Climate Links: October 2018 #2

Oh, shit!
Time to get serious about climate change... global beer supply at risk!
Decreases in global beer supply due to extreme drought and heat. Wei Xie et al, Nature.


If I stop eating meat, will it really help climate change? Asian correspondent. Oct. 26, 2018.Perhaps treat meat as just a condiment?
(Hat tip Yves Smith.. for the link and the condiment suggestion)


Humanity has wiped out 60% of animal populations since 1970, report finds. Damian Carrington, Guardian. Oct. 30, 2018.

The huge loss is a tragedy in itself but also threatens the survival of civilisation, say the world’s leading scientists

“We are rapidly running out of time,” said Prof Johan Rockström, a global sustainability expert at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. “Only by addressing both ecosystems and climate do we stand a chance of safeguarding a stable planet for humanity’s future on Earth.”

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Wildlife and the ecosystems are vital to human life, said Prof Bob Watson, one of the world’s most eminent environmental scientists and currently chair of an intergovernmental panel on biodiversity that said in March that the destruction of nature is as dangerous as climate change.

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“there is this direct link between the food system and the depletion of wildlife,” said Barrett. Eating less meat is an essential part of reversing losses, he said.

Scientists Warn World Facing Major Famine, Could "Lead To Severe Shocks To Global Food System". zerohedge. Oct. 17, 2018.

How Feedback Loops Are Driving Runaway Climate Change. Dahr Jamail, truthout. Oct. 1, 2018.

Wadhams .. noted that the change of albedo (a measure of reflection of solar radiation) due to the loss of sea ice and snowline retreat across the Arctic “is sufficient to add 50 percent to the warming effect of CO2 emissions alone.”

MW: notwithstanding the fact that the neoliberal form of so-called capitalism, under the likes of Clinton/Bush/Obama, etc. (and their contemporaries around the world), already made catastrophic climate change inevitable ... and thus that the tilt towards more fascist forms of government is just the icing on the cake...  this is still worth a read: 

Why Catastrophic Climate Change is Probably Inevitable Now. Udair Haque, e&co. Oct. 10, 2018.

How Capitalism Torched the Planet by Imploding Into Fascism

The reality is: we’re probably not going to make it. It’s highly dubious at this juncture that humanity is going to win the fight against climate change. 

Yet that is for a very unexpected — yet perfectly predictable — reason: the sudden explosion in global fascism — which in turn is a consequence of capitalism having failed as a model of global order. If, when, Brazil elects a neo-fascist who plans to raze and sell off the Amazon — the world’s lungs — then how do you suppose the fight against warming will be won? It will be set back by decades — decades…we don’t have. America’s newest Supreme Court justice is already striking down environmental laws — in his first few days in office — but he will be on the bench for life…beside a President who hasn’t just decimated the EPA, but stacked it with the kind of delusional simpletons who think global warming is a hoax. Again, the world is set by back by decades…it doesn’t have. Do you see my point yet? Let me make it razor sharp. ...

Global Warming Is Real. The Threat Is Real. Ecocide Is On The Horizon. Paul Craig Roberts. Oct. 26, 2018.

The tobacco companies’ response to the US Surgeon General’s report in 1964 linking smoking to lung cancer was countered by the tobacco companies setting up propaganda organizations to create a controversy by generating doubt over the link. This strategy staved off the inevitable for more than two decades. 

The same tactic is being used by the carbon energy companies against the independent climate scientists who have established that the climate is warming as a result of CO2 emissions. After a certain amount of warming, feedback mechanisms come into play that accelerate the warming. For example, as CO2 emissions raise temperatures, permafrost begins melting releasing methane, a greenhouse gas that speeds the warming. 

Another example of feedback is the loss of sea ice and snow cover on land. Ice and snow reflect the sun’s heat, but the dark surface of the ocean and land absorb the heat, resulting in a further rise in temperature. 

The greenhouse gases around the planet trap heat radiation. The oceans, which cover about 75% of the planet, have enormous heat capacity and can soak up a lot of energy. Being very deep, they take a long time to heat up. As the oceans absorb the heat, it takes decades for the atmosphere to heat up. This “climate lag” delays the full impact of global warming. 

As temperatures rise, the feedback mechanisms come into play and the planet arrives at tipping points at which things spin out of control. Once that happens, it is too late to control carbon emissions. The release of methane and nitrous oxide, the acidification of the oceans, the destruction of rain forests—which turns them from their service as carbon sinks into net carbon sources—work together to destroy the oceans and coral reefs as a source of food, to deplete water resources, and to raise temperatures beyond those at which life can exist. 

It is important to understand that global warming is not a theory. It is observable fact. It is documented. The measurements are made. The numbers are actual measurements, not predictions from a model. If CO2 emissions are not controlled in time, there is no way to avoid the consequences. 

It is important to understand that we are talking about whether planet Earth will be able to sustain life in the near future. 

It is important to understand that mass bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef is already occurring, that CO2 is rising as a percentage of the atmosphere, that the acidification of the oceans is increasing. 

These are facts. 

It is also important to understand that unlike the hired guns of the carbon energy industry, independent climate scientists have no material interest in misrepresenting the facts. 

It is important to understand that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is not a fake news organization. Neither is NASA. Neither is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. 

It is important to understand that glaciers have melted away, that the Greenland ice shelf is rapidly shrinking, that ships now move year round through the Artic ice. 

The carbon energy industry has put out all manner of disinformation and conspiracy theories about the independent scientists. They are said to be part of a plot to install global government, as part of a plot to reduce the human population, as part of a plot to reduce living standards for the mass of humanity to primitive levels so that the one percent can have even more, and so on. 

If you want to gain an understanding of climate science and to discover that there is much more to the ecocide threat than you are aware of, and if you want to see the hard, documented evidence, read the just published book, Unprecedented Crime: Climate Science Denial and Game Changers for Survival(Clarity Press, 2018) by Dr. Peter D. Carter and Elizabeth Woodworth, with a foreword by Dr. James E. Hansen. The authors write: “Since the United Nations Paris conference in late 2015, climate change indicators have escalated so quickly that an emergency response is imperative if civilization is to avoid breakdown and eventual collapse.” The authors provide the hard and extensive evidence in a science appendix titled “Evidence of the Climate Emergency.”

Rebelling against extinction. George Monbiot. Oct. 19, 2018.

As for the economic elite, as the consequences of their own greed and self-interest emerge, they seek, like the Roman oligarchs fleeing the collapse of the Western Empire, only to secure their survival against the indignant mob. An essay by the visionary author Douglas Rushkoff this summer, documenting his discussion with some of the world’s richest people, reveals that their most pressing concern is to find a safe refuge from climate breakdown, economic and societal collapse. Should they move to New Zealand or Alaska? How will they pay their security guards once money is worthless? Could they upload their minds onto supercomputers? Survival Condo, the company turning former missile silos in Kansas into fortified bunkers, has so far sold every completed unit. 

Trust, the Edelman Corporation observes, “is now the deciding factor in whether a society can function.” Unfortunately, our mistrust is fully justified. Those who have destroyed belief in governments exploit its collapse, railing against a liberal elite (by which they mean people still engaged in public service) while working for the real and illiberal elite. As the political economist Will Davies points out, “sovereignty” is used as a code for rejecting the very notion of governing as “a complex, modern, fact-based set of activities that requires technical expertise and permanent officials.” 

Nowhere is the gulf between public and private interests more obvious than in governments’ response to the climate crisis. 

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These people are not serving the nation. They are serving each other. 

In Germany, the government that claimed to be undergoing a great green energy transition instead pours public money into the coal industry, and deploys an army of police to evict protesters from an ancient forest to clear it for a lignite mine. On behalf of both polluting power companies and the car industry, it has sabotaged the EU’s attempt to improve its carbon emissions target. Before she was re-elected, I argued that Angela Merkel was the world’s leading eco-vandal. She might also be the world’s most effective spin doctor: she can mislead, cheat and destroy, and people still call her Mutti. Since then, she has done all she can to retain her position as the leading planetary delinquent. That she has now slipped to third place shows only that the collapse of the public service ethos has become a global phenomenon. 

Other governments shamelessly flaunt their service to private interests, as they evade censure by owning their corruption. 

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In Australia, the new Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, has turned coal burning into a sacred doctrine.

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If Jair Bolsonaro takes office in Brazil, their gleeful annihilation on behalf of private interests will seem mild by comparison. He claims that climate breakdown is a fable invented by a “globalist conspiracy”, and seeks to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, abolish the environment ministry, put the congressional beef caucus (representing the murderous and destructive ranching industry) in charge of agriculture, open the Amazon Basin for clearance and dismantle almost all environmental and indigenous protections. 

With the exception of Costa Rica’s, no government has the policies required to prevent more than 2°C of global warming, let alone 1.5°. ...

How Brazil’s presidential election could eff up the planet for everyone. Paola Rosa-Aquino, Grist. Oct 9, 2018.

As the vast Brazilian rainforest steadily dwindles, so do our chances of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. And with the possible election of Jair Bolsonaro, the so-called “Trump of the Tropics” and far-right frontrunner in the Brazilian presidential election, a crucial part of the planet’s carbon emission-curbing toolkit might be in jeopardy.

What’s Another Way to Say ‘We’re F-cked’? Jeff Goodell, Rolling Stone. Oct. 12, 2018.

Revealing the Dark Side of Wind Power. Mark Buchanan, Bloomberg. Oct. 4, 2018.

Surprising new research suggests harvesting cleaner energy may have serious consequences for the environment.

Billionaires Are the Leading Cause of Climate Change. Luke Darby, GQ. Oct. 11, 2018.


Who cares what old people think about climate change? J.R. Hennessy, The Outline. Oct. 11, 2018.

If you won’t live to see the worst of it, kindly shut up.

Trudeau on back foot as frustration builds over PM's climate strategy. Leyland Cecco, Guardian. Oct. 10, 2018.

Several provinces unhappy with PM’s national carbon tax, while green groups oppose government investment in fossil fuels

Huge reduction in meat-eating ‘essential’ to avoid climate breakdown. Damian Carrington, Guardian. Oct. 10, 2018.

Major study also finds huge changes to farming are needed to avoid destroying Earth’s ability to feed its population

Save the Climate, Eat Less Red Meat. Jessica Fanzo and Shreya Das, Bloomberg. Oct. 31, 2018.

Dietary change could substantially reduce greenhouse gases.

Nature will need up to five million years to fill the gaps caused by man-made mass extinctions, study finds. Chris Baynes, The Independent. Oct. 16, 2018.

also covered here:
Humanity’s ongoing annihilation of wildlife is cutting down the tree of life, including the branch we are sitting on, according to a stark new analysis. Damian Carrington, Guardian. Oct. 15, 2018.

and:
'Hyperalarming' study shows massive insect loss. Ben Guarino, WashPo. Oct. 15, 2018.



State of the climate: New record ocean heat content and a growing El Niño. Zeke Hausfather, Carbon Brief. Oct. 23, 2018.

Ocean heat content (OHC) set a new record in the first half of 2018, with more warmth in the oceans than at any time since OHC records began in 1940. 

That’s one of the headlines from Carbon Brief’s latest “state of the climate” report, a quarterly series on global climate data that now includes temperatures, ocean heat, sea levels, greenhouse gas concentrations, climate model performance and polar ice.

Bioenergy carbon capture: climate snake oil or the 1.5-degree panacea? Paul Behrens, RenewEconomy. Oct. 23, 2018.


Nobel Prizes in Economics, Awarded and Withheld. Peter Dorman, EconoSpeak. Oct. 8, 2018.

Most of the commentary today on the decision to award Nobel prizes in economics to William Nordhaus and Paul Romer has focused on the recipients. I want to talk about the nonrecipient whose nonprize is perhaps the most important statement by the Riksbank, the Swedish central bank that decides who should be recognized each year for their work in economics “in memory of Alfred Nobel”.

Nordhaus was widely expected to be a winner for his work on the economics of climate change. For decades he has assembled and tweaked a model called DICE (Dynamic Integrated Climate-Economy), that melds computable general equilibrium theory from economics and equations from the various strands of climate science. His goal has been to estimate the “optimal” amount of climate change, where the marginal cost of abating it equals the marginal cost of undergoing it. From this comes an optimal carbon price, the “social cost of carbon”, which should be implemented now and allowed to rise over time at the rate of interest. In his first published work using DICE, from the early 1990s, he recommended a carbon tax of $5 a tonne of CO2, inching slowly upward until peaking at $20 in 2085. His “optimal” policy was expected to result in an atmospheric concentration of CO2 of over 1400 ppm (parts per million) at the end of this planning horizon, yielding global warming in excess of 3º C. (Nordhaus, 1992)

Over time Nordhaus has become slightly more concerned with the potential economic costs of climate change but also more sanguine about the prospects for decarbonized economic growth, even in the absence of policy. In his latest work he advocates a carbon tax of $31 per tonne in 2015, increasing at 3% per year over the following century. This too would result in more than 3º warming. To give a sense of how modest his suggestion is, consider that, in the same paper, Nordhaus calculates that the most efficient carbon tax to limit warming to 2.5º is between $107-184 per tonne depending on assumptions. The target of the Paris Accord is 2º, and most scientists consider this an upper bound for the amount of warming we should permit.

What do these “optimal” tax numbers mean? Based on the carbon content of gas, each $1 carbon tax translates into a one cent tax on a gallon of gas at the pump. If we adopted Nordhaus’ suggestion for carbon pricing, the result would be minuscule compared to the year-to-year fluctuations in energy prices due to other causes. In other words, while his prize is being trumpeted as a statement from the Swedish bankers on the importance of climate change, in fact he is a key spokesman for the position, rejected by nearly all climate scientists, that the problem is modest and can be solved by easy-to-digest, nearly imperceptible adjustments to energy prices. If we go down his road we face a significant risk of a climate apocalypse.

But Nordhaus is not the only climate economist on the block. In fact, he has been locked in debate for many years with Harvard’s Martin Weitzman. Weitzman rejects the entire social-cost-of-carbon approach on the grounds that rational policy should be based on the insurance principle of avoiding worst-case outcomes. His “dismal theorem” demonstrates that, under reasonable assumptions, the likelihood of tail events does not fall as rapidly as their degree of catastrophe increases, so their expected cost rises without limit—and this applies to climate scenarios. (I explain this graphically here.) Not surprisingly, Weitzman’s work is often invoked by those who, like me, believe much more aggressive action is needed to limit carbon emissions.

It also happens that Weitzman is a giant in the field of environmental economics quite apart from his particular contribution to the climate debate. He did the original work on environmental policy under uncertainty and has contributed significantly to other areas of economic theory. (His analysis of the uncertainty problem is explained here.) Even if the greenhouse effect never existed he would be a candidate for a top prize.

Because of this, whenever economists speculated on who would win the econ Nobel, the Nordhaus scenario was always couched as Nordhaus-Weitzman. (For a recent example, see Tyler Cowen, who adds Partha Dasgupta, here.) It seemed logical to pair a go-slow climate guy with a go-fast one. But as it happened, Nordaus was paired not with Weitzman but Paul M. Romer for the latter’s work on endogenous growth theory. I won’t take up Romer’s contribution here, but what is interesting is that the Riksbank committee chose to yoke together two economists whose work is only loosely related. I can’t recall any forecaster ever predicting a joint prize for them, no matter how much commentators have scrambled to justify it after the fact.

The reality is this is a nonprize for Weitzman, an attempt to dismiss his approach to combating climate change, even though his position is far closer to the scientific mainstream than Nordhaus’. An example of the enlistment of the uncritical media in this enterprise is today’s New York Times, where Binyamin Appelbaum writes:

Mr. Nordhaus also was honored for his role in developing a model that allows economists to analyze the costs of climate change. His work undergirds a new United Nations report on the dangers of climate change, released Monday in South Korea.

Wrong. The work Nordhaus pioneered in the social cost of carbon is mentioned only twice in the IPCC report, a box in Chapter 2 and another in Chapter 3. The reason it appears only in boxes is that, while the authors of the report wanted to include this work in the interest of being comprehensive, it plays no role in any of their substantive conclusions. And how could it? The report is about the dangers of even just 1.5º of warming, less than the conventional 2º target, and far less than the 3+º Nordhaus is comfortable with. Damages are expressed primarily in terms of uninhabitable land and climate refugees, agricultural failure and food security, and similarly nonmonetary outcomes, not the utility-from-consumption metric on which Nordhaus’ work rests.

The Nordhaus/Romer combo is so artificial and unconvincing it’s hard to avoid the impression that the prize not given to Weitzman is as important as the one given to Nordhaus. This is a clear political statement about how to deal with climate change and how not to deal with it. The Riksbank has spoken: it wants a gradual approach to carbon, one that makes as few economic demands as possible.



A Not-So-Nobel Prize for Growth Economists. Brian Czech, CASSE. Oct. 15, 2018

In 1991 Nordhaus uttered one of the most iconic sentences in the history of unsustainability: “Agriculture, the part of the economy that is sensitive to climate change, accounts for just 3% of national output. That means that there is no way to get a very large effect on the US economy” (Science, September 14, 1991, p. 1206).  Think about that. He must have set a graveyard’s worth of classical economists (Adam Smith, David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill…) to rolling. They’d be rolling in laughter if the folly of Nordhaus wasn’t so dangerous.

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For [Romer], all that mattered was capital and labor; he said nothing about land, natural resources, or the environment. ... For Romer, it was as if ideas alone [R&D] could overcome water shortages, biodiversity loss, mineral depletion, soil erosion, pollution, and climate change. As if ideas could be perpetually borne out of human minds struggling in a degrading environment, a warming climate, and an imperiled agricultural base (not to mention a crowded, noisy, and stressed out society). Romer was like a cook thinking up recipes with no idea where the ingredients would come from.

A Few Things You Probably Didn't Know About William Nordhaus, Winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics. Ugo Bardi, Cassandra's Legacy. Oct. 14, 2018.

The strong non-linearity of the behavior of complex systems -- including the global economy -- is nearly impossible to understand for people trained in economics. William Nordhaus, the recent Nobel prize winner in economics, is no exception to the rule. In this post, I'll report how, at the beginning of his career, Nordhaus criticized "The Limits to Growth", showing in the process that he had understood nothing of the way complex systems work.

After having been awarded the Nobel prize in economics of this year, William Nordhaus has been often presented as some sort of an ecologist (see, e.g. this article on Forbes). Surely, Nordhaus' work on climate has merit and he is one of the leading world economists who recognize the importance of the problem and who propose remedies for it. On the other hand, Nordhaus' approach on climate can be criticized. Nordhaus tend to see the problem in terms of costs and solvable just by means of modest changes, for instance by means of a carbon tax. This has led him to clash rather heavily with another economist, Nicholas Stern, who sees the problem in more dramatic terms.

Nordhaus' approach to climate change mitigation highlights a general problem with how economists tend to tackle complex systems: their training makes them tend to see changes as smooth and gradual. But real-world systems, normally, do what they damn please, including crashing down in what we call the Seneca Effect.

On this point, let me tell you a little story of how Nordhaus started his career at Yale by an all-out attack against system dynamics, the method used to prepare the 1972 study "The Limits to Growth," showing in the process that he had understood nothing on the way complex systems work.

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Nordhaus just didn't understand Forrester's ideas and methods, claiming over and over that standard economics was a better tool to describe the world system. He couldn't understand -- just as most modern economists can't -- that standard economics doesn't account for the kind of oscillations -- including crashes - which are observed in history and that system dynamics describes very well. This is an especially serious limitation when dealing with the earth's climate, which is a complex system subjected to abrupt changes and tipping points: here Nordhaus' approach is not only wrong but outright dangerous because it leads decision makers to a false sensation of safety and control which, in reality, we don't have.

The Nordhaus Racket: How to use capitalization to minimize the cost of climate change and win a ‘Nobel’ for ‘sustainable growth’. Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan, Real-World Economics Review. Nov. 5, 2018.

Fiddling with the discount rate 

To illustrate, consider the following example. Suppose Nordhaus wants to cut the estimated PVt of climate change costs incurred 100 years from now by 50% below the scientific consensus. One way of doing so is to convince his readers that, 100 years from now, Ct+n will be half as large as most scientists think. But that won’t be easy. After all, Nordhaus is no climate scientist, he is a mere economist, and it would be a tall order, even for a future Economics Nobel Laureate, to argue that the climatological consensus is 50% off the mark. 

But there is a much easier route, and that is to fiddle with the discount rate (r). The enclosed chart shows how the same $100 worth of climate damage incurred 100 years from now (rightmost point on the horizontal axis, where n=100) changes as we get closer to the present (leftmost point, where n=0). Each line shows the changing present value under a different discount rate, with lower/higher discount rates causing smaller/greater reductions in present value. 

Now, suppose the conventional discount rate is 2.3% (dotted series). With this discount rate, today’s present value (PV0) of $100 worth of climate cost incurred one hundred years from now (n=100) is approximately $10. But there is nothing to prevent Nordhaus from using a different rate. A slightly higher rate of 3% (dashed series), for example, will cause today’s present value to drop by one half, to a mere $5, give or take. And Nordhaus doesn’t have to stop there. He can go the Full Monty, push the discount rate up to 4.7% (solid series), and reduce the present value to a paltry $1. Blessed are the wonders of compound interest. 

The nice thing about these discount-rate ‘adjustments’ is that, unlike the commotion stirred by debates over the actual cost of climate change, here there are no messy quarrels with scientists, no raised eyebrows from journalists and no outcries from the cheated public. Only contented politicians and delighted capitalists. 

And that is exactly the route chosen by William D. Nordhaus. 

Leveraging the capitalization ritual 

In his 2007 ‘Review of the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change’, he mocked Lord Nicolas Stern’s assumption of a low discount rate of 1.4%, suggesting we should instead discount the future by his favourite rate of 6%. 

And that mockery succeeded wonderfully. By leveraging the capitalization ritual in the name of profit and glory, Nordhaus managed to not only help investors minimize the apparent cost of climate change, but also win the Economics Nobel Prize as the white knight of nothing less than . . . ‘sustainable global economic growth’! Who says you can’t eat your cake and have it too?

ExxonMobil CEO Depressed After Realizing Earth Could End Before They Finish Extracting All the Oil. The Onion. Oct. 10, 2018.



Time travel with Galileo. Leanne  Ogasawara. 3QD. Oct. 15, 2018

Who in the world wants to travel forward in time? Is there any evidence whatsoever that things are going to become more interesting in the future? 

I would argue that every indication suggests that not only is our world going to get hotter, more barbaric and unjust–but as if that isn’t bad enough, conversations and romance will continue to decline precipitously. Evidence is surely on my side, right? Clinking my glass with my fork to get their attention, I patiently tried explaining what the future has in store: 

“Temperatures will rise,” I said, as their eyes glazed over. “And as people begin to jostle for resources, the elite class (I looked at them accusingly) will begin hunkering down in comfortable enclaves, while the vast global majority suffers outside.” 

I then painted a picture of what I imagined to be a dark version of today’s gated communities. “These enclaves for the wealthy will be like medieval castles. But whereas medieval castles served as a defense against 16th century artillery, the cities of the future will be fortresses for better control of scarce resources.”