Insert gif of president from Spaceballs sniffing his canned air.
I skimmed the section headings of this article and really can't bring myself to read it any more closely.
I agree with 2. Anyway, I assume some kind of global war will check carbon emissions before it gets that bad.
In the short run, global war will increase emissions, because of flying all those airplanes and driving all those tanks around.
Even our global war optimism is tainted.
FWIW, Michal "hockey stick" Mann thinks that article overplays the DOOM angle.
One would expect Michael Mann to be kind of at home with doom.
Happy Valley isn't quite that awful.
Even in a non-drought year, the California wildfires continue.
7: Mann's critique, posted on Facebook here has some obvious flaws.
He starts out by making an argument about public relations, not about scientific or journalistic accuracy:
I have to say that I am not a fan of this sort of doomist framing. It is important to be up front about the risks of unmitigated climate change, and I frequently criticize those who understate the risks. But there is also a danger in overstating the science in a way that presents the problem as unsolvable, and feeds a sense of doom, inevitability and hopelessness.
He does make the substantive claim here that Wallace-Wells is "overstating" the case, but he seems to be using "overstating" to mean being too depressing, not being inaccurate.
The article argues that climate change will render the Earth uninhabitable by the end of this century.
No it doesn't.
He does go on to detail some substantive gripes that I'm willing to assume are correct, but they only blunt the impact of the article somewhat.
At that concentration, compared to the air we breathe now, human cognitive ability declines by 21 percent.
I'd like to see the source material on that. There is a lot of stupid climate denial that is based on the small percentages involved (hey, we're only talking about a thousandth of the air), but that does seem like a small enough change to have no impact on brain chemistry. I mean, maybe if we were talking about carbon MONoxide ...
11: Fires are a regular occurrence here, not unexpected pretty much any year, and this year all the vegetation that grew because it actually got rain probably increases the risk.
My understanding was that new, green growth does not increase fire hazard?
It's all brown now. The rain stopped in April, and late spring and early summer have been really hot. Wildfires around here are always worse in rainy years because there's so much more brush.
Well, why did you let the rain stop?
You just need to accept that people aren't supposed to live there, and sink into the the sea. They even made a James Bond movie about this. Chris Walken is still available.
18: we do it every year and never learn from our mistakes
There isn't nearly enough reporting focused on "what if we don't successfully mitigate? What happens then?" People need to understand that we're now at the point where "successfully mitigate" means moderate global catastrophe instead of extreme global catastrophe. "Successfully mitigate" doesn't mean everything is fine. Oh, and so far we're not successfully mitigating.
I was feeling depressed as shit about this article last night. Then this morning I learned that a friend's 18-year-old son committed suicide last night, and now I'm feeling depressed as shit about that. The world is depressing as shit.
Yeah, I know Mann's intentions are good, but now every denial-inclined reader of the original article will assume it's all bullshit because the experts disagree. There's no way to win this one. I still think a massive, massive worldwide sabotage campaign is more than justified, if we could trust in anyone to do it right, which I guess we can't. I think about this frequently -- about everyone's misguided scruples.
All the baby boomer retirees want retirement homes in the hills, and none of them want to clear brush. A perfect cause for Dubya to throw himself into!
(I did not know we typically got wildfires in rainy years too. Haven't been here long enough. Thanks for the education.)
Coolest/quirkiest fact I learned from that article is that pitchers are 5% more likely to retaliate against the other team when their teammate gets hit by a pitch.
It also contains the phrase "pathetically small economic potatoes".
Urp, I'm so sorry. That is awful.
23.1: I don't know if they still do it, but in the 1990s they started bringing goats in for the dry season to eat up the excess brush in the regional parks. Probably not for personal yard use, though.
There's no way to win this one.
I think, as in this case, liberals get unnecessarily tied up in knots over how to persuade idiots. I mean, okay, politicians need to fret about that sort of thing, but journalists and scientists need to be communicating with the people who gain useful information from journalists and scientists. They need to tell the truth, and leave the PR to the professionals.
I know there are rent-a-goat services, my grandparents used them once, but I suspect they are mostly used as novelty.
The fetish thread is the other one.
Goats are still in action in the hills; we saw them maybe two years ago? Very cute.
29: They need to tell the truth, and leave the PR to the professionals. -- I'm confused about your point here. Mann objected to misrepresentations of fact in the article, as well as to its tone. Whom do you see as telling the truth and whom do you see as concerned about PR? I'm also not sure about the division between "idiots" and "people who get information from scientists and journalists," assuming your point is not that scientists and journos should be preaching to the choir.
I agree that Mann had substantive gripes. I'm only saying that a fairly consistent critique from Mann and his ilk strongly implies that we need to avoid talking about worst-case scenarios because they bum people out. Too bad. People should be depressed.
(And gosh, urp, I sure am sorry about 21.2)
That very sucks, Urple. Hope things improve.
22: I disagree violently. "I don't think that's helpful, are you sure you're a team player?" etc. is a big part of how we got in this mess.
37: this is very disorienting, but the claim I stand by is "there's no way to win this one." In Mann's position I would have done the same thing, correcting the errors in a public statement. But Mann is also (in part) saying "I don't think that's helpful," is he not? Can you help me understand the source of our disagreement?
I'm genuinely sorry I messed up the thread. Pls continue discussion of pending environmental doom.
39: This idea that you shouldn't disagree with anyone on The Team (Go! Team!) because it might look bad is what I disagree with.
Link to feel-good tweets explaining why this article is bad: https://twitter.com/ramez/status/884485119796420608.
Here's the one I'm most interested in:
8. We've made huge climate strides. Business-as-usual used to mean 6 or 7 degrees C or warming. Now it looks like 3-4, and trending down.
Is this true? It's offered without evidence. I wasn't aware that we had made anything like that sort of progress. Or even much meaningful progress at all, really. I'm prepared to be convinced otherwise.
I hear you. I was expressing frustration at the situation, not making an implicit recommendation.
41 There's a difference between disagreeing and expressing disagreement. And there are definitely shades of difference in how disagreement can be expressed.
And I don't think caring about how disagreement is expressed in public is even remotely how we got where we are. In so many ways we are where we are because people who should know better have chosen hyperbole.
42: Yes, India and China are turning! off! coal! power! stations! because solar got cheap. A lot of stuff happened.
42, 45: The US power industry's shift from coal to natural gas has also had a big impact.
The push-back on this article from some climate folks is so annoying. We must be optimistic! Fuck you; I don't care what you think about public relations. The article is explicitly thinking through worst-case outcomes, and the factual criticisms I've seen are piddly stuff.
This public opinion shit is clearly the hardest part of climate science to model and/or engineer. I am 98% flippant and 2% very interested in leveraging cutting-edge technology to attack the problem.
Just finished reading The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth's Past Mass Extinctions and recommend it as a good survey of current views on all that there stuff back then. Plus you can have all sorts of thoughts and qualms (and gloom if you want) on the relevance--if any--to those events to what we are seeing today (people in the book have opinions...).
General (and utterly unsurprising) takeaway: It is best not to have rapid and significant climate change during your species time on earth.
I wonder how much the pushback to things like this, among non-deniers, is driven by memories of things like The Population Bomb and its predictions.
Fuck you; I don't care what you think about public relations.
I am so delighted by that semicolon.
51: I have to admit there's a little of this operating in me. I don't recall the specifics of The Population Bomb in particular, but it is just often the case that when you hear someone hyperventilating about anticipated catastrophe, the worst-case scenario does not play out in the end. Often it's because the proposed scenario was based on bullshit to begin with, but sometimes unexpected developments intervene.
Given the choice to base your attitude on a scenario that inspires dread and paralysing despair versus one that allows for a little hope, well you understand the temptation to favour optimism, even if it increases the danger of inaction.
Issues like this really drive home the tragedy of "government is always the problem" thinking. Sometimes government is the best method of collective action, especially when warding off worst-case scenarios is needed, and it's crazy not to reach for the right tool when it's called for.
Before government action: hey, we're really about to eat every last cod off the face of the earth.
After government action: oh, cod fisheries bounce back pretty well when you give them the odd year off to reproduce and such.
For instance. I realise I'm preaching to the choir. A sermon that they've all heard before.
If somebody who isn't a white, Christian male eats the last cod, then I think we've all lost something as Americans.
Somebody in China is already going to eat the last rhino and the last tiger. Don't we get anything?
I demand the total elimination of cod from the face of the earth, some batter, salt, a deep fryer, and, if you don't hate white people, some chips and malt vinegar.
OT: If you save urine, you don't need to piss on someone if they are on fire.
Benjamin Franklin during the negotiations leading to the Treaty of Paris (fishing rights were a fairly significant issue):
I observe, as to catching fish, you mention only the Banks of Newfoundland. Why not all other places. and amongst others the Gulf of St. Lawrence? Are you afraid there are not fish enough, or that we should catch too many?
Ben Franklin, a man who wants a complete list of all the places where you can catch fish.
It's too bad he didn't live long enough to throw batteries at Santa Claus during an Eagle game. I think he would have enjoyed that.
I wonder how much the pushback to things like this, among non-deniers, is driven by memories of things like The Population Bomb and its predictions.
I've seen the anti-Population Bomb argument made many times to ridicule environmentalists and others, but to my knowledge not once since 1985 or so has that argument been made in good faith.
Erlich's fears made a certain intuitive sense, and the media picked up on them, but there was never a scientific consensus behind him.
And he was wrong. Lots of science stuff is wrong. From this, we can either learn that science proceeds by reaching provisional conclusions that are open to correction, or we can learn that science doesn't work.
The latter approach is useful only if you want to demonstrate bullshit - like climate change isn't real, or creationism is.
I've also seen Population Bomb deployed to ridicule any claim that catastrophe is possible. Hey, the gloom-and-doomers were wrong here, so that shows they are always wrong because we always muddle through.
Except in the case of Iraq or Katrina or the financial system or any number of other cases where the doom-and-gloomers were right, or in cases like environmental cleanup or the ozone layer, where the doom-and-gloomers were heeded and problems were averted.
Population Bomb did nothing to damage the credibility of science, because you don't need to cite that book to make these kinds of ridiculous claims. Look at that worthless prick Bret Stephens in the New York Times, explaining that climate data should be discounted because Hillary's pollsters got the election wrong.
Breaking news, in every sense of the word.
Expecting our firstborn in October; reading things like this make me want to go and live in a greenhouse with machine gun nests on a high part of an island in the Outer Hebrides.
Babies are great. Have fun and congrats.
Congrats, put the nursery on high ground and you should be fine.
This tweetstorm speaks for me. https://twitter.com/drvox/status/885193512668479488
This tweetstorm speaks for me. https://twitter.com/drvox/status/885193512668479488
For those who don't like tweetstorms, I assume his post on the subject is similar (and is good). I liked this quote that he higlighted:
Finally, fear+hope requires fear. Wallace-Wells himself has the best defense, in a (fascinating) interview with Gothamist:It just so happens that people seem much less aware of those sort of [negative-end] tail risks than they are of the positive-end tail risks, which are namely that life will continue much like it is now. And so I thought even just as a kind of experiment in psychological anchoring, it was useful to say, here's really the worst case outcome that you should be thinking about probably as often as you think about the best case outcome, which is the world that you walk through every day. There's been a sort of general failure of imagination that means we've accepted what's the median-likely outcome as a worst-case scenario. As a result we've been a bit handicapped in thinking about how much action needs to be taken.
63 is right. Also, the likelihood of catastrophe varies greatly depending on what you think "catastrophe" means.
Global warming is not going to destroy the world, in a hyper-literal "reduce the planet Earth to another asteroid belt" or "reduce it uninhabitable by multicellular life" sense. Those would be ridiculous.
Global warming is not going to cause human extinction within the next 100 or 1000 years. That would likewise be ridiculous, or at least, would require a lot of other bad things happening that have nothing to do with global warming. (If humans go extinct within the next million years, global warming might be a big part of why, but anything can happen on that timescale.)
Global warming probably won't destroy human civilization or render it unrecognizable. Canada won't resemble the Serengeti and Waterworld wasn't prescient, not on the above timescales.
Anyone predicting something like that is either overwrought, or beating up on a strawman. Despite all that, over the next thousand years global warming will still kill millions of people and make life noticeably worse for absolutely everyone but the 1 percent. More extreme weather, spending more money to mitigate rising seas or move people away from them, worse food with less variety and it'll be more expensive, exotic diseases in new places, using more air conditioning around the world. Not literally apocalyptic, but smaller things than that have caused wars. And all that, over something that was essentially preventable if we had started seriously trying when it mattered.
(To Seed, congratulations, and sorry to be depressing. If you're in the developed world that stuff shouldn't impact your kid's quality of life much, if it helps...)
63: Whether or not the comparison is fair is different from whether or not it's part of people's motivations.
Here's a chart of CO2e emissions:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B19Sr_Qmr4GJVlg2Ym13UFFBeUE/view
2007 is when we put in new, energy efficient windows. You can see the little drop there.