How Bad Is Global Warming?

[Iamwhomiam]

How ‘Warmest Ever’ Headlines and Debates Can Obscure What Matters About Climate Change
By Andrew C. Revkin
January 21, 2015 11:32 am

http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/01/21/how-warmest-ever-headlines-and-debates-can-obscure-what-matters-about-climate-change/


Art accompanying a federal report finding 2014 was the warmest year since 1880.Credit National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

Updated, Jan. 23, 11:26 p.m. | If you track developments related to human-driven global warming, my guess is you’re aware that the federal agencies that analyze climate conditions released the final word on 2014’s climate on Friday.

Both NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration firmly concluded that last year beat out 2010 and 2005, the previous years that had held the title of warmest since methodical record-keeping began in 1880.

N.O.A.A. went the furthest, saying its calculations showed 2014 “easily breaking the previous records”:



The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said2014 "easily" broke previous records for global warmth even though the finding was not certain.

Ever since, there’ve been salvos from critics decrying the definitiveness with which both agencies summarized the 2014 findings (each agency had a distinct methodology and slightly different conclusions).

I talked about this yesterday on Brian Lehrer’s radio show, making the point that it’s a distraction to focus on records — as the media and elected officials tend to do — given how year-to-year differences in global temperature are measured in a few hundredths of a degree Fahrenheit, and given the implicit uncertainty in such measurements. You can listen here.

Such fights divert attention from long-term trends:

Tracking climate change, scientists say long-term patterns are the key, with federal scientists placing 19 of the 20 hottest years since 1880 in the past 20 years Credit Climate.gov

If you want to dig in on whether the agencies oversimplified, read on to learn why I think so. I think it would have been better to have been clear up front that the case for 2014 is probabilistic, not set in stone.

But I also agree with Gavin A. Schmidt, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who noted in an email that it’s unlikely those focused on sowing doubt about global warming will magically cheer if the agencies get every dot and dash right:

There is no proportionality in the size of the backlash against word choices and framing. It should be be obvious why. These are the same people every time looking for a reason to distract, dissemble and yes, deny, that anything is happening.

To see where the issue lies, you have to dig into the agency websites or look at the separate analysis done by James Hansen of Columbia University along with Schmidt of NASA and others. When you do, you see abundant references to the uncertainties behind the news releases and news headlines.

The N.O.A.A. website has a page describing how it reached its conclusions about last year — “Calculating the Probability of Rankings for 2014” — which states:

Taking into account the uncertainty and assuming all years (1880-2014) in the time series are independent, the chance of 2014 being….

– Warmest year on record: 48.0%
– One of the five warmest years: 90.4%
– One of the 10 warmest years: 99.2%

Using the agency’s characterizations at the bottom of the page, the 48-percent probability is “more unlikely than likely.”

I queried the agency press office yesterday, asking how that can be squared with saying 2014 “easily” set a new record?

They put me in touch with Derek Arndt, one of the National Climatic Data Center scientists who worked on the 2014 report. He said it’s not that simple, explaining that it’s the relative ranking of probabilities of last year and previous warm years that leads to the conclusion that 2014 tops the list.

On this point, he wrote:

[P]lease reference the N.O.A.A. half of slide 5 of [the agencies’ online briefing]:


A table showing how the two federal agencies tracking climate change ranked the probabilities of different years being the warmest on record.
A table showing how the two federal agencies tracking climate change ranked the probabilities of different years being the warmest on record.Credit NASA/NOAA

These are the probabilities of the given years being the warmest on record, using calculations based upon the uncertainties (and the shape of those uncertainties) associated with each year’s value. 2014 comes in at 48%. The next most likely year is 2010, at 18%. This means that 2014 is a little more than 2.5 times more likely than 2010 to be the warmest on record.

This may seem pedantic, but it’s an important point: there is a warmest year on record. One of the 135 years in that history is the warmest. 2014 is clearly, and by a very large margin, the most likely warmest year. Not only is its central estimate relatively distant from (warmer than) the prior record, but even accounting for known uncertainties, and their known shapes, it still emerges as easily the most likely warmest year on record.

Another agency Web page provides detail on this point.

Arndt also said some critics and some news media missed, or misconstrued, that the odds of each year being the warmest are expressed in different ranges, not single numbers, but this still can reveal a clear leader. He alluded to this helpful graph produced and tweeted by Gavin Schmidt at NASA:

A NASA graph showing the likelihood of estimates for global temperature in record cold and hot years since 1880. Credit NASA

For more on all of this, Andrew Freedman at Mashable has a nice summary of the arguments used by NASA and N.O.A.A. climate scientists defending their definitiveness and explaining how critics are either misunderstanding or mischaracterizing sources of uncertainty.

An independent climate research group, Berkeley Earth, put 2014 in a tie with 2005 and 2010, noting the uncertainties.

In his State of the Union address to Congress last night, President Obama (no surprise) echoed the agencies’ definitiveness on 2014’s record heat, but wisely didn’t dwell on that, making the point that the pattern is the key (along with the accumulating science pointing to specific rising risks):

2014 was the planet’s warmest year on record. Now, one year doesn’t make a trend, but this does — 14 of the 15 warmest years on record have all fallen in the first 15 years of this century.

I’ve heard some folks try to dodge the evidence by saying they’re not scientists; that we don’t have enough information to act. Well, I’m not a scientist, either. But you know what — I know a lot of really good scientists at NASA, and N.O.A.A., and at our major universities. The best scientists in the world are all telling us that our activities are changing the climate, and if we do not act forcefully, we’ll continue to see rising oceans, longer, hotter heat waves, dangerous droughts and floods, and massive disruptions that can trigger greater migration, conflict, and hunger around the globe. The Pentagon says that climate change poses immediate risks to our national security. We should act like it.

A “Scientific Dante’s Inferno”

For a last word from an independent authority on how climate science intersects uncomfortably with the policy arena, here’s Peter W. Thorne, a senior researcher at the Nansen Environmental and Remote Sensing Center in Bergen, Norway, who was a lead author on the most recent science assessment from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change:

Scientifically I agree wholeheartedly that the message is the longer-term changes and that this is absolutely the core message…. Chasing annual averages is fixating on individual trees at the expense of a view of the forest.

The core issue is that there is a demonstrated demand for annual (and even monthly or daily) monitoring and reporting. If the customer has their heart set on a Ferrari (annual data), offering them a Porsche (trend / decadal) is not, sadly, going to work out well for either the supplier or the customer. Now, you can argue about how we got into this situation but the reality is that we are in a position where there is a demonstrable expectation from multiple stakeholders that annual averages are reported at year end.

But, scientifically we do not, never have, and never will, observe perfectly the true measure of surface temperatures across the entire globe. The observations are incomplete in space and time and contain both random and systematic artifacts. Now, many uncertainties cancel as you average in space and time, but not all of them, and not completely. So, there is an irreducible uncertainty that remains and always will. A lot of effort is expended trying to understand the data, remove biases and constrain the uncertainty in a defensible way.

So, having established a clear “need” for annual reporting and that scientifically it is beyond doubt that there is real and irreducible uncertainty in the true annual means I think its less Catch-22 and more a proverbial scientific Dante’s Inferno. Each step to increase the degree of scientific veracity of reporting yields a more and more complicated picture to paint. Meanwhile, whispering in the scientists’ ears are people urging simple messaging. It is an unenviable, and impossible to please all people, position to be put into. I doubt there is a single sweet spot to find in all this.

I, personally, believe that the two groups did about as good a job as you could in reporting what is complex information as simply as possible. Is it exactly how I would have done so? No. Would I have signed off on it? Yes.

Update, Jan. 23, 11:30 p.m. | Gavin Schmidt of NASA has a post on RealClimate.org on coverage and discussions surrounding the warmth in 2014. Here’s his take-home point:

The excitement (and backlash) over these annual numbers provides a window into some of problems in the public discourse on climate. A lot of energy and attention is focused on issues with little relevance to actual decision-making and with no particular implications for deeper understanding of the climate system. In my opinion, the long-term trends or the expected sequence of records are far more important than whether any single year is a record or not. Nonetheless, the records were topped this year, and the interest this generated is something worth writing about.

[Iamwhomiam]

A Sudden Blip Of Global Warming That Took Place 55 Million Years Ago Is A Terrifying Analog Of Today



http://www.businessinsider.com/global-warming-55-million-years-ago-is-like-today-2014-12

NASA Animation Shows How 2014 Became The Hottest Year On Record

http://www.businessinsider.com/nasa-2014-hottest-year-on-record-2015-1

Human Activities Have Pushed Earth Into The Danger Zone

http://www.businessinsider.com/r-climate-change-extinctions-signal-earth-in-danger-zone-study-2015-1

Can Humanity’s ‘Great Acceleration’ Be Managed and, If So, How?

http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/01/15/can-humanitys-great-acceleration-be-managed-and-if-so-how/

Traces of Montana Oil Spill Are Found in Drinking Water

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/21/us/traces-of-montana-oil-spill-are-found-in-drinking-water.html

North Dakota: Pipeline Rupture Spills 3 Million Gallons of Saltwater

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/23/us/north-dakota-pipeline-rupture-spills-3-million-gallons-of-saltwater.html

Oh, those damned regulations! How they hamper our progress!

[stillrobertpaulsen]

In the Alaskan tundra, scientists dig up dirt on future climate change

BY Rebecca Jacobson January 16, 2015 at 6:05 PM EST



Short grasses and plants growing near the Arctic Circle absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. As they die, the carbon-rich plant matter is pushed into the soil, where it freezes.

In warmer conditions, the plant matter would be broken down quickly by bacteria another microorganisms in the soil, releasing more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. In the Arctic tundra, the dead plant matter remains frozen about a foot below the surface, which makes the tundra a giant vault of carbon dioxide, says Matthew Wallenstein, a Colorado State University ecologist.

But the vault is opening. As the planet warms, microbes hiding in the Arctic will feed on the thawed plant matter. As they eat, they release carbon dioxide as a byproduct.

NewsHour science correspondent Miles O’Brien caught up with Wallenstein and a team from Colorado State University, who are digging up frozen cores of Alaskan soil to study these microbes.

“This is frozen,” says researcher Megan Machmuller, gesturing to the tundra. “So, that prevents the release of the carbon to the atmosphere, but as temperatures are warming very fast here in the Arctic, this – the microbes – speed up, decompose carbon faster perhaps by releasing more carbon to the atmosphere, and that’s really what we’re trying to understand.”

O’Brien has more in this report for the National Science Foundation series “Science Nation.”*

*For the record, the National Science Foundation is also an underwriter of the NewsHour.

[Luther Blissett]

Watch Chinese Air Pollution Work Its Way Around the World in This Scary NASA Animation

by Rafi Schwartz

Baoding, a heavily industrialized city in China’s northeast, has been awarded the dubious honor of having that country’s most polluted air. It’s an impressive, if disheartening, achievement, considering that in 2014 90 percent of Chinese cities failed to meet national air quality standards—ones put in place to combat the growing pollution created during the past thirty years of Chinese industrial growth. But while Baoding’s dirty atmosphere represents a major environmental and health concern for that city’s 11 million residents, climatological research shows that industrial air pollution in China doesn’t stay in China for long. This newly released NASA animation demonstrates how fast and far air pollution, much of it from Asia, flows through the planet’s atmosphere in just a matter of months.


Chinese air pollution may also be responsible for stronger, more destructive weather patterns seen across the Pacific ocean. In an article released alongside their video, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory researcher Yuan Wang explains that “pollution from China affects cloud development in the North Pacific and strengthens extratropical cyclones.” Those extratropical cyclones, in turn, are responsible for heavy snowfall and bitter cold in the United States. In other words: More pollutants in the atmosphere lead to heavier clouds, stronger storms, and worse weather such as, Wang speculates, the extremes felt during the winter of 2013.

If Baoding’s recent recognition is any indication, this is a trend that is likely to continue for the immediate future, and is already altering the way climatologists see the world. According to Wang’s co-researcher, Jonathan Jiang:

“Before, we thought about the North-South contrast: the Northern Hemisphere has more land, the Southern Hemisphere has more ocean. That difference is important to global atmospheric circulation. Now, in addition to that, there's a West-East contrast. Europe and North America are reducing emissions; Asia is increasing them. That change also affects the global circulation and perturbs the climate.”

It’s a stark reminder just how interconnected—and fragile—our planet truly is.

[Luther Blissett]

Earth's Dashboard Is Flashing Red—Are Enough People Listening?
As scientists and much of the public differ on the causes of climate change, the planet keeps getting warmer … and the effects are adding up.


Dennis Dimick
National Geographic
PUBLISHED FEBRUARY 2, 2015

Scientists are having trouble convincing the public that people are changing the climate.

A Pew Research Center survey, released last week as part of a broader report on science and society, found that only 50 percent of Americans believe that humans are mostly responsible for climate change, while 87 percent of scientists accept this view. This 37-point gap persists even though thousands of scientists during the past few decades have been involved in publishing detailed reports linking climate change to carbon emissions.

Evidence of a human role in climate change keeps piling up. Recent studies of record-breaking temperatures, rising sea levels, and high levels of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere all point to an Earth under stress from a rapidly expanding human presence.

We are burning record levels of coal, oil, and natural gas to fuel modern society. As a result, we are producing record levels of greenhouse gases that warm the atmosphere, melt the planet's ice, and cause the oceans to become more acidic-threatening marine life.

And as our numbers and appetites keep growing, we also keep cutting down tropical forests to expand cropland and decimating native ocean fish populations with industrial-scale fishing. We pollute waterways and coastal regions with nitrogen and phosphate fertilizer runoff from those croplands.

Scientists say it's as if the gauges on Earth's environmental dashboard are flashing yellow and red as we put the planet under increasing stress.

It's Getting Hot

In mid-January, researchers from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and NASA reported that 2014 was the warmest year in the past 135 years of record-keeping. Globally, land and ocean temperatures were 1.24°F (0.69°C) higher than the average for the 20th century-passing previous highs set in 2005 and 2010.

Temperatures have been rising for several decades, and with the exception of 1998, the ten warmest years since modern record-keeping began in 1880 have all been since 2000. The last time the Earth set an annual record for cold, according to NOAA, was 103 years ago in 1911.

"This is the latest in a series of warm years in a series of warm decades," said Gavin Schmidt of NASA. "While the ranking of individual years can be affected by chaotic weather patterns, the long-term trends are attributable to drivers of climate change that right now are dominated by human emissions of greenhouse gases."

One striking, visible effect of rising temperatures is the shrinking Arctic ice cap. Satellites have been observing the ice cap since 1979, and since then the summer ice there has been shrinking about 12 percent per decade. By the end of summer 2012, about half of the Arctic ice area present in 1979 had melted. National Geographic revised its most recent atlas to show this loss of Arctic ice.

National Geographic cartographer Juan José Valdés has said that, compared with previous editions, this remapping of the Arctic is "the biggest visible change [on the world map] other than the breakup of the U.S.S.R."

The Coming Flood

A new study says seas have been rising faster in the past two decades than anyone realized previously.

Seas are rising because ice sheets in Greenland and parts of Antarctica, and glaciers in Alaska and elsewhere, are melting as global temperatures rise. Meltwater flows from continents into the oceans, just like water flowing into a bathtub. Seawater also expands because it's getting hotter as global temperatures rise.

As Laura Parker reports in the February issue of National Geographic magazine, Miami and its suburbs face more financial risk from flooding due to sea-level rise by 2050 than any other major urban area in the world. By century's end, Miami could be dealing with seas up to five feet higher than now. It is one of many low-elevation coastal cities confronting the reality—and expense—of rising seas as salt water floods streets and intrudes into drinking water supplies.

This year began with atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide at 400 parts per million. Carbon dioxide, which comes from power plant smokestacks and vehicle tailpipes when we burn coal and gas or from forests when we burn them, has been flirting with this level since 2013.

Once carbon dioxide is in the sky, it stays up there for hundreds, even thousands of years, and it traps radiant or reflected solar heat in the atmosphere in a similar way as more blankets on our bed make us warmer. We have in effect been adding more blankets to Earth's atmosphere.

Carbon dioxide levels are more than one-third higher than they were at the start of the Industrial Revolution around 1750, and higher than they have been in 800,000 years or longer. Scientists know this because they have been pulling long cores from ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica that have trapped in them ancient bubbles of carbon dioxide. Their studies indicate that when carbon dioxide levels are high, so are global temperatures.

We are on the verge of learning much more about how carbon dioxide—which serves as a global thermostat—works in the atmosphere. A new satellite carbon observatory called OCO-2, launched in 2014 by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, is starting to monitor Earth's carbon levels, and the goal is to map carbon dioxide circulation globally, showing its sources and how it moves throughout the year.

Besides trapping heat in the atmosphere, carbon dioxide also alters ocean chemistry. As oceans absorb it, they become more acidic, affecting the health of shelled organisms such as oysters, mussels, and coral reefs. Ocean acidification has been called global warming's "evil twin."

Another recent study reports that acidification, overfishing, seabed mining, and other human activities threaten the future of ocean life. One author of that study, Stephen Palumbi of Stanford University, told the New York Times that slowing extinctions in the oceans will require cutting back on carbon emissions.

"If by the end of the century we're not off the business-as-usual [carbon emissions] curve we are [on] now, I honestly feel there's not much hope for normal ecosystems in the ocean," Palumbi said.

Keeping Carbon Down

If we want to keep carbon dioxide levels (and temperatures and sea levels) down, we need to rein in burning of things that cause CO2 levels to rise. At least that's the thinking of scientists studying reserves of coal, oil, and natural gas in the ground.

They are trying to determine how much of these carbon-rich fuels we must avoid burning to keep global temperatures from rising more than 3.6°F (2°C). This 3.6-degree level is considered a threshold beyond which we'll likely see rapid melting of ice sheets and even more rapid sea-level rise.

Researchers project in a new study that we must leave 80 percent of the coal, 50 percent of the natural gas, and 30 percent of the oil in the ground to limit temperature increases. This is a hard sell for a world heavily reliant on these fuels. The U.S. Department of Energy projects that coal, oil, and gas likely will remain the energy sources of choice for the United States for the next 25 years, and globally our reliance on coal and oil keeps rising.

Our tight embrace of fossil fuels and our expanding footprint across the planet has other impacts on oceans, landscapes, the atmosphere, and ecosystems.

New research from the Stockholm Resilience Centre looks at Earth as an integrated system containing a set of interlocking systems with "boundaries." These boundaries identify a "safe operating space" for human beings measured by a set of gauges—just like in your car—called a "planetary dashboard."

These boundaries set theoretical limits on how much we can change the environment before the Earth systems that provide us food, clean water, and clean air, among other things, are themselves damaged. The study says we already have crossed planetary boundaries in four areas: extinction rates, deforestation, level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and flow of nitrogen and phosphorus (used on land as crop fertilizer) into the ocean.

The researchers conclude that as we keep cutting down forests, domesticating wild lands, building more cities, depleting groundwater, polluting the air and water, and harvesting the oceans, we risk destroying the "safe space for humanity" we have enjoyed for more than ten thousand years. The authors say their study amounts to an early warning system to help society "reduce risk and develop sustainably."

Raising Science Literacy

It's possible that more evidence won't affect the outlook of Americans who question whether humans really are changing the climate. That said, the Pew study found one area in which scientists and a majority of the American public agree: Education in "STEM" subjects—science, technology, engineering, and math—in grades K-12 is only average and needs to be improved.

It's possible that better science education eventually could produce a more scientifically literate public, and that this could reduce the gap between the 87 percent of scientists who think humans are the primary agents of climate change and the half of the U.S. public who think we are not.

Improved science literacy could increase the number of Americans who think action on climate change is necessary. Another Pew survey this month indicated that the percentage of Americans who want government action on climate change was up from the 29 percent in last year's survey, but at 38 percent was still a minority—and that policy changes to address climate change are one of Americans' lowest priorities.

Dennis Dimick is National Geographic's Executive Editor for the Environment. You can follow him on Twitter, Instagram, and flickr.

[Elihu]

Listen, I have a lot of respect for many libertarians. But usually insofar only as they see what the problems actually are. It's their supposed "solutions" that I see as completely ass backwards.

For instance, we have rampant corporate destruction of the environment. The solution to this is NOT to get rid of all federal environmental laws and have a free-for-all.

One of the reasons we have an unprecedented level of financial criminality occuring at the highest levels of banking and government is because Alan Greenspan was a libertarian who decided what the financial system needed was LESS regulation instead of MORE.

Sure there are tons of bad laws. Throw them out. But to keep criminals at bay you have to have good laws and regulations and you have to enforce them. Especially when it comes to the financial world, the environment, corporate malfeasance, voting, etc. etc. etc.

Without that, and without enforcement, the foxes take over the henhouses of the world.

Anything else is magical thinking. Which is my problem with the classic mainstream Libertarian approach. It purports to create a utopia through magical thinking. ANY system which purports to create a utopia through magical thinking is WAY on the wrong track

magical thinking? have we been posting together so long nordic and thou hast not known me? no no no. libertarians, if a label is needed, understand that it is not possible to improve society through democratic legislation because an impost must be raised and a gendarme formed. by definition a gendarme can never anticipate, only pursue and threaten.

if a law is passed, that every almond nature produces must be pastuerized, people are no longer in business, they are in a compliance organization. it matters not what dangers were posed by unpastuerized almonds. production and distribution, and, therefore, since there are only 24 hours in a day, social behavior, are determined by compliance. compliance exists because of threats. threat based compliance creates a social hierarchy. a social hierarchy, cannot, but by definition, being a subset of the flawed humans themselves, produce anything other than mischief.

this is a logical deduction, and libertarians, if a label is needed, repudiate social legislation. they deduce that, humans, being mischievous and untrustworthy in their nature, aware of their mortality, and capable of perceiving the consequences of their actions, will, in aggregate, have no other choice but to cooperate, regardless of race creed or color, if, force and fraud are punctually and severely penalized. that's it. that's their whole theory of government. there is no moral dimension to it. what you do on your own time is between you and your God. it's not state business. increasing cooperation and coordination in the material sphere will also, by definition, penalize and constrict prejudice of all kinds. it will pit desire for less work against hatred of other people. in other words, one would have to work harder to effectuate negative feelings toward others into the material shpere. which is not to say one couldn't sit at home and hate if that's what they wanted to spend their limited time on.

something bad somewhere may have been prevented and will be prevented in future with a gendarme-backed prohibition is an occlusion of vision. emotively powerful, it, by definition is erroneous and is to be repudiated always. the consequence is social hierarchy, or what my friend sounder would call a vertically integrated coercive social construct perceived by its victims as their benefactor. you wanted a better theory of government? or one simply more palatable? if i feel i'm telling the truth, i'm glad you find it distasteful.

so if i may contextualize what it is i think you mean by "magical thinking", it is a post hoc perjorative characterization of "take the regulations off the rich and their benificent business activities will trickle down to the poor as they clear-cut the forest for nothing more than cash for a bigger cotillion next week!" *sigh* partisan politics backing more gendarme government is dead it's a failure because ALL of it is operating on a flawed premise. more and forward means more disaster. small comments like "i am against climate legislation" aren't made because i belong to the rich or because i have a tv horse in this race. they are made from a heart of systemic conviction. 100 years of social legislation is in fact the cause of "global bio whatever". and no, no gendarme government can fix it.

[stillrobertpaulsen]

Scientists: We Cannot Geoengineer Our Way Out of the Climate Crisis
Zoe Carpenter February 10, 2015


A dried-up riverbed at Huangyangchuan reservoir in Gansu province, China (Reuters/China Daily)

When Mount Pinatubo erupted in the Philippines in 1991, the volcano shot 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere. Those particles reflected enough sunlight to cool the earth by about one degree Fahrenheight—a temporary phenomenon, but one whose implications are still very much debated. Why not, some scientists have asked in the decades since, counter climate change by reproducing the effects of Mount Pinatubo—for example, by flying a plane into the stratosphere and spraying enough sulfate aerosols to turn down the sun?

That question was held up for scrutiny on Tuesday by the National Academy of Sciences, which released a study (funded, in part, by the CIA) of two ideas for staving off the worst effects of climate change via technological manipulation of the climate: to remove carbon-dioxide from the atmosphere and sequester it elsewhere, or to reflect sunlight away from the planet by what’s known as albedo modification, à la Mount Pinatubo. The unequivocal message from the committee was that the world cannot expect to geoengineer its way out of the climate crisis.

“There is no silver bullet here. We cannot continue to release carbon dioxide and hope to clean it up later,” said committee chair and Science Editor-in-Chief Marcia McNutt at a press briefing in Washington. The climate “doesn’t go backwards. It goes different. And we don’t even understand where that different state ends up,” said another member of the panel. In preparing and discussing the report, its authors declined to use the term “geoengineering,” opting instead for “climate intervention.” McNutt explained, “We…felt that ‘engineering’ implied a level of control that is illusory.”

Current carbon-capture and storage methods would take “decades to achieve moderate results and be cost-prohibitive,” according to the report. These carbon-removal strategies include land management and reforestation; ocean iron fertilization; and sucking carbon dioxide from the air, which is difficult to do because its much more diffuse in ambient air than, say, in a smokestack at a power plant. According to the committee, large-scale deployment of these techniques would cost just as much if not more than transitioning to clean-energy sources. Still, given the political barriers to emissions reductions, and the scale of reductions needed, the committee said it was “almost inevitable” that some carbon-capture technology would be required to avoid some of the worst effects of warming. As such, the concluded, more research and development is warranted.

Albedo modification presents a more troubling case. It would be “irrational and irresponsible” to pursue those techniques without reducing emissions, the committee wrote. Not only do they fail to address the root cause of climate change. They also pose a number of known risks, including ozone loss and changes to rainfall, and could disrupt the climate in other, less clear ways. “There is significant potential for unanticipated, unmanageable, and regrettable consequences in multiple human dimensions from albedo modification…including political, social, legal, economic, and ethical dimensions,” the report reads.

The committee issued a hesitant recommendation for further research into albedo modification. “We have reached a point where the severity of the potential risks from climate change appears to outweigh the potential risks from the moral hazard associated with a suitably designed and governed research program.” (‘Moral hazard’ in this case refers to fears that the prospect of a technological ‘fix’ for global warming, however impractical, will lessen political pressure to pursue a real solution.)

There are some compelling arguments in favor of this research. Albedo modification and the novel risks it poses could be introduced suddenly and unilaterally in a time of crisis. “Do we want those decisions to be kneejerk reactions?” McKnell asked. Even some scientists who are skeptical of geoengineering in general support more research. “There’s a difference between doing research and actually doing implementation,” Alan Robock, a professor of environmental sciences at Rutgers University who has written extensively about the negative consequences of injecting sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere, told me on Tuesday. “We may discover that it’s so dangerous we should never do it.” (Robock was not involved in the National Academy report.)

And yet the assumption that research won’t lead to implementation is troubled by history, as Naomi Klein points out in This Changes Everything; she references the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki less than a month after the first successful nuclear test. “It may start with just checking the deployment hardware, but how long before the planet hackers want to see if they can change the temperature in just one remove, low-population location… and then one a little less remote?” Klein writes. Even if small-scale research did not turn into a slippery slope, the results might not truly predict the consequences of climate interventions deployed on a large scale over long periods of time.

So far there is no official program in the United States to support geoengineering research, although scientists like Robock have received limited funding. The NAS report has spurred discussion of the possibility of attaining more deliberate federal funding. For his part, Robock said he hoped that any new financial support would be part of ongoing climate research programs but would not sap any money from those efforts. “When people realize that we’re considering these crazy things, it might encourage them to push more for mitigation,” Robock said.

[Iamwhomiam]

Honestly, it is vitally important that we demand of those interested in experimenting with altering our climate to apply the Precautionary Principle to every approach proposed.

I will continue to harp upon the need to institute this important decision making tool I see as essential and a necessary precursor to transitioning to a sustainable society, one that minimizes risk and cost and one that could and imo should be applied to a multitude of situations in everyday life as well.

So here's one guy's opinion about geoengineering :

The Risks of Climate Engineering

By CLIVE HAMILTON FEB. 12, 2015

THE Republican Party has long resisted action on climate change, but now that much of the electorate wants something done, it needs to find a way out of the hole it has dug for itself. A committee appointed by the National Research Council may just have handed the party a ladder.

In a two-volume report, the council is recommending that the federal government fund a research program into geoengineering as a response to a warming globe. The study could be a watershed moment because reports from the council, an arm of the National Academies that provides advice on science and technology, are often an impetus for new scientific research programs.

Sometimes known as “Plan B,” geoengineering covers a variety of technologies aimed at deliberate, large-scale intervention in the climate system to counter global warming.

Despairing at global foot-dragging, some climate scientists now believe that a turn to Plan B is inevitable. They see it as inscribed in the logic of the situation. The council’s study begins with the assertion that the “likelihood of eventually considering last-ditch efforts” to address climate destabilization grows every year.

The report is balanced in its assessment of the science. Yet by bringing geoengineering from the fringes of the climate debate into the mainstream, it legitimizes a dangerous approach.

Beneath the identifiable risks is not only a gut reaction to the hubris of it all — the idea that humans could set out to regulate the Earth system, perhaps in perpetuity — but also to what it says about where we are today. As the committee’s chairwoman, Marcia McNutt, told The Associated Press: The public should read this report “and say, ‘This is downright scary.’ And they should say, ‘If this is our Hail Mary, what a scary, scary place we are in.’ ”

Even scarier is the fact that, while most geoengineering boosters see these technologies as a means of buying time for the world to get its act together, others promote them as a substitute for cutting emissions. In 2008, Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, later Republican presidential candidate and an early backer of geoengineering, said: “Instead of penalizing ordinary Americans, we would have an option to address global warming by rewarding scientific invention,” adding: “Bring on the American ingenuity.”

The report, considerably more cautious, describes geoengineering as one element of a “portfolio of responses” to climate change and examines the prospects of two approaches — removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and enveloping the planet in a layer of sulfate particles to reduce the amount of solar radiation reaching the Earth’s surface.

At the same time, the council makes clear that there is “no substitute for dramatic reductions in the emissions” of greenhouse gases to slow global warming and acidifying oceans.

The lowest-risk strategies for removing carbon dioxide are “currently limited by cost and at present cannot achieve the desired result of removing climatically important amounts,” the report said. On the second approach, the council said that at present it was “opposed to climate-altering deployment” of technologies to reflect radiation back into space.

Still, the council called for research programs to fill the gaps in our knowledge on both approaches, evoking a belief that we can understand enough about how the Earth system operates in order to take control of it.

Expressing interest in geoengineering has been taboo for politicians worried about climate change for fear they would be accused of shirking their responsibility to cut carbon emissions. Yet in some congressional offices, interest in geoengineering is strong. And Congress isn’t the only place where there is interest. Russia in 2013 unsuccessfully sought to insert a pro-geoengineering statement into the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Early work on geoengineering has given rise to one of the strangest paradoxes in American politics: enthusiasm for geoengineering from some who have attacked the idea of human-caused global warming. The Heartland Institute, infamous for its billboard comparing those who support climate science to the Unabomber, Theodore J. Kaczynski, featured an article in one of its newsletters from 2007 describing geoengineering as a “practical, cost-effective global warming strategy.”

Some scholars associated with conservative think tanks like the Hoover Institution and the Hudson Institute have written optimistically about geoengineering.

Oil companies, too, have dipped their toes into the geoengineering waters with Shell, for instance, having funded research into a scheme to put lime into seawater so it absorbs more carbon dioxide.

With half of Republican voters favoring government action to tackle global warming, any Republican administration would be tempted by the technofix to beat all technofixes.

For some, instead of global warming’s being proof of human failure, engineering the climate would represent the triumph of human ingenuity. While climate change threatens to destabilize the system, geoengineering promises to protect it. If there is such a thing as a right-wing technology, geoengineering is it.

President Obama has been working assiduously to persuade the world that the United States is at last serious about Plan A — winding back its greenhouse gas emissions. The suspicions of much of the world would be reignited if the United States were the first major power to invest heavily in Plan B.

Clive Hamilton is a professor of public ethics at Charles Sturt University in Australia and the author, most recently, of “Earthmasters: The Dawn of the Age of Climate Engineering.”


http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/12/opinion/the-risks-of-climate-engineering.html?ref=opinion

Why Hacking the Atmosphere Won’t Happen Any Time Soon
By Andrew C. Revkin
February 12, 2015 5:13 pm

Colored Weather.gov Photograph

It’s worth spending some more time on the National Academy of Sciences reports on geoengineering prospects and concerns — the concerns mainly being about adding sun-blocking particles to the atmosphere to counteract global warming driven by the buildup of heat-trapping greenhouse gases.

I loved what the climate scientist Raymond Pierrehumbert had to say in Slate yesterday. His views are particularly notable not only because he was one of the report’s authors but also because of his unbridled language in describing the process and his conclusions:

The nearly two years’ worth of reading and animated discussions that went into this study have convinced me more than ever that the idea of “fixing” the climate by hacking the Earth’s reflection of sunlight is wildly, utterly, howlingly barking mad. In fact, though the report is couched in language more nuanced than what I myself would prefer, there is really nothing in it that is inconsistent with my earlier appraisals.

Even the terminology used in the report signals a palpable change in the framing of the discussion. The actions discussed for the most part are referred to as “climate intervention,” rather than “climate engineering” (or the common but confusing term geoengineering). Engineering is something you do to a system you understand very well, where you can try out new techniques thoroughly at a small scale before staking peoples’ lives on them. Hacking the climate is different—we have only one planet to live on, and can’t afford any big mistakes.

In case you missed it, I covered the release of the report and its main findings here.

Clive Hamilton, the Australian ethics professor who wrote “Earth Masters,” a manifesto against geoengineering, came away from the report with a deeper, darker concern, saying that its call for more research essentially legitimizes the basic idea. Hamilton, who is listed as a reviewer of the Academy report, put his thesis this way in an Op-Ed article today in The Times (posted above ~ Iam):

The report is balanced in its assessment of the science. Yet by bringing geoengineering from the fringes of the climate debate into the mainstream, it legitimizes a dangerous approach.

He stresses how some Republicans have embraced the idea, writing:

With half of Republican voters favoring government action to tackle global warming, any Republican administration would be tempted by the technofix to beat all technofixes.

Given that the Central Intelligence Agency was one of the main sponsors of the Academy report on atmospheric intervention and a companion volume on carbon dioxide removal from air, there’s also plenty of room for conspiracy theories.

But jump to what Eli Kintisch wrote yesterday in Science, and you’ll see what a tiny arena this has been:

Since 2006, when Nobel Prize–winning geochemist Paul Crutzen called for climate engineering research, scientific societies, a number of high-level panels and prominent lawmakers have endorsed federal funding for the field. But the United States has never established a formal mechanism to support studies of either type of geoengineering, and agencies have distributed just a few million dollars to researchers. The biggest funder of geoengineering research has been a nonprofit fund supported by billionaire Bill Gates, which has disbursed some $8.5 million for research and meetings since 2007.

Personally, I see value in further research on both sides of the intervention question — on ways to draw CO2 from the air and on sun-blocking options, many of which can be tested at small scale. I don’t see the research legitimizing climate interventions and, in fact, the reports demonstrate that such studies help clarify why it’s a very bad idea.

Pierrehumbert’s prime concern (there are plenty more, all legitimate) is that any sun-blocking intervention done at climate scale would have to continue unabated for millenniums, or until CO2 removal was in high gear — or risk climatic whiplash if veils of reflective materials dissipated.

That should be enough to deter any countries from going global with such efforts.

But I’ve long seen plenty of other reasons why this is almost assuredly a nonstarter in any case. The main one is diplomatic, not technological. Who sets the thermostat?

Here’s how I summarized that issue in a 2007 post:

It’s been hard enough figuring out how to slow an unintended human-induced warming. How hard will it be to agree on strategies for an engineered cooling?

If you see any scenario that would result in a lone actor hacking the sky, let me now. Otherwise, I stand by a bet I proposed on Facebook today (and have made many times before):

I’d bet $1,000 that no country initiates atmospheric geo-engineering beyond the small-research scale in my lifetime.

I know. I’m pushing 60, so that’s not necessarily a very long span, but you get the idea.

With aging in mind, I’ll conclude with a little “same as it ever was” reflection.

I can’t believe it, but this is my 30th year reporting on sun-blocking substances and human-driven climate change.

One of the first conversations I had about adding sulfur to the atmosphere to counteract global warming was, appropriately, with Edward Teller — yes, the physicist and hydrogen bomb pioneer who was one of the inspirations for Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove.”

I first interviewed him in 1985 for a Science Digest cover story I was writing on another type of climate intervention by humans — the hypothesized “nuclear winter” that could follow a nuclear war. (Read the article in full here.) Around that time, he had already noted rough estimates of how many jumbo jets full of sulfur compounds would be required each year to counteract global warming. (In 1997 he wrote on that idea in The Wall Street Journal.)

In the end, here’s how I described this question in “Global Warming: Understanding the Forecast,” my first book on climate change:

Some economists, scientists, and planners look at the historical record and conclude that our ingenuity will get us through any coming climate change, and that the immediate cost of preventing — or at least slowing — any man-made change is unacceptably high. Moreover, they say, there is always the possibility that the models are wrong, and that the world is actually going to warm only moderately. More research is needed before costly changes are made. Much more research.

Others say there is no need to worry now. There will always be a technological fix. We can fertilize the ocean around Antarctica, for instance, and vast plankton blooms will pull excess carbon dioxide from the air. We can blast CFC’s from the sky with specially-tuned lasers. We can fill the stratosphere with plane-loads of sulfur dioxide, which will form tiny droplets of sulfuric acid that will reflect away excess sunlight and counter the warming.

But given our current lack of understanding of the existing global system, most scientists say that the last thing we should consider is adding another variable to the equation. More nasty surprises would surely be in store.

Same as it ever was, indeed.

For a bit more explication, and a chuckle, here’s a great student-created primer on the geoengineering basics that I wrote about in 2008 (as with everything, there’s room for improvement; find the fun misspelling):


http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/02/12/why-hacking-the-atmosphere-wont-happen-any-time-soon/

[Iamwhomiam]

In Climate Change, What’s in a Name?

FEB. 12, 2015

Justin Gillis
BY DEGREES

The Aurora Australis glows over an emperor penguin colony at Atka Bay, Antarctica. Credit Stefan Christmann/Corbis

The words are hurled around like epithets.

People who reject the findings of climate science are dismissed as “deniers” and “disinformers.” Those who accept the science are attacked as “alarmists” or “warmistas. ” The latter term, evoking the Sandinista revolutionaries of Nicaragua, is perhaps meant to suggest that the science is part of some socialist plot.

In the long-running political battles over climate change, the fight about what to call the various factions has been going on for a long time. Recently, though, the issue has taken a new turn, with a public appeal that has garnered 22,000 signatures and counting.

The petition asks the news media to abandon the most frequently used term for people who question climate science, “skeptic,” and call them “climate deniers” instead.

Climate scientists are among the most vocal critics of using the term “climate skeptic” to describe people who flatly reject their findings. They point out that skepticism is the very foundation of the scientific method. The modern consensus about the risks of climate change, they say, is based on evidence that has piled up over the course of decades and has been subjected to critical scrutiny every step of the way.

Drop into any climate science convention, in fact, and you will hear vigorous debate about the details of the latest studies. While they may disagree over the fine points, those same researchers are virtually unanimous in warning that society is running extraordinary risks by continuing to pump huge quantities of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

In other words, the climate scientists see themselves as the true skeptics, having arrived at a durable consensus about emissions simply because the evidence of risk has become overwhelming. And in this view, people who reject the evidence are phony skeptics, arguing their case by cherry-picking studies, manipulating data, and refusing to weigh the evidence as a whole.

The petition asking the media to drop the “climate skeptic” label began with Mark B. Boslough, a physicist in New Mexico who grew increasingly annoyed by the term over several years. The phrase is wrong, he said, because “these people do not embrace the scientific method.”

Dr. Boslough is active in a group called the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, which has long battled pseudoscience in all its forms. Late last year, he wrote a public letter on the issue, and dozens of scientists and science advocates associated with the committee quickly signed it. They include Bill Nye, of “Science Guy" fame, and Lawrence M. Krauss, the physicist and best-selling author.

A climate advocacy organization, Forecast the Facts, picked up on the letter and turned it into a petition. Once the signatures reach 25,000, the group intends to present a formal request to major news organizations to alter their terminology.

All of which raises an obvious question: If not “skeptic,” what should the opponents of climate science be called?

As a first step, it helps to understand why they so vigorously denounce the science. The opposition is coming from a certain faction of the political right. Many of these conservatives understand that since greenhouse emissions are caused by virtually every economic activity of modern society, they are likely to be reduced only by extensive government intervention in the market.
Continue reading the main story
Continue reading the main story

So casting doubt on the science is a way to ward off such regulation. This movement is mainly rooted in ideology, but much of the money to disseminate its writings comes from companies that profit from fossil fuels.

Despite their shared goal of opposing regulation, however, these opponents of climate science are not all of one mind in other respects, and thus no single term really fits them all.

Some make scientifically ludicrous claims, such as denying that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas or rejecting the idea that humans are responsible for its increase in the atmosphere. Others deny that Earth is actually warming, despite overwhelming evidence that it is, including the rapid melting of billions of tons of land ice all over the planet.

Yet the critics of established climate science also include a handful of people with credentials in atmospheric physics, and track records of publishing in the field. They acknowledge the heat-trapping powers of greenhouse gases, and they distance themselves from people who deny such basic points.

“For God’s sake, I can’t be lumped in with that crowd,” said Patrick J. Michaels, a former University of Virginia scientist employed by the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington.

Contrarian scientists like Dr. Michaels tend to argue that the warming will be limited, or will occur so gradually that people will cope with it successfully, or that technology will come along to save the day – or all of the above.

The contrarian scientists like to present these upbeat scenarios as the only plausible outcomes from runaway emissions growth. Mainstream scientists see them as being the low end of a range of possible outcomes that includes an alarming high end, and they say the only way to reduce the risks is to reduce emissions.

The dissenting scientists have been called “lukewarmers” by some, for their view that Earth will warm only a little. That is a term Dr. Michaels embraces. “I think it’s wonderful!” he said. He is working on a book, “The Lukewarmers’ Manifesto.”

When they publish in scientific journals, presenting data and arguments to support their views, these contrarians are practicing science, and perhaps the “skeptic” label is applicable. But not all of them are eager to embrace it.

“As far as I can tell, skepticism involves doubts about a plausible proposition,” another of these scientists, Richard S. Lindzen, told an audience a few years ago. “I think current global warming alarm does not represent a plausible proposition.”

Papers by Dr. Lindzen and others disputing the risks of global warming have fared poorly in the scientific literature, with mainstream scientists pointing out what they see as fatal errors. Nonetheless, these contrarian scientists testify before Congress and make statements inconsistent with the vast bulk of the scientific evidence, claiming near certainty that society is not running any risk worth worrying about.

It is perhaps no surprise that many environmentalists have started to call them deniers.

The scientific dissenters object to that word, claiming it is a deliberate attempt to link them to Holocaust denial. Some academics sharply dispute having any such intention, but others have started using the slightly softer word “denialist” to make the same point without stirring complaints about evoking the Holocaust.

Scientific denialism has crept into other aspects of modern life, of course, manifesting itself as creationism, anti-vaccine ideology and the opposition to genetically modified crops, among other doctrines.

To groups holding such views, “evidence just doesn’t matter any more,” said Riley E. Dunlap, a sociologist at Oklahoma State University. “It becomes possible to create an alternate reality.”

But Dr. Dunlap pointed out that the stakes with most of these issues are not as high as with climate-change denial, for the simple reason that the fate of the planet may hang in the balance.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/17/science/earth/in-climate-change-whats-in-a-name.html?_r=0

Denier bait! ^^^

[zangtang]

bait indeed !
- but if we're doing psycholinguistics......and i think we are....
can we change 'extraordinary risks' to........'initiate global suicide'
and change
'the fate of the planet' to 'wilful human self extinction'

especially whilst we're being so honest with ourselves

[Iamwhomiam]

Sure. Why not? After all, "the fate of the planet" is so open-ended with many possible outcomes. Tends to make one believe that a cheery outcome is possible, but that's no longer true - we will suffer severe effects from ever-warming climate and they will continue to worsen, becoming catastrophic before we're able to convert to a sustainable society. But there's no guarantee of what will be.

We're still warring barbarians vying for territorial wealth of resources and I do not believe there is the will to manage the world's resources for the benefit of all. Lust for Greed and Power has doomed us, I'm afraid. We are too entrenched in our present ways and systems, too inflexible for change and too greedy to appropriately self-regulate. The Keystone Pipeline is aptly named.

[seemslikeadream]

start from 13:00


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0Cp7DrvNLQ

[zangtang]

i too love (need) to believe that 'nothing is written in stone' (georgia guidestones kerflooey notwithstanding)

- its a line i often use in the pub & at summer festivals - when my adoring and reverential supplicants ask of my weighty opinion.

got a feeling (how certain are you?) that the die has been cast, & the possibly worst of all roads, in potentiality, become fixed in ongoing manifestation.

I fear that for the sake of continued existence of humanity (at all, at all) every billion of us are going to have to begrudgingly, yet willingly sacrifice ourselves so that
a million plutocratic fascists can spool out another couple hundred years underground.....or in hermetically geodesic domed valhalla compounds....somewhere.

i really need to get laid.

[zangtang]

SLAD - just finished, gave it the whole 3 hrs - loadsa catastrophism!
i've bookmarked the one with prof Brian Cox.
you've saved me 20 quid cos i skipped the pub!
chin chin

[Luther Blissett]

New Climate Change Study Calls For Urgent Action To Prepare NYC

We can keep debating global climate change (it's real!) until the last polar bear takes its final gasping breath. But let's never forget that this seaside city is in imminent danger—a new study confirms New York's temperatures are skyrocketing, sea levels are rising, and we're in for one hell of a grim ride.

The Mayor's Office has just released this year's incredibly bleak New York City Panel on Climate Change report today, noting that their findings "underscore the urgency of not only mitigating our contributions to climate change, but adapting our city to its risks." Not that this should be surprising at this point. Here are some fun things to look forward to, according to the report:

Mean annual temperatures are expected to shoot up by 4.1 to 5.7 degrees Fahrenheit by the 2050s. By the 2080s, those mean annual temperatures could increase by as much as 8.8 degrees Fahrenheit. For comparison's sake, mean annual temperature increased a total of 3.4 degrees Fahrenheit from 1900 to 2013, so that's a pretty big jump in under a century.

This temperature spike will result in more heat waves, which sound pleasant on a day like today, but will be far less so while you're underground waiting for a futuristic F train in July 2088. (Kidding, F trains won't change between now and 2088.) The report predicts that heat wave frequency will triple by the 2080s, from two per year to six per year. Then again, extreme cold events will likely decrease, so...pick your poison.

And woo boy is it going to get rainy: mean annual precipitation will likely increase by 4 to 11 percent by the 2050s. By the 2080s, that number will have increased by 5 to 13 percent, and we'll be able to expect 1.5 times more extreme precipitation days per year.

The news gets worse. The sea level will increase between 11 inches and 21 inches by the 2050s; by the 2080s, it'll be up to between 18 and 29 inches, and by 2100, we can expect an increase of between 22 and 50 inches. And if the science gods are against us—and aren't they always?—that sea level could see a rise as high as six feet by 2100. Bye, Red Hook!

In fact, by 2100, sea level will have risen so much it'll have doubled the area for 2013's designated coastal flooding zones for both the 100-year flood and the 500-year flood, leaving a lot of previously untouched inland vulnerable:





Don't swallow that entire bottle of pills just yet—there's more! All this climate confusion will likely increase respiratory and cardiovascular diseases, increase allergens, asthma and air pollution, and perhaps even amplify diseases spread by ticks, mosquitos, food, and water. We can expect more heat-related deaths, particularly among seniors, children, the poor, and disadvantaged minorities, to name a few.

There is some good news, though it still doesn't sound good enough. The city's implemented a number of new projects recommended by the NPCC report that aim to, at the very least, mitigate the effects of destructive climate change. These include funding a $335 million flood protection system for the Lower East Side, using the NYC Cool Roofs program to coat building roofs with cooling reflective paint, and funneling $100 million into protecting at-risk waterfront communities like Coney Island Creek. They've also added sand dunes to Staten Island, updated building and zoning codes, and added 4.15 million cubic yards of sand to city beaches.

Future efforts will include upgrading flood protection systems and coastal protection in at-risk areas like Red Hook and Breezy Point, preparing NYCHA for heavy flooding, ensuring hospitals don't lose electricity during major weather events, and putting $450 million toward constructing levees and the like in Midland Beach and on Staten Island's East Shore.

The scary thing here, though, is that so much of these efforts are meant to protect us from the effects of climate change, and won't actually do much to slow down what is apparently an imminent, relentless, and terrifying alteration to the environment in which we live. The city has pledged to cut greenhouse gas emissions significantly, which will ultimately help future generations if more municipalities in America and around the world follow suit, but that's not happening. This is the overheated, increasingly toxic bed we've made, so, might as well let the sheets strangle us, right?