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Climate Apocalypse

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geo

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Re: Climate Apocalypse

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Kaboom!

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Robert Tulip

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Arctic Summer Sea Ice Collapse Since 1980.gif
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Hey zombies, check out Bill McKibben's apocalyptic facts in Rolling Stone

Summary: 500 gigatonnes of carbon will increase world temperature by 2 degrees. Fossil fuel companies plan to burn 2500 gigatonnes, five times as much as is thought the upper political limit. They hold the power to change the physics and chemistry of our planet, and they're planning to use it. Obama's response? "You have my word that we will keep drilling everywhere we can... That's a commitment that I make." Exxon plans to spend about $100 million a day searching for yet more oil and gas. In December, BP finally closed its solar division. Shell shut down its solar and wind efforts in 2009. The five biggest oil companies have made more than $1 trillion in profits since the millennium – there's simply too much money to be made on oil and gas and coal to go chasing after zephyrs and sunbeams.The fight, in the end, is about whether the industry will succeed in its fight to keep its special pollution break alive past the point of climate catastrophe. Moral outrage just might give rise to a real movement. If people come to understand the cold, mathematical truth – that the fossil-fuel industry is systematically undermining the planet's physical systems – it might weaken it enough to matter politically. Just like us, our crops are adapted to the Holocene, the 11,000-year period of climatic stability we're now leaving... in the dust.

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/ne ... z21RryJgg4
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geo

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I'll tell you when humans will stop using fossil fuels. When we run out of fossil fuels, or when extracting them becomes too prohibitive. Until then, if there's a profit to be made, you can bet Exxon will continue pumping and selling oil. Our very lifestyle is fueled by cheap energy and there is no alternative that comes close to fossil fuels. I just don't buy this notion that all of our problems will be solved if only the climate deniers would get on board. But I suppose ranting about climate deniers make people like Krugman feel like he's doing something useful.

Anyway, I suppose you've already given up your car and don't use air-conditiioning, right?

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/23/opini ... ce.html?hp
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geo wrote:I'll tell you when humans will stop using fossil fuels. When we run out of fossil fuels, or when extracting them becomes too prohibitive. Until then, if there's a profit to be made, you can bet Exxon will continue pumping and selling oil. Our very lifestyle is fueled by cheap energy and there is no alternative that comes close to fossil fuels. I just don't buy this notion that all of our problems will be solved if only the climate deniers would get on board. But I suppose ranting about climate deniers make people like Krugman feel like he's doing something useful.

Anyway, I suppose you've already given up your car and don't use air-conditiioning, right?

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/23/opini ... ce.html?hp
I haven't been following this debate closely, but I can see it's a good one. Our reliance on this miracle energy source, fossil fuel, can be seen as a historical accident, going way back in history, as all of this organic matter deposited 200 million years or so ago has been the enabler of the industrial revolution. Alternative fuels don't come close in bang for the buck, I agree. I wish we would get more serious about them, but there's little real chance of that when we're so damned clever about finding new ways to get fossils out of the ground or from under the ocean floor. Our economy and that of the rest of the world being predicated on growth--well, it just raises one more huge obstacle to freeing ourselves from our addiction to oil, in G.W. Bush's immortal phrase.
Last edited by DWill on Tue Jul 24, 2012 6:06 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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DWill wrote:
geo wrote:I'll tell you when humans will stop using fossil fuels. When we run out of fossil fuels, or when extracting them becomes too prohibitive. Until then, if there's a profit to be made, you can bet Exxon will continue pumping and selling oil. Our very lifestyle is fueled by cheap energy and there is no alternative that comes close to fossil fuels. I just don't buy this notion that all of our problems will be solved if only the climate deniers would get on board. But I suppose ranting about climate deniers make people like Krugman feel like he's doing something useful.

Anyway, I suppose you've already given up your car and don't use air-conditiioning, right?

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/23/opini ... ce.html?hp
I haven't been following this debate closely, but I can see it's a good one. Our reliance on this miracle energy source, fossil fuel, can be seen as a historical accident, going way back in history, as all of this organic matter deposited 200 million years or so ago or so has been the enabler of the industrial revolution. Alternative fuels don't come close in bang for the buck, I agree. I wish we would get more serious about them, but there's little real chance of that when we're so damned clever about finding new ways to get fossils out of the ground or from under the ocean floor. Our economy and that of the rest of the world being predicated on growth--well, it just raises one more huge obstacle to freeing ourselves from our addiction to oil, in G.W. Bush's immortal phrase.
Most of the time there's no debate at all, only ridicule and scorn of climate deniers or "zombies" as Robert has lately called them. No one bothers coming up with solutions, only hints that the government should impose taxes and make laws against drilling oil and then all will be right with the world. This resembles the God-of-the-Gaps argument in many ways. If only the deniers would quit hiding their heads in the sand . . . Behind the global climate scare is a presumption that the government will rescue us from ourselves. There's also a huge conspiracy preventing these new technologies from being developed, but the deniers of course can't see this.

We are addicted to oil and there are no easy alternatives waiting in the wings. Humans are partying like there's no tomorrow.
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Robert Tulip

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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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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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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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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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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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