[Discussion] Climate Change

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

Yeah, we're boned. Anyone working for a fossil fuel company should be looking into backup careers and job training.

I suggest grub farming

This is petty and inconsequential, but it annoys me that by 2040 most of the people who deny this is even happening (or that it's caused by humans, or that there's anything we can do about it, etc.) will be dead or on their way out. We won't even really get the chance to say, "I told you so. Thank you so much for your shortsighted, selfish decisions which have left future generations to struggle to pick up the pieces."

Specifically I'm thinking of my dad, who cited Michael Crichton to back his argument when I tried to discuss this with him a few years ago. Yes, for him, a deceased fiction author and former physician trumps the consensus by actual climate scientists. He started getting irritated and driving slightly more aggressively when I was talking about it too, so I just dropped it.

It’s not petty. Boomers especially have f*cked us. By the time that voting block dies off it will be too late.

If it makes you feel better even if they were alive in 2040 and the world was facing a disaster they still wouldn't admit they were wrong.

It would still be Obama's fault. Thanks Obama!

Here's hoping we can all download ourselves before then, then we can spend eternity Chalrton Heston'ing at the Boomers.

IMAGE(https://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2018/04/03/planet-apes-1968-ending-you-blew-it.jpg)

Jonman wrote:

Here's hoping we can all download ourselves before then, then we can spend eternity Chalrton Heston'ing at the Boomers.

That's the hope that will keep me afloat. I already curse them constantly. It would be sweet to be able to curse them for eternity.

JeremyK wrote:

If it makes you feel better even if they were alive in 2040 and the world was facing a disaster they still wouldn't admit they were wrong.

This is true. If my 7 year old son were gunned down at school tomorrow, I don’t think my dad would give even a passing thought to the need for revamped gun laws despite losing his only grandchild. He has found his political religion to follow and not even the end of the world would sway him from it.

Fox News is a hell of a drug.

Yeah I suspect the rally call will soon be "well it's too late to change it now so lets go out with a bang!"

"Now that we have all of these economic challenges from climate change we have to use fossil fuels to keep up!"

The Guardian: We have 12 years to limit climate change catastrophe, warns UN

Global Warming of 1.5 °C: an IPCC special report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways, in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change, sustainable development, and efforts to eradicate poverty

TheGameguru wrote:

Yeah I suspect the rally call will soon be "well it's too late to change it now so lets go out with a bang!"

Likely. The problem with that is, of course, is that even limiting it to 1.5 °C or 2 °C is vastly better than letting it go to 4 °C.

The arguments I've been hearing from family and friends is that "It's only going to go up a couple degrees? So what!? The temperature changes more than that in a day!" This is why education funding is so important.

Kehama wrote:

The arguments I've been hearing from family and friends is that "It's only going to go up a couple degrees? So what!? The temperature changes more than that in a day!" This is why education funding is so important.

Jesus Christ

DSGamer wrote:
Kehama wrote:

The arguments I've been hearing from family and friends is that "It's only going to go up a couple degrees? So what!? The temperature changes more than that in a day!" This is why education funding is so important.

Jesus Christ

Precisely.

Kehama wrote:

The arguments I've been hearing from family and friends is that "It's only going to go up a couple degrees? So what!? The temperature changes more than that in a day!" This is why education funding is so important.

An innumerate population is an easily fooled population.

Jonman wrote:
Kehama wrote:

The arguments I've been hearing from family and friends is that "It's only going to go up a couple degrees? So what!? The temperature changes more than that in a day!" This is why education funding is so important.

An innumerate population is an easily fooled population.

Isn't the census supposed to count the population?

Chumpy_McChump wrote:
Jonman wrote:
Kehama wrote:

The arguments I've been hearing from family and friends is that "It's only going to go up a couple degrees? So what!? The temperature changes more than that in a day!" This is why education funding is so important.

An innumerate population is an easily fooled population.

Isn't the census supposed to count the population?

I said, innumerate, not illiterate.

Jonman wrote:
Chumpy_McChump wrote:
Jonman wrote:
Kehama wrote:

The arguments I've been hearing from family and friends is that "It's only going to go up a couple degrees? So what!? The temperature changes more than that in a day!" This is why education funding is so important.

An innumerate population is an easily fooled population.

Isn't the census supposed to count the population?

I said, innumerate, not illiterate. :)

IMAGE(https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/593186617856118784/LG1KN-Q4_400x400.png)

Kehama, show them this page. Hardiness zones are guides to the types of plants, including crops, that grow well in certain areas. Then point out that that represents about a degree of change. Extrapolate from there. We are in the process of moving the wheat belt north into Canada, for example. This also changes the local humidity, which can affect people's ability to deal with increased heat, which can increase the need for water and power, which puts stress on the water supply system... And on and on.

Here's an example of what the drying of Colorado's climate by even one degree has meant...

Dave Huhn is a sheriff's deputy for Montezuma County, Colo., a stretch of sagebrush mesas and sandstone cliffs bordering Utah, Arizona and New Mexico, home to Mesa Verde National Park, where ancestral Puebloans' cliff dwellings still stand.

Huhn specializes in the complex world of water law. His job has become more important in this region after a series of hot, dry summers have made farmers more desperate for water, and more willing to steal it or go to battle over it.

One Sunday morning several years ago, Huhn got a phone call. The woman on the other end was frantic, screaming as she watched her 82-year-old husband from the window.

Their 86-year-old neighbor was beating him with a shovel.

"It was a situation where you had two old-timers that were very stubborn and very hard-headed," Huhn says, "and they were bound and determined to do it their way. And the other party was saying, 'No you won't.' "

They were fighting over water.

One of the men accused the other of taking more than his share from their irrigation ditch, leaving less for everyone else. The situation escalated to the point that their shovels transformed from farm tools to weapons.

And this is just the early years...

This is the scariest graph I've ever seen

CNN: This is the 'last generation' that can save nature, WWF says

(CNN)Global wildlife populations have fallen by 60% in just over four decades, as accelerating pollution, deforestation, climate change and other manmade factors have created a "mindblowing" crisis, the World Wildlife Fund has warned in a damning new report.

The EPA's Climate Change Page Is Just Gone Now

EPA.gov pages that previously provided information about climate change have been changed from claiming that they are "updating" to an error message that reads, "We want to help you find what you are looking for," as revealed by a report released this week by the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative. The change indicates that information related climate change is not being “updated,” but removed entirely.

In April 2017, the EPA put out a press release announcing that EPA.gov would be changing to “reflect the agency’s new direction under President Donald Trump and Administrator Scott Pruitt.”

New Yorker: How Extreme Weather Is Shrinking the Planet: With wildfires, heat waves, and rising sea levels, large tracts of the earth are at risk of becoming uninhabitable. But the fossil-fuel industry continues its assault on the facts.

Thirty years ago, this magazine published “The End of Nature,” a long article about what we then called the greenhouse effect. I was in my twenties when I wrote it, and out on an intellectual limb: climate science was still young. But the data were persuasive, and freighted with sadness. We were spewing so much carbon into the atmosphere that nature was no longer a force beyond our influence—and humanity, with its capacity for industry and heedlessness, had come to affect every cubic metre of the planet’s air, every inch of its surface, every drop of its water. Scientists underlined this notion a decade later when they began referring to our era as the Anthropocene, the world made by man.

I was frightened by my reporting, but, at the time, it seemed likely that we’d try as a society to prevent the worst from happening. In 1988, George H. W. Bush, running for President, promised that he would fight “the greenhouse effect with the White House effect.” He did not, nor did his successors, nor did their peers in seats of power around the world, and so in the intervening decades what was a theoretical threat has become a fierce daily reality. As this essay goes to press, California is ablaze. A big fire near Los Angeles forced the evacuation of Malibu, and an even larger fire, in the Sierra Nevada foothills, has become the most destructive in California’s history. After a summer of unprecedented high temperatures and a fall “rainy season” with less than half the usual precipitation, the northern firestorm turned a city called Paradise into an inferno within an hour, razing more than ten thousand buildings and killing at least sixty-three people; more than six hundred others are missing. The authorities brought in cadaver dogs, a lab to match evacuees’ DNA with swabs taken from the dead, and anthropologists from California State University at Chico to advise on how to identify bodies from charred bone fragments.

When I say the world has begun to shrink, this is what I mean. Until now, human beings have been spreading, from our beginnings in Africa, out across the globe—slowly at first, and then much faster. But a period of contraction is setting in as we lose parts of the habitable earth. Sometimes our retreat will be hasty and violent; the effort to evacuate the blazing California towns along narrow roads was so chaotic that many people died in their cars. But most of the pullback will be slower, starting along the world’s coastlines. Each year, another twenty-four thousand people abandon Vietnam’s sublimely fertile Mekong Delta as crop fields are polluted with salt. As sea ice melts along the Alaskan coast, there is nothing to protect towns, cities, and native villages from the waves. In Mexico Beach, Florida, which was all but eradicated by Hurricane Michael, a resident told the Washington Post, “The older people can’t rebuild; it’s too late in their lives. Who is going to be left? Who is going to care?”

Thirty years ago, some believed that warmer temperatures would expand the field of play, turning the Arctic into the new Midwest. As Rex Tillerson, then the C.E.O. of Exxon, cheerfully put it in 2012, “Changes to weather patterns that move crop production areas around—we’ll adapt to that.” But there is no rich topsoil in the far North; instead, the ground is underlaid with permafrost, which can be found beneath a fifth of the Northern Hemisphere. As the permafrost melts, it releases more carbon into the atmosphere. The thawing layer cracks roads, tilts houses, and uproots trees to create what scientists call “drunken forests.” Ninety scientists who released a joint report in 2017 concluded that economic losses from a warming Arctic could approach ninety trillion dollars in the course of the century, considerably outweighing whatever savings may have resulted from shorter shipping routes as the Northwest Passage unfreezes.

Exxon spent millions of dollars researching the problem. It outfitted an oil tanker, the Esso Atlantic, with CO2 detectors to measure how fast the oceans could absorb excess carbon, and hired mathematicians to build sophisticated climate models. By 1982, they had concluded that even the company’s earlier estimates were probably too low. In a private corporate primer, they wrote that heading off global warming and “potentially catastrophic events” would “require major reductions in fossil fuel combustion.”

An investigation by the L.A. Times revealed that Exxon executives took these warnings seriously. Ken Croasdale, a senior researcher for the company’s Canadian subsidiary, led a team that investigated the positive and negative effects of warming on Exxon’s Arctic operations. In 1991, he found that greenhouse gases were rising due to the burning of fossil fuels. “Nobody disputes this fact,” he said. The following year, he wrote that “global warming can only help lower exploration and development costs” in the Beaufort Sea. Drilling season in the Arctic, he correctly predicted, would increase from two months to as many as five months. At the same time, he said, the rise in the sea level could threaten onshore infrastructure and create bigger waves that would damage offshore drilling structures. Thawing permafrost could make the earth buckle and slide under buildings and pipelines. As a result of these findings, Exxon and other major oil companies began laying plans to move into the Arctic, and started to build their new drilling platforms with higher decks, to compensate for the anticipated rises in sea level.

Gremlin wrote:

As a result of these findings, Exxon and other major oil companies began laying plans to move into the Arctic, and started to build their new drilling platforms with higher decks, to compensate for the anticipated rises in sea level.

This
Is.
Capitalism.

We're so f*cked.

Fascinating throughout:

NYT: The Insect Apocalypse Is Here: What does it mean for the rest of life on Earth?

Sune Boye Riis was on a bike ride with his youngest son, enjoying the sun slanting over the fields and woodlands near their home north of Copenhagen, when it suddenly occurred to him that something about the experience was amiss. Specifically, something was missing.

It was summer. He was out in the country, moving fast. But strangely, he wasn’t eating any bugs.

The results were surprising in another way too. The long-term details about insect abundance, the kind that no one really thought existed, hadn’t appeared in a particularly prestigious journal and didn’t come from university-affiliated scientists, but from a small society of insect enthusiasts based in the modest German city Krefeld.

The current worldwide loss of biodiversity is popularly known as the sixth extinction: the sixth time in world history that a large number of species have disappeared in unusually rapid succession, caused this time not by asteroids or ice ages but by humans. When we think about losing biodiversity, we tend to think of the last northern white rhinos protected by armed guards, of polar bears on dwindling ice floes. Extinction is a visceral tragedy, universally understood: There is no coming back from it. The guilt of letting a unique species vanish is eternal.

But extinction is not the only tragedy through which we’re living. What about the species that still exist, but as a shadow of what they once were? In “The Once and Future World,” the journalist J.B. MacKinnon cites records from recent centuries that hint at what has only just been lost: “In the North Atlantic, a school of cod stalls a tall ship in midocean; off Sydney, Australia, a ship’s captain sails from noon until sunset through pods of sperm whales as far as the eye can see. ... Pacific pioneers complain to the authorities that splashing salmon threaten to swamp their canoes.” There were reports of lions in the south of France, walruses at the mouth of the Thames, flocks of birds that took three days to fly overhead, as many as 100 blue whales in the Southern Ocean for every one that’s there now. “These are not sights from some ancient age of fire and ice,” MacKinnon writes. “We are talking about things seen by human eyes, recalled in human memory.”

What we’re losing is not just the diversity part of biodiversity, but the bio part: life in sheer quantity. While I was writing this article, scientists learned that the world’s largest king penguin colony shrank by 88 percent in 35 years, that more than 97 percent of the bluefin tuna that once lived in the ocean are gone. The number of Sophie the Giraffe toys sold in France in a single year is nine times the number of all the giraffes that still live in Africa.