Speeding up
Grim:
Canada is warming on average at a rate twice as fast as the rest of the world, a new scientific report indicates.
The federal government climate report also warns that changes are already evident in many parts of the country and are projected to intensify.
Canada’s Arctic has seen the deepest impact and will continue to warm at more than double the global rate.
The report suggests that many of the effects already seen are probably irreversible.
…
Hotter temperatures could mean more heat waves and a higher risk of wildfires and droughts in some parts of the country.
Oceans are expected to become more acidic and less oxygenated, which could harm marine life.
Parts of Canada’s Arctic Ocean are projected to have extensive ice-free periods during summer within a few decades.
A rise in sea levels could also increase the risk of coastal flooding and more intense rainfall could cause problems with flooding in urban centres.
So, you know, floods, droughts, crop failures, collapse of the marine life that feeds billions…stuff like that.
H/t Acolyte of Sagan
But how can that happen from a Chinese hoax?
I have thought for some time, though I don’t share this with my students because the school is jittery about even having an environmental science class, that we passed the tipping point some time back; we needed to take action in the 1980s, and definitely by the 1990s. I think it’s now just a matter of how long, how deep, and who. We’ll cut back our emissions, but probably not by choice. We are pretty much at the tail end of being able to ride this out with our own choices on how to redo things.
The economy will be a right mess when all this comes down, and it is the economy that they are desperately trying to salvage by pretending there is no global warming. I’ve always said the economy is man-made, and we can remake it. The environment? We have barely scratched the surface of understanding how it works, and we certainly cannot remake it in any real way.
And meanwhile, I have colleagues who shrug and say, oh, well, we’ll just go to the moon, to Mars, to wherever is fashionable this week. Yeah, like we have any idea how to do that, even if it wouldn’t cost orders of magnitude more than fixing the problem here on earth would have cost.
The BBC had an excellent live series over the past few days about our oceans. There were three presenters dotted about the planet reporting on various stuff going on in the seas and like much of what the BBC does in this regard it was mostly great. There were whales bursting out all over the place and turtles doing their brilliant work (although there was a bit of an upset when a presenter released a baby turtle which was immediately stolen by a gull, which was somehow deemed by our idiot press to to be her fault).
What pissed me off was the third presenter. He’s a very shouty man who is – correctly – very enthusiastic about sharks. I’m very much a shark lover myself. But he constantly, over and over again – I’m guessing thirty times in as many minutes – said that if you give a section of an ecosystem a ‘chance’, it *will* “bounce back”. He kept on saying that it was basically inevitable.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m aware of the amazing things that local conservation can do. Many great things have been achieved, some of which he described and seemed to take some kind of smug vicarious credit for.
We should keep doing local conservation because it has great results. But… local conservation probably means nothing if we continue to dump waste into the seas and fuck with the atmosphere and the poles. It’s a triumph that Cod are recovering in British waters after our shameful over-fishing, but we can hardly pat each other on the back when they are choking on plastic.
OK, rant over. I support whatever local conservation efforts I can but I despise idiots like that guy telling the world that ecosystems just will “bounce back”.
Otherwise, it was a great show. Just… edit that shouty idiot out.
Oh, jeezis, the idea that we’ll just “go to Mars” is so stupid I can’t believe people say it. What, 7 billion of us? How? And do what if we got there? Would we pack all the food and water needed for eternity and just fly that there too? How? It takes massive resources to get a rover there; what would it take to send billions of people & everything it would take to get a working biological system going that could support them? More resources than there are in the universe, roughly.
I say “we” but obviously I mean “them” – but “we” the human collective. Could that “we” try to be not so stupid for one second?
Oh yeah, the moon and mars people.
I once had to organise a move of a department from Darlington to Bristol. It took about six months and we completely fucked it up. That was about 150 people moving a couple of hundred miles. We didn’t need to invent much technology or terraform very much of Bristol.
I have many acquaintances who believe that Elon Musk can save the planet because his firm can sometimes land rockets pointy side up. Colonizing Mars, they reckon, is a tiny step from that. Never mind that the AI in his cars can be fooled into crashing by putting stickers on the road or the sort of jiggery-pokery people like me do.
I know others who are convinced that we will all upload our minds into computers within a decade, despite the fact that we don’t understand brains or bodies or – for that matter – AI enough to make a dent in that idea even supposing it’s a good one. It’s been predicted to happen every ten years since at least the 70s and we’ve achieved absolutely fuck all in that direction so far.
We have planes falling out of the sky and millions of personal records out in the wild because nobody listens to experts. There are actual graveyards of semi-self driving cars that are pissing out sensitive data about their former drivers for anyone to see.
We have doorbells and light bulbs and baby monitors that can be hacked by any 8 year old (at least, if I have the teaching of them).
My fridge once needed a firmware upgrade so it wouldn’t catch on fire.
We aren’t going to Mars any time soon.
I once did a wetland restoration that involved moving a trailer full of plants from Ardmore (south central) Oklahoma to Poteau (south east) Oklahoma. A usually three hour drive that took all day, they had to stop regularly to water the plants, and some of them died anyway.
People say “Oh, but we’ll take seeds”. Yeah. I’ve been a botanist for too long to assume (1) that we could get enough seeds to the moon safely; (2) they would have what they needed to germinate once we got them there (water, anyone? Very heavy…none on the moon…need to carry it with us); and (3) that all plants will grow from seed. Then there is the symbiotic fungus…the insects…the bacteria…the worms…the everything. Most of which isn’t adapted to the moon, and certainly not to Mars, which last I checked is quite chilly.
By the way? Our wetland? Fewer than half the plants managed to establish, even though the system was nearly identical to the one we took them out of. Perhaps too much stress, lots of things could have gone wrong, but we did get a functioning system that lasted for one season and then…kaput. It needed management and the project ran out of money. A project that merely tried to restore a quarter mile of shoreline to demonstrate it could be done ran over budget by close to double, and we never had to go further than a three hour drive half a state away.
As for the things you mentioned, latsot, another thing that convinces me we aren’t going any time soon – I tried to use the Coke machine in my office the other day. My bottle of juice is probably still stuck somewhere in the inner workings.
iknklast, didn’t you know that vending machines contain secret portals to another dimension?
Ophelia, #3
I doubt that would ever be the plan. That trip would be for the mega-wealthy, enough military to make the mega-wealthy feel secure, and a few thousand prime breeding specimens. Oh, and enough peasants to do the work. The rest of us get to stay behind to stew and die
Well this story is topical and close to home for me. My wife and were just in Yellowknife, Northwest Territoties the second last week in March. We’d bought big parkas months ago in preparation for possible nightime temperatures of -20 C or lower that we expected when we went out aurora viewing. We never took them. The forecasts we checked before departure indicated that temperatures there were going to be the same (or warmer) than where we live in southwestern Ontario. We landed in, what was for them, a heatwave. For the first time in its 24 year history, the month-long Snow King Winter Festival (one of our reasons for going there) closed a week early because of the high temperatures, well above freezing. The festivities usually take place in an elaborate snow castle built over the course of January and February on the frozen surface of Great Slave Lake. Even before the festival was ended early, the castle was closed during the day because of flooding in some of the rooms. Only parts of it were usable on the Friday night we went to see one of the performances taking place in the castle. The decision to close the festival early was made the next day, with the Saturday night concert being the final performance.
Parts of some streets were filled with huge puddles and walking was a challenge, as you didn’t want to get drenched by passing cars going through them. We timed our passage on the sidewalk beside the puddles to coincide with breals in the traffic. Locals were amazed (some pleased, others not) by these unusual conditions. Maureen and I both figured that this was “climate” not “weather” that we were experiencing.
Don’t know if this will work, but this is a link to a temperature chart showing the temperatures for March of this year overlaid upon historical averages for the same period: https://www.theweathernetwork.com/ca/monthly/northwest-territories/yellowknife?year=2019&month=3&dispt=chart-container-monthly&autod=1
We are so fucked; we have so fucked ourselves, and much of the rest of all the living things on this planet. Hey, but the fossil fuel industry gets to squeeze a few billion more bucks out of the Earth before everything burns down.
Oh yes, and our federal government is still keen on building pipelines to keep the oil flowing to market. Our Mr. Trudeau has disappointed me on a number of fronts (electoral reform, continued arms trade with Saudi Arabia…), this chief among them.
YNnB, good grief, that is crazy stuff. Here in NZ our glaciers are in massive retreat with Franz and Fox glaciers in danger of collapse.
Further to latsot and Iknklast’s comments, for the merest hint of how difficult colonising Mars could be, read Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars. Even that starts from a base of technology and capability we haven’t even begun to develop in anything other than broad conceptual designs, let alone autonomous functioning technology. Alistair Reynolds also has a nice dystopian future series in which the first generation of uploaded human intelligences all just stop working for no obvious reason. Too bad the upload process also destroyed the bodies of the uber rich who had been trying to escape the hoi poloi.
I like technology and gadgets, but find all the ‘smart’ gizmos kinda creepy and worrying. Far too much poorly understood and designed tech that doesn’t take into account anything like as much security and lifecycle care as it should.
Latsot, I’d love you to teach me how to hack some of this stuff, I might be able to keep up with a modern 8 year old…
So, at my age (mid 60s), my best bet is to die soon.
groovy
Yes, forget going to Mars. Total bullshit. Also, we have not exactly lost the Earth. Yet.
We are in a unique phase of the Earth’s history. Thanks to the vagaries of continental drift, the last 2 million years or so have seen ice at both poles, locked in the Arctic Ocean by the Eurasian and North American landmasses and on the Antarctic Content, which happens right now to cover the South Pole. This coincides with the fact that we are at a turning point right now on the glacial-interglacial (‘ice age’) cycle of the last 350,000 years. From the graph on the link below, our future from here on should be one of increasing cold. So arguably global warming is the one thing we are getting right. EXCEPT that the fossil carbon will only last at most another 300 years at present rates of consumption, and carbon denialists all have to wear bags over their heads and go about ignoring all other factors like ocean acidification, species change on coral reefs, demise of arctic ice, etc.
Burning fossil carbon to unwittingly produce global warming is probably the right thing to do from some perspectives, and woefully wrong from others. The pace of it all is not set by politicians in the light of climatology, but by politicians soothed by cash in their pockets from the carbon barons like the Koch brothers.
Lord Stern got it dead right. It is the greatest market failure in all of economic history.
https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/abrupt-climate-change/Glacial-Interglacial%20Cycles
Yes, Omar, regardless of what we do, the ice is coming back…in fifty to a hundred thousand years.
The only question is whether there’ll be a “we” here by the time it does.
Also, the Moon-Mars people *are* wrong…but also right, in a way, despite themselves. The technologies and sciences developed for space exploration and terraforming will be applicable to Terra Firma (and Aqua…Firma?) in ways that have nothing to do with the unrealistic sci-fi fantasy of shuttling all of us (or even a stable breeding population of us) to another world while ours lay in ashes.
Space exploration and climate science should not be at odds with one another; both are taken for granted and imperiled by the greedy capitalists and the lazy breeders who think that some other smart people will save them when the clock has ticked down to two seconds before disaster, just like in the movies.
@Rob:
Well I do teach a class from time to time….
About totally ethical hacking, of course. It’s hardly my fault if my fault if my students bring down the world around us, is it?
Humans will probably survive the current crisis, but I think Civilization (with a capital Civ) is likely a goner. There’s going to be a huge disruption of ecosystems as/if/when the new temperature regime settles into something stable enough that organisms can actually more or less adapt to. Bad news for most human food production in the near run, though. People able to live off the land and make everything they need might be okay, so long as there are plants, animals and land to actually live off of. That’s assuming that nobody sets off the nukes in the last moments of trying to keep the old global ecomomy and political system going in someone’s particular favour over everyone else’s.
Will the hyper-rich be busy converting the perhaps soon-to-be-valueless billions they have in the bank into useful, tangible items like guns and food? If their money loses its value, they’ll need to find some other way to bribe and pay off people to do their bidding.
Things are going to get…interesting. Alas, Chigau might be right…
YNnB: The Great Lakes Basin, of which your corner of Ontario is a part (Hi from SE MIch!), is also warming faster than the rest of the USA, according to this in the Detroit Free Press: https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2019/03/21/great-lakes-basin-warming-study/3226076002/
Download the full report, executive summary, and policy recs here: http://elpc.org/glclimatechange/