[Discussion] Climate Change

This thread is just to post interesting news, thoughts, opinions about climate change.

I just can't even any more.

President Trump’s top White House adviser on energy and climate stood before the crowd of some 200 people on Monday and tried to burnish the image of coal, the fossil fuel that powered the industrial revolution — and is now a major culprit behind the climate crisis world leaders are meeting here to address.

“We strongly believe that no country should have to sacrifice economic prosperity or energy security in pursuit of environmental sustainability,” said Wells Griffith, Trump’s adviser.

Mocking laughter echoed through the conference room. A woman yelled, “These false solutions are a joke!” And dozens of people erupted into chants of protest.

The protest was a piece of theater, and so too was the United States’ public embrace of coal and other dirty fuels at an event otherwise dedicated to saving the world from the catastrophic effects of climate change. The standoff punctuated the awkward position the American delegation finds itself in as career bureaucrats seek to advance the Trump administration’s agenda in an international arena aimed at cutting back on fossil fuels.

But at least there's this:

“The U.S. delegation is comprised of seasoned climate change negotiators. On most issues, they have maintained the positions of the previous administration. In some instances, they have remained constructively quiet. They reach out to other delegations informally to build bridges and propose solutions,” said Carlos Fuller, a negotiator for a coalition of small island and low-lying coastal countries that are particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change.

“This is regrettable, as some of the best climate change scientists in the world are American. A lot of the data feeding the science comes from U.S. institutions and platforms. However, the White House policy statements have forced their negotiators to take this stance,” Fuller said.

But then it comes back around, and in response to the call to move from carbon based energy to wind and solar, our offical rep went on to tout the benefits of carbon sources and tossed in this little gem:

“Alarmism,” Griffith said, “should not silence realism.”

With, of course, realism being the economic benefits of coal.

Bloomberg: Corporate America Is Getting Ready to Monetize Climate Change

Bank of America Corp. worries flooded homeowners will default on their mortgages. The Walt Disney Co. is concerned its theme parks will get too hot for vacationers, while AT&T Inc. fears hurricanes and wildfires may knock out its cell towers.

The Coca-Cola Co. wonders if there will still be enough water to make Coke.

Climate change isn’t all downside for the largest U.S. companies. Many of those that filed reports with CDP said they believe climate change can bolster demand for their products.

For one thing, more people will get sick. “As the climate changes, there will be expanded markets for products for tropical and weather related diseases including waterborne illness,” wrote Merck & Co. The company didn’t respond to a request for comment.

More disasters will mean increased sales for Home Depot, the company wrote. And as temperatures get higher, people are going to need more air conditioners. Home Depot predicted that its ceiling fans and other appliances will see “higher demand should temperatures increase over time.”

“If customers value Google Earth Engine as a tool to examine the physical changes to the Earth’s natural resources and climate, this could result in increased customer loyalty or brand value,” Google wrote. “This opportunity driver could have a positive impact on our brands.”

Huh. Google comes off sounding the worst somehow.

Chairman_Mao wrote:

Huh. Google comes off sounding the worst somehow.

Those snippets come from Alphabet's response to the CDP's (Carbon Disclosure Project's) 2018 climate change questionnaire.

CDP is a UK-based non-profit group that's trying to make corporations accurately disclose the environmental impacts of their business and make that kind of disclosure and risk management standard practice.

CDP's questionnaire literally asked Alphabet to disclose the risks and opportunities the company faced with global warming. One of their risk responses was that, as an advertising company, climate change could negatively impact their revenue if people and companies slowed their consumption (and that decreased the need for advertising).

Another outlined an opportunity that might exist for Google Earth, which was to show people how climate change was affecting the planet. The sum benefit Alphabet identified was that its $142 billion brand value could go up by $142 million because the company was helping to educate people about the impacts of climate change.

Oh it makes sense, I was really just thinking about the wording compared with the others.

Maybe if corporate profits become endangered, we might actually do something.

Of course I think Home Depot is being short-sighted about the potential damage to their own stores and inventory in new flood zones. An up-tick in selling plywood won't cover millions of dollars of ruined inventory if the store gets flooded out.

Or frozen out.

ABC/AP: Science Says: Get used to polar vortex outbreaks

WASHINGTON (AP) — It might seem counterintuitive, but the dreaded polar vortex is bringing its icy grip to the Midwest thanks to a sudden blast of warm air in the Arctic.

Get used to it. The polar vortex has been wandering more often in recent years.

It all started with misplaced Moroccan heat. Last month, the normally super chilly air temperatures 20 miles above the North Pole rapidly rose by about 125 degrees (70 degrees Celsius), thanks to air flowing in from the south. It's called "sudden stratospheric warming."

That warmth split the polar vortex, leaving the pieces to wander, said Judah Cohen, a winter storm expert for Atmospheric Environmental Research, a commercial firm outside Boston.

"Where the polar vortex goes, so goes the cold air," Cohen said.

The Day After Tomorrow was prophecy!

OG_slinger wrote:

The Day After Tomorrow was prophecy!

I’m glad someone else also thinks of that when they hear “polar vortex.”

I think the link to Day After Tomorrow was pretty obvious myself.
It was one of those instances of truth is stranger than fiction.

Feels like -30 outside right now here in Columbus. I might need to move.

'We’re getting soft’: Kentucky governor says America is weak for closing schools during polar vortex

“We’re getting soft,” warned Bevin, who loves posting selfies on social media but has also blocked hundreds of his constituents from interacting with his pages because he doesn’t like what they say about him, according to the Louisville Courier-Journal. In case his message wasn’t clear, he repeated: “We’re getting soft.”

Suck it up Kentuckians! Your governor knows how weak you really are.

Chairman_Mao wrote:

'We’re getting soft’: Kentucky governor says America is weak for closing schools during polar vortex

“We’re getting soft,” warned Bevin, who loves posting selfies on social media but has also blocked hundreds of his constituents from interacting with his pages because he doesn’t like what they say about him, according to the Louisville Courier-Journal. In case his message wasn’t clear, he repeated: “We’re getting soft.”

Suck it up Kentuckians! Your governor knows how weak you really are.

In a just world Bevin would be forced out of bed at 6:30 AM and given the option of standing outside for 30 minutes or walking a couple of miles, both without a warm winter coat or boots.

Like all the big-mouth, gibbering f*cksticks in office these days, he talks a bunch of sh*t without having ever dealt with it. He clearly has no clue the kinds of crazy sh*t that can happen at -40 to -60 F.

It was super neat seeing all the cars with blown out tires or stalled-out dead engines on the interstate yesterday... to say nothing of all the spin outs.

When I did contract snow removal at a regional airport, we had to stop operations at -38 because the hydraulics would stop working. The rubber tires would freeze and we would just skid every where. Didn’t matter if you were skilled at winter driving or not when you have ice skidding on ice.

But yes. Weak.

Scientists Have Detected an Enormous Cavity Growing Beneath Antarctica

Researchers say the cavity would once have been large enough to hold some 14 billion tonnes of ice. Even more disturbing, the researchers say it lost most of this ice volume over the last three years alone.

...

While researchers are still learning new things about the complex ways ice melts at the Thwaite Glacier, at its most basic, the giant cavity represents a simple (if unfortunate) scientific actuality.

"[The size of] a cavity under a glacier plays an important role in melting," Milillo says.

"As more heat and water get under the glacier, it melts faster."

That's important to know, since Thwaites currently accounts for about 4 percent of global sea level rise.

Obviously back in the time of the greatest generation anyone could do anything unimpeded by winter weather. Just ask Hitler.

Reaper81 wrote:

Like all the big-mouth, gibbering f*cksticks in office these days, he talks a bunch of sh*t without having ever dealt with it. He clearly has no clue the kinds of crazy sh*t that can happen at -40 to -60 F.

It was super neat seeing all the cars with blown out tires or stalled-out dead engines on the interstate yesterday... to say nothing of all the spin outs.

When I did contract snow removal at a regional airport, we had to stop operations at -38 because the hydraulics would stop working. The rubber tires would freeze and we would just skid every where. Didn’t matter if you were skilled at winter driving or not when you have ice skidding on ice.

But yes. Weak.

The local media facebook pages are torn between people who are glad schools and mail service are closed, and people ridiculing these closures because it's just 'normal winter weather' and thus no big deal. The latter go on about how they drove hundreds of miles or walked to work and were fine, so clearly this is all blown out of proportion as part of the conspiracy to 'wussify' America. I'm looking forward to these people never getting their way again.

Energy Policy Solutions Simulator:
https://us.energypolicy.solutions/sc...

The thing everyone is talking about today:

Nature Geoscience: Possible climate transitions from breakup of stratocumulus decks under greenhouse warming

Stratocumulus clouds cover 20% of the low-latitude oceans and are especially prevalent in the subtropics. They cool the Earth by shading large portions of its surface from sunlight. However, as their dynamical scales are too small to be resolvable in global climate models, predictions of their response to greenhouse warming have remained uncertain. Here we report how stratocumulus decks respond to greenhouse warming in large-eddy simulations that explicitly resolve cloud dynamics in a representative subtropical region. In the simulations, stratocumulus decks become unstable and break up into scattered clouds when CO2 levels rise above 1,200 ppm. In addition to the warming from rising CO2 levels, this instability triggers a surface warming of about 8 K globally and 10 K in the subtropics. Once the stratocumulus decks have broken up, they only re-form once CO2 concentrations drop substantially below the level at which the instability first occurred. Climate transitions that arise from this instability may have contributed importantly to hothouse climates and abrupt climate changes in the geological past. Such transitions to a much warmer climate may also occur in the future if CO2 levels continue to rise.

8 degrees is approximately double the warming compared to worst case scenario I've seen before this.

Hopefully we won't reach the 1,200 ppm tipping point--and hopefully there aren't other tipping points that we just haven't noticed yet.

Well! This was a bracing read.

"Deep Adaptation" is quite unlike any other academic paper. There's the language ("we are about to play Russian Roulette with the entire human race with already two bullets loaded"). There's the flashes of dark humour ("I was only partly joking earlier when I questioned why I was even writing this paper"). But most of all, there's the stark conclusions that it draws about the future. Chiefly, that it's too late to stop climate change from devastating our world – and that "climate-induced societal collapse is now inevitable in the near term".

How near? About a decade.

Professor Jem Bendell, a sustainability academic at the University of Cumbria, wrote the paper after taking a sabbatical at the end of 2017 to review and understand the latest climate science "properly – not sitting on the fence anymore", as he puts it down the phone to me.

What he found terrified him. "The evidence before us suggests that we are set for disruptive and uncontrollable levels of climate change, bringing starvation, destruction, migration, disease and war," he writes in the paper. "Our norms of behaviour – that we call our 'civilisation' – may also degrade."

"It is time," he adds, "we consider the implications of it being too late to avert a global environmental catastrophe in the lifetimes of people alive today."

I'm working my way through it. Can't really face it all at once with everything else going on.

I read it. I honestly wouldn't say it is worth much. There is no new information in it with regards to climate change and a lot of supposition. Maybe it will happen, maybe it won't. All I know is that I've been reading about doomsday theories for the past 11 years for any number of things and they haven't come to pass. And even if one turns out to be true, it isn't worth reading because what's the point? Why color the rest of your life with how these things make people feel?

Well hopefully the guy that is credited with inventing the Lithium Ion battery (Goodenough) will come through again with his glass solid state battery.

Plus there are a lot of things cropping up regarding graphene. I think it was as little as a few months ago that a startup has found a way to "mass" produce it. Not on the level of steel and such but certainly seemingly enough to make an business out of it.

Those two give major hope at our ability to wholesale change a lot of industries to clean energy.

When I read climate change, my mind always goes to Bob Dylan's The Times They Are A Changin' song. So I pulled it up again and other then a few lines, the song can easily fit the theme of climate change. The first verse is even about rising water levels. I wonder if Bob Dylan knew something in the 60s.

Robear wrote:

I'm working my way through it. Can't really face it all at once with everything else going on.

This is how I feel. I've been fairly pessimistic for quite a while. Didn't have kids, in part, because it felt like the world already had too many humans. I don't need more pessimism right now, even if it's warranted.

Boogtehwoog wrote:

All I know is that I've been reading about doomsday theories for the past 11 years for any number of things and they haven't come to pass.

"80th floor, and still no problems!" said the falling man...

Robear wrote:
Boogtehwoog wrote:

All I know is that I've been reading about doomsday theories for the past 11 years for any number of things and they haven't come to pass.

"80th floor, and still no problems!" said the falling man...

Yeah, at what point does the doomsday "occur"?

Is it when the meteor is knocked onto a collision course with the earth, when it strikes, or 50 years later when the last human eking out a meagre existence alone in a cave passes away?

I'm also not aware of any climate "doomsday theory" that postulates doomsday stuff happening in the last 11 years...

See, this matters, because if people think that it's not going to happen, they might not care. And if they think that we can't do *anything* about it, they might not care. But neither of those is true. The problem is that today seems to be much like yesterday. Gradual change is hard to spot until the cumulative changes suddenly hit you in the face, and then it is far more likely to seriously affect your life than any of the small bellwether changes that preceded it.

At that point, there'll be a *lot* of people saying "Gee, maybe we should have done something about this earlier...". And burning down their government over it.

I live 80ft above sea level and I have started telling my wife that it might soon be time to sell our house and move to a state that is higher up. She thinks I am crazy.