American Dreamers

So their eyes are growing hazy 'cos they wanna turn
it on, 
so their minds are soft and lazy. 
Well, hey, give 'em what they want. 

10, 000 maniacs

Greetings

   Its always nice to get together with friends and family.   Talk about traveling, the kids, the grand-kids.  The grand-kids are doing well. They're playing soccer and going to a Japanese immersion school !.     

    (But It's  hard to wonder a little, especially once you've taken the red pill.  :>)

    Can't help wondering about that  grandchild.   Let's say she is born this year..  What will things look like when she is 16?    Will she be driving around like Jim was, enjoying a life of freedom?   Perhaps.   Perhaps not.     Wonder what the weather will be like down in LA?   What kind of food will they be serving at Pop Tate's Malt shop?  Fish and chips? )

      Below a nice piece exploring the psychological aspects of dealing with the future.   

"In America, we talk incessantly about our way of life or the American Dream, and with great allegiance and fervor.  The stories we tell about ourselves and our way of life—the way we narrate our conscious experience and perception of things—have no place in them for the most basic, and mainly uncontested, facts about energy and the environment."

  

     This dream is supported by the media. the politicians, and the academics. So, who wants to argue?  My favorite is the Nobel Prize winning economist who says:

 “it is very easy to substitute other factors for natural resources, then there is, in principle, no problem. The world can, in effect, get along without natural resources.”

OK !!   Now we're talking!  

 Read my highlights here, or the whole story below:

   --------

http://peakoil.com/generalideas/the-future-of-an-illusion

"How is it that the leading economists, politicians, journalist, along with most academics, speak matter-of-factly about a future that cannot exists, at least not without the destruction of life as we know it (and with it, as the most tragic collateral damage, our dearly beloved economy)?  

......

"Once in a while, this zealously guarded theory of infinite and eternally replaceable natural resources will cross paths with the data linking economic activity with energy use and resource extraction.  Consider in this vein the graph below put out in 2009 by The Energy Information Agency, which is the statistical wing of the U.S. Department of Energy, which in turn is torn between providing reliable data, which it does, and supporting an optimistic, pro-business agenda.

The dark blue line on top, which rises slowly from 86 million barrels per day in 2008 to around 105 barrels per day in 2030, represents a bare minimum growth in liquid fuel supply that will be needed to keep the global economy relatively intact.  Other projections of liquid fuel needs, like that of the U.S. military, will calculate this probable demand much higher.  The colored sections sweeping down to the right represent all known sources of liquid fuels and their expected depletion rates.  Along with other analysts, I am at somewhat of a loss to explain the wording used to explain the large blank space standing between demand and supply:  Is this a joke or just a bad dream?  Is “unidentified” code for “does not exist”?  Or is it code for “of coursesomeone will find this if demand remains sufficiently high?”  Or is this a Rorschach test against which each may test his or her own cultural expectations?  While the fact that this gap will have grown to the equivalent of about five Saudi Arabia’s of oil production within the next fifteen years (and no one thinks that even one more Saudi Arabia even exists) suggests that the authors might be secretly admitting defeat, there is little else in the EIA’s reporting, here or elsewhere, to suggest that preparing for a 43 million barrel a day shortfall should be of wide or urgent concern.  At the same time, no real climate scientists believes that life on planet Earth can survive if we don’t drastically reduce our consumption of fossil fuels.  A 105 barrel a day diet is a doomsday prophecy, especially since the EIA and other similar agencies also project similar increases in coal and natural gas consumption.

.....
If and when historians look back on our time, the most notable aspect of industrial civilization will not be our political system or our respect of individual dignity.  It will not be our love of freedom nor our ingenious hard work.  It will not be our technological advances, the dazzling array of amusing gadgetry or load-lightning machinery.  It will be the ungodly and unsustainable (and therefore unsustained) amounts of energy that a people gripped by a great and inexplicable fever used and wasted with little thought or concern.  How, they will someday ask, could these people not see what was so obvious?  How could they prattle on and on about their way of life and the model they present for the rest of the world to follow?

......

In order to support this view–that there are no ecological limits to growth–one must make some improbable assumptions about resources themselves, the main one being that any resource has a better and cheaper substitute waiting to be found, discovered, or synthesized by next inventive genius.  Another Nobel Prize winner, Robert Solow, will thus declare that, since “it is very easy to substitute other factors for natural resources, then there is, in principle, no problem. The world can, in effect, get along without natural resources.”  This belief that it is so easy to substitute one natural resource for another–to the point, apparently where this substitutional whirl will launch us free from gravity and the Earth itself–has in fact been formalized into “Hartwick’s Rule.”

  

.....

The Future of an Illusion

by Erik Lindberg, originally published by Transition Milwaukee  | TODAY

Illusion image via Fran/flickr. Creative Commons 2.0 license.

 

In Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, Sigmund Freud relates the story of the man accused by his neighbor of damaging a borrowed kettle.  As Freud tells it, “A. borrowed a copper kettle from B. and after he had returned it was sued by B. because the kettle now had a big hole in it which made it unusable. His defense was: ‘First, I never borrowed a kettle from B at all; secondly, the kettle had a hole in it already when I got it from him; and thirdly, I gave him back the kettle undamaged.’”  As Freud notes, “each one of these defenses is valid in itself,” or rather, I would suggest, is logically coherent; “but taken together they exclude one another.”  Not only can they all not be true, the mere articulating of all three reveals a fundamental sort of incoherence that Freud attributes to the unconscious wishes expressed in our dreams or voiced in our jokes.  But this sort of thinking also seems to occur when one is straining beyond all rationality to defend a hopeful ideal against the onslaught of reality   A. is clearly lying.  The remaining question is why he is lying in such an ineffective manner.  Perhaps, we might guess, he is lying to himself as much as anyone else.  The story gets its humor and provides a moment of recognition, I would suggest, from the fact that we all will hurl such incompatible defenses at a subject when we cannot bear to admit the truth.  What makes the story funny is the way A.’s irrationality is presented in a condensed form, while we would be more likely to use one excuse one day, and a different one on another.

 

Freud’s anecdote may help illustrate the role played by energy or natural resources in the fictions we recite in American and the industrial world about our way of life.  The American way of life, its starry-eyed defenders will tell us, is not really dependent on massive amounts of energy or other natural resources; rather, as we have seen, it is based on the American spirit, our traditions, and our freedoms.  Yet as part of the same cultural matrix, we are also assured that there is plenty of oil and other fossil fuel to power what is, in fact, the high energy demands of Americans; and finally, in the face of our impending shortage of fossil fuels, certainly, we are reminded, the budding renewable energy sector will bring sufficient amounts of wind, solar, and biofuels on line in a timely manner, while our high-tech computer industry will create a low-energy network of “smart” efficiencies.   And so we are told that we won’t run out of current sources, and that there are plenty of alternatives when we do run out, and, in the end, that we don’t actually need all that energy to maintain our way of life, because, in a final twist of heavy-eyed logic, our way of life is so ingenious as to find or create all the resources we need.  

 

It is unusual to hear all three or four of these defenses come out of one person’s mouth in quick succession.  But, it seems to me, most Americans have multiple defenses like this, ready-at-hand, whenever the issue of energy or our environmental destruction begins to rise to the surface of our consciousness.  Who among us has not, in the face of a particularly disturbing story about global warming, muttered to themselves, “certainly someone will do something to stop this before it is too late,” thus calming the momentary flare up of anxiety.  Have we not all warded off a pang of guilt at a wasteful purchase or careless disposal with soothing images of the coming miracle of green technology?  If we were really about to run out of oil, the government would tell us, right?  Certainly we can live like we do right now with increased efficiencies.  Of course wind and solar need just a little more incentive and they too can spark a new energy revolution.  Every time someone predicts apocalypse, things turn out okay.  Remember what a dud Y2K was?  The Stone Age didn’t end because of a shortage of stones, after all!  Even the most energy-conscious among us have a repertoire of images of rescue and reprieve which allow us to turn the thermostat a notch higher than we need or buy that unnecessarily large television.  In a million little ways, the accumulated  messages, the fragments of an idea, the overheard remark, the reassuring voice of the radio whisper to us—“this is okay, this is okay, this is okay.”

 

At the risk of drawing a closer parallel with Freud’s more technical version of it than I wish, I am proposing, then, that energy isthe unconscious of the American way of life.  Energy is there, everywhere; it underwrites everything we do, want, and expect.  But it remains absent from our prominent self-descriptions, pushed out of sight by a thousand acts of informal censorship.  The middle- class lifestyle in the United States and other “advanced” nations requires unfathomable supplies of finite and rapidly depleting resources for its daily operation.  The way that a consumption-driven economic system concentrates waste and hazardous materials is destroying the ecological balance upon which life depends and at an alarming rate, to the point, now where massive extinctions have become commonplace, and where we don’t know where something as basic as water for our food supply will come from in the near future.  This prodigious use of energy and production of waste forms the most fundamental conditions of possibility for the American way of life.   All that we know and expect, value and demand, are not possible without all this consumption and this waste.  If and when historians look back on our time, the most notable aspect of industrial civilization will not be our political system or our respect of individual dignity.  It will not be our love of freedom nor our ingenious hard work.  It will not be our technological advances, the dazzling array of amusing gadgetry or load-lightning machinery.  It will be the ungodly and unsustainable (and therefore unsustained) amounts of energy that a people gripped by a great and inexplicable fever used and wasted with little thought or concern.  How, they will someday ask, could these people not see what was so obvious?  How could they prattle on and on about their way of life and the model they present for the rest of the world to follow?

 

It is easy enough to understand how the average American consumer can stumble along unaware of the ecological footprint of his or her way of life.  We interact with our natural environment mainly through the medium of money, and the relatively low cost of energy and thus of everything else has done little to cause us much concern.  Many of us are shuttled by way of cheap gasoline from climate-controlled house, to an artificially lighted work-place, to a prepackaged supermarket, to a night in front of electronic amusement, and there is little, in all this, to shock one’s level of energy and material use out of the unconscious realm. This, however, is not the case with economists, who must keep track of things like the changing effects of supply and demand.  All this leads to some astounding instances of Kettle Logic that would be amusing were its chief proponents not given such power and influence within the modern world.  Our prevailing roadmap for the future has been drawn according to an economic paradigm of beliefs and, worse yet, desires.

 

There is a sense in which all discussions of true sustainability (not the marketing version) either are about economics, or should be.  The future of its illusions are at one with the future of humanity; our political and moral choices are often treated as subsets of a greater economic view of things that is mistaken with reality itself.  But for now we might simply note a simple incongruity in mainstream economics that no one (but a handful of peak oilers) seems to recognize.  On the one hand, all economists know that when economies grow, they need larger supplies of fuel, especially oil.  Everyone who thinks about these things is equally aware that nothing lowers demand for oil, and thus lowers its price, like a recession.  This sort of knowledge is part of the daily consideration of anyone purchasing stocks, bonds, or commodity futures.  As evidence, note the visible handwringing up and down Wall Street or the Capitol Mall the moment some global conflict threatens even a minor source of oil, like the Libyan one, which amounted to a mere 2% of the global supply.   In a similar vein, government agencies like the Department of Commerce or Department of Energy that are charged with long-term planning will publicly project that the world production of liquid fuels will, for instance, be required to rise from its current level of 90 million barrels a day to a minimum 110 million barrels a day by 2030 in order to stave-off the sort of economy-destroying recession that still has a partial grip on the world economy today.  Every economist and policy-maker understands the dependence of national and global economies on oil.

 

But, lest we worry too much about where all this oil might come from—or about the fact that another agency of the government charged with thinking about climate change might be printing pamphlets about our imminent decrease in fossil-fuel use—economists will without any apparent sense of contradiction argue that there are no material limits to economic growth.  George Gilder may be a bit more colorful than most when he declared that the new “knowledge economy” was about to “overthrow the tyranny of matter,” but Nobel Prizes in economics are regularly handed out to people who proclaim that we need neither oil nor other natural resources to maintain our current trajectory of perpetual and permanent economic growth.  As William Bernstein summarizes it in a book about the history of prosperity, “economic historian Simon Kuznets pointed out that a slowdown in economic growth can come from either of the two basic economic sources: supply or demand.  He believed that supply, driven by man’s innate curiosity and industry, could not be the source of stagnation. . . . Ecological . . . and demographic forces do not seem likely impediments to growth” (The Birth of Plenty 374).  Supply of natural resources, in other words, cannot limit, and therefore by implication cannot really affect, the economy—at least according to a good majority of economists, at least when describing the damaged kettle on one day or another.  The job of economists, therefore, is to recommend policies ensuring that demand remains sufficiently high, thus triggering our innate curiosity and industry.  This is the centerpiece of liberal economists like Paul Krugman and Robert Reich.

 

In order to support this view--that there are no ecological limits to growth--one must make some improbable assumptions about resources themselves, the main one being that any resource has a better and cheaper substitute waiting to be found, discovered, or synthesized by next inventive genius.  Another Nobel Prize winner, Robert Solow, will thus declare that, since “it is very easy to substitute other factors for natural resources, then there is, in principle, no problem. The world can, in effect, get along without natural resources."  This belief that it is so easy to substitute one natural resource for another--to the point, apparently where this substitutional whirl will launch us free from gravity and the Earth itself--has in fact been formalized into “Hartwick’s Rule.”  Hartwick’s Rule calculates the amount of investment in capital needed to offset declining stocks of non-renewable natural resources.  As Geir B. Asheim and Wolfgang Buchholz explain, Hartwick’s rule is concerned with equality of consumption into the future, showing us how “exhaustible natural resource inputs can be substituted by manmade capital in a way that depleting these natural resources does not harm future generations. Substitutability between natural and manmade capital thus, in spite of the exhaustibility of natural resources, may allow for equitable consumption for all generations” (“The Hartwick Rule: Myths and Facts”).  The implication of this rule is that with enough “capital,” this substitution can go on forever and without harming any future generations—never mind where this capital comes from or what it is made of. 

 

We can see this reason-bending fantasy of eternal substitution, supported in many cases by a sort of Kettle Logic, at work throughout the field of economics.  It becomes especially apparent whenever someone attempts to summarize the broader view that we don’t need natural resources, or we won’t run out, or that if we do run out, we can just spend more money on their replacements.   Face to face with the Kettle Logic, the defense will begin to flounder.   Or as economist Zagros Madjd-Sadjadi tries to explain it, “We will never run out of non-renewable resources simply because the price will rise to make extraction cost-prohibitive. At that point, we will have to switch to renewables simply because of the cost.  Furthermore, because of those price signals, entrepreneurs will come up with new ways to reduce the use of fossil fuels and other non-renewables.”.  If we look closely, we will see that Madjd-Sadjadi is sliding stealthily between two meanings of “run out.”  According to the logic of extraction, it is true, the cost of rare and buried minerals or fuels does become prohibitively high before they are entirely depleted.  No one will bother to drill 3 miles beneath the North Pole to extract the last barrel of oil.  We won’t actually run all the way out of oil, but will leave the last and most expensive oil in place.  But the fact that we won’t run out of it or other resources in this, more technical sense, doesn’t mean that we won’t run out in a more practical sense.  When they become too rare and expensive to extract, we will have in fact run out in any normal sense of the phrase.  Madjd-Sadjadi is hoping that no one, including himself I would imagine, will notice that the logic of resource depletion and the way it shows how we will never “run out” does not makes it inevitable that there will be some equally good renewable that we can “switch to” when the moment arises.  Groggy and groping in the dark for some sort of switch, like many economists, he doesn’t seem to entertain the fact that many switches simply toggle between on and off.   The whole proposition depends, at any rate, on some sort of quasi-magical belief that high cost itself can reliably synthesize raw materials as some sort of automatic price-generated feverish wish-fulfillment.  The American Dream indeed.

 

Once in a while, this zealously guarded theory of infinite and eternally replaceable natural resources will cross paths with the data linking economic activity with energy use and resource extraction.  Consider in this vein the graph below put out in 2009 by The Energy Information Agency, which is the statistical wing of the U.S. Department of Energy, which in turn is torn between providing reliable data, which it does, and supporting an optimistic, pro-business agenda.

 

 

The dark blue line on top, which rises slowly from 86 million barrels per day in 2008 to around 105 barrels per day in 2030, represents a bare minimum growth in liquid fuel supply that will be needed to keep the global economy relatively intact.  Other projections of liquid fuel needs, like that of the U.S. military, will calculate this probable demand much higher.  The colored sections sweeping down to the right represent all known sources of liquid fuels and their expected depletion rates.  Along with other analysts, I am at somewhat of a loss to explain the wording used to explain the large blank space standing between demand and supply:  Is this a joke or just a bad dream?  Is “unidentified” code for “does not exist”?  Or is it code for “of coursesomeone will find this if demand remains sufficiently high?”  Or is this a Rorschach test against which each may test his or her own cultural expectations?  While the fact that this gap will have grown to the equivalent of about five Saudi Arabia’s of oil production within the next fifteen years (and no one thinks that even one more Saudi Arabia even exists) suggests that the authors might be secretly admitting defeat, there is little else in the EIA’s reporting, here or elsewhere, to suggest that preparing for a 43 million barrel a day shortfall should be of wide or urgent concern.  At the same time, no real climate scientists believes that life on planet Earth can survive if we don’t drastically reduce our consumption of fossil fuels.  A 105 barrel a day diet is a doomsday prophecy, especially since the EIA and other similar agencies also project similar increases in coal and natural gas consumption.

 

How is it that the leading economists, politicians, journalist, along with most academics, speak matter-of-factly about a future that cannot exists, at least not without the destruction of life as we know it (and with it, as the most tragic collateral damage, our dearly beloved economy)?  How is it that this big blank unidentified white space that stands at the center of the American way of life has gone all but unnoticed by anyone who seems to matter?  The answer is in some ways painfully simple: obviously the pot already had a hole in it when we borrowed it.  Beyond that, we might conclude, our expectations are far more powerful than abstract logic and all the evidence pointing to a frightening and unimaginable future.  We value our consumption, or are so afraid to go without it, to the extent that logic, reason, and data are of insignificant mental or emotional consequence.  In America, we talk incessantly about our way of life or the American Dream, and with great allegiance and fervor.  The stories we tell about ourselves and our way of life—the way we narrate our conscious experience and perception of things—have no place in them for the most basic, and mainly uncontested, facts about energy and the environment.  Until we hit rock bottom, perhaps, we will be unable to shake free of the constraints of beliefs and expectations gone wild.  I hope we can change stories, and our course, before then--though hope is hard-earned these days.

Giddy-up 409

My four speed dual quad posi-traction 409

-Beach boys

Well, the last thing I remember, Doc, I started to swerve
And then I saw the Jag slide into the curve
I know I'll never forget that horrible sight
I guess I found out for myself that everyone was right
Won't come back from Dead Man's Curve

_Jan and Dean

Greetings

  Isn't civilization great?  It gave us muscle cars and plenty of gas to run them..   Too bad we didn't know enough to avoid dead man's curve. 

    Michael Mann has a new article in Scientific American: Earth Will Cross Climate Danger Threshold in 2036.     See more below  

    He addresses the "pause', which he calls a "slow down".  Also he tries to get a grip on climate sensitivity.    If I am understanding his points, he says that climate sensitivity estimates range from 1.5 to 4.5.  He uses 3.   Once we reach 405, we will have locked in 2 degrees - but due to lags in the system , we won't hit 2 degrees until 2036.  (If sensitivity were 2.5 it would be 2046 - likewise if sensitivity were higher, presumably we would hit 2 degrees sooner) 

 

     Why 405?  And not 450?   In a word -  "aerosols"   So far, aerosols have been masking some of the impacts of coal burning.    Hanson calls this the "Faustian Bargain" 

"These findings have implications for what we all must do to prevent disaster. An ECS of three degrees C means that if we are to limit global warming to below two degrees C forever, we need to keep CO₂ concentrations far below twice preindustrial levels, closer to 450 ppm. Ironically, if the world burns significantly less coal, that would lessen CO₂ emissions but also reduce aerosols in the atmosphere that block the sun (such as sulfate particulates), so we would have to limit CO₂ to below roughly 405 ppm."

    What are we make of this?    Consider food for instance.  While the FAO predicts that by 2050, world population will increase by 50%.  On the other hand  the IPCC predicts that food production will decrease by 2% per decade.  And recent studies suggest even with adaptation there may be more serious impacts to agriculture.   see here

The authors of both papers found that farming innovations could reduce the negative impact of climate change on yields, but that the impact was still negative.

“While just the climate change effects (result in) a 17% negative yield hit on average, the final yield hit is only 11%, again on average,” said the lead author of both papers, Gerald Nelson.

 

     When?   This paper asserts that the yields will begin to fall in the 2030's

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Far Worse than Being Beaten with a Hockey Stick: Michael Mann, Our Terrifying Greenhouse Gas Overburden and Heating the Earth by + 2 C by 2036

I’m going to say something that will probably seem completely outrageous. But I want you to think about it, because it’s true.

You, where-ever you are now, are living through the first stages of a disaster in which there is nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, and no safe place on Earth for you to go to avoid it. The disaster you are now living through is a greenhouse emergency and with each ounce of CO2, methane and other greenhouse gasses you, I, or the rest of us, pump into the air, that emergency grows in the vast potential of damage and harm that it will inflict over the coming years, decades and centuries. The emergency is now unavoidable and the only thing we can hope to do through rational action is to reduce the degree of harm both short and long term, to rapidly stop making the problem worse, and to put human ingenuity toward solving the problem rather than continuing to intensify it.

But damage, severe, deadly and terrifying is unleashed, in effect and already happening, with more on the way.

*    *    *    *    *

(Michael Mann’s famous Hockey Stick graph showing Northern Hemisphere temperatures over the past 1,000 years. The influences of human warming become readily apparent from the late 19th to early 21rst centuries. But human greenhouse gas forcing has much greater degrees of warming in store.)

This week, Michael Mann wrote an excellent piece describing the immediacy of our current emergency in the Scientific American. In typical, just the facts, fashion, he laid out a series of truths relevant to the current greenhouse catastrophe. These facts were told in a plain manner and, yet, in a way that laid out the problem but didn’t even begin to open the book on what that problem meant in broader context.

Michael Mann is an amazing scientist who has his hand on the pulse of human-caused climate change. He is a kind of modern Galileo of climate science in that he has born the brunt of some of the most severe and asinine attacks for simply telling the truth and for revealing the nature of our world as it stands. But though Mann’s facts are both brutal and hard-hitting for those of us who constantly read the climate science, who wade through the literature and analyze each new report. By simply stating the facts and not telling us what they mean he is hitting us with a somewhat nerfed version of his ground-breaking Hockey Stick. A pounding that may seem brutal when compared to the comfortable nonsense put out by climate change deniers and fossil fuel apologists but one that is still not yet a full revelation.

I will caveat what is a passionate interjection by simply saying that Michael Mann is one of my most beloved heroes. And so I will do my best to help him out by attempting to lend more potency to his already powerful message.

2 C by 2036 — Digging through the Ugly Guts of it

All that said, Michael Mann laid out some brutal, brutal facts in his Scientific American piece. Ones, that if you only take a few moments to think about are simply terrifying. For the simple truth is that the world has only a very, very slim hope of preventing a rapid warming to at least 2 C above 1880s levels in the near future and almost zero hope altogether of stopping such warming in the longer term.

The first set of figures Mann provides involves the current greenhouse gas forcing. Current CO2 levels are now at the very dangerous 400 parts per million threshold. Long term, and all by itself, this forcing is enough to raise global temperatures by between 2 and 3 degrees Celsius. But hold that thought you were just about to have, because we haven’t yet included all the other greenhouse gasses in that forcing.

Mann, in the supplemental material to his Scientific American paper, notes that the total forcing of all other greenhouse gasses currently in the atmosphere is about 20% of the total CO2 forcing. This gives us a total CO2 equivalent forcing of 480 ppm CO2e, which uncannily mirrors my own analysis here (the science may have under-counted a bit on the methane forcing, but this value is likely quite close to current reality for both the short and long term).

480 ppm CO2e is one hell of a forcing. It is nearly a 75% greater forcing than 1880s values and, all by itself, is enough to raise temperatures long-term by between 3.5 and 4.5 degrees Celsius.

And it is at this point that it becomes worthwhile talking a bit about different climate sensitivity measures. The measure I am using to determine this number is what is called the Earth Systems Sensitivity measure (ESS). It is the measure that describes long term warming once all the so called slow feedbacks like ice sheet response (think the giant glaciers of Greenland and West Antarctica) and environmental carbon release (think methane release from thawing tundra and sea bed clathrates) come into the equation. Mann, uses a shorter term estimate called Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity (ECS). It’s a measure that tracks the fast warming response time once the fast feedbacks such as water vapor response and sea ice response are taken into account. ECS warming, therefore, is about half of ESS warming. But the catch is that ECS hits you much sooner.

At 480 ppm CO2e, we can expect between 1.75 and 2.25 degrees C of warming from ECS. In essence, we’ve locked about 2 C worth of short term warming in now. And this is kind of a big deal. I’d call it a BFD, but that would be swearing. And if there is ever an occasion for swearing then it would be now. So deal with it.

Mann, in his article, takes note of the immediacy of the problem by simply stating that we hit 2 C of shorter term ECS warming once we hit 405 ppm CO2 (485 CO2e), in about two to three years. And it’s important for us to know that this is the kind of heat forcing that is now hanging over our heads. That there’s enough greenhouse gas loading in the atmosphere to push warming 2 C higher almost immediately and 4 C higher long term. And that, all by itself, is a disaster unlike anything humans have ever encountered.

(Global annual fossil fuel emission is currently tracking faster than the worst-case IPCC scenario. Aerosols mask some of the heating effect of this enormous emission, what James Hansen calls ‘a Faustian Bargain.’ Image source: Hansen Paper.)

But there is a wrinkle to this equation. One that Dr. James Hansen likes to call the Faustian Bargain. And that wrinkle involves human produced aerosols. For by burning coal, humans pump fine particles into the atmosphere that reflect sunlight thereby masking the total effect of the greenhouse gasses we have already put into the atmosphere. The nasty little trick here is that if you stop burning coal, the aerosols fall out in only a few years and you then end up with the full heat forcing. Even worse, continuing to burn coal produces prodigious volumes of CO2 while mining coal pumps volatile methane into the atmosphere. It’s like taking a kind of poison that will eventually kill you but makes you feel better as you’re taking it. Kind of like the greenhouse gas version of heroine.

So the ghg heroine/coal has injected particles into the air that mask the total warming. And as a result we end up with a delayed effect with an extraordinarily severe hit at the end when we finally stop burning coal. Never stop burning coal and you end up reaching the same place eventually anyway. So it’s a rigged game that you either lose now or you lose in a far worse way later.

Mann wraps coal and other human aerosol emissions into his equation and, under business as usual, finds that we hit 2 C of ECS warming by 2036 as global CO2 levels approach 450 ppmv and global CO2e values approach 540 ppmv. At that point, were the aerosols to fall out we end up with an actual short term warming (ECS) response of 2.5 to 3 C and a long term response (ESS) of about 5 to 6 C. (Don’t believe me? Plug in the numbers for yourself in Mann’s climate model here.)

So ripping the bandaid off and looking at the nasty thing underneath, we find that even my earlier estimates were probably a bit too conservative and Mann, though we didn’t quite realize it at first, is hitting us very hard with his hockey stick.

What does a World That Warms So Rapidly to 2 C Look Like?

OK. That was rough. But what I am about to do is much worse. I’m going to take a look at actual effects of what, to this point, has simply been a clinical analysis of the numbers. I’m going to do my best to answer the question — what does a world rapidly warming by 2 C over the next 22 years look like?

Ugly. Even more ugly than the numbers, in fact.

First, let’s take a look at rates of evaporation and precipitation. We know that, based on past research, the hydrological cycle increases by about 6% for each degree Celsius of temperature increase. So far, with about .8 C worth of warming, we’ve had about a 5% increase in the hydrological cycle. What this means is that evaporation rates increase by 5% and precipitation events, on average, increase by about 5%. But because weather is uneven, what this does is radically increase the frequency and amplitude of extreme weather. Droughts are more frequent and more severe. Deluges are more frequent and more severe.

(Program in which top climate scientists explain how global warming increases the intensity of evaporation and precipitation all while causing dangerous changes to the Jet Stream.)

At 2 C warming we can change this loading from a 5% increase in the hydrological cycle of evaporation and precipitation to a 12% increase. You think the droughts and deluges are bad now? Just imagine what would happen if the driver of that intensity more than doubled. What do you end up with then?

Now let’s look at something that is directly related to extreme weather — sea ice loss. In the current world, about .8 C worth of warming has resulted in about 3.2 C worth of warming in the polar regions. And this warming has resulted in a massive and visible decline of sea ice in which end summer volume values are up to 80% less than those seen during the late 1970s. This loss of sea ice has had severe effects on the Northern Hemisphere Jet Stream, both pulling it more toward the pole and resulting in high amplitude Jet Stream waves and local severe intensification of storm tracks. At 2 C worth of global warming, the Arctic heats up by around 7 C and the result is extended periods of ice free conditions during the summer and fall that last for weeks and months.

(Actual rate of sea ice loss vs IPCC model predictions. The most recent record low value achieved in 2012 is indicated by the dot. Image source: Assessment of Arctic Sea Ice/UCAR Report.)

The impacts to the Northern Hemisphere Jet Stream are ever more severe as are the impacts to Greenland ice sheet melt. Under such a situation we rapidly get into a weather scenario where screaming temperature differentials between the North Atlantic near Greenland and the warming tropics generate storms the likes of which we have never seen. Add in a 12% boost to the hydrological cycle and we get the potential for what Dr. James Hansen describes as “frontal storms the size of continents with the intensity of hurricanes.”

Greenland melt itself is much faster under 2 C of added heat and the ice sheets are in dangerous and rapid destabilization. It’s possible that the kick will be enough to double, triple, quadruple or more the current pace of sea level rise. Half foot or more per decade sea level rise rapidly becomes possible.

All this severe weather, the intense rain, the powerful wind storms and the intense droughts aren’t kind to crops. IPCC projects a 2% net loss in crop yields each decade going forward. But this is likely to be the lower bound of a more realistic 2-10 percent figure. Modern agriculture is hit very, very hard in the context of a rapidly changing climate, increasing rates of moisture loss from soil and moisture delivery through brief and epically intense storms.

The rapid jump to 2 C is also enough to put at risk a growing list of horrors including rapid ocean stratification and anoxia (essentially initiating a mass die off in the oceans), large methane and additional CO2 release from carbon stores in the Arctic, and the unlocking of dangerous ancient microbes from thawing ice, microbes for which current plants and animals do not have adequate immune defenses.

How do we avoid this?

In short, it might not be possible to avoid some or even all of these effects. But we may as well try. And this is what trying would look like.

First, we would rapidly reduce human greenhouse gas emissions to near zero. As this happens, we would probably want a global fleet of aircraft that spray sulfate particles into the lower atmosphere to make up for the loss of aerosols once produced by coal plants. Finally, we would need an array of atmospheric carbon capture techniques including forest growth and cutting, then sequestration of the carbon stored by wood in lakes or in underground repositories, chemical atmospheric carbon capture, and carbon capture of biomass emissions.

For safety, we would need to eventually reduce CO2 to less than 350 ppm, methane to less than 1,000 ppb, and eliminate emissions from other greenhouse gasses. A very tall order that would require the sharing of resources, heroic sacrifices by every human being on this Earth, and a global coordination and cooperation of nations not yet before seen. Something that is possible in theory but has not yet been witnessed in practice. A test to see if humankind is mature enough to ensure its own survival and the continuation of life and diversity on the only world we know. A tall order, indeed, but one we must at least attempt.

Links:

Earth Will Cross Climate Danger Threshold by 2036

What does a World at 400 Parts per Million CO2 Look Like Long-Term?

One Scientist Argues 2036 Could be Point of No Return for Climate Disaster

A Faustian Bargain on the Short Road to Hell

Doubling Down on our Faustian Bargain

Dr. Jennifer Francis, Top Climate Scientists Explain How Global Warming Aps the Hydrological Cycle and Wrecks the Jet Stream to Unleash Extreme Weather

Assessment of Arctic Sea Ice/UCAR Report

China reduces local pollution, dooms climate

Greetings

     In an effort to deal with local pollution in its cities,  China is constructing a number of rural coal meg projects.   Some are quite large.

    With these projects, China could, by itself, use up the remaining carbon budget by 2050

.

"Experts estimate that if China's planned coal bases are built, the country's emissions would likely hit 10 billion tons a year—putting it on track to consume the world's remaining 349 billion tons by 2050."

See also:  Inside Climate science

http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/theres-a-coal-base-in-china-the-size-of-la

China Is Building a "Coal Base" the Size of LA

China, faced with ever-worsening pollution in its major cities—a recent reportdeemed Beijing "barely suitable for living"—is doing what so many industrializing nations have done before it: banishing its titanic smog spewers to poor or rural areas so everyone else can breathe easier. But China isn't just relegating its dirty coal-fired power plants to the outskirts of society; for years, it's been building 16 unprecedentedly massive, brand new "coal bases" in rural parts of the country. There, they won't stifle China's megacities; they'll churn out enough pollution to help smother the entire world.

The biggest of those bases, the Ningdong Energy and Chemical Industry Base, spans nearly 400 square miles, about the size of LA. It's already operational, and seemingly always expanding. It's operated by Shenhua, one of the biggest coal companies in the world. China hopes to uses these coal bases not just to host some of the world's largest coal-fired power plants, but to use super-energy intensive technology to convert the coal into a fuel called syngas and use it to make plastics and other materials. 

Syngas is healthier to breathe when burned than typical coal—but as Motherboardhas noted before, synthesizing the stuff emits nearly twice the carbon pollution. That's why when Inside Climate News, the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative environmental outfit, traveled to China to investigate the operation, they, and a number of climate experts concluded it would "doom the climate." 

Image: Ningdong

Ningdong is the fossil fuel-guzzling centerpiece to the effort. Here's how Inside Climate's William J. Kelly describes the massive operation 700 miles west of Beijing:

Conceived in 2003, Shenhua said it broke ground in 2008 on the 386-square-mile coal base. That's an area about three-quarters the size of Los Angeles that's being covered bit by bit over a period of some 17 years with coal mines, power plants, power lines, pipelines, roads, rail tracks and all manner of chemical processing plants with their towers, smokestacks and tanks ... The project is so huge that engineers used the world's largest crane to set in place the unit that's to serve as the heart of the plant, a 2,155-ton Fischer-Tropsch synthesis reactor that's as high as a 17-story building.

Greenpeace has documented the carnage caused by the project in the region, charging that the coal plants are "triggering severe water crises in the country’s arid Northwest. This huge amount of water will be used for the water-intensive coal extraction, forcing deterioration of arid grassland and forcing herders to seek alternative livelihoods." In fact, the only limit on many of these coal plants that activists see is water itself—if they dry out the local water supplies, they won't be able to use it to extract coal.

Image: Greenpeace

It's projected to finally be finished by the end of the decade, when it will produce a jaw-dropping 30,000 MW of power, sucking down 100 million tons of coal every year in the process. And it's just one of over a dozen such sprawling operations.

As such, Ningdong does a fairly good job of epitomizing China's grave threat to the global climate system. A recent paper in Nature Climate Change noted that if all of the coal-to-gas plants get built, they'd produce 21 billion tons of CO2 alone. The Washington Post's Brad Plumer puts that in context: "The entire nation of China produced 7.7 billion tons of carbon-dioxide in 2011." Put simply, China's on a path to produce an unholy amount of carbon pollution.

Writing in Rolling Stone, Bill McKibben estimated that, based on climatologists' forecasts, humans worldwide can can only safely burn some 365 gigatons (or billions of tons) of carbon before we seriously disrupt the global climate system. Using those estimates, Kelly notes that even if China where to burn just 10 billion tons of carbon each year, that would put it "on track to consume the world's remaining 349 billion tons by 2050." After that, the table is set for runaway, or catastrophic, global warming.

China's giant coal bases, then, may very well be the largest looming threat to a stable global climate. 

I fell into a burning ring of fire

-Johnny Cash

The wheat fields waving

The dust clouds rolling

-Woody Guthrie

Greetings

     Here's a nice article that ties together the Russian petro state, the Siberian fires of 2012  (amazing photos from NASA); with the wheat fields of Ukraine.    He describes Putin's death spiral - more oil leads to more burning wheat fields, requiring land grabs, fueled by oil profits, requiring more oil etc....

    Then there is the Exxon connection.  Exxon and Rosneft have entered into a $500 billion partnership .    And what about sanctions?  Here's a quote from Business Week:   Perhaps the US has its own oligarchs...

As the U.S. and European Union ratchet up sanctions against Russia, it’s hard to see Chevron and Exxon being receptive to whatever pressure they may get from Washington to pull back from their newfound Russian comrades. After all, these companies may be headquartered in the U.S., but they derive much of their profits from operations overseas. Their fidelity is to their shareholders, not necessarily their government. In an infamous quote included in Steve Coll’s book on Exxon, Private Empire, former CEO Lee Raymond once said, “I’m not a U.S. company, and I don’t make decisions based on what’s good for the U.S.”"

------

from Robertscribbler

The Monsters of Growth Shock Rise: Conflict in the Ukraine, Global Food Crisis, and Spending 500 Billion Dollars to Permanently Wreck the World’s Climate

(Immense Russian wildfires burning through the thawing tundra’s carbon pool during summer of 2012. The bar on the lower left denotes 50 kilometers. From end to end, the burning zone seen is about 500 miles in length. Image credit: NASA. Image source: Smoke From Massive Siberian Fires Seen in Canada.)

The radio and television today blares with the news but never the causes:

US meat, coffee, almond and milk prices to sky-rocket. Ukraine invaded by the Russian petro-state. Exxon Mobile to partner with Russian Rosneft and invest 500 billion dollars in extracting oil and gas from the increasingly ice-free Arctic.

What has caused all this? In a term — Growth Shock.

What is Growth Shock?

It’s what happens when any system grows outside of the boundaries of its sustainable limits. In the current, human case, its primary elements are overpopulation, renewable and nonrenewable resource depletion, climate change, poisoning the biosphere and wasting livable habitats, and a vicious system of inequality in which an amoral elite loots and pillages the lion’s share of planetary resources while driving increasing numbers of persons into poverty, hunger, and vulnerability to environmental/ecological collapse.

In the more immediate sense, human burning of fossil fuels is now intensifying droughts and extreme weather around the world. This is negatively impacting agricultural production. In addition, military aggression on the part of Russia has destabilized one of the world’s largest food producers — Ukraine. But these causes and effects are all a part of the larger structure of an ongoing Growth Shock crisis. The most recent and more intense iteration of a series of events that began in the 1970s and continues today.

In my own writing, I have described the forces of Growth Shock as four monsters (overpopulation, resource depletion, climate change, institutionalized human greed) and, like the Diakiaju of Pacific Rim, they continue to grow stronger and to devour increasingly large chunks of our world.

In the context of our intensifying Growth Shock, conflicts can rapidly escalate as resources grow scarce and various nations, powerful individuals and corporate entities jockey for dominance in the context of increasing limitation and peril. But it is important to note that unless the underlying condition that caused the crisis — what is now likely the most terrible manifestation of Growth Shock ever witnessed by humans — is addressed, then there are no winners. No dominators that survive to flourish in the end. No remnant that sees a prosperous future. Only an ongoing string of worsening conflicts, disasters and temporary victories leading to a terrible and bitter ultimate defeat.

*    *    *    *    *

The Special Interests of a Corporate Petro-State, its Dictator and its Oligarchs

So many of you are probably wondering why Russia suddenly invaded Ukraine? Why the West is taking an increasing stake in this country that, until recently, rarely showed on the international stage?

The reasons currently given by US officials certainly appear noble. We should not allow one country to simply invade, bully and rig the electoral process for another. We should not allow a single nation to flaunt international law and behave in a manner that better fits an age of anarchy and brutality. We should not permit these things from the member of the international community with broad responsibilities and obligations that is Russia.

These are moral and, indeed, appropriate frames for the current conflict. As they are appropriate rhetorical responses to international bullying. But we would also be wise not to ignore the underlying drivers — food crisis and overwhelming political power of fossil fuel special interests.

If anything Russia is now little more than a dictatorial, nuclear-armed petro-state, run by corporate oligarchs and a brutish strong man in the form of Vladimir Putin. A man who has ruled this country for a period now going on two decades through a combination of bullying, trickery, and poll fixing. The kind of character many conservatives these days seem to appreciate…

At 2.2 trillion dollars in GDP each year, its economy is comparable to that of the UK — sizable, but not an equal to economic powerhouses US, China, Germany or Japan. But what the Russian petro-state lacks in economic girth, it more than compensates for in two very destructive and destabilizing items — nuclear weapons and fossil fuels. It also retains a rather sizable and effective military — one whose forces are capable of projecting power and toppling governments throughout both Europe and Asia. One that retains its ability to rain nuclear Armageddon on any nation of peoples around the globe.

And this set of powers is increasingly being used to advance the special interests of the corporate, dictatorial state that is today’s Russia.

But it is Russia’s vast oil and natural gas wealth, the single-minded and narrow interests of its rulers, and the dark impetus that is global climate change that have likely combined to spur Russian’s current aggression.

Food, Fossil Fuels and the Compost Bomb

(The tundra compost bomb explodes into burning rings of fire that illuminate the Russian night during 2012. The fire rings seen here are each between 10 and 100 kilometers across. Image credit: NASA. Image source: Burning Rings of Fire.)

For the very natural gas, oil and coal that Russia uses as a mainstay for its economy are now in the process of wrecking its future prospects and propelling it to ever more desperate and violent action.

To understand why, one simply has to think a little bit about permafrost and frozen ground.

A majority of Russia’s land mass sits on a pile of permafrost ranging from 1 to more than 10 meters in depth. In the past, this frozen substrata underlay many of Russia’s fields, cities and towns, forming a kind of frozen bedrock. But over the past few decades, the permafrost began to rapidly thaw under the radical and violent force that is human-caused warming. At first, this event was thought to weigh in Russia’s favor. The newly thawed permafrost would become more productive farmland, many assumed, and the added warmth would extend Russia’s growing season.

But few apparently accounted for the speed and violence of human-caused climate change. What happened instead was literally a firestorm. For the thawing peat retained a combustibility roughly equivalent to brown coal. Even worse, it contained pockets of highly flammable liquified organic carbon and methane. Over top this volatile layer were the great boreal forests and the vast grasslands of the Russian land mass. During the periods of summer drought that emerged as human caused climate change amplified at the end of the 2000s, these forests and grasses were, increasingly, simply piles of kindling growing atop a meters thick layer of volatile fuel.

By 2010, climate change brought on a series of record droughts and heatwaves extending far into the Arctic that set both permafrost thaw and lower latitude regions ablaze. As a result, Russia suffered agricultural losses unlike anything seen in its past. Fields and towns burned. The productive regions burned. Russia was forced to close its agricultural market for exports. World food prices hit all time record highs and the food riots that followed were enough to topple regimes and alight civil wars throughout the world’s most vulnerable states.

Through the summers of 2013, Russia suffered amazing fires in its thawing tundra lands. These blazes were, at times, intense enough to require the calling up of its military and the mobilization of up to 200,000 people simply to fight the fires. Heat and moisture from the thawing tundra spilled out into the Jet Stream and amplified the storm track. By 2013, record drying and burning in the tundra lands turned to record floods in the Amur region of both China and Russia. A tragic song of flood and fire.

(Massive wildfires burn over Yakutia as an immense rainstorm begins to form over the Amur region of Russia and China. The fires and deluge would together ruin millions of acres of crops during 2014. Image credit: Lance-Modis. Image source: A Song of Flood and Fire.)

It was a string of climate change induced disasters that produced blow after telling blow to Russian agricultural production.

Meanwhile, around the world, similar droughts, floods and severe wind storms were ripping through the world’s croplands. By early 2014, the world food price index was again on the rise. By February, the index had climbed to 208, a very high level that would put those countries and populations at the margins at risk of increasing poverty and hunger all while potentially destabilizing any number of nations.

Ukraine — The Breadbasket of Europe

Perhaps the irony is lost on Russia that the very fuels — oil, gas and coal — that it views as an economic strength are also the source of its increasingly marginal food security and the ongoing and growing devastation of its lands. But Russia, its strongman, and its corporate oligarchs likely haven’t overlooked the fact that Ukraine is one of the world’s largest food producers. In a world where food is becoming increasingly costly and scarce, this particular commodity may well be more important than even oil, gas, or coal.

Ukraine possesses 30% of the world’s remaining richest black soil. It regularly ranks within the top ten producers of both wheat and corn. It is the world’s top producer of sunflower oil. The reach of its agricultural exports extends to the UK, Europe, Japan, China and into Russia itself. If Russia has a food crisis, it will be to the Ukraine that it turns to first. Moreover, the current Russian dictator must see an imperative not to rely overmuch on the US or its other economic rivals for food.

So it is in this context — a one in which climate change is causing Russia to flood and burn, in which climate change is now beginning to take down global agricultural productivity, and in which the Ukraine could well be seen as the Iraq of world food production (one of the only countries with the ability to radically increase production) — that we must also view both the Ukrainian revolution for independence and the Russian armed invasion as a response.

Russia Already Taking Hold of Some of Ukraine’s Most Productive Farmland

Centuries ago, during the dark ages, bad winters drove waves of tribes out of the frigid northern lands and into the then fertile fields of Rome and Europe. History, it seems, is not without its rhymes. For now, a fiery human-driven thaw and climate change appears to be having a similar impact on the Russia and Ukraine of today.

For the lands already under Russian occupation and threat of invasion (Eastern Ukraine primarily) are also some of Ukraine’s most productive wheat and corn growing zones. These lands under threat of additional Russian incursion, if added to the already occupied and planned to be annexed Crimea would compose the bulk of Ukraine’s agriculture.

Russia’s invasion, thus, must be seen as a direct looting of Ukraine’s lands and productive capacity for Russian and, by extension, Putin’s self interest. A set of interests likely inflamed by Russia’s own declining state of food security.

Climate Change and Why This Fight Must Be Against Fossil Energy, Not for It

Unfortunately, this conflict, like so many others, falls under the ominous shadow of the global fossil fuel trade. A shadow that grows ever darker as the crises imposed by human-caused climate change become more and more dire.

In the context of what could cynically be termed American interests, the fossil fuel giant Exxon recently partnered with Rosneft, an oil corporation Putin and his oligarchs essentially looted from a political rival, to invest 500 billion dollars in drilling and exploration in the Russian Arctic. The zones included in the deal involve the highly unstable clathrate and natural gas stores of the Arctic Ocean. And considering the massive sum invested, one cannot overlook the likelihood that the ESAS’s store of up to 1400 gigatons of natural gas clathrate have now been targeted by global fossil fuel interests for burning. Such an exploitation would result in the near tripling of the current human atmospheric carbon loading — all by itself and without the added inputs from coal, tar sands, or other oil and gas reserves. In other words — corporate insanity in the mad pursuit of profits for a few supremely wealthy and powerful individuals. In this case, a breed of greed-driven insanity that falls under the specter of an increasingly violent and expansionist Russia. One driven to hunger for resources by the land and crops destroying influences of the fossil fuels it continues to seek to exploit.

Here is Growth Shock in its most brazen form when wealthy oligarchs, dictators and corporations collude to profit while ruining the productivity of the lands upon which even they rely. And it is this terrible state that cannot be allowed to continue.

The US, therefore, could strike a blow against both Russian aggression and climate change game over by sanctioning Russian-backed Rosneft, disallowing any American corporation from conducting business with them or any other Russian petroleum entity and going further to say that they will sanction any other global corporation with ties to Rosneft. Use of the power of the dollar and of the global monetary system, in this way, could strike a blow against both the greed that underlies the current Growth Shock crisis and against the maniacal continued and expanding exploitation of extraordinarily destructive fuels.

If the US wishes to continue to bring Russia to heel, it will also use the carrot of access to US grain and food shipments as well as providing partnership arrangements with US alternative energy and sustainability-based corporations in exchange for a peaceful withdrawal from the Ukraine. To help Russia save face, it could provide these offers in a less public fashion or in a way that is not personally insulting to Putin.

Little to No Time Left, But the Crisis Presents a Fleeting Opportunity

In broader context, the deteriorating global food situation, the deteriorating global climate situation and the maniacal quest by fossil fuel companies to access and burn an ever-growing volume of oil, coal and natural gas has reached a critical stage that simply cannot continue for much longer without entirely ruining the prospects for human civilization and, likely, much of life on Earth. The Russia and Ukraine conflict is an opportunity to begin a full attempt to change course and to bring the, now very large and growing, forces of our Growth Shock crisis to bay. If we do not, the window of opportunity may well be closed and we may well have consigned ourselves to ever-worsening conflict under a situation of ongoing resource destruction, destruction of modern civilization’s food base, a situation where the powerful are ever more enabled to take from the weak, and a situation in which a hothouse extinction eventually snuffs out most or all of those that survive the ensuing collapse.

Links:

Growth Shock

Smoke From Massive Siberian Fires Seen in Canada

Burning Rings of Fire

Climate and Frozen Ground

Lance-Modis

A Song of Flood and Fire.

World Food Security in the Cross-hairs of Human-caused Climate Change

Climate Change Pushes FAO Food Price Index to 208 in February

The Economy of the Ukraine

Rosneft Warns West over Crimean Sanctions Woos Japan

Rosneft

Putin — the New Global Shah of Oil