climate change – Page 13

American elites want magical technological fixes to climate change because they refuse to confront the truth that seriously addressing the problem would require limits to their own power and luxury.

Few of us want to face the climate mess. The numbers are scary and confusing, and the facts have never been reported in a way that actually generates public understanding. “The media are complacent while the world burns,” Mark Hertsgaard and Kyle Pope declare in the Columbia Journalism Review. There’s plenty of data to back up this bold assertion: based on an analysis of 600 New York Times articles on climate change, a UC Berkeley report states that “the vast majority contained none of the five basic climate facts,” meaning that readers are left uneducated about the truth and scope of the problem. (The five criteria the researchers used are that global warming is happening, that burning fossil fuels produces greenhouse gases that create warming, that 90%+ of climate scientists agree on the human causes of warming, that there is now more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than there has been for hundreds of thousands of years, and that warming is permanent.)

It’s not just a lack of effective information: many media movers and shakers claim that climate coverage is “a palpable ratings killer” in the first place, and so they tend to curtail or water down their coverage. Of course there are exceptions—an article in New York by David Wallace-Wells beat the supposed “traffic Kryptonite” curse (over 6 million hits, which led to his book The Uninhabitable Earth). Wallace-Wells has stated that “being alarmed is what the facts demand.” …

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

‘Soon the world will be unrecognisable’: is it still possible to prevent total climate meltdown?

August 4, 2022

‘Soon the world will be unrecognisable’: is it still possible to prevent total climate meltdown?

Globe with steam rising from it. North and South America in view. — Record high temperatures and extreme weather events are being recorded around the world. Photograph: Ian Logan/Getty Images

Blistering heatwaves are just the start. We must accept how bad things are before we can head off global catastrophe, according to a leading UK scientist

The publication of Bill McGuire’s latest book, Hothouse Earth, could not be more timely. Appearing in the shops this week, it will be perused by sweltering customers who have just endured record high temperatures across the UK and now face the prospect of weeks of drought to add to their discomfort.

And this is just the beginning, insists McGuire, who is emeritus professor of geophysical and climate hazards at University College London. As he makes clear in his uncompromising depiction of the coming climatic catastrophe, we have – for far too long – ignored explicit warnings that rising carbon emissions are dangerously heating the Earth. Now we are going to pay the price for our complacency in the form of storms, floods, droughts and heatwaves that will easily surpass current extremes.

The crucial point, he argues, is that there is now no chance of us avoiding a perilous, all-pervasive climate breakdown. We have passed the point of no return and can expect a future in which lethal heatwaves and temperatures in excess of 50C (120F) are common in the tropics; where summers at temperate latitudes will invariably be baking hot, and where our oceans are destined to become warm and acidic. “A child born in 2020 will face a far more hostile world that its grandparents did,” McGuire insists.

Bill McGuire. — Bill McGuire is emeritus professor of geophysical and climate hazards at University College London and was also an adviser to the UK government.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

What Does An Ecological Civilization Look Like?

July 24, 2022

ILLUSTRATIONS BY DELPHINE LEE/YES! MAGAZINE

What Does An Ecological Civilization Look Like?

A society based on natural ecology might seem like a far-off utopia—yet communities everywhere are already creating it.

As a new, saner administration sets up shop in Washington, D.C., there are plenty of policy initiatives this country desperately needs. Beyond a national plan for the COVID-19 pandemic, progressives will strive to focus the administration’s attention on challenges like fixing the broken health care system, grappling with systemic racial inequities, and a just transition from fossil fuels to renewables.

These are all critically important issues. But here’s the rub: Even if the Democratic administration were resoundingly successful on all fronts, its initiatives would still be utterly insufficient to resolve the existential threat of climate breakdown and the devastation of our planet’s life-support systems. That’s because the multiple problems confronting us right now are symptoms of an even more profound problem: The underlying structure of a global economic and political system that is driving civilization toward a precipice.

Take a moment to peer beyond the day-to-day crises capturing our attention, and you quickly realize that the magnitude of the looming catastrophe makes our current political struggles, by comparison, look like arguing how to stack deck chairs on the Titanic.

The climate emergency we’re facing is far worse than most people realize. While it was clearly an essential step for the United States to rejoin the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change, the collective pledges on greenhouse gas emissions from that agreement are woefully insufficient. They would lead to a dangerous temperature rise of more than 2 degrees Celsius this century—and many nations are failing to make even these targets. We are rapidly approaching—if we haven’t already passed—climate tipping points with reinforcing feedback loops that would lead to an unrecognizable and terrifying world.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

James Howard Kunstler: It’s All Going to Have to Get Smaller

July 13, 2022

James Howard Kunstler: It’s All Going to Have to Get Smaller

“I’m not a techno-narcissist. I don’t think there are technological rescue remedies that will allow us to keep doing what we’re doing…”

— James Howard Kunstler

There is a prevailing fallacy, despite warning signs to the contrary (looming peak oil, fragile markets, and climate weirdness, among others), that we can continue in perpetuity the lifestyle to which we’ve become accustomed. All we need to do is to pump into The System more debt or more political insanity, or hope that alternative energies or some new techno-solution will bail us out.

But, at best, all debt-fueled growth, shale oil “miracles” and green fuels can do by themselves is to make the Long Emergency just “a little bit longer.”

“The Long Emergency” is a phrase coined by James Howard Kunstler to describe the economic, political and social upheavals that will dominate the first decades of the 21st-century as the honeymoon of affordable energy comes to a close. It is also the name of Kunstler’s seminal book on the topic. (The Long Emergency is one of fifteen books on our “Essential Reading List for the Strong Towns Thinker.”)

James Howard Kunstler is our very special guest on today’s episode of the Strong Towns podcast. He is the author of more than 20 books, including The Geography of Nowhere, Too Much Magic, and the World Made By Hand novel series.

In this episode, Strong Towns president Charles Marohn talks with Kunstler about what has changed—or perhaps what hasn’t changed—since The Long Emergency was first published in 2005. Kunstler explains why the “psychology of previous investment” (4:45) makes it so hard for most people to imagine living differently. Marohn and Kunstler also discuss (17:00) what’s wrong with the Green Revolution narrative that we can keep doing everything we’re doing now, if just “do it green”:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Wide Awake

June 4, 2022

Wide Awake

“Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.” – Carl Sagan

Carl Sagan was a brilliant scientist, gifted orator, skilled teacher, and effective advocate for his strongly held beliefs. It is no exaggeration to say that Sagan is likely responsible for inspiring more people to pursue a career in the sciences than any other person in history. His 13-part television documentary Cosmos: A Personal Journey – which first premiered on PBS in 1980 and is still stunningly well-worth watching to this day – is widely regarded as one of the best science-themed series ever produced. Sagan knew how to turn a phrase to enchant an audience and routinely did so with a level of passion and charisma that cannot be faked.

In the climactic final episode of Cosmos titled Who Speaks for Earth? Sagan makes an impassioned plea for nuclear de-escalation. The first nine minutes of the piece are particularly spellbinding, and the introduction draws to a close with Sagan walking along a rocky shoreline where he delivers a historic monologue (emphasis added throughout):

“The civilization now in jeopardy is all humanity. As the ancient myth makers knew, we are children equally of the earth and sky. In our tenure on this planet, we have accumulated dangerous, evolutionary baggage – propensities for aggression and ritual, submission to leaders, hostility to outsiders, all of which puts our survival in some doubt. We have also acquired compassion for others, love for our children, a desire to learn from history and experience, and a great, soaring passionate intelligence – the clear tools for our continued survival and prosperity.

Which aspects of our nature will prevail is uncertain, particularly when our visions and prospects are bound to one small part of the small planet earth. But up and in the cosmos, an inescapable perspective awaits. National boundaries are not evidenced when we view the earth from space…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Climate change, energy, and an unstable grid: The mainstream belatedly gets the connections

May 30, 2022

Climate change, energy, and an unstable grid: The mainstream belatedly gets the connections

Memorial Day marks the unofficial beginning of summer in the United States as the temperate breezes of spring give way to an enveloping heat that has become more and more intense each year due to climate change. This summer forecasters are expecting two big things: deadly heat and electricity outages. Mainstream news coverage is now explaining why these are inextricably intertwined, a relatively new development in such coverage. And, it turns out that the recent blistering record heatwave in India and Pakistan is but a foretaste of our future.

Those of us who have covered climate change in the last two decades believed that by the time such connections became obvious and noted by mainstream outlets, the world would be so far along in the process of global warming that stability-challenging events such as grid failures would become normal.

That’s because of the lag time between when we introduce greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and when we experience the warming caused by them is between 25 and 50 years. This is due to what’s called the thermal inertia of the oceans which means more or less that the oceans take time to warm (usually decades). Even if we were to take drastic action now that stopped all further emissions of greenhouse gases, the world would be in for several more decades of rising temperatures. But, of course, we as a global society are instead pursuing business as usual.

I can remember as a child living largely without air-conditioning. We would experience nights so cool at the cottage we rented along the shores of Lake Michigan that we would close all the shutters and cover ourselves with wool blankets.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Our Impending Impasse and Sid Smith’s New Series

May 11, 2022

Our Impending Impasse and Sid Smith’s New Series

Keowee Toxaway State Park, South Carolina

I have a backlog of articles I have started but haven’t yet finished, so I’m starting with this one which has to do with our impending impasse. I think William Catton, Jr. worded that very well. It actually comes from his book, Bottleneck: Humanity’s Impending Impasse, in which a review is available here. For those unfamiliar with Catton, he wrote (among other books), Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change, and along with other pioneering giants such as Paul Ehrlich (The Population Bomb) and Dennis and Donella Meadows (The Limits to Growth), he brought awareness to the simple fact that society was breaching planetary limits and beginning to reach tipping points in planetary systems.

Nowadays, it seems that everyone is getting in on some predicament; whether it is climate change, population growth, energy and resource decline (peak oil), pollution loading, or many others, these are all symptom predicaments of ecological overshoot, the master predicament. While I think it is great to have goals and to work towards those goals, I also think it is important to have goals that are not incongruent to what one is working towards. In other words, if one is working towards solving a particular issue, making the issue worse instead of better is senseless. Yet most people have little if any awareness that their favorite goal when it comes to the environment (often climate change) is getting further and further away rather than closer. As long as ecological overshoot is allowed to continue increasing, ANY environmental goal along with most other goals will continue fading into the distance.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Whispers of the Fall

May 9, 2022

Whispers of the Fall

It’s been sixteen years now since I first started posting these weekly essays to the internet. Though I didn’t originally intend them to focus on the crisis of industrial society, that theme was impossible for me to evade, and I soon gave up trying; there was too much that had to be said about the future of our age, and too few people were saying it. Over the years that followed, I watched (and joined in) the peak oil movement as it rose and fell, watched (and kept my distance from) the parallel movement of climate change activism as it rose and fell, watched (and dealt in my own life with some of the consequences of) the slow twilight of America’s global empire and the vaster twilight of Western civilization as a whole—and all of those got discussed in blog posts.

I sometimes get asked by readers what happened to all the fuss about peak oil, and now and again someone brings up one of the other topics I’ve talked about over the years and wonders what’s up with those. A glance back over those four themes thus seems appropriate just now. Partly, a retrospective look is a useful thing from time to time, and partly—well, we’ll get to that.

We can start with peak oil. Starting in the middle years of the twentieth century, a handful of petroleum geologists began to point out that building a civilization on the breakneck extraction and consumption of nonrenewable fossil fuels would have an awkward downside once the fuels began to run short. Their concerns were brushed aside by almost everyone else. When the United States—the first nation on earth to start extracting oil commercially…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Biden administration will pay farmers more money not to farm

April 5, 2022

The Biden administration will pay farmers more money not to farm

Large black land farm in Eastern Arkansas with plowed field laying fallow. Seed and grain silos in background with sheds and farm equipment.

iStock/Warren_Price

The goal is to add 4 million acres of farmland to the Conservation Reserve Program, which takes land out of production to blunt agriculture’s environmental impact.

The Biden administration announced on Wednesday that it would expand a program that pays farmers to leave land fallow, part of a broader, government-wide effort to cut greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030. The new initiative will incentivize farmers to take land out of production by raising rental rates and incentive payments.

The Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) was created in 1985 to incentivize landowners to leave some of their marginal land unplanted, a plan meant to protect the environment by reducing agricultural runoff into streams and rivers, preserving wildlife habitats, and preventing erosion. Today, the Department of Agriculture (USDA) “rents” about 21 million acres of farmland from landowners, typically for 10 years at a time—a tiny fraction of the total land farmed nationwide. In recent years, the number of acres enrolled in CRP has fallen, possibly because USDA’s rental payments have not been competitive with the open market, Chuck Abbott reported for FERN News.

The new announcement is a bid to incentivize farmers to enroll 4 million more acres of land in the program to total 25 million acres, the current program limit. “Sometimes the best solutions are right in front of you,” said Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack in a press release.

“A huge amount of money was essentially paid and then lost when those acres go back into farming.”

All told, the increased rental rates and expanded incentive payments—which pay farmers extra for growing buffer strips and promoting wildlife habitats—will increase CRP spending by about 18 percent, totaling $300 million or more in annual spending.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

‘Climate Revolution’: Scientists Launch Global Civil Disobedience Campaign

April 5, 2022

Scientists hold sign calling for a climate revolution

Scientists hold a sign reading, “Climate Revolution Or We Will Lose Everything” at a rally. This week, scientists around the world will occupy universities to demand a “Climate Revolution” following the release of the latest report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. (Photo: Twitter/@ScientistRebel1)

‘Climate Revolution’: Scientists Launch Global Civil Disobedience Campaign

“Scientist Rebellion will be on the streets between April 4th and 9th, acting like our house is on fire,” said organizers. “Because it is.”

Scientists from around the world on Monday mobilized to demand a “Climate Revolution,” holding rallies and staging acts of civil disobedience with the goal of making the planetary emergency “impossible to ignore.”

With a kick-off timed to coincide with Monday’s release of the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), researchers across the globe this week will participate in the Scientist Rebellion, staging strikes and occupations at universities, research institutes, and scientific journals to demand that the community speak out forcefully against continued fossil fuel emissions to highlight “the urgency and injustice of the climate and ecological crisis.”

“In short, there’s no worthy reason for me to be doing this work if I’m not also pushing for climate action.”

“We have not made the changes necessary to limit warming to 1.5°C, rendering this goal effectively impossible,” said Dr. Rose Abramoff, an American climate scientist, referring to the goal set by the Paris climate agreement in 2015. “We need to both understand the consequences of our inaction as well as limit fossil fuel emissions as much and as quickly as possible.”

For scientists, Abramoff added, “it is no longer sufficient to do our research and expect others to read our publications and understand the severity and urgency of the climate crisis.”

One neuroscientist named Jonathan posted a video on social media explaining why he is taking part in the Scientist Rebellion.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

As oil declines, the threat of a greenhouse earth & extinction from climate change decline

April 4, 2022

As oil declines, the threat of a greenhouse earth & extinction from climate change decline

Carbon sequestration, wind, solar, geo-engineering, and other remedies are trivial compared to the effect declining fossil fuels will have on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The natural rate of decline today is 8.5%, exponentially increasing, and offset by 4%, so the gap will continue to grow wider, with petroleum eventually decreasing by 6% and more a year in the future.

Climate change is also a symptom of overpopulation and overshoot of the planet’s carrying capacity. If family planning became the green new deal, there would be a chance for all problems to be reduced in severity. “Renewables” are certainly not a solution since transportation and manufacturing can’t be electrified or run on anything else (see Chapter 6 and 9 of “Life After Fossil Fuels”).

Climate models developed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) show a range of greenhouse gas trajectories. The worst-case IPCC scenario is Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 8.5. This predicts a rise of temperature by 5°C, and this is the scenario you read about daily in the newspapers as being the most likely “business as usual” future. But lately many scientists think around 3 °C (RCP 4.5 to RCP 6) is more likely (Hausfather and Peters 2020).

Geologists have a far more optimistic outlook. Using realistic fossil fuel reserves in climate models, they predict an outcome from RCP 2.6 to RCP 4.5 (Doose 2004; Kharecha and Hansen 2008; Brecha 2008; Nel 2011; Chiari and Zecca 2011; Ward et al. 2011, 2012; Höök and Tang 2013; Mohr et al. 2015; Capellán-Pérez et al. 2016; Murray 2016; Wang et al. 2017).

The IPCC scenarios do not model fossil fuels at all, since their assumption is that we will be burning fossil fuels, at exponentially increasing amounts until 2400. The IPCC RCP 8.5 hothouse world scenario assumes a fivefold increase in coal use by 2100 (Ritchie and Dowlatabadi 2017), even though coal production may have peaked, or will soon (see chapter 6 of “Life After Fossil Fuels”).

So rather than becoming crisply well-done, perhaps we’ll scrape by with a medium rare sunburn.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Could climate change make humans go extinct?

April 3, 2022

Could climate change make humans go extinct?

A 3D illustration of a woman watching a climate change simulation of Earth.

A digital illustration of someone watching a climate change simulation. (Image credit: boscorelli/Shutterstock.com)

The impacts of climate change are here with soaring temperatures, stronger hurricanes, intensified floods and a longer and more severe wildfire season. Scientists warn that ignoring climate change will yield “untold suffering” for humanity. But if things are going to get that much worse, could climate change make humans go extinct?

Scientists predict a range of devastating scenarios if climate change is not kept under control, but if we just consider the direct impacts, then there’s some good news; it’s unlikely to cause our mass extinction.

“There is no evidence of climate change scenarios that would render human beings extinct,” Michael Mann, a distinguished professor of atmospheric science at Penn State and author of “The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet” (PublicAffairs, 2021), told Live Science in an email.

However, it’s possible that climate change will still threaten the lives of hundreds of millions of people, such as by leading to food and water scarcity, which has the potential to trigger a societal collapse and set the stage for global conflict, research finds.

Too hot to handle?

Humans are increasing the amount of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide and methane, in the atmosphere through the burning of fossil fuels and other activities. These gases trap and hold heat from the sun, causing global temperatures to rise and the climate to change much faster than it otherwise would, putting humanity on a dangerous path.

A runaway greenhouse effect is probably the only way climate change impacts could directly cause human extinction, according to Luke Kemp, a research associate at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Climate Impacts From a Removal of Anthropogenic Aerosol Emissions

March 23, 2022

Climate Impacts From a Removal of Anthropogenic Aerosol Emissions

Abstract

Limiting global warming to 1.5 or 2.0°C requires strong mitigation of anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Concurrently, emissions of anthropogenic aerosols will decline, due to coemission with GHG, and measures to improve air quality. However, the combined climate effect of GHG and aerosol emissions over the industrial era is poorly constrained. Here we show the climate impacts from removing present-day anthropogenic aerosol emissions and compare them to the impacts from moderate GHG-dominated global warming. Removing aerosols induces a global mean surface heating of 0.5–1.1°C, and precipitation increase of 2.0–4.6%. Extreme weather indices also increase. We find a higher sensitivity of extreme events to aerosol reductions, per degree of surface warming, in particular over the major aerosol emission regions. Under near-term warming, we find that regional climate change will depend strongly on the balance between aerosol and GHG forcing.

Plain Language Summary

To keep within 1.5 or 2° of global warming, we need massive reductions of greenhouse gas emissions. At the same time, aerosol emissions will be strongly reduced. We show how cleaning up aerosols, predominantly sulfate, may add an additional half a degree of global warming, with impacts that strengthen those from greenhouse gas warming. The northern hemisphere is found to be more sensitive to aerosol removal than greenhouse gas warming, because of where the aerosols are emitted today. This means that it does not only matter whether or not we reach international climate targets. It also matters how we get there.

1 Introduction

If global warming is to be kept within 1.5 or 2.0°C, strong, and rapid mitigation of anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions is required (Matthews & Caldeira, 2008; Millar et al., 2017; Rogelj, Luderer, et al., 2015). As anthropogenic aerosols are often coemitted with long-lived GHG, such emissions will likely also see sharp decreases—compounded by present and future effort to improve air quality (Bowerman et al., 2013; Smith & Bond, 2014).

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Oilfield Approval Off Newfoundland Coast Would Undercut Climate Commitments, Harm Biodiversity, Experts Warn

February 20, 2022

Oilfield Approval Off Newfoundland Coast Would Undercut Climate Commitments, Harm Biodiversity, Experts Warn

U.S. Orders Containment, Cleanup for 14-Year Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill

Berardo62/flickr

Cultural Causes of Climate Injustice

February 20, 2022

Cultural Causes of Climate Injustice

Growth economics has changed the status of money, from being a useful tool nowadays it is often regarded as an end in itself. The illusion that money is needed to feed us is a dangerous one. What is really needed to sustain us is a stable climate and environment. That fact has become obscured by the industrial food-production which occurs at such a distance to our city-dwellers who only ever obtain food by spending their money.

This disconnect from Nature, and the fact that modern lifestyles have many ‘anaesthetic’ qualities which result in the suppression of emotions like fear, anxiety, anger, hate, guilt and blame, mean that the majority of people are still not adequately aware of the escalating existential crises to the extent that they are motivated to take significant action.

All money originates from natural resources of some sort. We rely on biodiversity and a stable climate in order to manufacture food. However inhabitants of the modern world are not directly aware how dependent we are on these things. We have put ourselves in a precarious position that is now in the process of collapse.

Judgement and Trust

The hype and the artificial messages from the advertising has taught us to distrust the sincerity of anyone who is imparting information. In a world steered by people who are seeking monetary profit whenever we enter into a relationship we have learnt to ask ‘what is their motive?’.

Addressing Climate Injustice

Respect for monetary profit as an end in itself is very deeply ingrained in our modern society. To successfully address climate injustice we shall need to move away from this dangerous prioritisation of a bartering tool which is increasingly at risk of devaluing rapidly. There are five key themes that would help this culture shift to happen.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Tag Archives: climate change

Content

Post categories

Economic Links

Energy/Resource Links

Environmental Links

Geopolitical Links

Liberty Links

News Links

Other Links

Survival Skills

Post Archives by Category

Post navigation

Latest Posts