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Climate Apocalypse

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Robert Tulip

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Re: Climate Apocalypse

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My reference to zombies was not to climate deniers, but to all humanity who are sleepwalking to oblivion like the living dead. Investment of a few billion dollars would do the trick to transform the global economy - less than one percent of military spending going to an actual major existential security threat seems reasonable.

McKibben says the current global situation is rather like a drink driver who knows they can have five drinks over an evening and stay under the legal limit, but they wilfully have twenty five drinks, get behind the wheel and crash and die.

The five drink legal limit represents the explicit agreement of governments to aim for a temperature rise of less than two degrees. The twenty five drinks is the amount of CO2 (ie 2500 gigatonnes) we plan to add to the atmosphere, already built into the current stock price of energy companies as recoverable reserves.

The science is clear - a two degree temperature rise is predicted if we release 500 more gigatonnes of CO2. But there are 2500 gigatonnes primed and ready to burn. A six to ten degree temperature rise this century very likely means the end of human civilization. We are on track to add 500 more gigatonnes of CO2 to the air by about 2023, like the day after tomorrow.

In the face of the global climate crisis, what anyone does as an individual to reduce personal emissions is like a fart in a hurricane. It is actually worse than useless because corking your farts (so to speak) promotes the delusion that personal action makes a difference. Only a systemic recognition of CO2 as the main security threat facing the planet will make any difference.
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Re: Climate Apocalypse

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Robert Tulip wrote:My reference to zombies was not to climate deniers, but to all humanity who are sleepwalking to oblivion like the living dead. Investment of a few billion dollars would do the trick to transform the global economy - less than one percent of military spending going to an actual major existential security threat seems reasonable.
I stand corrected on the zombies reference.

The second part is a rather bold assertion. Where in the world do you come up with this stuff?
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Robert Tulip

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Re: Climate Apocalypse

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Its pretty simple really.

The world spends about a trillion dollars a year on the military, supposedly for security.

One percent of a trillion is ten billion.

The Copenhagen Institute conducted a 'fix the climate' process, involving a number of Nobel Economics Laureates, in which they suggested research and development spending on our real security problem of about this scale.

http://fixtheclimate.com/ says what is required is work to identify and refine best value interventions, not subsidies to existing solar and biofuel products.
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DWill

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Re: Climate Apocalypse

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But still, Robert, no one could possibly take seriously an estimate of 3 billion dollars to transform the world economy. Are you sure it wasn't 3 trillion--which still sounds low.

A question you may not be asking yourself about the importance of individual action is where the political will comes from to make the enormous changes needed. In a democratic process, the will of individuals will translate to government use of power. This will would naturally be expressed as individual actions. How do you propose that governments proceed in the absence of consent by constituencies?
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Robert Tulip

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Re: Climate Apocalypse

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The figure I gave was 1% of military spending, roughly ten billion dollars a year, for research and development. Rather like judo, smart strategic public investment could shift the momentum of the existing economy towards where we want it to go, a sustainable future. But the focus has to be achieving commercial viability through a free market, not the madness of solar panel subsidies in cold dark Germany.

The Nobel Laureates at Lomborg's Fix the Climate site take it completely seriously that it is possible to identify game changers, new technology that could make non fossil fuels economically competitive. I personally think such an economic transformation is both possible and necessary, primarily utilising the vast untapped scale of energy in ocean movement and heat. But at the moment there is practically no public investment in this central critical topic for the future of life on earth. The oil companies have successfully poisoned the well of public debate.

The sun pumps out ten billion times as much light as hits the earth. Energy is very abundant. Politics, stupidity, vested interests and lethargy are what stops us from beginning a new Manhattan-Apollo Project to deliver universal sustainable power.
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Re: Climate Apocalypse

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DWill wrote:But still, Robert, no one could possibly take seriously an estimate of 3 billion dollars to transform the world economy. Are you sure it wasn't 3 trillion--which still sounds low.

A question you may not be asking yourself about the importance of individual action is where the political will comes from to make the enormous changes needed. In a democratic process, the will of individuals will translate to government use of power. This will would naturally be expressed as individual actions. How do you propose that governments proceed in the absence of consent by constituencies?
More like 3 kerplillion, I'd think. And transform the world economy into what?

I must have a dim view of human nature. The only way people will stop their profligate ways is at the point of total economic collapse. A climate apocalypse would precipitate this event, but so would any major disruptions in the supply of oil. We catch small glimpses of this during hurricanes when some of our refineries go offline. A couple of years ago here in Asheville, none of the gas stations could get gas for about a week. The first thing that happens is everyone tries to top off their tanks, so there are huge lines at any of the gas stations that do have gas. But that doesn't last for long. Pretty soon people can't get to work. The next thing that happens is people stock up on food and bottled water and grocery stores shelves are depleted. It doesn't take long for this to happen. Our petroleum supply is our lifeline and it's very precarious. And the existence of cheap energy has allowed our population to burgeon far beyond a sustainable level. Where are these magical alternative energy sources?
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Robert Tulip

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Re: Climate Apocalypse

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geo wrote:More like 3 kerplillion, I'd think. And transform the world economy into what?
The 'Fix the Climate' study by the Copenhagen Institue argues that research and development can identify commercially competitive sustainable energy sources that could save us from our current global hurtle towards disaster. The problem is that current resources and attention to this problem are far too small in view of the scale and urgency of the risks, since climate change has been captured by a left-right political divide that undermines the need for capitalist solutions. My view is that algae biofuel produced at sea would produce abundant cheap energy in a way that would be ecologically beneficial. But the attention to this issue is miniscule. A few billion of public private partnership seed funding would be transformative, enabling us to keep the petroleum and coal infrastructure of cars and refineries and power stations while shifting the fuel source to abundant renewable systems that would suck carbon out of the air, cool the ocean, expand fisheries and rapidly drive CO2 back down to a safe level.
I must have a dim view of human nature. The only way people will stop their profligate ways is at the point of total economic collapse. A climate apocalypse would precipitate this event, but so would any major disruptions in the supply of oil. We catch small glimpses of this during hurricanes when some of our refineries go offline. A couple of years ago here in Asheville, none of the gas stations could get gas for about a week. The first thing that happens is everyone tries to top off their tanks, so there are huge lines at any of the gas stations that do have gas. But that doesn't last for long. Pretty soon people can't get to work. The next thing that happens is people stock up on food and bottled water and grocery stores shelves are depleted. It doesn't take long for this to happen.
This reminds me of the analysis of psychological stupidity in our current fiction selection on the zombie war. People dither, avoid, deny, until it is too late. Brooks has written a parable for the looming climate apocalypse, providing a warning that could be heeded.
Our petroleum supply is our lifeline and it's very precarious. And the existence of cheap energy has allowed our population to burgeon far beyond a sustainable level. Where are these magical alternative energy sources?
My personal view is that large scale ocean based algae biofuel is a key transformative energy source that could sustain human population at far larger scale than now, while being good for the planet. Nothing magical, just a need for analysis and investment. Otherwise we are possibly doomed to species extinction, like the myths of the frog in the pot, or the lemming rushing over the cliff. In my study of the topic I have not seen anything comparable to algae biofuel as a global game changer.
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Re: Climate Apocalypse

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Book Review: Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity, by James Hansen, 2009

James Hansen is a true prophet of the new age for planet earth. He explains with great clarity the scientific and social problem of climate change, which he sums up by saying that “coal trains are death trains.” Against all the political hawing that seeks a negotiated solution, Hansen explains that the laws of physics do not compromise, and that we are placing our planet on an inexorable death track by our psychotic fixation on fossil fuels. His argument suggests that the evil corruption of our political systems by the big energy firms will kill all life on earth unless we transform global politics with a new energy paradigm.

As a leading spokesman for America’s NASA space agency, among the most authoritative scientific organisations in the world, Hansen’s views are guided by simple physics. Mars is very cold because it has no CO2 blanket, earth is liveable because our CO2 blanket is just the right thickness, and Venus is a 450 degree boiling hellhole because it has a CO2 atmosphere. CO2 lets light in but does not let heat out. Every step we make towards the Venus Syndrome is seriously poisonous for the earth. Coal is the main poison we are addicted to. We have to kick the habit of fossil fuels, which are more cancerous than nicotine. But like with other drugs of addiction, we talk all the time about cutting down on our use of fossil carbon, while in fact our use level is growing at an accelerating rate, like the tolerance of a heroin addict.

Towards the close of Storms of My Grandchildren, Hansen sketches a beautifully poignant and terrifying science fiction story. Aliens living on an earth-like world 40 light years away discover our radio signals in the twentieth century, at a time when their own sun is swelling to cook them. They send a ship to colonise earth which arrives after 500 years. They are too late, and find a dead planet. Thick clouds swirl over boiling oceans. Continents that once supported abundant life are now desolate deserts. We killed our home.

Who killed Cock Robin? Not I say the energy barons, not I say the politicians, not I say the stupid environmentalist opponents of fast nuclear energy. But for Hansen all are judged as guilty, condemned for failure to comprehend the fragile complexity of our wonderful planetary biosystem and the urgent need for action to reverse global warming.

In the Bible, Jesus Christ tells us to beware of false prophets. Christians have sown confusion by their aggressive insistence that true prophets must express a magical supernatural message from God. Unlike the Christian tradition, all of Hansen’s prophecies are based solely on evidence. There is certainly a strongly Biblical apocalyptic tone in Hansen’s explanation of how our CO2 emissions are unleashing the four horsemen of death, war, plague and famine. He fully expects catastrophic sea level rise this century. Yet there is nothing false in Hansen’s prophecies. They are the scientific reality, against which the popular indifference and denial is a mad sickness. Climate denial is worse than Holocaust denial. Hitler only killed millions – the coal kings will kill all life unless we stop them.

One of the most interesting aspects of Storms of My Grandchildren is Hansen’s analysis of political tactics. He gets to meet national leaders, and despairs that the lobbying power of money is greater than the power of truth. In the three years since he wrote this book in 2009, the climate of political debate has only worsened, with arrogant denialists emboldened by their idiotic group-think, like a pack of Nazi thugs delighting in their freedom to intimidate and bully. Even as Hurricane Sandy showed everything Hansen predicted to be completely true as it devastated the US northeast, Obama expresses nothing but platitudes about protecting the planet, showing he is a weakling puppet of the evil despots who run the USA.

Hansen provides an excellent and highly readable scientific factual explanation of why the climate situation is dire. Everyone should read it. But his suggestion for how to solve the problem, focussed on building popular support for 350.org, is not the strongest part of the book. I don’t disagree that the goal of reducing CO2 to 350 parts per million in the air is needed. But the problem is that this worthy political strategy is far from enough to address the scale of the climate problem, failing to come to grips with the moral, psychological and spiritual foundations of the political and economic drivers of business as usual.

The great scientist Buckminster Fuller once said that it is more important to build the new than to fight the old. Hansen flags this view with his suggestion that perhaps a new technology, for example in algae biofuel, will save us. Such a change of our energy security paradigm could be implemented through a massive resource deployment, modelled on the Manhattan and Apollo Projects that produced the atom bomb and the moon landing. I think this is true, and agree with Bjorn Lomborg of the Copenhagen Consensus Center that funding of research and development into ways to stabilise the global climate is the biggest human security problem of our day.

But Hansen puts far too much weight on the market mechanism of price signals through carbon tax. Tax is necessary but not sufficient. The urgent sound of the four horsemen of the climate apocalypse is bearing down upon us, like Tolkien’s ring-wraiths riding in black. We need dramatic sudden change or they will kill us. Tax reform did not stop Hitler, and nor will it stop the evil momentum of carbon extraction.

Despite his bold language, Hansen retains a scientific caution regarding moral argument. He expressed doubt about the merit of condemning his enemies as wicked. He does not describe global warming as an apocalyptic clash between the forces of good and evil, although that is precisely what it is. Evil must be named and fought. The evil vested interests of business as usual have poisoned the public mind so they can keep poisoning our air.

Good and evil are religious concepts. As a scientist, Hansen does not wish to express the moral certainty of a religious evangelist who preaches that the end of the world is nigh. He is no John the Baptist preaching in the wilderness with a message of forgiveness for the repentance of sin. But that is what we need. The world of fossil fuels is at an end, and we behold a new heaven and a new earth, a sustainable planetary ecology. The psychological mystery of how people can ignore the big story of planetary survival is essentially a religious problem, grounded in old deep concepts of human identity as spiritual rather than natural.

We need a new global natural spirituality, repenting of the false religion of the last age. The alienation of human spirituality from nature is at the core of the economic and political drivers of our present climate rampage.

The Bible tells us at Revelation 11:18 that the wrath of God is against those who destroy the earth. This little-known verse would surprise many if they pondered it, since it shows that God is with those who are working to sustain human life, not against us. Scientists are so used to seeing religion as an enemy that they have left the powerful resources of religion to the false prophets of supernatural redemption and their farcical magic stories of rapture. But as this verse from Revelation 11:18 shows, religion can itself be redeemed as a force for good against evil. A new Christian reformation can build on the observation that only a God can save us, recognising that God can only work through natural science.

We truly are lost and fallen, stumbling about stupidly in the dark, fouling our own nest with CO2 emissions that are a ticking time bomb. Rather than build a secular consensus, we need a global transformation of thinking for a new age, placing the mythical messianic stories of the Second Coming of Jesus Christ within the entirely scientific understanding of our real planetary fate. Hansen provides essential steps along this path.

Robert Tulip, 25 December 2012
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Re: Climate Apocalypse

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Climate scientists are revising estimates of how hot the planet will get. In short, it's not as bad as it first seemed. In terms of climate sensitivity, the higher prognostications are being revised to reflect a more moderate increase.

This can be viewed as giving us more time to reduce carbon emissions. Andrew Revkin here also discusses briefly the problem of tribalism that exists in climate science circles, a mindset that resists this more moderate view of warming trends.

http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/ ... nsitivity/

By the way, this is science at work. We are now several years into studying the problem of global warming and getting a more refined and probably a more accurate picture of what's going on.

One thing's for certain though. There's still a tremendous amount of uncertainty with respect to global warming. Another certainty is that fossil fuel use is till very much on the rise and will remain so in the near future.
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An article, Some Like It Hot!, published in the New York Review of Books on May 9, 2013, written by Bill McKibben, investigates implications for security analysis of global warming. The emerging scientific consensus is that a hotter world must be avoided because climate change presents high risk of the collapse of civilization. Here I summarise McKibben’s article. The original, with sources, is at http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archive ... ke-it-hot/

The Arctic has only one fifth as much sea ice as in 1980. The planet is heating up fast. Arctic vegetation zones have moved seven degrees latitude towards the North Pole since 1983. Global warming is melting the Arctic with likely catastrophic feedback loops. We will find out soon what effect further increases will bring.

Our political and economic systems have a constant push to extract more oil and gas and coal. Exxon plans to double its oil exploration area. A new oil find in California was reported to be four times larger than a patch in North Dakota, which was itself compared to Saudi Arabia. In Australia, a shale oil find has estimated recoverable reserves worth $20 trillion.

The mighty political power of the fossil fuel industry has so far been enough to obliterate reason. The US Government has passed no real climate legislation. A few countries have made efforts, but in most places the fossil fuel industry has prevailed by funding disinformation and by purchasing governments.

The facts are noble and despairing. Academic and bureaucratic warnings provide only faint hope that we’re still capable as a species of recognizing oncoming catastrophe and heading it off before it reaches its full-blown form. The US National Research Council has prepared a report for the US intelligence community which finds that security analysts should expect climate surprises to become progressively more serious and frequent. Things are bad already and getting worse. Climate change will bring catastrophic effects on water, food, migration and diseases. Yellow fever, for example, is likely to produce large, explosive fatal epidemics. Climate change makes systems unstable, multiplying threats, as seen in the link between drought-induced rises in food prices and the Arab Spring.

The US Navy’s senior Pacific commander, Samuel J. Locklear III, said that climate change “is probably the most likely thing …that will cripple the security environment, probably more likely than the other scenarios we all often talk about …There is real potential … of nations displaced by rising sea level… Weather patterns are more severe than they have been in the past. We are on super typhoon twenty-seven or twenty-eight this year in the Western Pacific. The average is about seventeen. … It is imperative to get military capabilities aligned for when the effects of climate change start to impact massive populations… You could have hundreds of thousands or millions of people displaced and then security will start to crumble pretty quickly.”

The World Bank has made climate change a priority. Turn Down the Heat, published by the Bank in 2012 points out that current policies will produce a world at least four degrees warmer. Different policies could keep the rise below two degrees. The 4°C scenarios would cause inundation of coastal cities, malnutrition, drought, flood, unprecedented heat waves, high-intensity tropical cyclones; and irreversible loss of biodiversity, including coral reef systems. We would experience a completely new class of heat waves, with magnitudes never experienced before in human history. The rise in heat and humidity we’ve already experienced has reduced by about 10 per cent the amount of outdoor work humans can do. In the coming century, conditions in the southern USA will prevent sustained outdoor work. The urgency required by these facts is not however on display. The World Bank continues to finance large-scale coal projects.

The Keystone Pipeline is for the dirtiest extraction of the dirtiest crude from the tar sands in Canada’s far north. It seeks to lock in dangerous emission levels for many decades. Keystone is a powerful symbol for the whole damned category. When you’re in a hole, stop digging.

A second Dark Age has fallen on Western civilization, in which denial and self-deception have disabled the world’s powerful nations in the face of tragedy, leading to a “Great Collapse.” It sounds both biblical and like something out of science fiction, but it is painfully real. What remains to be seen is whether reality still has any traction in our public life.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archive ... ke-it-hot/
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