How Bad Is Global Warming?

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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby American Dream » Tue Apr 03, 2018 6:56 am

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Last edited by American Dream on Tue Apr 03, 2018 2:19 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby BenDhyan » Tue Apr 03, 2018 8:14 am

AD, I understand this thread is meant to offer the opportunity for RI members to discuss the pros and cons of the claims for global warming, I fail to understand how a post about some tweeter's poll about the assassination of Trudeau is a serious attempt to engage in the spirit for which this thread was reasonably established.
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby American Dream » Tue Apr 03, 2018 8:24 am

You've got it backwards. I started with Anti-Racist Canada's post and the content against anthropogenic global warming discourse and then looked for the thread that are relevant. The key point being that this particular form of Denialism correlates strongly with other pernicious myths of the Right.



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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby DrEvil » Tue Apr 03, 2018 12:48 pm

^^There is a "how bad is global warming denial?" thread somewhere. It would probably be more appropriate there.
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby American Dream » Tue Apr 03, 2018 2:19 pm

I moved it.
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby Luther Blissett » Wed Apr 04, 2018 8:39 am

Jeff’s been posting a ton of good data covering Arctic news through this dark winter heat wave.
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby DrEvil » Sat Oct 27, 2018 3:12 pm

Peter Watts is as always cheerful and optimistic. Tons of links at original.


https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=8433

The Adorable Optimism of the IPCC.

They showed us why we were there: the dust zones, the drowned coastlines,
the weedy impoverished ecosystems choking to death on centuries of Human
effluent. They showed us archival video of the Koch lynchings,
which made us feel a little better but didn’t really change anything.

—”Hotshot”


People have noticed.

I got it in Lviv. I got it in an epic email interview with BiFrost. I get it in pubs and emails, and from one disapproving professor at Concordia who— clearly regretting having invited me into her classroom— asked “So why do you even get out of bed in the morning?”

“You once described yourself as an angry optimist,” Erwann Perchoc asked me a few weeks ago. “Is that still true?”

Perhaps the tone of my writing has changed over the years. It was always what some insist on calling “dark”— but perhaps the shadows have deepened. Even a dozen years ago, the backdrop of my stories— not the plot or the theme, mind you, just the context in which the story took place— might have been described as a forlorn fire alarm: Jesus Christ, people, can’t you see the cliff we’re headed for? We have to hit the brakes! Now, though— well, in recent years I’ve written at least three stories with happy endings. And the reason those endings are happy is because they end in murder and massacre.

It’s not that I’ve given up hope entirely. But perhaps my narrative emphasis has shifted away from Avoid the Cliff and closer to Make the Fuckers Pay. Hope— dims, as time runs out. Anger builds.

And now, nearly a hundred world-class scientists throw a report at our feet that proves something I’ve recognized intellectually for years, although not so consistently in my gut: I’ve been just as childishly, delusionally optimistic as the rest of you.

Bear with me, though. Read on. I have at least one more happy ending in me.

*
It’s been a couple of weeks now since the IPCC report came out. You know what it says. If the whole damn species pulls together in a concerted effort “without historical precedent”— if we start right now, and never let up on the throttle— we just might be able to swing the needle back from Catastrophe to mere Disaster. If we cut carbon emissions by half over the next decade, eliminate them entirely by 2050; if the species cuts its meat and dairy consumption by 90%; if we invent new unicorn technologies for sucking carbon back out of the atmosphere (or scale up extant prototype tech by a factor of two million in two years) — if we commit to these and other equally Herculean tasks, then we might just barely be able to keep global temperature from rising more than 1.5°C.[1] We’ll only lose 70-90% of the word’s remaining coral reefs (which are already down by about 50%, let’s not forget). Only 350 million more urban dwellers will be exposed to severe drought and “deadly heat” events. Only 130-140 million will be inundated. Global fire frequency will only increase by 38%. Fish stocks in low latitudes will be irreparably hammered, but it might be possible to save the higher-latitude populations. We’ll only lose a third of the permafrost. You get the idea.

We have twelve years to show results.

If we don’t pull all these things off— if, for example, we only succeed in meeting the flaccid 2°C aspirations of the Paris Accords— then we lose all the coral. We lose the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and the Greenland Ice Shelf (not that it isn’t already circling the bowl, of course). Twice as many people suffer “aggravated water scarcity” than at 1.5°C; 170% more of the population deals with fluvial flooding. The increase in global wildfire frequency passes 60% and keeps going. Marine fisheries crash pole to pole. The number of species that loses at least half their traditional habitat is 2-3 times higher than would have been the case at 1.5°C. It goes on.

There’s no real point in worrying about a measly 2° increase, though, because on our current trajectory we’ll blow past 3° by century’s end (the Trump administration is predicting 4°, which is why they’re so busy dismantling whatever pitiful carbon-emission standards the US had already put into place; what’s the point of reducing profit margins if we’re headed straight for perdition no matter what we do?). We don’t really know what happens then. Methane clathrates released from a melting Arctic could turn the place into Venus, for all I know.

You probably know all this. You’ve had two weeks to internalize it; time to recoil, to internalize the numbers, to face facts.

To shrug, from what I can see. To go back to squabbling over gender pronouns, and whether science fiction has too many dystopias.

*

Remember last year’s New York Magazine article by David Wallace-Wells? It came pretty close to outlining the fate we’ve made for ourselves, closer than any bureaucrat or politician has ever dared. Remember the pile-on that happened in its wake? Activists and allies all decryig the story as hyperbolic and defeatist? Remember the Hope Police insisting that we had to inspire, not doomsay?

Where are they now?

One of them is Michael Mann, Climate Science superstar. Back in 2017 he shat on Wallace-Wells with everyone else: “There is no need to overstate the evidence, especially when it feeds a paralyzing narrative of doom and hopelessness.” And now here he is, just a few days ago: admitting that even this stark doomsday report is “overly conservative“, that it understates the amount of warming that’s already occurred. And Mann is still an optimist compared to, say, Prof. Jem Bendell, who argues that society is bound for inevitable collapse just a decade down the road and that we might as well start grieving now and avoid the rush. (He even wrote up a paper to that effect, but the policy journal he sent it to wouldn’t publish it until he rewrote it to be less “disheartening”.)

Still. Optimistic or not, this latest report is unprecedented by IPCC standards. It effectively offers, as The Tyee points out, a simple choice between Catastrophe and Disaster. It does, as a thoroughly-vindicated Wallace-Wells proclaims, give us “permission to freak out“.

So. Are we?

In terms of media reaction, the usual suspects say the usual things. Big Think and Rolling Stone go straight down the middle, admit the sitrep is dire, express doubts that we’ll doing anything about it even now. David Suzuki— well, zero points for guessing where David Suzuki comes down. The Tech folks are talking about geoengineering again. The Guardian talks about food. Over at Medium, Daniel Estrada tries really hard to put a good spin on it, to work within the timeline of the IPCC Report and the US Election cycle to explore ways in which we might achieve the merely-disastrous Best Case— and then, halfway through, admits that he doesn’t really think any of it will happen, that this is merely a hopeful thought experiment, and in his heart of hearts he thinks we’re all well and truly fucked.

Over at the National Post— Canada’s answer to Fox News— some idiot named Kelly McParland blames the activists for everything, because they hectored and warned and complained for so long that who could blame the rest of us for tuning out? But perhaps the most telling reaction from the right wing comes courtesy of petro-shill Anthony Watts, who— unable to deal with the actual science— simply ran a cartoon showing IPCC authors whining for more money, alongside a guest editorial suggesting that even if it is all true, it would be way cheaper to just give everyone air conditioners.[2]

Of course, none of these folks wield any actual power. What they think doesn’t matter. What about the people who actually call the shots? How have the World’s Leaders responded to this latest 10-alarm fire, to this 12-year deadline?

Brazil is two days away from electing a far-right reactionary who has promised to quit the Paris Accords once elected. Germany— a world leader in environmental issues, not so long ago— reacted to the report with a profound “Meh”. Australia‘s Energy Minister dismissed it as a distraction from the more-important goal of lowering energy prices for Australians. Back in August France‘s Environment Minister resigned in disgust over his own government’s inaction on climate change; that was before the report’s release, but has Macron had a come-to-Jesus moment in the meantime? Here in Canada, provincial premiers are taking the Feds to court over a measly carbon tax; the government itself permitted an “emergency session” right after the report came out, a parliamentary debate which— as far as I’ve been able to tell— accomplished exactly fuck-all beyond one side of the aisle yelling Think of the Children! while the other yelled Think of The Economy!

And these are the progressive jurisdictions. I probably don’t have to tell you about Donald Trump’s hilarious “Instinct for Science“, which apparently allows him to dismiss the IPCC’s findings as biased even as he makes clear that he doesn’t actually know what the IPCC is.

And what about the world’s real leaders, the 0.01% who actually hand out marching orders to these presidents and premiers and prime ministers? Turns out they’re retaining consultants to advise them on how to prevent their personal security forces from killing them, once civilization has collapsed and their money’s no good any more. It seems to be a lot more than mere thought experiment to these people: global societal collapse seems to be their default scenario. They call it “The Event.”

Why, it’s almost as though they knew what was coming before the IPCC even tendered their report.

*

To me, one of the most interesting facets of this whole clusterfuck is how eager everyone is to tell us that It’s Not Our Fault. “Neoliberalism has conned us into fighting climate change as individuals“, the Guardian charges. “Capitalism Killed Our Climate Momentum“, claims Naomi Klein (who, in all fairness, I’ve admired ever since No Logo). Over at Slate Genevieve Guenther asks “Who Is the We in “We Are Causing Climate Change”?”, and saves us the trouble by answering herself:

Does it include the 735 million who, according to the World Bank, live on less than $2 a day? Does it include the approximately 5.5 billion people who, according to Oxfam, live on between $2 and $10 a day? Does it include the millions of people, all over the world (400,000 alone in the 2014 People’s Climate March in New York City) doing whatever they can to lower their own emissions and counter the fossil-fuel industry?

GQ reassures us that “Billionaires are the Leading Cause of Climate Change“. And I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve read that a mere 100 companies are responsible for 71% of global carbon emissions.

To which I say, Bullshit. You’re all to fucking blame whether Naomi Klein wants to let you off the hook or not.

Not that I’m denying any of her arguments. They’re all true. We were certainly told— by supposed allies like Greenpeace and the PIRGs, as well as more obviously-nefarious corporations and governments— that if we all just recycled and ate one meat-free meal a week, we’d be Doing Our Part to Save the Planet while BP and the Koch Brothers continued to rape the biosphere. Up here in Canada, the reigning Liberals— for all their noble rhetoric about fighting climate change— are still buying pipelines and forcing Tar Sands down our throats and subsidizing Big Oil to the tune of over three billion dollars a year; the Conservative Opposition won’t even pay mealy-mouth lip service to the issue. Down in the states both mainstream parties are sucking too hard on the corporate teat to do anything that might actually endanger the profits of their owners. Individual actions can’t fix things: the very scale of the problem guarantees that institutional responses have always been necessary. All of this is true.

But you know what, people? There were always alternatives. You could have voted for Sanders. You could have voted Green. You could have voted for Ralph fucking Nader, when he was running. Hell, am I the only one who remembers Jerry Brown’s abortive run at the presidency, back in 1980? I still remember his announcement, the Three Priorities he laid out for his administration:

1. Protect the Environment
2. Serve the People
3. Explore the Universe

That’s a damned good mission statement if you ask me. All it got him was jokes from Johnny Carson about how Jerry Brown had locked up the Grey Whale vote, and jokes from everyone else that usually revolved around the fact he was fucking Linda Ronstadt.

Of course he didn’t have a chance. Of course voting for him, or Nader, or the Greens was “throwing away your vote”. None of them had a chance.

And that’s my fucking point. It’s not that no one had heard of these people. It’s not that you weren’t familiar with their platforms. You knew what they stood for and you wrote them off. You were told they were fringe, that they never stood a chance, so you went out and made it true. You voted en masse for the status quo and the corporate teat-sucklers. Now Darby and Klein and Guenther trip over themselves to let you off the hook, to blame Capitalism and Neoliberalism and its stranglehold on the groupthink of modern politics— but how did you end up with leaders who so willingly abased themselves at that altar in the first place, you ignorant shit-heads? There were always alternatives, and you saw them, and you laughed.

Sure, the Neolibs conned you. Because you wanted to be conned.

Reap the whirlwind, you miserable fuckers. May your children choke on it.

*

So what’s left?

Every pundit on the planet is fond of pointing out that politicians can’t look beyond the next couple of election cycles— but twelve years is a couple of election cycles, more or less, and we’re still accelerating toward the cliff. Last weekend, The BUG and I talked about how we’d have to kill our cats before abandoning the house. We weren’t joking.

And yet— in my own way, I’m right with you in The Nile. I can still laugh at The BUG’s jokes. I still watch Netflix. I lie in bed with a sore back because Minion has been sitting on my chest for an hour and I don’t have the heart to disturb her. Sure, there are fewer insects, fewer frogs, less wildlife than I remember from childhood (more pigeons, at least. More raccoons)— but the ravine across the fence is still green, the sky still blue. The tag line on this ‘crawl remains as true as ever: I’m still In Love With the Moment, because I am not starving yet, because those I love are still doing okay, because all the birds have not quite come home to roost and there’s something so indescribably wondrous about being sapient, being able to look around and wonder at the universe. There is still so much to love in the Moment.

But the second part of that line is even truer: I am scared shitless of the future. Because those birds are closer than even I allowed myself to think, and not so far from now I could be a skeleton in the background of a Mad Max movie.

The only hope I can see lies in Donald Trump.

Don’t worry. This isn’t one of those contrarian bits of agitprop designed to provoke a reaction. I’m dead serious.

But when I speak of hope, I’m not talking about the world. I’m talking about hope for my country. I’m talking about hope for my family. Hope for maybe an extra decade or two before the ceiling crashes in. That’s the limited, desperate, end-of-need hope I pin on Trump and his enablers.

Because what do you do when your family is starving and the guys next door have food? What does any country do when drought and famine and heat waves are decimating its taxpayers while the cooler, luckier land to the north has enough— well, if not for all, at least for some? Will the governments of imploding regimes just sadly shake their heads, and— wracked with remorse for their shortsightedness— resign themselves to well-deserved apocalypse?

Of course, Canada’s hardly immune from the unfolding catastrophe (anyone from Fort McMurray could tell you that much). But we’ll still be better off than the US. Smaller temperature jumps. Less agro impact. Hell, our growing season could actually improve in the short term— and there’s lots of room to move north with the isotherms, even if northern soils don’t hold a candle to what we’re used to. Sorry, Inuit. You lose again.

So, yeah. If your family is starving and the house next door has food, you break in. You invade. And if the US invaded us now, we wouldn’t stand a chance. They’d Spread Democracy north of the 49th without breaking a sweat, and our pathetic little armed forces wouldn’t be able to do a damned thing about it. (Hell, the West Edmonton Mall used to have a bigger submarine fleet than the Canadian Navy; the only reason that’s not still true is because the Mall shut down their sub attraction in 2006.)

After a couple of terms of Trumpism, though, who knows?

The US is already at war with itself. It tears itself apart even as we speak: wagons circled, guns beyond counting all pointed inward. Trump and his ilk seem only too happy to spur them on. Maybe, given enough time, they’ll waste all that ammo on each other. Maybe that hypermilitary will be so busy guarding gated communities and mowing down protestors that they’ll forget to invade anyone else. Maybe— if Trump has his way— they’ll be so busy eating each other that by the time they remember us, they’ll have too many self-inflicted wounds to do much about it.

Maybe then we’ll have a fighting chance. Or maybe they’ll just leave us up here to die in peace, a few decades further down the road.

See? I told you I wasn’t out of happy endings.

[1] That’s global mean temperature, mind you. The Arctic’s already up by 3°C, and could blow past 4.5°C while the “mean” temperature is still languishing down at 1.5.

[2] No link from here, though; you can Google the site if you want. And good luck washing the stench off your fingertips.



Is it just me, or did the latest IPCC report just kind of disappear off the radar almost immediately? There were some articles when it came out and then zip, nada, nothing. I suspect that people just really, really don't want to hear what it has to say, because what it has to say is that we are thoroughly and completely fucked.

Anyway - here's the summary for policy makers:
http://report.ipcc.ch/sr15/pdf/sr15_spm_final.pdf

And the full report:
http://www.ipcc.ch/report/sr15/
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby DrEvil » Fri Nov 02, 2018 5:43 pm

https://www.axios.com/worlds-oceans-war ... a4c5d.html

The world's oceans are warming far faster than thought

The world's oceans have absorbed about 60% more heat during the past 25 years than previously estimated, according to a new study published in the journal Nature. The study takes advantage of a new method that can serve as a whole ocean thermometer.

Why it matters: If the ocean is absorbing even more heat than observed, it would suggest future global warming will track on the upper end of projections — possibly as high as 5°C, or 9°F, by 2100 if emissions are not significantly curtailed.

The oceans are absorbing about 93% of the extra energy from increasing amounts of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

What they did: For the study, scientists, led by Princeton University geochemist Laure Resplandy and Ralph Keeling from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, devised a new way of taking the global ocean temperature. It relies on precise atmospheric measurements of oxygen and carbon dioxide, which date back to 1991.

The scientists examined the combined amount of oxygen and carbon dioxide in the air, which they term "atmospheric potential oxygen," or APO.
Both of these gases are less soluble in warmer water, and as the ocean warms, these gases are released into the air, which increases the APO.
This contrasts with other methods that use millions of observations from ocean sensors, including buoys and ship-based instruments. These measurements have considerable uncertainty, particularly the further back you go in time.

What they found: The amount of carbon dioxide that can be emitted by human activities before putting the goals of limiting warming to under 2℃, or 3.6℉, out of reach is about 25% less than what was previously calculated.

“Imagine if the ocean was only 30 feet deep,” said Resplandy in a press release. “Our data shows that it would have warmed by 6.5℃, or 11.7℉, every decade since 1991. In comparison, the estimate of the last IPCC assessment report would correspond to a warming of only 4℃, or 7.2℉, every decade.”

What they're saying: Keeling told Axios the results, “Imply that there’s likely to be more warming in the future.”

This is because the warming oceans eventually transfer much of that extra heat into the atmosphere, resulting in accelerated global warming and stronger storms that can deliver heavier precipitation.

"This study shows that estimates of this ocean heat uptake are probably on the high side of what we previously thought," said NASA climate scientist Kate Marvel. "Why is this scary? Because of something called 'climate sensitivity:' a measure of how hot the planet will eventually get."

Pieter Tans, who closely tracks the amount of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere for NOAA and was not involved in the new study, told Axios the paper is valuable for providing a new, independent estimate of global average ocean warming.
"In case the larger estimate of ocean heat uptake turns out to be true, adaptation to, and mitigation of, our changing climate would become more urgent."
— Pieter Tans, NOAA

However, Tans cautioned that the new estimate is still uncertain, and needs to be replicated by subsequent studies. So too did Kevin Trenberth, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research who was not involved in the new study.

Ultimately, the calculations, Trenberth says, "have implications, because the planet is clearly warming and at faster rates that previously appreciated, and the oceans are the main memory of the climate system (along with ice loss)."
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby JackRiddler » Fri Nov 02, 2018 9:07 pm

.

At least I had the pleasure of reading that world-ender from this Peter Watts, with whom I was unfamiliar.

As for the last section, I had the same thoughts nearly 20 years ago already, some time around first getting acquainted with the works of Michael Ruppert. (I'm sure Watts had the same thoughts long ago, as well.) I mean, about how the endgame for American imperialism isn't going to be toe-to-toe with China, but

CANADA, O Canada,
water-rich and cool!
Home to virgin coastlands
of Our Arc-tic civili-zaaaaay-shun!

Who's going to stop that, eh?

.

Post-Script: Ha! Here's me having that exact thought more than seven years ago, on Osama Death Nacht, May 1, 2011:

JackRiddler » Sun May 01, 2011 10:24 pm wrote:
Belligerent Savant wrote:Clearly, the stage is being [perpetually] set for whatever plans are in place to perpetrate the next fraud or introduce us to the next official Enemy of The State. Need some new cud for the cattle to chew on.


Ha, that's hilarious because they're already talking about it on CNN. Obama still hasn't spoken but the "analyst" is busy passing the crown to Anwar Al-Awlaki. Smooth. Fitting that the head of AQ should finally be an American born.

But we all know things are looking bad for the empire. Endgame vs. China, occupying Saudi Arabia, all that's turning into neocon science fiction. The next enemy will be Latino, or domestic.

Or Canada. For denying sand-oil and not letting us build some cities on the future warm-water North Coast. You, we can obviously handle. Why do you hate our freedoms?


oooooh one minute to Obama! Submit!

.


Didn't foresee the next enemy plan would be Russia again, but that is looking like another neocon stopgap. (Assuming it's doesn't blow up into a terminal blow-up.) It's going to be domestic aliens. And once most shit is smoked, Canada gets annexed.

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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby DrEvil » Sat Nov 17, 2018 7:30 pm

Now this is more like it:

Dozens arrested after climate protest blocks five London bridges

Thousands of protesters occupied bridges across the Thames over extinction crisis in huge act of peaceful civil disobedience
Matthew Taylor and Damien Gayle
Sat 17 Nov 2018 15.31 GMT


Eighty-five people have been arrested as thousands of demonstrators occupied five bridges in central London to voice their concern over the looming climate crisis.

Protesters, including families and pensioners, began massing on five of London’s main bridges from 10am on Saturday. An hour later, all the crossings had been blocked in one of the biggest acts of peaceful civil disobedience in the UK in decades. Some people locked themselves together, while others linked arms and sang songs.

By 2pm the blockade of Southwark Bridge had been abandoned and protesters moved from there to Blackfriars Bridge, where organisers said they were soon to move west towards Westminster Bridge.

Demonstrators occupied Southwark, Blackfriars, Waterloo, Westminster and Lambeth bridges.

The Metropolitan police said all the bridges had since reopened

and that most of the arrests had been for obstruction under the Highways Act.

Afterwards, demonstrators gathered in Parliament Square to hear speeches. Roger Hallam, one of the strategists behind the actions, told the Guardian he felt the protest had been fantastic.

“This is total prediction stuff, mass participation civil disobedience,” he said. “They can’t do anything about it unless they start shooting people, and presumably they won’t do that.”

The day was due to end with an interfaith ceremony outside Westminster Abbey.

The move is part of a campaign of mass civil disobedience organised by a new group, Extinction Rebellion, which wants to force governments to treat the threats of climate breakdown and extinction as a crisis.

“The ‘social contract’ has been broken … [and] it is therefore not only our right but our moral duty to bypass the government’s inaction and flagrant dereliction of duty and to rebel to defend life itself,” said Gail Bradbrook, one of the organisers.

Alice, 19, from Bristol was one of those blocking Westminster Bridge.

“I took the coach at 3am to make sure I didn’t miss it,” she said, “and I’m so glad that I did. It’s a tiny personal inconvenience and, having made it, I get to be part of a rebellion.

“This moment will be remembered in the history books, when we finally stopped allowing our leaders to take us over the cliff.”

Jenny Jones, the Green party peer, joined the protest on Westminster Bridge. She backed the nonviolent direct action taken by demonstrators.

“We are at the point where if we don’t start acting and acting fast we are just going to wipe out our life support system,” she said.

“It’s fine to think we are a rich country, the sixth biggest economy in the world, but actually we won’t do any better than anywhere else because climate change will massively affect us too.

“Basically, conventional politics has failed us – it’s even failed me and I’m part of the system – so people have no other choice.”

Father Martin Newell said on Blackfriars Bridge: “What brought me here is the climate emergency, the extinction emergency and my faith in God who created all this and whose creation we’re destroying and crucifying … I’m called as a Christian to protect our neighbour who’s being abused.”

In the past two weeks more than 60 people have been arrested for taking part in acts of civil disobedience organised by Extinction Rebellion ranging from gluing themselves to government buildings to blocking major roads in the capital.

However, those disruptions were eclipsed on Saturday, when organisers say 6,000 people took part in protests.

“It is not a step we take lightly,” said Tiana Jacout, one of those involved. “If things continue as is, we face an extinction greater than the one that killed the dinosaurs. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather be a worthy ancestor.”

Extinction Rebellion, which cites the civil rights movement, suffragettes and Mahatma Gandhi as inspirations, said smaller events took place in other UK cities as well as overseas on Saturday.

Organisers say they are planning to escalate the campaigns from Wednesday, when small teams of activists will “swarm” around central London blocking roads and bridges, bringing widespread disruption to the capital.

“Given the scale of the ecological crisis we are facing this is the appropriate scale of expansion,” said Bradbrook. “Occupying the streets to bring about change as our ancestors have done before us. Only this kind of large-scale economic disruption can rapidly bring the government to the table to discuss our demands. We are prepared to risk it all for our futures.”

The group is calling on the government to reduce carbon emissions to zero by 2025 and establish a “citizens assembly” to devise an emergency plan of action similar to that seen during the second world war.

On top of the specific demands, organisers say they hope the campaign of “respectful disruption” will change the debate around climate breakdown and signal to those in power that the present course of action will lead to disaster.

The group, which was established only a couple of months ago, has raised around £50k in small-scale donations in the past weeks.

It now has offices in central London and over the past few months has been holding meetings across the country, outlining the scale of the climate crisis and urging people to get involved in direct action this weekend.

“Local groups are setting up across the country and even new groups are seeing around 100 people come to meetings, and we have coaches coming, from Newcastle to Plymouth,” said Rupert Read, a philosophy academic at the University of East Anglia.

The campaign hit the headlines a couple of weeks ago when the former archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams was one of almost 100 academics to come out in favour of it.

In a letter published in the Guardian they said: “While our academic perspectives and expertise may differ, we are united on this one point: we will not tolerate the failure of this or any other government to take robust and emergency action in respect of the worsening ecological crisis. The science is clear, the facts are incontrovertible, and it is unconscionable to us that our children and grandchildren should have to bear the terrifying brunt of an unprecedented disaster of our own making.”

The civil disobedience comes amid growing evidence of looming climate breakdown and follows warnings from the UN that there are only 12 years left to prevent global ecological disaster.

The group is also making international contacts, with 11 events planned in seven countries so far, including the US, Canada, Germany, Australia and France.

“To properly challenge the system that is sending us to an early grave we have to be bold and ambitious,” said Read. “Forging new connections across the world and learning from each other.”


https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... -rebellion
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby Sounder » Tue Nov 20, 2018 7:11 am

Hypothetically speaking, what will be the long term effect on environmental activism, a necessary element for re-shaping our future, if Judith Curry is right? Will people listen when warned about, say meltdown risks inherent in current nuclear plant design, or pesticide run-off killing aquifers, or GMO's killing the microbes in our guts, or pharmaceuticals and fluoride in the water supply, etc, etc?

What happens if the current lack of sunspot activity does indeed make things colder for awhile?

If we are to have a future to be proud of, we will need to identify and confront the identity creation and re-enforcement machine. Does anyone really want an AD style future where every dissenter is labeled a Nazi and/or a crazy person? Come-on people, that is not the road to utopia.



If Barthes can forgive me, “What the public wants is the image of passion Justice, not passion Justice itself.”


I have felt this in my bones since Kennedy was shot.



http://www.climatedepot.com/2014/09/16/ ... the-2030s/

Screen capture of November 2010 Scientific American article.
“By that time I had becoming increasingly skeptic of the UN IPCC,” she noted. [See: Curry: ‘If the IPCC is dogma, then count me in as a heretic’]

Crushing of Scientific Dissent

Curry spoke of the “intolerance of dissent” and attempts to silence skeptic in the global warming discussion today. “President Obama said in his State of the Union address, ‘we don’t have time for a meeting of the flat earth society.’” [See: Climatologist Dr. Judith Curry: ‘I am mystified as to why Obama and John Kerry are making such strong (and indefensible) statements about climate change’]

She called claims of a 97% consensus “deeply flawed.”

“You cannot even talk about these kinds of issues in the mainstream climate debate. We get called ‘deniers’. This is a very sad state of affairs,” she noted.

“Careerism is a big problem. It much more beneficial to join the dominant paradigm, rather than to fight against it,” Curry explained.

“If I were nontenured scientist, I would fear for my job! But I am a senior scientist with retirement in my sight, so I can afford to do what I want, say what I think.”

“I no longer write government grant proposals. I have lot more independence. I truly feel liberated by not having to chase dollars,” she added.

Curry lamented the current state of academia. “There is a system in place with an emphasis on paper counts, an emphasis on dollars, and it is very difficult to dig in and work on hard problem. You have got to keep cranking it out. I really despair. I really despair,”



All these things will continue as long as coercion remains a central element of our mentality.
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby BenDhyan » Fri Nov 23, 2018 11:45 pm

Sure, what could go wrong....

Dimming the sun: The answer to global warming?

November 23, 2018

(CNN) Scientists are proposing an ingenious but as-yet-unproven way to tackle climate change: spraying sun-dimming chemicals into the Earth's atmosphere.

The research by scientists at Harvard and Yale universities, published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, proposes using a technique known as stratospheric aerosol injection, which they say could cut the rate of global warming in half.

The technique would involve spraying large amounts of sulfate particles into the Earth's lower stratosphere at altitudes as high as 12 miles. The scientists propose delivering the sulfates with specially designed high-altitude aircraft, balloons or large naval-style guns.

Despite the technology being undeveloped and with no existing aircraft suitable for adaptation, the researchers say that "developing a new, purpose-built tanker with substantial payload capabilities would neither be technologically difficult nor prohibitively expensive."

They estimate the total cost of launching a hypothetical system in 15 years' time at around $3.5 billion, with running costs of $2.25 billion a year over a 15-year period.

The report does, however, acknowledge that the technique is purely hypothetical. "We make no judgment about the desirability of SAI," the report states. "We simply show that a hypothetical deployment program commencing 15 years hence, while both highly uncertain and ambitious, would indeed be technically possible from an engineering perspective. It would also be remarkably inexpensive."

The researchers also acknowledge potential risks: coordination between multiple countries in both hemispheres would be required, and stratospheric aerosol injection techniques could jeopardize crop yields, lead to droughts or cause extreme weather.

The proposals also don't address the issue of rising greenhouse gas emissions, which are a leading cause of global warming.

And despite the conviction of the report's authors, other experts were skeptical. "From the point of view of climate economics, solar radiation management is still a much worse solution than greenhouse gas emissions: more costly and much more risky over the long run," said Philippe Thalmann of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, an expert in the economics of climate change.

David Archer of the Department of Geophysical Science at the University of Chicago said, "The problem with engineering climate in this way is that it's only a temporary Band-Aid covering a problem that will persist essentially forever, actually hundreds of thousands of years for fossil fuel CO2 to finally go away naturally.

"It will be tempting to continue to procrastinate on cleaning up our energy system, but we'd be leaving the planet on a form of life-support. If a future generation failed to pay their climate bill they would get all of our warming all at once."

https://edition.cnn.com/2018/11/23/health/sun-dimming-aerosols-global-warming-intl-scli/index.html



" Despite the technology being undeveloped and with no existing aircraft suitable for adaptation, the researchers say that "developing a new, purpose-built tanker with substantial payload capabilities would neither be technologically difficult nor prohibitively expensive." " - See, chem trials is fake..
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby DrEvil » Sun Dec 09, 2018 4:09 pm

Sounder » Tue Nov 20, 2018 1:11 pm wrote:Hypothetically speaking, what will be the long term effect on environmental activism, a necessary element for re-shaping our future, if Judith Curry is right? Will people listen when warned about, say meltdown risks inherent in current nuclear plant design, or pesticide run-off killing aquifers, or GMO's killing the microbes in our guts, or pharmaceuticals and fluoride in the water supply, etc, etc?


And what about aliens, huh? Or faulty airbags? What if you fall down the stairs? What if a comet wipes us all out? Then what?

What happens if the current lack of sunspot activity does indeed make things colder for awhile?


Then we get lucky and have a few more years of reprieve before the cycle turns and starts adding to the heating.

If we are to have a future to be proud of, we will need to identify and confront the identity creation and re-enforcement machine. Does anyone really want an AD style future where every dissenter is labeled a Nazi and/or a crazy person? Come-on people, that is not the road to utopia.


I just want a future.

If Barthes can forgive me, “What the public wants is the image of passion Justice, not passion Justice itself.”


I have felt this in my bones since Kennedy was shot.



http://www.climatedepot.com/2014/09/16/ ... the-2030s/

Screen capture of November 2010 Scientific American article.
“By that time I had becoming increasingly skeptic of the UN IPCC,” she noted. [See: Curry: ‘If the IPCC is dogma, then count me in as a heretic’]

Crushing of Scientific Dissent

Curry spoke of the “intolerance of dissent” and attempts to silence skeptic in the global warming discussion today. “President Obama said in his State of the Union address, ‘we don’t have time for a meeting of the flat earth society.’” [See: Climatologist Dr. Judith Curry: ‘I am mystified as to why Obama and John Kerry are making such strong (and indefensible) statements about climate change’]

She called claims of a 97% consensus “deeply flawed.”

“You cannot even talk about these kinds of issues in the mainstream climate debate. We get called ‘deniers’. This is a very sad state of affairs,” she noted.

“Careerism is a big problem. It much more beneficial to join the dominant paradigm, rather than to fight against it,” Curry explained.

“If I were nontenured scientist, I would fear for my job! But I am a senior scientist with retirement in my sight, so I can afford to do what I want, say what I think.”

“I no longer write government grant proposals. I have lot more independence. I truly feel liberated by not having to chase dollars,” she added.

Curry lamented the current state of academia. “There is a system in place with an emphasis on paper counts, an emphasis on dollars, and it is very difficult to dig in and work on hard problem. You have got to keep cranking it out. I really despair. I really despair,”





Frankly, Curry can go fuck herself. The above piece is nothing but a full bingo-card worth of denier talking points and obfuscations and zero substance.
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby DrEvil » Sun Dec 09, 2018 4:15 pm

BenDhyan » Sat Nov 24, 2018 5:45 am wrote:Sure, what could go wrong....

Dimming the sun: The answer to global warming?

November 23, 2018

(CNN) Scientists are proposing an ingenious but as-yet-unproven way to tackle climate change: spraying sun-dimming chemicals into the Earth's atmosphere.

The research by scientists at Harvard and Yale universities, published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, proposes using a technique known as stratospheric aerosol injection, which they say could cut the rate of global warming in half.

The technique would involve spraying large amounts of sulfate particles into the Earth's lower stratosphere at altitudes as high as 12 miles. The scientists propose delivering the sulfates with specially designed high-altitude aircraft, balloons or large naval-style guns.

Despite the technology being undeveloped and with no existing aircraft suitable for adaptation, the researchers say that "developing a new, purpose-built tanker with substantial payload capabilities would neither be technologically difficult nor prohibitively expensive."

They estimate the total cost of launching a hypothetical system in 15 years' time at around $3.5 billion, with running costs of $2.25 billion a year over a 15-year period.

The report does, however, acknowledge that the technique is purely hypothetical. "We make no judgment about the desirability of SAI," the report states. "We simply show that a hypothetical deployment program commencing 15 years hence, while both highly uncertain and ambitious, would indeed be technically possible from an engineering perspective. It would also be remarkably inexpensive."

The researchers also acknowledge potential risks: coordination between multiple countries in both hemispheres would be required, and stratospheric aerosol injection techniques could jeopardize crop yields, lead to droughts or cause extreme weather.

The proposals also don't address the issue of rising greenhouse gas emissions, which are a leading cause of global warming.

And despite the conviction of the report's authors, other experts were skeptical. "From the point of view of climate economics, solar radiation management is still a much worse solution than greenhouse gas emissions: more costly and much more risky over the long run," said Philippe Thalmann of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, an expert in the economics of climate change.

David Archer of the Department of Geophysical Science at the University of Chicago said, "The problem with engineering climate in this way is that it's only a temporary Band-Aid covering a problem that will persist essentially forever, actually hundreds of thousands of years for fossil fuel CO2 to finally go away naturally.

"It will be tempting to continue to procrastinate on cleaning up our energy system, but we'd be leaving the planet on a form of life-support. If a future generation failed to pay their climate bill they would get all of our warming all at once."

https://edition.cnn.com/2018/11/23/health/sun-dimming-aerosols-global-warming-intl-scli/index.html



" Despite the technology being undeveloped and with no existing aircraft suitable for adaptation, the researchers say that "developing a new, purpose-built tanker with substantial payload capabilities would neither be technologically difficult nor prohibitively expensive." " - See, chem trials is fake..


Ignoring climate change and pretending it doesn't exist while spreading doubt and disinformation.

Sure, what could go wrong....

Here's a thought: You are one of the reasons this is being considered in the first place.
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