Comfortably Numb

Am I in heaven 

or am I in Miami?

     -Martin Mull

Lets take the whole day off

     -Oingo Boingo

Greetings

Good news

Oregon bill gets nice coverage   and  passes house  But.....

Jay Inslee releases an ambitious climate plan

Greetings 

          I must confess I missed the 1st Dem debate.  But I hear that MSNBC and the Dems have a good grip on the important issues.  Climate Change got 7 minutes.   See here    It must not be a real problem.

         So, what are they missing?   Eric Holthaus gives a good overview 

It’s the hottest month of one of the hottest years in the history of human civilization, and unusual wildfires are sprouting up all over the map. Sweden has called for emergency assistance from the rest of the European Union to help battle massive wildfires burning north of the Arctic Circle. Across the western United States, 50 major wildfires are burning in parts of 14 states, fueled by severe drought. The wildfires burning in Siberia earlier this month sent smoke plumes from across the Arctic all the way to New England, four thousand miles away. Last year, big wildfires burned in Greenland for the first time in recorded history.

And then there are the rains. In Laos, after days of downpours, a hydropower dam that was under construction collapsed on Tuesday. Hundreds of people have been reported missing. Higher global temperatures increase the evaporation rate, putting more water vapor in the atmosphere and making extreme downpours more common.

In recent weeks, high-temperature records have been set on nearly every continent. On Monday, Japan had its hottest temperature in recorded history — 106 degrees Fahrenheit — just days after one of the worst flooding disasters the country has ever seen.

Algeria has recorded the highest reliably measured temperature in Africa, 124 degrees Fahrenheit. In late June, the temperature never dropped below 108 degrees Fahrenheit in Oman — the highest overnight low temperature anywhere in the world.

Even in normally temperate places, the air has been sweltering: Temperatures approaching 100 degrees Fahrenheit hit parts of Canada, overwhelming hospitals in Montreal — where another heat wave is imminent this week.

 Even the permafrost is getting hot And its is melting  like its 2090.  see here

The aforementioned study, from 2003-2016, found permafrost melt up to 240% more than previous years. In geological terms, that’s like winning the Indy 500, hands down. That permafrost had been frozen solid for “thousands of years.” Accordingly, scientists predicted the permafrost “wouldn’t melt for another 70 years.” Yet, the landscape has already collapsed by up to three feet.

Not only is permafrost collapsing, but it’s also reported that houses are “sinking into the earth” in parts of Alaska, Canada, and Russia. Alaska’s 92-mile road for Alaska’s Denali National Park is moving off center by the forces of slip-sliding land.

James Anderson, who won the noble prize for his work on ozone puts it this way 

 “People have the misapprehension that we can recover from this state just by reducing carbon emissions, Anderson said in an appearance at the University of Chicago. Recovery is all but impossible, he argued, without a World War II-style transformation of industry—an acceleration of the effort to halt carbon pollution and remove it from the atmosphere, and a new effort to reflect sunlight away from the earth’s poles… This has to be done, Anderson added, within the next five years.” 

Based upon that gauntlet as laid down by professor Anderson, only 4 years remains to get something done to “save us.” But, sadly, there is no “WW-II style transformation of industry” under consideration, not even a preliminary fact-finding mission.

also

"The chance that there will be any permanent ice left in the Arctic after 2022 is essentially zero," Anderson said, with 75 to 80 percent of permanent ice having melted already in the last 35 years.

Can we lose 75-80 percent of permanent ice and recover? The answer is no."

The answer is no in part because of what scientists call feedbacks, some of the ways the earth responds to warming. Among those feedbacks is the release of methane currently trapped in permafrost and under the sea, which will exacerbate warming. Another is the pending collapse of the Greenland ice sheet, which Anderson said will raise sea level by 7 meters (about 23 feet).

Hans Joachim Schellnhuber of the Potsdam Institute puts it equally starkly

“The Emeritus Director of the Potsdam Institute, Prof. Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, warns that ‘climate change is now reaching the end-game, where very soon humanity must choose between taking unprecedented action, or accepting that it has been left too late and bear the consequences.’ He says that if we continue down the present path ‘there is a very big risk that we will just end our civilisation. The human species will survive somehow but we will destroy almost everything we have built up over the last two thousand years.’”

Dave Roberts offers a sobering look at the efforts to date on "decarbonizing"

First, we’re still moving in the wrong direction. Global carbon emissions aren’t falling fast enough. In fact, they aren’t falling at all; they were up 1.7 percent in 2018.

Second, we’re still pushing in the wrong direction. Globally, subsidies to fossil fuels were up 11 percent between 2016 and 2017, reaching $300 billion a year.

And third, the effort to clean up is flagging. This week brought some good news for the United States — more of America’s electricity came from clean energy than coal for the first time ever in April, as Bloomberg reported Tuesday. But the GSR report reveals that total investment in renewable energy (not including hydropower) was $288.9 billion in 2018 — less than fossil fuel subsidies and an 11 percent decrease from 2017.

This is all bad news. The public seems to have the impression that while things are bad, they are finally accelerating toward something better. It’s not true

...

Every climate model that involves humanity hitting its carbon targets involves rapid declines in “energy intensity,” i.e., the amount of energy used to produce a unit of GDP. In theory, if you can reduce energy intensity fast enough, you can offset the natural rise in energy consumption (from population and economic growth) and even cause total energy demand to decline.

In theory, anyway. In reality, global energy intensity has declined just 2.2 percent in the past five years. That has not been enough to offset the rise in global energy demand, which crept up 1.2 percent.

Energy intensity is declining at around 0.4 percent a year. To hit midcentury global decarbonization targets, global energy intensity would need to decline by between 4 and 10 percent a year. That means the world needs to accelerate efficiency and electrification rates by about 10 times.

So, what should we prepare for?  In dealing with risk, its important to look at both the "best case" and the worst case.  It may be dangerous to rely on "mid range projections"

planners are working with a mid-range projection of sea level rise, their efforts might protect coastal regions from the most likely scenarios depicted in climate models, but that still leaves a lot of risks, say the authors of the study published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"Coastal decisions, by and large, require long lead times, and it would be nice if we could wait for the science to clear up, but we can't," said Michael Oppenheimer, an atmospheric scientist at Princeton University and one of the authors of the study.

"If you knew there was a one-third or even 10 percent chance a plane would crash, you wouldn't get on it. It's the same with sea level rise," 

 Here is one "reasonably likely" scenario

See here

Find the report here

2020–2030: Policy-makers fail to act on evidence that the current Paris Agreement path — in which global human-caused greenhouse emissions do not peak until 2030 — will lock in at least 3° C of warming.The case for a global, climate-emergency mobilization of labor and resources to build a zero-emission economy and carbon drawdown in order to have a realistic chance of keeping warming well below 2°C is politely ignored.  

As projected by Xu and Ramanathan,  by 2030 carbon dioxide levels have reached 437 parts per million—which is unprecedented in the last 20  million years — and warming reaches 1.6°C.

 

2030–2050: Emissions peak in 2030, and start to fall consistent with an 80 percent reduction in fossil-fuel energy intensity by 2100 compared to 2010 energy intensity. 

This leads to warming of 2.4°C by 2050, consistent with the Xu and Ramanathan “baseline-fast”   scenario. 

However, another 0.6°C of warming occurs —taking the total to 3°C by 2050—due to the activation of a number of carbon-cycle feedbacks and higher levels of ice albedo and cloud feedbacks than current models assume. 

 [It should be noted that this is far from an extreme scenario: the low-probability, high-impact warming     (five percent probability) can exceed 3.5–4°C by 2050 in the Xu and Ramanathan scheme.] 

2050:  By 2050, there  is broad scientific acceptance that system tipping-points for the West AntarcticIce Sheet and a sea-ice-free Arctic summer were passed well before 1.5°C of warming, for the Greenland Ice  Sheet well before 2°C, and for wide spread permafrost loss and large-scale Amazon drought and die back by 2.5°C. The “hot house Earth”scenario has been realised, and Earth is headed for another degree or more of warming, especially since human green house hothouse is still significant. 

...

Thirty five percent of the global land area, and 55 percent of the global population, are subject to more than 20 days a year of lethal heat conditions, beyond the threshold of survivability.

Interestingly,  this corresponds pretty well with a scenario from "The Age of Consequences", put out in 2006 by the Center for Strategic and International studies 

In the case of severe climate change, cor-

responding to an average increase in global 

temperature of 2.6°C by 2040, massive non-

linear events in the global environment give 

rise to massive nonlinear societal events. In 

this scenario, addressed in Chapter IV, nations 

around the world will be overwhelmed by the 

scale of change and pernicious challenges, such 

as pandemic disease. The internal cohesion of 

nations will be under great stress, including in the 

United States, both as a result of a dramatic rise 

in migration and changes in agricultural patterns 

and water availability. The flooding of coastal 

communities around the world, especially in the 

Netherlands, the United States, South Asia, and 

China, has the potential to challenge regional and 

even national identities. Armed conflict between 

nations over resources, such as the Nile and its 

tributaries, is likely and nuclear war is possible. 

The social consequences range from increased 

religious fervor to outright chaos. In this sce-

nario, climate change provokes a permanent shift 

in the relationship of humankind to nature.

This may be a little abstract.  Lets look how it could play out in the area of food and water. From the weather underground

As I wrote in my 2016 post, Food System Shock: Climate Change's Greatest Threat to Civilization, the greatest threat of climate change to civilization over the next 40 years is likely to be climate change-amplified extreme droughts and floods hitting multiple major global grain-producing "breadbaskets" simultaneously. An interruption in U.S. grain exports due to failure of the ORCS, if it occurs during the same year that another major grain-producing nation experiences a serious drought or flood, could cause a frightening global food emergency. The impact might be similar to what was outlined in a "Food System Shock" report issued in 2015 by insurance giant Lloyds of London, with rioting, terrorist attacks, civil war, mass starvation and severe losses to the global economy.

As for water

In India, “Day Zero” has already arrived for over 100 million people, thanks to excessive groundwater pumping, an inefficient and wasteful water supply system and years of deficient rains. “Day Zero” is expected to arrive for millions more in India by 2020 when groundwater supplies are predicted to run out for 100 million people in the northern half of India.

Over 12% of India’s population – 163 million people of 1.3 billion – live under “Day Zero” conditions, with no access to clean water near their home, according to a 2018 WaterAid report. That is the most of any country in the world. With the taps dry, people are forced to dig ever-deeper wells or buy water.

The number of people in India experiencing “Day Zero” is set to grow significantly by 2020, according to a startling report released in 2018 by Niti Ayog, India’s federal think tank. “Supply gaps are causing city dwellers to depend on privately extracted groundwater, bringing down local water tables,” the report says.

“In fact, by 2020, 21 major cities, including Delhi, Bengaluru (formerly called Bangalore) and Hyderabad, are expected to reach zero groundwater levels, affecting access for 100 million people.”

See also here and here

So how would this play out?   Well, initially at least the "first world" in the northern latitudes will get off relatively easy (fire, flood and drought).  Its is the poor southern latitudes that will be hit much harder.

As a recent UN Report explains:

In a blistering new report being presented to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva this week, Alston warns hundreds of millions of people will face food insecurity, forced migration, disease, and death this century – and even in the short term the mounting crises will be devastating in effect.

"It could push more than 120 million more people into poverty by 2030," Alston says.

"Climate change threatens to undo the last 50 years of progress in development, global health, and poverty reduction."

The biggest risk, the report explains, is to the world's poor; people from nations who are the least responsible for the consequences of carbon pollution, but who will feel its most severe impacts.

While those in developing countries will not be the only victims of the climate crisis as it unfolds, they will be the most exposed to its dangerous environmental repercussions, Alston says.

"People in poverty tend to live in areas more susceptible to climate change and in housing that is less resistant; lose relatively more when affected; have fewer resources to mitigate the effects; and get less support from social safety nets or the financial system to prevent or recover from the impact," the report states.

"Their livelihoods and assets are more exposed and they are more vulnerable to natural disasters that bring disease, crop failure, spikes in food prices, and death or disability."

It's these types of factors, Alston writes, that help to explain why in this century alone, people in poor countries have died from disasters at rates up to seven times higher than citizens from wealthy countries.

This phenomenon, which may be even more exacerbated as climate strife deepens, paints a dire picture of where things are headed.

"We risk a 'climate apartheid' scenario where the wealthy pay to escape overheating, hunger, and conflict while the rest of the world is left to suffer," Alston says.

I suppose this is where I am supposed to say that we can still turn this around, if we just try harder.    But I'm not sure that is a useful message.

   I recently read a thoughtful review of two Climate related books  "Falter", by Bill Mckibben and "The Uninhabitable Earth" by David Wallace Wells.   The reviewer praises them for their able description of the situation, but suggests they  falter at the end.  The whole review of worth reading.  Here is a snip.

In this way, both authors adhere neatly to the genre of the monitory ecological sermon, which found archetypal form in Theodor Geisel’s 1971 story The Lorax: industrial capitalism has wrought total ecological devastation upon the Earth, denuding it of Truffula Trees, brown Bar-ba-loots, Humming Fish, and Swomee Swans, which devastated world is fated to be our grim gray home forever … unless. Unless, that is, we heed the Lorax who speaks for the trees. The future depends upon cultivating the right feelings: “Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.” Which implies that if you do care, things will get better — a kind of magical thinking to which Americans seem especially susceptible.

Both The Uninhabitable Earth and Falter swerve in their final pages into this “unless,” in equally desperate and unconvincing ways. Wallace-Wells insists that “[i]f humans are responsible for the problem, they must be capable of undoing it,” which assertion is false in two ways. First, I may be responsible for knocking a glass of wine onto the floor, but I cannot simply undo the shattering. George W. Bush was responsible for the American invasion of Iraq, but no executive order could unbomb Baghdad and resurrect all the children he killed. Both ecological thinking and human history teach the same lesson: actions have complex, unforeseeable, and often irrevocable consequences.

Second, Wallace-Wells’s assertion attributes conscious deliberation to an abstract entity — “humanity” — which has shown no evidence of having any such quality. At the global scale, we act not as rational agents making individual decisions, but as a concatenation of competing actors. Even at the level of the individual, we often face limitations when it comes to doing what we think we ought. Simply because someone is responsible for drinking too much, losing their temper, or making a fool of themselves does not mean that they are necessarily capable of doing otherwise, much less of undoing the consequences of their actions.

While Wallace-Wells subscribes to the standard checklist of proposals to fight climate change, he neglects to present a convincing case for how policies such as the Green New Deal, a carbon tax, or massive global investment in direct air capture technology might be enacted and put into practice. Any environmental studies undergrad can tell you what we need to do; the problem is doing it. Wallace-Wells’s personal exhortations that we “choose to feel empowered” and “take responsibility” for climate change ring as hollow as the self-help slogans they so resemble.

McKibben’s “unless” relies less on contemporary language of empowerment than on a mashup of 1960s social activism and 1970s techno-utopianism. He argues that “two new technologies” offer us the chance to save the Bar-ba-loots: “One is the solar panel, and the other is the nonviolent movement.” To support this claim, McKibben first turns to Thomas Friedman–style anecdotes about poor families in Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, and rural Vermont relying on solar panels for home power generation, then descends into a stupefying mix of cheerleading, moral hectoring, and small-is-beautiful nostalgia.

Solar panels, on their own, cannot meet global energy needs, and will not solve the problems caused by CO2 currently in the atmosphere and oceans, the catastrophic collapse of the biosphere, imminent crises in industrial agriculture, and accelerating climate feedbacks. And at this point — after the 2003 protests against the Iraq War, the “largest anti-war rally in history,” which saw millions of people in hundreds of cities across the world protesting the American invasion of Iraq and which utterly failed to stop the war — after the “People’s Climate March” in 2014, the “largest climate change march in history,” which utterly failed to have any noticeable effect on global climate policy — after decades of failed protests against institutional racism, gun violence, sexism, nuclear weapons, abortion, war, environmental degradation, and a raft of other issues — only the deluded and naïve could maintain that nonviolent protest politics is much more than ritualized wishful thinking. In the end, McKibben’s argument falls into the same vague preaching as does Wallace-Wells’s. Human beings are special, McKibben insists, because we have free will: “We’re the only creature who can decide not to do something we’re capable of doing.” Asking hard questions about who that “we” is, how “we” make decisions, how power works, and the limits of human freedom are beyond the reach of both writers, because such questions lie outside the narrative they’re both trapped in.