections coming up in several states in November that will indirectly decide who controls Congress for the next ten years. Voting in this off-year election, especially if you live in Virginia can make a material difference in how the United States responds to this crisis.
And vote in the democratic primaries for politicians that don't take a moderate position on the issue. cough cough, Joe Biden is a moderate, cough cough
It's really not so simple as moderate vs progressive. For instance, Bernie Sanders does not support levying a carbon tax. I doubt he would seriously support any climate change effort that isn't ultimately part of a jobs / labor bill.
He supports the Green New Deal, which while part of a jobs program, is still relevant and effective policy. I don't see the problem with it being a jobs program; we need trillions of dollars of infrastructure investment, and people need jobs. A carbon tax alone is untenable, as citizens are already adverse to taxes of any sort due to irrationality.
This doesn't even touch Chinese coal emissions. The latter are easily visible from space, and unlike ours are recently deployed and continue being built.
I took the parent comment to be making the assumption that politically attractive options for responding to emissions and climate change tend to be "market-based" solutions or activities that are picking winners between industries (say solar manufacturers and installers vs. coal plant workers). If there is a choice where there is a "winner" with money on the line there will also be lobbying money put toward that effort and so consensus building is easier.
There isn't necessarily anything nefarious about this, just that it may be incapable of dealing with the enormity of climate climate and also, as OP intimates, there may be a class of solutions that are better/cheaper/more efficient from a policy perspective, but that don't have anyone positioned to gain financially from them and so are harder to garner support for.
Pollution is a commonly-used example of a negative externality [0], or a way to shift business costs onto a third party.
In the parent example, the implication is that rather than investing money in reducing pollution, that money can instead by returned to the investors as dividends, and the global public must bear the impact of the unmitigated soot emissions.
The "wealth transfer" in this case is represented by the costs absorbed by the public (in terms of increased healthcare costs, endangered coastal real estate, disaster relief costs, etc which may result from pollution and/or anthropogenic climate change) being transferred to the investors/owners/operators of the polluting companies in the form of reduced spending on mitigation technology.
That was my interpretation of the parent's meaning, at least. At the time I posted this comment, there were three different interpretations of the same comment, which is very interesting.
1. Refuse to support politicians that do not see this as the grave issue it is. Most other political issues won't matter if we cannot change the course of global warming.
2. Spread awareness. Update yourself on the facts, and share them with your friends and family.
Minor nitpick: 20,000 square km is not equal to 12,427 square miles. Looks like the author divided the area by the km/mi ratio instead of km^2/mi^2. I'd email the author but the mailto: is improperly formatted.
Here's a more quantitative view, to get an idea of how serious this season is. Summary: its still early in the melt season, but this year is somewhat ahead of every previous year.
This first graph is arctic sea ice area, including the sum of all of the sub-regions that are what you normally think about as the Arctic Ocean. Several other bodies of water also get seasonal ice coverage adjacent to the arctic basin.
There are three clusters of lines shown here. Each one corresponds to the reports provided by a different sea-ice monitoring office. Differences in technique have been used by commentators to kibbutz about the finer points of what constitutes a record minimuim in the past, so its common for independent observers to show multiple institutes all together now. While the details differ, the broad picture is the same for all three offices.
The three clusters have been offset in the vertical axis to visually separate the three institutes. Roughly 2/3 of the arctic basin melts out each year.
Each institute reports both sea ice area, and sea ice extent. Ice area is the total area actually covered by ice. Ice extent is somewhat trickier to understand. Much of the summer ice pack isn't a big chunk of ice, its composed of many different chunks, and they will break up and merge over time. So many of the map grid cells are only partially covered by ice. When the fraction of coverage is greater than a certain threshold, then the entire grid cell is counted towards "ice extent" - the amount of ocean that has some ice floes in it. With that definition in mind, here's the current graph of sea ice extent, along with some recent historical context:
One thing of note: The current record year for melting is 2012. You'll note that the shape of that year's curve is quite a bit different from every other year's curve. 2012's weather patterns drove a melt that was so substantial that every year since has followed a different trajectory than the years prior to 2012, because so much multi-year ice melted out. At this point in the Summer, several years have had less area and/or extent than the previous record.
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[ 1.1 ms ] story [ 166 ms ] threadhttps://www.youtube.com/channel/UCr546o7ImhGM57qoY0hHvkA
He does 15 minute videos reviewing the latest papers and news.
Headline: everything is happening faster than predicted.
[I'm not affiliated with Paul in any way, I just like his videos.]
The more aggressive models and the scientists that supported those models lost funding and were shouted down. Some of the models that got buried fully expected the changes to be happening at the pace we are witnessing. Some of those models said that once the permafrost started to thaw that it would release so much carbon, methane and nitrious oxide withing 10-15 years that the earth it's self would surpass human generated output. If those models are correct then it means we've passed a climate tipping point and nothing humans can do will reverse what's been set in motion. Event if human greenhouse gas output is reduced to zero overnight, the earth itself is now driving the changes to the climate.
Twelve years later.. and .. recurrent headlines on YNews ? US EPA being dismantled, with the legal authority to regulate air pollution at the center of it.. Mixed signals from the other world economies, while posturing for trade routes through the Northern passage, and billions bet on small changes in oil prices each day .. Whats to worry about.
Is it that goof founder of 360-dot-org that said something like "Do something, just do something" ? Panic and gossip are clearly not enough.
Normal people can't do anything worthwhile.
Unless you're in a position to personally bankroll the research and buildout of fusion power (hi, Jeff) the only thing you can do at this late date is get in the face of your government representatives: Jam up their phone lines, sit in at their offices, back primary challengers who will address the problem.
It makes me so mad.
Don’t have kids.
The inability to understand this (ending in antinatalism at the extreme) is perhaps the root of my problems with the left side of politics. It's hard to get behind a side that is mathematically predestined to disappear completely.
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/hawaiian-electric-finalizes... (Hawaiian Electric finalizes largest-ever renewables procurement)
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/new-york-awards-record-1700... (New York awards record 1,700 MW offshore wind contracts)
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/regulators-unanimously-appr... (Regulators unanimously approve Georgia Power plan, increasing renewables 72% by 2024)
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/aep-plans-2b-15-gw-wind-pur... (AEP plans $2B, 1.5 GW wind purchase in Oklahoma)
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/12/5/1812692... (Xcel Energy, one of the biggest utilities in the US, committed to going completely carbon-free by 2050 (and 80 percent carbon-free by 2030).)
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/jul/09/eon-uk-to-s... (E.ON UK to supply 3.3m customers with 100% renewable electricity)
According to the IPCC, we have to cut global CO2 emissions by 50% before 2030. So your vast fleet of nuclear power plants might just barely be coming online by then. Maybe. If you started getting regulatory approval yesterday and nothing goes wrong at all.
I'm not convinced this is true. Obviously there is Chernobyl, but the failures and shortcomings seem to not only be understood but popularized by Western media and we can say "oh that was just the Soviet Union." Then Fukushima happened, in a country which seems to be far better than the US at building efficient, safe infrastructure. We could say that was a fluke and we will learn from it (and I'm sure we will), but how many more times will we need to learn to avoid the literal fallout of another nuclear disaster? Shit goes wrong sometimes and you can't predict it.
You can argue that it's still safer (obviously there are lots of nuclear power plants in the US that have had no huge disasters), but why not look at alternatives that are even safer?
Yes, Chernobyl was especially bad, and yes there were issues at Fukushima. I think we would avoid Chernobyl-level disasters, but I'm not convinced we would avoid Fukushima-level disasters.
We have very few nuclear plants in areas that are even seismically active anymore, much less have any meaningful tsunami risk.
It seems obvious that it's possible to build safe nuclear power plants - we've done it. But I think it's like building airplanes. Despite flying being the safest way to travel, all the planes were built decades ago and our attempts to change that in the US, ie the 737-MAX, have shown obvious examples of corruption and incompetence that have led to unnecessary deaths.
I think where we disagree is whether or not the US government is competent enough to build a nuclear power plant today, not whether or not the project itself is viable. I realize my original comment doesn't reflect that, so I apologize for the poor communication on my part.
The evidence does not bear out this part, unfortunately. It's not NIMBYism that has killed the reactors in South Carolina, or is on the way to killing Vogtle's expansion in George, that's just mere construction incompetence.
The time to start building nuclear was in 2000-2010; we started, perhaps too small to make a big difference, but in the end it was good that more weren't attempted because it was a gigantic failure and drew far too much money away from better projects.
The problem with nuclear power aren't accidents during operation, or NIMBYism, the problem is that we no longer know how to build it. (And once you start looking into the history of construction in the US, it was also often the case that we didn't know how to build them 40 years ago.)
The idea that the rest of the world is going to follow suit automatically based only on morals is far from obvious.
It doesn't seem that anyone in the mainstream has really found a way to come to grips with this, that at its core any solution is a global coordination problem. (Even putting aside that half the US has found it more politically useful to deny the problem entirely.)
Make the carbon tax revenue neutral, and pitch it as leveling the playing field and a boon to the local economy.
Sure, there are tons of details to work out, but I think this should be doable.
How, roughly, could this work politically at a global level, in a way that also works within the politics of each individual country?
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-climatechange-insig...
oh, and there's all the other shit china does of course https://nationalpost.com/news/world/scientists-discover-chin...
but somehow people dodge the issue every time with 'but the usa per capita' as if these measurement are really comparable.
e: wow, struck a nerve there? sourced with articles, even. now let's wait for dang to come and say this is 'unsubstantive'
William Nordhaus has done the math, you can read his papers for more details and appropriate levels. Of course the fact that we didn't implement in 2015 when he did his calculations means that the appropriate levels are higher than they were then.
I would love to. But unfortunately the climate problem isn't even a small part of the political dialogue here.
In New Zealand, people with high carbon lifestyles say "well regardless of what we do, nothing matters if Americans don't change"
Now I live in America, where people with high carbon lifestyles say "well regardless of what we do, nothing matters if the Chinese don't change"
And I'm sure in China they say the same thing back to the US.
It's fun shifting the blame.
I don't think blame is a useful concept at all. The question is, within the complex world of economics and politics, starting from the point we are at today, what would a pragmatic solution look like, that is actually possible?
It is far from obvious that the best solution is to make local sacrifices, then hoping the world will follow. It might be that we all (in the world) need to agree to make sacrifices together first, put some rules and treaties in place, and then start improving together in coordination.
It sounds so Machiavellian but, if we are already making the economic sacrifices (that other countries aren't, but would like us to), I wonder if we aren't even losing potential bargaining power in coordinating globally?
case in point: Europe. taxes over taxes over taxes has pushed energy cost to the point production is non competitive https://businesstech.co.za/news/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/G...
net result: local decade long slump plus most heavy industry moved to countries that have less energy cost and less regulation, so it's not clear if the world is actually better off, since you also get pollution from naval transport
William Nordhaus' climate club:
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.15000001
https://issues.org/climate-clubs-to-overcome-free-riding/
The idea that eventually every industrial nation can mature and "grow out of" carbon production makes the ludicrous claim that somehow industrial production magically requires less CO2 over all in the long run. Sure this would be possible if processes could all become more efficient and overall output experience 0 growth, but continued growth is essential for current economic models.
We all know we are living in a global economy, but then talk about resources and waste as if they are local problems. The truth is modern global Capitalism requires perpetual growth and increase production and consumption. We all like getting paid and living in a prosperous society but that money cannot come in a sustainable world. Where do you derive profit from a truly sustainable system?
[1] https://www.carbonbrief.org/mapped-worlds-largest-co2-import...
He talks a lot of talk but he doesn’t walk the walk.
The hard work is going to be passing a carbon tax or climate package and getting it to stick instead of fighting another decade long fight against gutting it like Obamacare. But Jay Inslee is not good at convincing people who don’t already agree with him.
No we don't.
FYI, there are no "world leaders" and whatever corrupt bureaucrats they come up with to fake that, they have absolutely no right to force me to do anything about it.
And global carbon emissions are at their highest ever.
It's good we've built renewables rather than fossil. But the scale of the problem is WAY bigger than 1 trillion over 20 years.
https://www.iea.org/wei2018/
I have the impression that most people opposing clinate change are afraid that the will loose something by the necessary changes, their cars, their perceived life style,... That's where politics come into play. Politicians have to communicate the necessary changes and come up with ways to manage the change without screwing the average Joe over. They found ways to divert billions to corporations with the best lobbyists, so there should be enough funds to combaz climate change. And once the western world started we are already half way there. The Paris accords used to be a global treaty, so there can be a global approach.
There is so much upside and opportunity in attacking climate change and pollution, I cannot understand why so many are willing to bury their heads in the sand. Decarbonization and undoing the damage we done is the chance for a second industrial revolution, with a much higher quality of life.
We already have plenty of rules that restrict economic freedom like not being allowed to steal or to kill people or thousands of others. If we have rules that limit the freedom to pollute there is plenty of economic freedom left. People and businesses would adapt quickly.
https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2017/06/climate-chan...
That is only going to change through local action, which means going to city council and planning meetings and being willing to be yelled at and lied about by those who oppose all new housing.
So it's not enough just to go alone, you need to find local friends, get them to go too, and to make sure that this viewpoint is represented in these highly undemocratic forums in which local decisions are made.
But we also need to change the local as much as possible. Every single ton of CO2 we can avoid now is one less that we'll have to pull out later.
It seems that efficiency isn't enough because people will just use up more energy. Growth and how we think about the economy is incompatible with what needs to be done.
- walk as much as possible
- buy as less as possible (if the sales plummet, less sending products overseas I suppose) or local
- plant trees
IMHO, the problem isn't as much individuals not choosing to do that, but a system that prevents these choices from ever being made.
Also, not all spending is equal; buying propane or gasoline or airline tickets are clearly worse than buying a share of community solar; or buying new insulation for your home, or building new high-density apartment buildings next to a train station.
I don't think that we will ever win over climate change by championing austerity; rather we need to champion change in the system, and that takes lots of spending.
Furthermore, we are now at a point that it's going to be absolutely necessary to start pulling CO2 out of the ocean or atmosphere and sequestering it. Without a whole bunch more prosperity and cheap energy, we will never be able to do that, so building a future with super cheap and abundant solar and wind energy is pretty much the only way I can imagine us avoiding > 2C climate change.
Our electrical grid is slightly behind pace for decarbonization, but nowhere near as far behind as all the rest of society.
The bad part of society that has my greatest attention lately is single family zoning; this necessitates massive energy use, massive car use, and disallows anybody from creating a low-energy alternative that has all the amenities that people need in order to live. Single family zoning should be illegal. Nobody should be prevented from building an apartment building next to a small grocery store. Big-box stores should be highly restricted, instead of highly restricting apartment buildings.
(apologies for the long rant!)
unlike zeros
I know very well that people consumption aren't the main polluting factor but we.. are the people, we can divert part of the cycle
people aren't willing to talk about the heavy stuff... yet. we'll get there, but until people start talking about painful solutions - technology running daylight hours only, order of magnitude reduction in oceanic shipping, etc. - it's just feel good type stuff.
Like what?
Without a democratic consense and legislation we won't manage to fight climate change because people won't support it and the industrialized world that is not authoritarian ruled won't buy into a climate dictatorship.
That being said, nothing good comes from dictatorship and authoritarian systems, never. If we atart to unilaterally dicide what is good and bad there is no way to tell when and where to stop. Or when we ourselves end up on the "wrong" side.
but, to be honest, i think that's shirking your responsibility. it's just giving up in a slightly different way - "can't do anything about this any more, need authoritarianism; my hands are clean!"
we know a small % of people can enact revolutionary change. many people are afraid, comfortable, or unable to do something like sitting in front of $national_capital, risking their jobs, etc. until that change comes.
it's unfortunate but this idea that "the people" can't enact change is silly; there's just not (yet) enough willingness to really sacrifice to get it done.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/08/record-shattering-27...
That seems like an un-dire consequence of the ice being gone
What am I missing? I should put a downpayment on beach front property in Nevada?
Advocate that governments cut down on soot emissions.
This accounts for a significant portion of the current temperature rise in the Arctic -- but, most importantly -- an unknown amount of the loss of snow and ice cover.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/scientists-track-...
Unfortunately, this form of carbon (soot) is not as useful for funds transfer...
Between cutting down soot (all Chinese power plants could be outfitted with soot collectors in one year), and planting trees (which is the least expensive, most accessible option for sequestering carbon dioxide at planetary scale), we could actually start to impact arctic snow cover and permafrost within a couple of years, within a budgetary envelope that every developed country could easily manage.
But, once again -- unfortunately, neither of these options appear to be politically attractive, because the primary goal seems to be wealth transfer, not actual harm mitigation...
i.e. vote. There are extremely important elections coming up in several states in November that will indirectly decide who controls Congress for the next ten years. Voting in this off-year election, especially if you live in Virginia can make a material difference in how the United States responds to this crisis.
https://berniesanders.com/issues/combat-climate-change-and-p...
There isn't necessarily anything nefarious about this, just that it may be incapable of dealing with the enormity of climate climate and also, as OP intimates, there may be a class of solutions that are better/cheaper/more efficient from a policy perspective, but that don't have anyone positioned to gain financially from them and so are harder to garner support for.
In the parent example, the implication is that rather than investing money in reducing pollution, that money can instead by returned to the investors as dividends, and the global public must bear the impact of the unmitigated soot emissions.
The "wealth transfer" in this case is represented by the costs absorbed by the public (in terms of increased healthcare costs, endangered coastal real estate, disaster relief costs, etc which may result from pollution and/or anthropogenic climate change) being transferred to the investors/owners/operators of the polluting companies in the form of reduced spending on mitigation technology.
That was my interpretation of the parent's meaning, at least. At the time I posted this comment, there were three different interpretations of the same comment, which is very interesting.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality#Negative
I’d be interested to know if this can be scaled up if societies started investing in it.
1. Refuse to support politicians that do not see this as the grave issue it is. Most other political issues won't matter if we cannot change the course of global warming.
2. Spread awareness. Update yourself on the facts, and share them with your friends and family.
3. Plant trees like crazy.
This is actually normal for averages - some years are higher, some are lower. Otherwise it wouldn't be an average.
Maybe the state of affairs is still alarming, but then they should describe it better.
(via the excellent arctic sea ice blog's regional data aggregation page: https://sites.google.com/site/arcticseaicegraphs/regional)
This first graph is arctic sea ice area, including the sum of all of the sub-regions that are what you normally think about as the Arctic Ocean. Several other bodies of water also get seasonal ice coverage adjacent to the arctic basin.
https://14adebb0-a-62cb3a1a-s-sites.googlegroups.com/site/ar...
There are three clusters of lines shown here. Each one corresponds to the reports provided by a different sea-ice monitoring office. Differences in technique have been used by commentators to kibbutz about the finer points of what constitutes a record minimuim in the past, so its common for independent observers to show multiple institutes all together now. While the details differ, the broad picture is the same for all three offices.
The three clusters have been offset in the vertical axis to visually separate the three institutes. Roughly 2/3 of the arctic basin melts out each year.
Each institute reports both sea ice area, and sea ice extent. Ice area is the total area actually covered by ice. Ice extent is somewhat trickier to understand. Much of the summer ice pack isn't a big chunk of ice, its composed of many different chunks, and they will break up and merge over time. So many of the map grid cells are only partially covered by ice. When the fraction of coverage is greater than a certain threshold, then the entire grid cell is counted towards "ice extent" - the amount of ocean that has some ice floes in it. With that definition in mind, here's the current graph of sea ice extent, along with some recent historical context:
https://14adebb0-a-62cb3a1a-s-sites.googlegroups.com/site/ar...
One thing of note: The current record year for melting is 2012. You'll note that the shape of that year's curve is quite a bit different from every other year's curve. 2012's weather patterns drove a melt that was so substantial that every year since has followed a different trajectory than the years prior to 2012, because so much multi-year ice melted out. At this point in the Summer, several years have had less area and/or extent than the previous record.