Wednesday, August 24, 2016



Maybe
I'm gonna have a baby
      The Pretenders
Baby Baby Baby
Oh baby
     -The Carpenters
Greetings
     Well, we find ourselves in interesting times.  Sometimes it seems  like we are like an addict staring at his next fix.  You want it, but....  Here's how Dave Roberts puts it. (Yes that Dave Roberts.  The one who gave that stirring Ted X talk  
"Yet here we are. The fact is, on our current trajectory, in the absence of substantial new climate policy, we are heading for up to 4°C and maybe higher by the end of the century. That will be, on any clear reading of the available evidence, catastrophic. We are headed for disaster — slowly, yes, but surely.
Even as many climate experts are now arguing that 2°C is an inadequate target, that it already represents unacceptable harms, we are facing a situation in which limiting temperature even to 3°C requires heroic policy and technology changes.
And yet ... the world doesn't appear to be ending; there's no big, visible threat. Climate change moves so slowly that its pace is evident primarily through graphs and statistics. It rarely rises above the background noise."
    
Or see his recent piece on the the ludicrous gulf between where we are and what it would take.   In fact, even if the "voluntary commitments" from the latest climate summit were actually implemented  they "would limit global warming to between 2.6 degrees and 3.1 degrees Celsius, a significant overshoot.",      (even "green" Oregon has had trouble staying on track toward it's 2007 goal. )
OK, so 2 percent is pretty much in the bag.  Maybe as early as 2030.  Here's Dr Micheal Mann predicting 2036
And so, one might ask ask why .  Because we want what we want, I suppose.  Maybe its cultural inertia.   Here's an interesting piece  from NPR about a professional philosopher who has  concluded that it is immoral for a "westerner" to have children.  That the additional burden on the environment, and the future , cannot be justified .  
"For years, people have lamented how bad things might get "for our grandchildren," but Rieder tells the students that future isn't so far off anymore.
He asks how old they will be in 2036, and, if they are thinking of having kids, how old their kids will be.
"Dangerous climate change is going to be happening by then," he says. "Very, very soon."
Rieder wears a tweedy jacket and tennis shoes, and he limps because of a motorcycle accident. He's a philosopher with the Berman Institute of Bioethics at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and his arguments against having children are moral.
Americans and other rich nations produce the most carbon emissions per capita, he says. Yet people in the world's poorest nations are most likely to suffer severe climate impacts, "and that seems unfair," he says.
There's also a moral duty to future generations that will live amid the climate devastation being created now.
"Here's a provocative thought: Maybe we should protect our kids by not having them," Rieder says.

-------
Oregon State University researchers have calculated the savings from all kinds of conservation measures: driving a hybrid, driving less, recycling, using energy-efficient appliances, windows and light bulbs.
For an American, the total metric tons of carbon dioxide saved by all of those measures over an entire lifetime of 80 years: 488. By contrast, the metric tons saved when a person chooses to have one fewer child: 9,441.
  But don't stop there.   Read on.  See what the philosopher's wife has to say!  .  Of course I feel for the philosophers wife.  She wants to have a family.  Don't we all?   And we all want to fly to see Aunt Mary, and drive to the coast to cool off, or get that cool new gadget.    We want what we want.
      So, it's only natural that the only possible "solution" to climate change, would involve magical technology that would either give us instant access to clean energy,  or shield us from the impact of using our current energy mix  .   "Solutions" that do not interfere with getting "what we want"        And it's pretty clear that these "solutions"  if implemented will not have the desired effect - they will not prevent 1.5, which us the new line between dangerous and non dangerous.  They will not prevent 2 degrees.  Could they prevent 3 degrees?  4?  
        One surely hopes that something will.  But, based on history , it quite possible that we will continue to burn as long as we can.  And at some point, it will no longer matter whether we do or don't .   Other mechanisms will take over.  Blue ocean absorbing more heat,  forests that used to be sink become sources,  tundra releasing co2 and methane .
       I had an interesting experience last week.  I was invited to sit in on a session with a largish charitable foundation, and a bunch of environmental groups to think about how philanthropists might deal with climate change .  And of course it is great news that the organization is thinking about climate change.         But I found myself in a strange position. I felt like the participants were fighting the last war.   
       At this meeting, all the emphasis was on preventing dangerous climate change -    -  education, messaging, providing, information.    This is all good, but it seems like the train has left the station.  I think it may be time to put more focus on looking at how to deal with the impacts.

And some of the dangerous tipping points may hit before 2 degrees.  Here are nine of them  
       Maybe at least some of attention should be focused on building reslience.   Basic stuff - food, water, shelter.    These things are about to become problems .   Water is already a problem for 3/4 of this state , and are likely to get worse."The chances for a water crisis are high in Oregon."    says Oregon Climate Change Research Institute  

        On the food side, here is something to think about, from Gwynne Dyer, an independant journalist. .
If you want to go on eating regularly in a rapidly warming world, then live in a place that’s either high in latitude or high in altitude. Alternatively, be rich, because the rich never starve. But otherwise, prepare to be hungry.
......
.... the World Bank, for example, has long known approximately how much food production every major country will lose when the average global temperature is 2 degrees C higher. At least seven years ago it gave contracts to think tanks in every major capital to answer precisely that question.
What the think tanks told the World Bank was that India will lose 25 percent of its food production. China, I have been told by somebody who saw the report from the Beijing think tank, will lose a catastrophic 38 percent. But these results have never been published, because the governments concerned did not want such alarming numbers out in public and were able to restrain the World Bank from releasing them.
      -----
"In other words, just in the past 17 months, 8 rain events that are considered very low probability (i.e., less than 0.2%) occurred. Three happened in the past 3 months. Flooding like this should happen very rarely – there are AEP maps for only 18 more events, one of which was in 1913, all others having occurred since 2010. As our hearts go out to the families affected by the flooding, we may be asking; is this a series of unfortunate events? Certainly. The sheer loss of life and property is staggering, and heartbreaking. Totally unexpected? Unfortunately, the answer is hardly.
------

At some point we may come to realize that we cannot prevent the emergency, but that it is already here.

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Thursday, August 11, 2016

That Sinking Feeling

Oops I did it again
      -Brittney Spears
Somebody must change
     - Blind Faith (Can't find my way home)
Happy Overshoot day!
       I'm not quite sure what the appropriate activity for overshoot  day might be .   Out here in Polk County, shooting guns is always an accepted means of self expression, so maybe that's it...
    The footprint folks have a number of indicators that they use to track overshoot.  One of the is of course climate.  And human emmissions continue to accelerate
"The level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is not just rising, it's accelerating, and another potent greenhouse gas, methane showed a big spike last year, according to the latest annual greenhouse gas index released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
CO2 emissions totaled between 35 and 40 billion tons in 2015, according to several agencies. Some of that is absorbed by forests and oceans, but those natural systems are being overwhelmed by the sheer volume of new CO2. As a result, the inventory shows, the average global concentration increased to 399 parts per million in 2015, a record jump of almost 3 ppm from the year before."
But possibly more worrisome is that some of what used to be natural "sinks" of CO2 may now become "sources".    One of the largest terrestrial sink is the Amazon rainforest, which is no longer a guaranteed dink, but depending on drought and fire, also is sometimes a source of CO2.  see here  
"A severe drought is again stressing trees even as it is fanning wildfires to greater intensity than during 2005 and 2010. Early satellite measures seem to indicate that something even worse may be happening — the rainforest and the lands it inhabits are now being hit so hard by a combination of drought and fire that the forest is starting to bleed carbon back. This gigantic and ancient repository of atmospheric carbon appears to have, at least over the past two months, turned into a carbon source."
Speaking of trees, a recent study indicates that the changes in the timing of snowmelt in the northern forests , is affecting their absorption as well.
"Earlier snowmelt periods associated with a warming climate may hinder subalpine forest regulation of atmospheric carbon dioxide, according to the results of a new study.
The findings, which were recently published in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union, predict that this shift in the timing of the snowmelt could result in a 45 percent reduction of snowmelt period forest carbon uptake by mid-century.
A separate study, also published in Geophysical Research Letters, found that earlier, slower snowmelt reduces the amount of streamflow, a phenomenon with potentially drastic consequences…"
           But the bigger picture might be the planetary limits generally .   Recently scientists have attempted to define a "safe operating space" for the earth ecosystem.   They have identified a number of key limits   see here.   One of these is biodiversity .  A recent study , see here shows that we are already bumping into that limit.
"....international team of researchers has concluded that biodiversity loss has become so severe and widespread that it could affect Earth’s ability to sustain human life.
The researchers examined 2.38 million records of 39,123 terrestrial species collected at 18,659 sites around the world to model the impacts on biodiversity of land use and other pressures from human activities that cause habitat loss. They then estimated down to about the one-square-kilometer level the extent to which those pressures have caused changes in local biodiversity, as well as the spatial patterns of those changes.
They found that, across nearly 60 percent of Earth’s land surface, biodiversity has declined beyond “safe” levels as defined by the planetary boundaries concept, which seeks to quantify the environmental limits within which human society can be considered sustainable.
“We estimate that land use and related pressures have already reduced local biodiversity intactness — the average proportion of natural biodiversity remaining in local ecosystems — beyond its recently proposed planetary boundary across 58.1% of the world’s land surface, where 71.4% of the human population live,” the researchers write in an article published this month in the journal Science.
In other words, more than 70 percent of the global population lives in areas where the level of biodiversity loss has been so substantial that the ability of ecosystems to support humanity is now in question."

So, where are the "leaders"?  Asleep.  Here's one attempt to get them to pay attention

Prominent organizations try for the third straight election to get candidates to answer questions about climate change and other crucial issues.
Science, especially climate science, has again gotten so little attention in the presidential campaigns that a group of more than 50 science organizations is seeking to push it into the conversation.
The group, which includes the American Association for the Advancement of Science, The National Academy of Sciences, the American Geophysical Union and Duke University, represents more than 10 million scientists and engineers nationwide. It is calling on the U.S. presidential candidates to address a set of questions related to science, engineering, technology, health and the environment, including climate change. It is also encouraging the media, the moderators that ask the debate questions and voters themselves to ask these questions of the candidates in the course of the campaign.
“Science issues are coming to influence more and more of the policy dialogues, and politicians seem to be having a hard time incorporating complex science information into their policymaking process,” said Shawn Otto, chair ofScienceDebate.org, which is organizing the initiative.

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Wednesday, August 3, 2016


They didn't see the stop sign
took a turn for the worse
  -The Eagles (Life in the Fats Lane)
Don't you think you'd better stop?
Well maybe
    -Pearl Jam  (All Those Yesterdays)
Greetings
       Here's hoping you are having a "resilient"  summer.  Hopefully you've had a chance "put up" some of your bounty.  Hard to believe, but it's time to start planting those fall crops.    And maybe finish chopping that firewood.  Yikes!   The days are getting shorter! 
      Richard Heinberg has a nice succinct analysis of our current situation in his latest piece "You Can't Handle the Truth".   Where he provides a nice sketch of the truth we'd rather avoid looking at.

"But here’s the real deal: a few generations ago we started using fossil fuels for energy; the result was an explosion of production and consumption, which (as a byproduct) enabled enormous and rapid increase in human population. Burning all that coal, oil, and natural gas made a few people very rich and enabled a lot more people to enjoy middle-class lifestyles. But it also polluted air, water, and soil, and released so much carbon dioxide that the planet’s climate is now going haywire. Due to large-scale industrial agriculture, topsoil is disappearing at a rate of 25 billion tons a year; at the same time, expanded population and land use is driving thousands, maybe millions of species of plants and animals to extinction.
 We extracted non-renewable fossil fuels using the low-hanging fruit principle, so that just about all the affordable petroleum (which is the basis for nearly all transport) has already been found and most of has already been burned. Since we can’t afford most of the oil that’s left (either in terms of the required financial investment or the energy required to extract and refine it), the petroleum industry is in the process of going bankrupt. There are alternative energy sources, but transitioning to them will require not just building an enormous number of wind turbines and solar panels, but replacing most of the world’s energy-using infrastructure.
 We have overshot human population levels that are supportable long-term. Yet we have come to rely on continual expansion of population and consumption in order to generate economic growth—which we see as the solution to all problems. Our medicine is our poison.

And most recently, as a way of keeping the party roaring, we have run up history’s biggest debt bubble—and we doubled down on it in response to the 2008 global financial crisis.
       Its no secret that climate -wise,   the chickens are coming home to roost. See e.g. Scorching global temps astound climate scientists; 1000 year flood in Maryland;  Alaska highway melting    Anthrax spewing zombie deer 

"Conditions that are melting Arctic permafrost there recently thawed the carcasses of deer felled by anthrax some 75 years ago, when World War II raged. Warmer temperatures then reactivated the infectious disease, which can survive in hibernation for decades. More than three dozen people have been hospitalised, half of them children, though with no confirmed cases. Making matters worse, a heatwave combined with the anthrax outbreak may have killed more than 1200 deer. New ones.
As apocalyptic as this development may seem, it's perhaps the least worrisome byproduct of warming near the top of the Earth, which is heating up the fastest. Retreating ice and softening permafrost both in the Arctic and elsewhere have already begun to yield other curiosities and dangers, some of which can do a lot more damage than a pile of dead deer:
        We've no option but to adapt, so it's probably a good idea to look at this analysis by the World Resource Institute, which points out how rainfall is movinging away from the equator and towards the poles

" Now a new study in the journal Nature provides some of the first evidence that this widely-predicted phenomenon – the movement of clouds and rainfall from the mid-latitudes towards the North and South poles -- is already taking place. Just like the retreat of glaciers and polar sea ice, now clouds and rain are retreating poleward.
 This will have huge implications for agricultural production, industrial and energy output, and municipal water provisioning. Many irrigated agricultural areas are already facing water stress. The climate-driven shift of clouds and rain – known as Hadley Cell expansion – will put those areas under even greater stress in the future. Rain-fed agriculture, which many poor people depend upon, will also suffer as a result of reduced rainfall in the mid-latitude regions.
         And of course this is likely to inspire migrants to make their way north.   This is most obvious in North Africa, and Europe, but here is an interesting report from the University of Portland,  suggesting that Oregon would do well do plan for a surge of migrants  - before they come.   

On the resources side, it is widely recognized that we are seeing the end of cheap oil.  There are many theories about this and its likely effects.  Here is a particularity interesting one from an economist with the IMF   see study here.   Although this is likely to result in higher prices over the longer term   (see The Coming Moonshot in Oil Prices), over the shorter term,  prices are fluctuating wildly.   Currently oil process are quite low.  Too low for many US producers to turn a a profit.    In this article Art Berman provides a useful overview of the oil situation in historical context.     Based on his review, one might divide the last 75 years into three categories:  The Golden Age, the age of debt, and the age of consequences
 "The United States experienced a golden age of economic growth and prosperity during the 25 years following World War II. This period forms the basis for U.S. and indeed global expectations that growth is the norm and that recessions and slow growth are aberrations that result from mis-management of the economy. This is the America that today’s populists want to return to.
The Golden Age, however, was a singular phenomenon that is unlikely to recur. After 1945, the economies and militaries of Europe and Japan were in ruins. The U.S. was the only major power that survived the war intact.  Having no competition is a huge competitive advantage.
The U.S. was the first country to fully convert to petroleum, another competitive advantage. A barrel of oil contains about the same amount of energy as a human would expend in calories in 11 years of manual labor.  Crude oil contains more than twice as much energy as coal and two-and-a-half times more than wood. And it’s a liquid that can be moved easily around the world and put in vehicles for transport.
 In 1950, the U.S. produced 52% of the crude oil in the world and was largely self-sufficient. Texas was the largest U.S. producing state and the Texas Railroad Commission (TXRRC) controlled the world price of oil through a system of allowable production that also ensured spare capacity.
      
     The age of debt started after the oil shocks in the 1970's
   "The U.S. put economic growth on a credit card that it never planned to pay off. Public debt increased almost 6-fold from the beginning of Reagan’s administration ($1 trillion) in 1981 to the end of Clinton’s ($6 trillion) in 2000 (Figure 5). By the end of Bush’s presidency in 2008, debt had reached $10 trillion. It is now more than $18 trillion.
 The 1990s were the longest period of economic growth in American history. There are, of course, limits to growth based on debt but the new economy seemed to be working as long as oil prices stayed low. 
It seems that the economy can grow given either a) low oil prices or b) the ability to absorb more debt.  Now  debt is astronomical, and even low oil prices cannot seem to do their magic.   We still feeling the effects of the recent surge in prices

"The oil-price collapse that began in July 2014 followed the longest period of unaffordable oil prices in history. Monthly oil prices (in 2016 dollars) were above $90 per barrel for 48 months from November 2010 through September 2014 ."
Berman puts it simply ; The economy is exhausted.  This intuition is confirmed by the fact that between 2005 and 2014, incomes were either stagnant or fell for 65-70% of the population in developed countries .   This was a big change, as in the periods before 2005, the figure was 2%. see here
Heinberg suggest the real underlying cause - we have just reached the limits to growth:
" In reality, these are all symptoms of an entirely foreseeable systemic crisis. The basic outlines of that crisis were traced over 40 years ago in a book titled The Limits to Growth. Today we are hitting the limits of net energy, environmental pollution, and debt, and the experience is uncomfortable for just about everyone. The solution that’s being proposed by our political leaders? Find someone to blame.

He suggest that neither party is willing to recognize this, and therefore they offer nothing to adress it
"The Republicans really do seem to get the apocalyptic tenor of the moment: their convention was all about dread, doom, and rage. But they don’t have the foggiest understanding of the actual causes and dynamics of what’s making them angry, and just about everything they propose doing will make matters worse. Call them the party of fear and fury.
 The Democrats are more idealistic: if we just distribute wealth more fairly, rein in the greedy banks, and respect everyone’s differences, we can all return to the 1990s when the economy was humming and there were jobs for everyone. No, we can do even better than that, with universal health care and free college tuition. Call the Democrats the party of hope.
In the end, Heinberg suggests that the most effective response is to work locally - on our own, and on our community's resilience
 "Given the absence of helpful leadership at the national level, our main opportunity for effective preparation and response to the wolf at our doorstep appears to lie in local community resilience building.
 It’s the truth. Can you handle it?

So, what to do?  Here's an interesting idea Conviviality

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