It’s the final call, say scientists, the most extensive warning yet on the risks of rising global temperatures. Their dramatic report on keeping that rise under 1.5 degrees C states that the world is now completely off track, heading instead towards 3C. Staying below 1.5C will require “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society”. It will be hugely expensive, the report says, but the window of opportunity is not yet closed.
UN Says Climate Genocide Is Coming. It’s Actually Worse Than That. David Wallace-Wells, NYMag. Oct. 10, 2018.
If you are alarmed by those sentences, you should be — they are horrifying. But it is, actually, worse than that — considerably worse. That is because the new report’s worst-case scenario is, actually, a best case. In fact, it is a beyond-best-case scenario. What has been called a genocidal level of warming is already our inevitable future. The question is how much worse than that it will get.
Barring the arrival of dramatic new carbon-sucking technologies, which are so far from scalability at present that they are best described as fantasies of industrial absolution, it will not be possible to keep warming below two degrees Celsius — the level the new report describes as a climate catastrophe. As a planet, we are coursing along a trajectory that brings us north of four degrees by the end of the century. The IPCC is right that two degrees marks a world of climate catastrophe. Four degrees is twice as bad as that. And that is where we are headed, at present — a climate hell twice as hellish as the one the IPCC says, rightly, we must avoid at all costs. But the real meaning of the report is not “climate change is much worse than you think,” because anyone who knows the state of the research will find nothing surprising in it. The real meaning is, “you now have permission to freak out.”
Ahh, I didn't need permission... I've been freaking out for years
'Tipping points' could exacerbate climate crisis, scientists fear. Fiona Harvey, Guardian. Oct. 9, 2018.
IPCC report ‘underestimates potential of these key dangers to send Earth into spiral of runaway climate change’
Key dangers largely left out of the IPCC special report on 1.5C of warming are raising alarm among some scientists who fear we ~may~ have underestimated the impacts of humans on the Earth’s climate.
The IPCC report sets out the world’s current knowledge of the impacts of 1.5C of warming and clearly shows the dangers of breaching such a limit. However, many scientists are increasingly worried about factors about which we know much less.
These “known unknowns” of climate change are tipping points, or feedback mechanisms within the climate system – thresholds that, if passed, ~could~ send the Earth into a spiral of runaway climate change.
Tipping points merit only a few mentions in the IPCC report.
[MW: that's f'g insane... about as sane as analyzing the state of the US economy in 2006/07 and not paying any attention to either the credit bubble or the housing bubble.]
For more on self-reinforcing positive feedback effects and tipping points, see here, and read about the Venus syndrome here, and, finally, see here.
In-depth Q&A: The IPCC’s special report on climate change at 1.5C. CarbonBrief. Oct. 8, 2018.
U.N. warns world must take "unprecedented" steps to avert worst effects of global warming. Nina Chestney and Jane Chung, Reuters. Oct. 7, 2018.
A major new climate report slams the door on wishful thinking. Umair Irfan, vox. Oct. 7, 2018.
The IPCC says that even the most optimistic scenario for climate change is dire.
Meanwhile...
Energy sector's carbon emissions to grow for second year running. Adam Vaughan, Guardian. Oct. 8, 2018.
"This is definitely worrying news for our climate goals. We need to see a steep decline in emissions. We are not seeing even flat emissions.”
Michael Mann: We are even closer to climate disaster than IPCC predicts. Realnewsnetwork. Oct. 10, 2018.
DHARNA NOOR: So, Michael, you’ve been raising the alarm about climate change for decades. Talk about the significance of this IPCC report. The Paris climate accord years ago actually set 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels as an aspirational target, but this report makes it seem like that target is nowhere near enough.
MICHAEL MANN: Yeah, and in fact, even this report is overly conservative, as these IPCC reports often are. It turns out that in some ways this latest report has actually understated the amount of warming that we’ve already experienced because of the burning of fossil fuels and the increase in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. And so arguably we are actually closer to those 1.5 degrees Celsius and 2.0 Celsius thresholds, temperature thresholds, that are discussed in the report. We’re probably closer to them than the report implies. We probably have less carbon left to burn if we are to avoid crossing those thresholds.
Twelve More Years to Do Nothing. Albert Bates. Oct. 14, 2018.
To keep global warming to 1.5 degrees, the report says that human emissions of carbon dioxide must fall dramatically: by about 45 percent from 2010 levels by 2030, and to “net zero” around 2050. The real situation is worse than that.
Depending on where you start, we are already close enough to 1.5 that we can feel its hot breath on our collar. The IPCC did a nifty trick of shifting the starting point nearly a century forward from its earliest reports, the ones the set the temperature goal. They literally moved the goal posts. If they can keep doing that, we will never warm 1.5 degrees. Pretty cool, huh? The report’s authors say that 1.5 degrees is still financially and technologically feasible, and maybe this is why. We can always just manipulate the numbers.
Most of the media, from Democracy Now! to the Wall Street Journal, reported the news as a chance to procrastinate for another decade more.
Response to the IPCC 1.5°C Special Report. Kevin Anderson. Oct. 8, 2018.
The IPCC report meticulously lays out how the serious climate impacts of 1.5°C of warming are still far less destructive than those for 2°C. Sadly, the IPCC then fails, again, to address the profound implications of reducing emissions in line with both 1.5 and 2°C. Dress it up however we may wish, climate change is ultimately a rationing issue.
The responsibility for global emissions is heavily skewed towards the lifestyles of a relatively few high emitters – professors and climate academics amongst them. Almost 50% of global carbon emissions arise from the activities of around 10% of the global population, increasing to 70% of emissions from just 20% of citizens. Impose a limit on the per-capita carbon footprint of the top 10% of global emitters, equivalent to that of an average European citizen, and global emissions could be reduced by one third in a matter of a year or two.
Ignoring this huge inequality in emissions, the IPCC chooses instead to constrain its policy advice to fit neatly within the current economic model. This includes, significant reliance on removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere much later in the century, when today’s senior scientists and policy makers will be either retired or dead. Conjuring up such futuristic ‘negative emission technologies’ to help achieve the virtually impossible 1.5°C target is perhaps understandable, but such intergenerational buck-passing also dominates the IPCC’s 2°C advice.
To genuinely reduce emissions in line with 2°C of warming requires a transformation in the productive capacity of society, reminiscent of the Marshall Plan. The labour and resources used to furnish the high-carbon lifestyles of the top 20% will need to shift rapidly to deliver a fully decarbonised energy system. No more second or very large homes, SUVs, business and first-class flights, or very high levels of consumption. Instead, our economy should be building new zero-energy houses, retrofitting existing homes, huge expansion of public transport, and a 4-fold increase in (zero-carbon) electrification.
The Paris Agreement notes how it will take a little longer for poorer countries to fully decarbonise, raising the bar still further for the UK, USA and other wealthy nations. Even for 2°C the maths points to such nations moving to zero-carbon energy by 2035-2040, with poorer nations following suit a decade later. For 1.5°C, such ‘real’ 2°C mitigation will need to be complemented with planetary scale negative emissions. Whilst the IPCC’s 1.5°C report rightly emphasises the urgent need to research these speculative technologies, it continues to run scared of the economic elephant dominating the room. Until the IPCC (and society more generally) are prepared to acknowledge the huge asymmetry in consumption and hence emissions, temperatures will continue to rise beyond 1.5 and 2°C – bequeathing future generations the climate chaos of 3°C, 4°C or even higher.
It's Already Here. Ajay Singh Chaudhary, n+1. Oct. 10, 2018.
What’s more is that the very idea embodied in the Paris Agreement—a transition to sustainability within existing political, economic, and social systems—is simply not plausible. To use the language of the administration’s study, such efforts are not currently “economically practicable.” The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report released just a week after the administration study emphatically underlines this point: at every turn, mitigation and adaptation efforts are “limited by economic, financial, human capacity and institutional constraints.”
“Not One Country” On Track To Limit Global Warming To 2°C. Joshua Hill, CleanTechnica. Oct. 4, 2018.
Partisanship derails MP’s six-hour emergency meeting on UN climate report. Anna Desmarais, The Star. Oct. 16, 2018.
When Green Party Leader Elizabeth May took the floor, she begged Environment and Climate Change Minister Catherine McKenna to adopt the new emissions targets before the Canadian delegation heads to the United Nations’ COP24 meetings in December.
“It’s clear this minister (McKenna) cares, she’s doing a lot more than what others would do … but the IPCC says we need to do twice what we are doing now,” May said in an impassioned speech. “I’m begging her (McKenna) to commit … to the emissions targets.”
...
Under the Paris Agreement, Canada committed to reducing emissions by 30 per cent of 2005 levels. The opposition members note these are the same targets first put forward by former Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper. However, the agreement includes a section asking governments to re-evaluate their targets every five years.
Last week, McKenna admitted to knowing what the United Nations was going to publish, but doubled down on the government’s stance, telling the Canadian Press the solution to the planet’s climate woes exist in the plan already brought forward by the Liberals. ...
IPCC Releases Climate Report - First Thoughts. Gaius Publius, naked capitalism. Oct. 16, 2018.
I’m just delving into the new IPCC special report on the effects of limiting, or not limiting, global warming of 1.5°C (full report here), and there are a number of bottom lines coming out of it, including this one, which we reported earlier: “
IPCC Manipulating Climate Report Summary to Favor Wealthy Nations.”
The reference to manipulation refers to the executive summary part of the report (titled “Summary for Policymakers“),
which national representatives are allowed to edit line by line. The rest of the report is written by climate scientists,
but written by consensus, which causes it to “lean conservative” in its prognostication and prescriptions.
On that last point,
Climate Central wrote in 2012:
Across two decades and thousands of pages of reports, the world’s most authoritative voice on climate science has consistently understated the rate and intensity of climate change and the danger those impacts represent, say a growing number of studies on the topic.
This conservative bias, say some scientists, could have significant political implications, as reports from the group – the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – influence policy and planning decisions worldwide, from national governments down to local town councils. …
A comparison of past IPCC predictions against 22 years of weather data and the latest climate science find that the IPCC has consistently underplayed the intensity of global warming in each of its four major reports released since 1990.
The drastic decline of summer Arctic sea ice is one recent example: In the 2007 report, the IPCC concluded the Arctic would not lose its summer ice before 2070 at the earliest. But the ice pack has shrunk far faster than any scenario scientists felt policymakers should consider; now researchers say the region could see nearly ice-free summers within 20 years.
Sea ice predictions that are way off the mark are just the first of the prognostication failures the article lists.
Yet taking all that into account, the bulk of which will strike most people as obvious, I still want to write several pieces about this publication, starting with this one.
Greenpeace bottom-lines the report as follows:
Key takeaways
• 2°C is much more dangerous than thought when the Paris deal was signed. We are closer to critical tipping points and other key risks than we thought. Four out of the five main Reasons for Concern have been revised to signal substantially higher risks with lower levels of warming for humans, species and economies.
• Limiting warming to 1.5°C instead of 2°C would make a huge difference for the life in oceans and land. It would protect hundreds of millions of people from frequent extreme heatwaves, halve the proportion of additional populations suffering water scarcity and help achieve sustainable development and poverty eradication goals.
• Limiting warming to 1.5°C or below is challenging but still achievable, if we are fast, bold and lucky, and accelerate action on all fronts now.
• Solutions exist that could enable halving global carbon emissions by 2030 in ways that support development goals, build climate resilience and deliver us healthier and more prosperous societies.
• The next few years are critical for the world to embark on a transformational path to reduce its carbon emissions and increase its forests to bring emissions to net zero by mid century the latest. With countries’ current climate targets for 2030, we would have no chance. So they must be improved.
• We need to think big, at all levels, with everyone on board. The challenge is unprecedented and it won’t be solved by technology or economics alone. We need better governance and deeper understanding of system transformations, agency and motivation for change. And we need to prepare for the impacts and losses that can no longer be avoided, meeting the needs of people at risk.
Greenpeace has other takeaways with more detail; the short info-sheet is worth reading in its entirety. Two that caught my eye are this one:
• With countries’ current climate targets we are heading for well above 3°C. …
and this one:
• To get below 1.5°C global CO2 emissions would need to be halved by 2030 and reach net zero by mid-century at the latest, with substantial reductions in other gases.
Greenpeace is doing its best to be equally alarming and encouraging, as is, I suspect the IPCC (though we’ll find out more after reading the full report). Since no one really knows the future (an obvious statement that’s still only partly true), there may be a chance to avoid the worst of the climate outcomes by stopping our emissions “now” — meaning ASAP, on an WWII-style emergency timeline.
The problem, of course, is that even though everyone, including the Fox News drones, believes the worst is on the way, no one among the masses believes a real solution is possible.
Thus, nothing meaningful will be done, since no one thinks a meaningful think can be done. A circular checkmate, to mix metaphors.
Climate Change and Confederate Flags
More on the last point later, but I do want to show you a recent Saturday Night Live take on the IPCC report, which restates the above problem in a novel and comic way. This is from their “Weekend Update” segment. After talking about the Kanye West’s bizarre appearance in the Oval Office, the hosts pivot to the climate report (emphasis added):
Colin Jost: This [Kanye West’s pro-Trump pronouncement] was pretty crazy. But look, it’s not the end of the world, O.K., because this is the end of the world. That’s right. Scientists basically published an obituary for the earth this week and people were like, yeah, but like what does Taylor Swift think?
We don’t really worry about climate change because it’s too overwhelming and we’re already in too deep. It’s like if you owe your bookie $1,000, you’re like, oh yeah, I gotta pay this dude back. But if you owe your bookie $1 million, you’re like, I guess I’m just gonna die.
Michael Che: This story has been stressing me out all week. I just keep asking myself, why don’t I care about this? Don’t get me wrong: I 100-percent believe in climate change. Yet, I’m willing to do absolutely nothing about it.
I mean, we’re all going to lose the planet. We should be sad, right? This whole episode should be like a telethon or something, but it’s not. I think it’s because they keep telling us we’re going to lose everything and nobody cares about everything.
People only care about some things. Like, if Fox News reported that climate change is going to take away all the flags and Confederate statues? Oh, there’d be recycling bins outside of every Cracker Barrel and Dick’s Sporting Goods.
Nice double use of “cracker” and two good points. First,
disaster freezes action (until it doesn’t). And second, most people don’t care about the planet or “humanity” in the abstract nearly as much as they care about their kin, their immediate friends, and their tribe. So what will make the TV-watching masses care enough to act?
I’ve often thought, for example, that something as non-lethal as the permanent inability to play college football anywhere on the East Coast from October 1 through November 30 — eight solid weeks — due to constant hurricanes and torrential rainstorms might do the trick.
After all, imagine: no home games for two entire months in much of the ACC or SEC, none in Florida, the Carolinas or Georgia, ever again. Would that get the Fox News and Fox Sports fanboys’ attention, enough for them to act? I think it might, and with a lot less loss of life than something much more drastic.
A
new IPCC report written and edited by 91 scientists from 40 countries who analyzed more than 6,000 scientific studies says we’re
looking at climate catastrophe as early as 2040
unless changes are made worldwide on a scale and speed which has no historic precedent. $54 trillion worth of damage is predicted to result from the 1.5 degree Celsius rise in global average temperatures we’re expected to be facing at that time if drastic changes are not made.
To be clear, when climate scientists talk about a 1.5 degree hike in global average temperatures, they are not saying that days will tend to be around 1.5 degrees warmer, which doesn’t sound bad at all. What they are saying is that there will be drastic heat spikes which elevate the overall average by 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) around the globe. This means moving into a world which sees sea levels rising and destroying coastal and island civilizations, it means mass famine due to destruction of crops from heat spikes in summer months, freezes in the winter and other extreme weather events, it means potential worldwide violence and predation as livable regions and resources become scarce on a rapidly changing planet.
This is coming off the back of the Trump administration’s seamless shift from claiming climate change is a Chinese hoax to saying it’s very real and very bad but there’s nothing that can be done about it. In a
Draft Environmental Impact Statement, Trump’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said that a temporary freeze in fuel efficiency requirements for cars won’t be that big of a deal in terms of environmental impact because we’re headed toward a four degree Celsius increase in global average temperatures by the end of the century and avoiding that “would require substantial increases in technology innovation and adoption compared to today’s levels and would require the economy and the vehicle fleet to move away from the use of fossil fuels, which is not currently technologically feasible or economically feasible.”
This also follows
a recent report about the
frightening phenomenon of positive feedback loops, warming effects which make themselves worse, which climate science has been reluctant to examine closely and as a group until recently. An example of a positive feedback loop would be the release of methane trapped in thawing Siberian permafrost, which exacerbates warming because methane is a potent and fast-acting greenhouse gas, which then causes more thawing and the release of more methane. After examining just a few of these feedback loops
(there are dozens), the paper concluded that it may be
possible for the earth to hit a “hothouse” point of accelerated warming from which there can be no coming back, regardless of changes made in human industry or behavior.
In just a few hours, the final call to save the world from #ClimateEmergency has slipped into near-invisibility on the @BBCNews front page. That says it all. pic.twitter.com/ejSxLTJIkt
— Media Lens (@medialens) October 8, 2018
Alarming new reports like these are pouring out constantly, and, contrary to the narrative promulgated by climate change deniers, they don’t generally get that much attention in the mainstream media. The British analysis website Media Lens
just reported that the IPCC study was on the front of the BBC website for just a few hours before getting buried, despite its cataclysmic implications for our species.
It’s much easier to get a reader interested in high-profile boogie men like Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump than it is to get them to look at data suggesting that they are staring down the barrel of an actual armageddon event in their lifetime, and the establishment powers which the corporate media serve have a vested interest in preserving the status quo. You are far more likely to see a news story about a celebrity or a politician when you switch on CNN than you are to see a report about the most important and pressing subject of our time.
This essay is guaranteed to get a lot of pushback from many of the conspiracy buffs who follow me, because they, unlike the Trump administration, still subscribe to the right-wing belief that anthropogenic global warming is a hoax being used by globalist elites to seize control of the world. And you know what? I get it. I will say that it is perfectly reasonable to believe that powerful plutocrats would be interested in using the concept of climate change to lock down control of human behavior and the world economy, and I will take it a step further and say it is a virtual certainty that there are plutocrats and their lackeys currently doing exactly that. When you’re talking about a shift in industry and energy worth tens of trillions of dollars and the potential to degrade national sovereignty with global regulations, you may be absolutely certain that there are extremely powerful people scheming to exploit it. Of course they are.
But that doesn’t mean it isn’t real. The science showing the warming effect of man’s carbon-releasing industrial activities was discovered in 1896 by a man named
Svante Arrhenius. Nobody accused him of being a pawn in a globalist conspiracy; the scientific world simply noted his discovery with an “Oh cool, yeah, that makes sense.” One of his colleagues even
suggested setting fire to unused coal seams in order to increase global temperature, because back then milder winters sounded like a nice idea. It wasn’t until this line of scientific inquiry became threatening to the fossil fuel industry that it turned into a radically politicized debate propelled by Koch-funded research teams and Fox News.
If this insane story is any indication, Trump may be trying out FUCK THE PLANET as a campaign slogan to replace MAGA. https://t.co/ZcsgPBtnpB
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) September 28, 2018
I’ve been watching climate deniers for a long time. They used to deny climate change altogether, then sometime around the turn of the century they started admitting that yes, we are seeing a warming trend, but that doesn’t mean it’s caused by human behavior. Now I’m starting to see them admitting that yes, the earth is warming, and yes, it probably is anthropogenic, but that doesn’t mean it will necessarily be a bad thing. That’s the dumbest one yet, in my opinion. In response to the latest IPCC report I’ve seen a flood of comments saying “Yeah, yeah, you guys have been predicting an approaching climate disaster for decades,” despite the fact that the new report concludes that climate catastrophe appears to be approaching far faster than most had predicted.
I used to involve myself in the climate change debate very extensively, and I’ve yet to encounter an argument against it that couldn’t be thoroughly debunked with a little research. It’s one of those things like Russiagate or QAnon which has a lot of emotional appeal but doesn’t hold up well to critical thinking. It seems clear to me from all the goalpost-shifting and straw-man arguments that the primary impulse behind climate denial is distrust of authority (which is always a good idea) and a
basic desire to avoid the psychological discomfort of grappling with the reality that in a few short decades humanity could be extinct (which is just garden variety cowardice).
It’s always seemed so weird to me that conspiracy enthusiasts can understand nuance in so many other fields, but not this one. They generally understand that a false flag isn’t necessarily a completely manufactured event from top to bottom and can in fact be as simple as allowing someone to make an attack they’d been planning. They can grasp complex financial arrangements and understand that alliances and power structures don’t always move in the way your view of the world would predict, but the idea that anthropogenic climate change can be real at the same time as the existence of oligarchic plans to exploit it is something that rarely seems to occur to people.
Love to be twenty years away from an actual apocalypse and the main political response is “science isn’t real”
— pixelated (something halloween-related) (@pixelatedboat) October 8, 2018
Billions of large mammals digging up fuel sources from the earth and pouring their exhaust into the air for decades will necessarily change the environment. Of course it will. This should be obvious to everyone. Powerful manipulators who work constantly to control as much of the world as possible will necessarily try to make sure they grab up as much power as possible in a historically unprecedented global shift in energy and industry. Of course they will. This too should be obvious to everyone. Both are true. Both need to be dealt with.
The fact that we are ruled by depraved oligarchs doesn’t mean we shouldn’t fight climate change, it means we should overthrow the oligarchs so that they don’t find a way to herd us into a globalist Orwellian dystopia as they shore up power in the fight against climate change.
In fact, if seen in the right light, if you take both into account, you will see this is also a huge opportunity to spot the machinations of the plutocracy as it shuffles everything into place, and in the chaos, for the people to seize back control. The smooth running machine of the oligarchy will necessarily have to change shape to take advantage of the new industries and to keep in control. That’s a tricky dance and one they haven’t been planning for that long, so there will be many openings where the people can seep in like water and gum up the gears.
In order to do this, we must have as complete a roadmap as possible, and that means letting go of loyalties to partisan theories and taking a step back and engaging with all the data as it is. It can be done. It must be done. Our lives depend on it.
A Climate Fit for a Groundhog. Ilargi, Automatic Earth. Oct. 9, 2018.
And there we go again. Another IPCC report, and they all keep getting more alarming than the previous one. And then nothing substantial happens. Until the next report is issued and makes everybody’s headlines for a day, or two. Rinse, spin and repeat. “Now we really have to do something!”. “World leaders have a moral obligation to act!”.
Oh boy. To start with that last bit, world leaders don’t act because of moral obligations. They act to stay in, or get in, power. And they all know that to achieve that goal they must keep their people happy, even if dictators do this differently from ‘democratically elected’ leaders.
The first tool they have for this is control of the media, control of the narratives that define -or seem to- their societies. If a society is in bad shape, they will control the media to show that it is doing fine. if it’s actually doing fine, they will make sure all the praise for this is theirs and theirs alone.
So what makes their people happy? One thing far ahead of anything else is
material comfort. If leaders can’t convince people that they’re comfortable, their power is in danger. Once enough people are miserable or hungry, a process is set in motion that threatens to push leaders aside in favor of someone who promises to make things better. There’s never a shortage of those.
Leaders, politicians, think short-term. They may see further into the future than the next election, but that is not useful information. If they enact measures aimed at 10 years from today or more, they risk being voted out in 2 years, or 4. It’s not even their fault, it’s how the system works. It is different for dictators, but not even that much.
The general notion is clear.
But that means we can’t rely on our leaders to act against the climate change the IPCC keeps warning of. because it has a -much- longer time window than the next elections -or the next coup in dictator terms. Even if every IPCC report depicts a shorter window than the last one, it’s still not inside those 4-year election cycles (numbers vary slightly, 4 is typical).
A typical ‘response’ to the climate threat are the COP meetings and agreements. I have fulminated plenty against COP21, the Paris accord, even named it
CON21. Because that was signed by those very leaders tied down in their election cycles. Completely useless. That most of the other signees were business leaders who represent oil companies, airlines and Big Tech with huge server parks seals the reality of the deal.
These are not the people who will solve the problems. They have too much interest in not doing so. The CEO’s have their profits to think about, the politicians their elections. They should be kept out of the decision-making process. But they’re the only ones who are in it.
I still think the issue was never better epitomized than in the December 2016 piece in the Guardian by Michael Bloomberg and Mark Carney entitled
“How To Make A Profit From Defeating Climate Change” , about which I said at the time:
These fine gents probably actually believe that this is perfectly in line with our knowledge of, say, human history, of evolution, of the laws of physics, and of mass psychology. All of which undoubtedly indicate to them that we can and will defeat the problems we have created -and still are-, literally with the same tools and ideas -money and profit- that we use to create them with. Nothing ever made more sense.
That these problems originated in the same relentless quest for profit that they now claim will help us get rid of them, is likely a step too far for them; must have been a class they missed. “We destroyed it for profit” apparently does not in their eyes contradict “we’ll fix it for profit too”. Not one bit. It does, though. It’s indeed the very core of what is going wrong.
Profit, or money in general, is all these people live for, it’s their altar. That’s why they are successful in this world. It’s also why the world is doomed. Is there any chance I could persuade you to dwell on that for a few seconds? That, say, Bloomberg and Carney, and all they represent, are the problem dressed up as the solution?
This week’s IPCC report says the efforts to keep warming at acceptable levels (1.5ºC) will cost many trillions of dollars every year. But a billionaire publisher and a central bank head want to make a profit?! Hey, perhaps they can, as long as you and I pay… But they won’t solve a thing. if only because not doing that will be too profitable. Still, while they’re at it, maybe they can do us a favor.
You see, what is hardly ever mentioned, let alone acknowledged, is that we have more than one major existential problem, and they exist in such a form of symbiosis that solving only one doesn’t make much difference.
We have a changing climate, we have accelerating species extinction, we have plastics in our fish, and we have a global economy that’s about to topple over. The common thread in all these is an overkill in energy use and therefore an overkill in waste. Thermodynamics, 2nd law. Waste kills. By raising temperatures, finishing off wildlife, plugging rivers and oceans with plastics, making increasing amounts of people economically miserable.
But as I wrote a while ago, our economies exist to produce waste, it’s not just a by-product -anymore. If we stop making things we don’t need, and things that do harm to our world and our lives, our economies will collapse.
We must continue on our path or see our lifetstyles plummet. They will anyway, we’re just delaying the inevitable, but we’re stuck.
And politicians are utterly useless and utterly unfit in situations like this. But ask yourself: are you any better? If you were told that in order to ‘save the planet’, you’d have to cut your energy use in half, which would take away many of your comforts and luxuries, would you do it?
A better question yet is, if you would agree to do that, and then see that your neighbor does not, would you still cut your driving and flying and electricity? That’s hard enough on an individual level, but how about if one nation does, while another refuses? Or when nations that have much lower per capita energy consumption tell the West: you go first?
What do you think the odds are that we’ll find a global solution, approach, before the 2030 cutoff date the IPCC provides in its latest report? While the likes of Bloomberg and Carney still talk about climate change as a profit opportunity? I know what I think.
The report says we need to drastically ‘reform’ our economies and lifestyles. Cutting our energy use in the West in half won’t be enough, if only because billions of people demand more energy at their disposal. Will you cut into your lifestyle, will your children, when they see their neighbors increasing their energy use, when they see entire nations increase theirs?
We don’t have ‘leaders’ that can stop species extinction or a warming planet or an economic collapse, because they either are clueless or they will be voted out of power if they tell the truth. Extend and pretend is a term that’s used to describe economic policies a lot, but it actually paints an accurate picture of everything we do.
“Free”, surplus, energy can come in the shape of sugar in a petri dish full of bacteria, or of stored carbon on planet earth. In both cases, the outcome is as predictable as can be. Can we, with our billions of cars and billions of miles flown every year, and billions of phones and computers, return to the energy use of only 100 years ago? Don’t think so.
On the contrary, we’re constantly increasing our energy consumption. Just like the bacteria do in the petri dish. Until they no longer can,
until reality, physics, thermodynamics, sets a limit. One of my favorite themes is that
we are the most tragic species ever because we can see ourselves doing things that we know are harmful to us, but we can’t stop ourselves from continuing.
The best we can hope for is that tomorrow morning everything will be the same again as where we started today. But no, that’s not sufficient, either,
many of the things we’ve unleashed have 20+ year runtimes, and they’re already baked into the cake of our futures. We can’t start afresh every morning, no Groundhog Day for us. Every morning the alarm goes off things have gotten worse. And we can’t stop that.
Ecosocialists Believe the Only Way to Stop Climate Change Is to Abandon Capitalism. Kayleigh Rogers, Motherboard. Oct. 10, 2018.
Once more. Climate change is settled science. Climate change is pas the point of no return. (If you believe that nations are even going to keep the Paris agreement targets, you’re such a fool you’ll be sold all the world’s bridges.)
These numbers are catastrophic, and the IPCC reports are always over-optimistic. Always.
There are quite a number of scenarios where this stuff happens faster. You’ll notice that this chart has straight line assumptions. That’s—almost certainly wrong. What will actually happen is that we’ll get some feedback loop like arctic or permafrost methane release and that will lead to parabolic increases. When it breaks, it will break hard.
At that point a lot of other problems could also blow up, the most serious of which would be the oceans losing their ability produce oxygen. If that happens, well, we’re dead.
Even if it doesn’t, things like the thermohaline currents flipping or shutting off are possible. Europe could, in the middle of everyone else getting hot, have a mini-ice age.
People don’t realize how far north Europe is. If it didn’t have warm currents, it would be like parts of Canada that are, well, almost uninhabited, and for damn good reasons.
This will also, certainly, screw with weather systems. Imagine Indian monsoons failing for even three years in a row. Can you say hundreds of millions of deaths. Move your lips.
And it isn’t that we are decelerating, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, who will likely win election, has essentially promised to chop down what remains of the Amazon jungle as fast as possible (and also, to commit genocide on the remaining indigenous tribes. No, don’t pretend; that’s what he means.)
We are so far up shit creek we are never seeing clear waters again.
Be very clear on this, and if you want to survive (deciding to not bother is a legitimate decision and if you’re old you may die before the worst of it) start doing what you can for yourself.
We are long past (a good 10 years past, at a minimum) any possibility of stopping this.
This is triage time. Are you going to survive? Your family, friends and loved ones?
The Adorable Optimism of the IPCC. Peter Watts. Oct. 26, 2018.
It’s been a couple of weeks now since the IPCC report came out. You know what it says. If the whole damn species pulls together in a concerted effort “without historical precedent”— if we start right now, and never let up on the throttle— we just might be able to swing the needle back from Catastrophe to mere Disaster. If we cut carbon emissions by half over the next decade, eliminate them entirely by 2050; if the species cuts its meat and dairy consumption by 90%; if we invent new unicorn technologies for sucking carbon back out of the atmosphere (or scale up extant prototype tech by a factor of two million in two years) — if we commit to these and other equally Herculean tasks, then we might just barely be able to keep global temperature from rising more than 1.5°C.
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Up here in Canada, the reigning Liberals— for all their noble rhetoric about fighting climate change— are still buying pipelines and forcing Tar Sands down our throats and subsidizing Big Oil to the tune of over three billion dollars a year; the Conservative Opposition won’t even pay mealy-mouth lip service to the issue. Down in the states both mainstream parties are sucking too hard on the corporate teat to do anything that might actually endanger the profits of their owners. Individual actions can’t fix things: the very scale of the problem guarantees that institutional responses have always been necessary. All of this is true.
But you know what, people? There were always alternatives. You could have voted for Sanders. You could have voted Green. You could have voted for Ralph fucking Nader, when he was running. Hell, am I the only one who remembers Jerry Brown’s abortive run at the presidency, back in 1980? I still remember his announcement, the Three Priorities he laid out for his administration:
- Protect the Environment
- Serve the People
- Explore the Universe
That’s a damned good mission statement if you ask me. All it got him was jokes from Johnny Carson about how Jerry Brown had locked up the Grey Whale vote, and jokes from everyone else that usually revolved around the fact he was fucking Linda Ronstadt.
Of course he didn’t have a chance. Of course voting for him, or Nader, or the Greens was “throwing away your vote”. None of them had a chance.
And that’s my fucking point. It’s not that no one had heard of these people. It’s not that you weren’t familiar with their platforms. You knew what they stood for and you wrote them off. You were told they were fringe, that they never stood a chance, so you went out and made it true. You voted en masse for the status quo and the corporate teat-sucklers. Now Darby and Klein and Guenther trip over themselves to let you off the hook, to blame Capitalism and Neoliberalism and its stranglehold on the groupthink of modern politics— but how did you end up with leaders who so willingly abased themselves at that altar in the first place, you ignorant shit-heads? There were always alternatives, and you saw them, and you laughed.
Sure, the Neolibs conned you. Because you wanted to be conned.
Reap the whirlwind, you miserable fuckers. May your children choke on it.
Catastrophe – Collapse – Apology – Words missing from the IPCC report. Jem Bendell. Oct. 8, 2018.
In complex systems people’s choice of time horizons for future events is as much a reflection of how they want to feel and how they want to communicate as it is an actual forecast. Especially so when combining so many different models on so many different ecosystem impacts and feedbacks.
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Some words missing from the IPCC SR 15 summary for policymakers are: Catastrophe, Collapse, Starvation, Emergency, Apology, Sorry.
So what to do? Lots of things! But here are a few:
- Seed clouds in the Artic and Antarctic at scale immediately and research the impacts.
- Research how else to stop methane escaping the artic shelf off Siberia and try it
- Global carbon tax embedded in trade agreements right now
- Implement means of drawing down carbon from atmosphere by restoring and growing natural carbon sinks, including transformation of modern agriculture
- Explore how to prepare for collapse locally and globally within a Deep Adaptation framing, which doesn’t assume or try to preserve our current ideas of development and progress. This is in itself a huge agenda, involving everyone, and seriously under-discussed because it has hitherto been taboo.
- Do not dismiss ideas on what to do now because they do not fit with your story of self or reality which gives you a sense of confidence or calm. Our attachment to our stories is what got us into this mess in the first place.
- Look within, at what you most value, as if these are our last years on Earth and we won’t succeed in achieving collective goals on development or environment. That means deeply adapting ourselves to collapse and it’s lessons for humanity and self.
That last one is important because nothing is now likely to work in preventing a near term social collapse due to climate change. But it is also important because it always was important. Afterall, why are we here!?
Hi friends. Let’s talk about the IPCC report. David Estrada, Medium. Oct. 18, 2018.
Okay, well, when I say “we can do it” I don’t really mean you and me. Even if everyone who has ever known someone that has read an article on medium.com were to stop driving their cars and eating meat today, by itself this would have very little impact on global warming trends. Individual behavior isn’t the problem. The global industrial dependence on fossil fuels is the problem. The “we” who can do this are the international regulatory bodies and multinational corporations, mostly energy companies, who are responsible for the heavy infrastructural dependence on fossil fuels.
Don’t get me wrong: if we can turn the system around, you will absolutely see dramatic changes in your individual daily routines, including basic things like transportation infrastructure, diet, and energy use habits. You should expect and prepare for those changes to arrive, and quickly. But we aren’t going to stop global climate change because you’ve made those changes. Rather, the fact that you’ve made those changes will add to the (hopefully growing) evidence that we’re effectively addressing climate change at the global scale. If we aren’t seen these sweeping changes in our own lives relatively soon we can be certain that we’re failing globally.
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we have some responsibility to recognize that our institutions have fundamentally failed us, and we should collectively declare a vote of no confidence. A declaration of no confidence would assert the people’s collective power to render the political framework in its current incarnation null, void, and inert. Perhaps we clean house and start fresh, perhaps we try some attractive alternative frameworks. If we suspect a no confidence vote going into 2028, we ought to be hard at work preparing alternatives beforehand. Regardless of which alternatives we advance, however, we should under no circumstances allow 2028 to pass without fundamental, sweeping political reform. One way or another, our political institutions after 2028 cannot resemble our political institutions before.
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Interlude: a confession
If you’re still reading, I’ll suspend my central thesis of optimism for a moment of honesty. I lost confidence in our political process a long time ago. I personally don’t trust our political institutions to manage this challenge. At all. I don’t think there’s enough leverage in the system to counteract the fundamental greed embedded in every facet of global capitalism. If you want my opinion, we should have demanded these sweeping reforms decades ago.
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there’s nothing inherently anti-capitalist about using government powers to prevent conditions that threaten the survival of the very populations which compose those markets. An empty market is only trivially free. It is in the interest of most capitalists to engineer a solution to climate change. The only big losers among the capitalists will be in the energy sector, because their business practices have triggered a global extinction event. If your primary concern is that a coordinated response to climate genocide is somehow anti-capitalist, perhaps your priorities are not where they should be. Any politician with this position is working for the energy industry, and should be treated as an enemy of the people and stripped of power immediately.
