Libertarians will save us
Grim news on the climate change front:
A landmark report from the United Nations’ scientific panel on climate change paints a far more dire picture of the immediate consequences of climate change than previously thought and says that avoiding the damage requires transforming the world economy at a speed and scale that has “no documented historic precedent.”
The report, issued on Monday by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of scientists convened by the United Nations to guide world leaders, describes a world of worsening food shortages and wildfires, and a mass die-off of coral reefs as soon as 2040 — a period well within the lifetime of much of the global population.
I think the imminent mass die-off of coral reefs was already widely reported – I know I’ve seen at least two nature or science documentaries that said it’s happening now and it’s unstoppable and it will be a disaster.
The authors found that if greenhouse gas emissions continue at the current rate, the atmosphere will warm up by as much as 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius) above preindustrial levels by 2040, inundating coastlines and intensifying droughts and poverty.
And it won’t be: things will be ok until 2040 when bam they’ll fall off a cliff. No, it will be things are already bad and will get steadily worse. They already are, and we’re seeing it, and they’re not going to turn around.
Avoiding the most serious damage requires transforming the world economy within just a few years, said the authors, who estimate that the damage would come at a cost of $54 trillion. But while they conclude that it is technically possible to achieve the rapid changes required to avoid 2.7 degrees of warming, they concede that it may be politically unlikely.
Ya think? Right now it’s not politically unlikely, it’s politically out of the question.
For instance, the report says that heavy taxes or prices on carbon dioxide emissions — perhaps as high as $27,000 per ton by 2100 — would be required. But such a move would be almost politically impossible in the United States, the world’s largest economy and second-largest greenhouse gas emitter behind China.
We don’t do science here. We do deals and casinos and reality tv.
President Trump, who has mocked the science of human-caused climate change, has vowed to increase the burning of coal and said he intends to withdraw from the Paris agreement. And on Sunday in Brazil, the world’s seventh-largest emitter of greenhouse gas, voters appeared on track to elect a new president, Jair Bolsonaro, who has said he also plans to withdraw from the accord.
Yeah; fuck the climate, right? Who needs it? So it’s a little too warm now and then – just turn up the AC in the Mercedes SUV.
To prevent 2.7 degrees of warming, the report said, greenhouse pollution must be reduced by 45 percent from 2010 levels by 2030, and 100 percent by 2050. It also found that, by 2050, use of coal as an electricity source would have to drop from nearly 40 percent today to between 1 and 7 percent. Renewable energy such as wind and solar, which make up about 20 percent of the electricity mix today, would have to increase to as much as 67 percent.
“This report makes it clear: There is no way to mitigate climate change without getting rid of coal,” said Drew Shindell, a climate scientist at Duke University and an author of the report.
Sorry; no can do; we’ve got Beautiful Clean Coal Donald Trump breaking everything and we can’t get rid of him.
The World Coal Association disputed the conclusion that stopping global warming calls for an end of coal use.
People who sell coal tell lies about coal and climate change; tell us something we don’t know.
Americans for Prosperity, the political advocacy group funded by the libertarian billionaires Charles and David Koch, has made a point of campaigning against politicians who support a carbon tax.
Yeah, let’s Liberty the climate until nothing but tube worms can survive.
And appropriately, Scott Morrison, the latest Australian PM to emerge from the revolving door of the ruling Liberal-National Coalition, distinguished himself not so long ago by carrying a lump of black coal into the Federal Parliamentary chamber, passing it around and ogling it as a child might do with a strange new toy. See, nothing to be afraid of in that. And the ignorant bastard has a science degree. And he leads a government which is dead-set against investment in renewable energy.
Fortunately, he and the denialist and squabbling gaggle he calls his party are likely to lose office at the next federal election. But despite all that, investment by ordinary householders in rooftop solar is galloping ahead, and solar is continuously getting cheaper. I know. I’ve got solar panels all over my own roof..
Omar,
Yes, despite the obstruction by the Coalition the rate of investment in renewables is accelerating and some of the projects are huge. The denialists will fade into history once the majority of capital moves from coal to alternative sources. We might even see some former “denialists” as advocates for renewables, if they’re paid enough. There always will be crackpots, people without any relevant qualifications who think that they know more than climate scientists, however the professional deniers will probably disappear.
The timetable is the problem though isn’t it? We will probably lose some of the world’s coral reefs, Pacific island nations, fisheries and the most productive farmlands before the global temperature is stabilised.
Unfortunately, RJW, this actually sounds too optimistic. I know it’s not supposed to be, since tucked into your “coral reefs”,”nations”, “fisheries” and “farmlands” is the spectre of mass extinction, displacement of millions of people, human famine on an unprecedented and unimaginable level, and the possible collapse of civilization itself, “before the global temperature is stabilised.” Without unpacking these bits, it almost sounds bearable. “I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed. But I do say no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops! Uh, depending on the breaks.
With the potential for ecosystem collapse (think “multiple organ failure” on a planetary scale), there might not be much in the way of “fisheries” or “farmland” coming back on a timescale useful for any large scale human population. It took millions of years for things to recover from the terminal Cretaceous extinction event, and dinosaurs (apart from birds) were not around to enjoy what became the new normal. Right now, in the US, the crackpots are in charge.
With the rising temperatures and associated effects happening on a much quicker timescale than predicted even a couple of years ago, I am all-but certain that our atmosphere has already passed the tipping point of any meaningful recovery and is now into the first stages of the unstoppable runaway global warming that most experts predicted to happen in a century or two from now.
Your Name’s not Bruce
The US isn’t the only country where the crackpots are in charge. The (Australian) ‘Environment’ minister claims that the world’s climate scientists have ‘got it wrong’ in the recent report on climate change.
I agree with your comments, however there’s one extremely important factor to be considered. The initial victims of climate change will be the inhabitants of what used to be the “Third World”, Until millions of refugees land in Europe, the US, or Australia I’m rather pessimistic in regard to any effective action. Of course if London or Miami are covered by 2 metres of sea water the deniers will probably be lynched. Too late.
I didn’t quantify the impending disaster because I have absolutely no idea of the populations involved. Also quoting ‘millions’ to the public is easily ridiculed by the denier parrots and probably counter-productive in the short term.
With the latest IPCC Report concentrating apparently from the reports on the Arctic, the issue I am most concerned about is the Totten Glacier in Antarctica. Warming seawater is getting to its underside. Never before the last 3 million years or so, (since the closure of the Isthmus of Panama) and over its entire geological history, has Earth had icecaps at both poles, threatening possible catastrophic sea level rise if glaciers like the Totten in Antarctica and the Greenland glaciers keep on their accelerating slide seawards; not just the relatively modest rise rates revealed by satellite altimetry, but relatively rapid ones sufficient to flood every port city in the world. That is what is possible in this particular stage of geological time. But of course, there is only one sure way to find out.
“Ben Galton-Fenzi, from the Australian Antarctic Division, said the Totten Glacier contains enough ice to raise global sea levels by about three metres (9.8 feet) if it all melted.
“Since the 1900s the global sea-level has risen by around 20 centimetres and by the end of the century it’s projected to rise by up to one metre or more, but this is subject to high uncertainty which is why studying glaciers such as the Totten is important,” he said.
https://phys.org/news/2018-03-sea-giant-antarctic-glacier-thought.html#jCp
Yes, I agree. As an environmental scientist, I could spend all my time crying or being angry, because I suspect that there is little we can do now. We needed to start when the alarm was sounded in the 1970s (or earlier, when Arrhenius did his work in the 1890s). The problem is, there are too many people who believe that we can solve anything, no matter how dire, once we decided to, and that there is no such thing as too late for a technological fix. Too many people saying “oh, we’ll just move to the moon, to Mars”. Too many people saying “but the economy”. None of them realizing that technological fixes can only work if you’ve still got something to work with, that the moon and Mars are not habitable, and we haven’t exactly had a great track record with building ecosystems on earth, or that the economy actually depends on the health of the environment, not the other way round.
The economy is man-made. We can rebuild it, remake it in a new form. The environment is not man-made, and we have only the most superficial level of understanding at this time, because the complexity of the environment dwarfs that of the economy by several orders of magnitude, and ecology is a new science, only developing its tools about the middle of the twentieth century. We don’t have the depth of understanding we require to fix it or save it, let alone rebuild it, even with the vast number of highly intelligent people working their asses off to try to reverse the situation before it reaches disaster.
Since the methane started escaping in the Arctic, I sort of gave up on the idea that we were short of the tipping point by just a little. We have passed that, I’m very sure (99%).
iknklast, right on cue comes this report into my news feed; https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/09/tipping-points-could-exacerbate-climate-crisis-scientists-fear
I’d add to that too many people who don’t give a fuck, too many people who think it’s a leftist conspiracy, too many people for whom the current fossil fuel extractive economy works just fine, who are egging on the first two groups on my list. Even those who believe in technological fixes and the power of the can-do spirit understand there’s a crisis needing to be faced, however delusionally optimistic they might be about our abilities to fix what we have broken.The ones who are actively denying there’s any problem at all are standing in the way of anyone wanting to address the problem in any meaningful way.
Our political systems have enabled monsters and clowns to take control and bend the course of history to their whims. Ignorant buffoons have been allowed to take the wheel and are driving us full speed to the edge of a cliff, insisting that there is no cliff and not to worry anyhow, because they can fly can get the car to fly. We have little experience and even less success in acting collectively for enterprises more complex than killing each other in world wars. Much of our economic activity has been accidental, unplanned and mindlessly competitive, leaving millions in want and risking global catastrophe. We are so fucked.
Monster clowns.
So Stephen King was right.
Looking on the bright side, life will survive, even if it is only bacteria, (Some species of them thrive in the vents of submarine volcanoes.) But the higher up the phyologenetic tree we go, the more question marks appear.) The unique assemblage of flora at the summit of Mt Gower on Lord Howe Island? Maybe; maybe not. It has run out of altitude to retreat into.
It could reach the point of billionaires’ retreats springing up on the tropical shores of Greenland, Baffin’s Bay and the Southern Hemisphere’s balmy Macquarie Island. Though swimming in the Antarctic Ocean could be risky, not so much from near-freezing ocean water as from orcas and sharks forced onto starvation diets.
My candidate for the most depressing proposition ever:
If most people in the industrial world had anything in them other than infinite dishonesty, sanctimony and hypocrisy, they would look their children in the eyes and say: “Sorry, but not sorry. I would bet your future on the proposition that my uninformed, ideologically motivated alternative facts trump all the evidence in the universe any time, and nothing is ever going to change my mind. If that means you’re screwed, then fine by me. If it’s between Your future and short-term convenience for myself now (or even not having to concede any problems with an ideology based on psychopathic selfishness, the Law of the Jungle and the Biggest Bully Wins), your future counts for exactly nothing, and I would trade it away any time just to stick it to those loathed leftist hippies. As long as there is breath in me I will do everything in my power to make sure you are screwed, and I will oppose any policy meant to prevent such a future to the death.”
Of course most people in the industrial world do not, in fact, have anything in them other than infinite dishonesty, sanctimony and hypocrisy, which is why nobody is going to come straight out and say it like that, but leave it to their actions to say it for them.
And it’s not just the usual suspects (the outright deniers, the fossil fuel industry, the trumpists, the right-wing think-tanks, Fox News etc.). As I have previously written there are no good guys in this story (or, if they exist, they’re as fringe and despised and marginalized as it gets). It’s the people who say it’s a real problem and that something (just not anything in particular) needs to be done about it, while continuing to opt for more of the same in every particular case and dismissing any policy that isn’t purely symbolic and woefully insufficient as crazy radical and delusional. To those who have paid attention, it’s been clear all along that no policy pursued by any government in the industrialized world goes anywhere near far enough to fulfill the goals of the Paris agreement, and the goals of the Paris agreement don’t go anywhere near far enough to limit global warming to 2 or even 3 °C (let alone 1,5 °C!). Yet these are the type of governments that people all over the industrial world keep electing every time, and any politician or party that dared to suggest doing anything that might actually make a difference would have committed political suicide.
I don’t buy the common excuse that people “have just been mislead”. It’s not as if there isn’t any reliable information out there, so the real question is why people keep actively seeking out the alternative facts and insist on believing them over the real ones. No football supporter has ever been more biased in favor of his/her team than the average person (again, not just the ones on the far right) are biased in favor of climate change denialism. The main difference seems to be that the far right is still stuck in the classical 5 stages of denialism (as we have seen the Trump administration recently moved all the way to stage 5) while the rest have moved on to stage 6, or what has been called implicatory denial where the objective facts are not denied per se, only that they have any real implications for the need to act now. And denying every part of a solution separately does indeed amount to denying the solution in general.
If there are any survivors centuries from now I hope they look back upon our generation with hate and contempt.