Climate Change: Plausible Worst Case Scenarios

Climate Progress has a great post up:

" * The Arctic could warm by up to 15.2 °C [27.4 °F] for a high-emissions scenario, enhanced by melting of snow and ice causing more of the Sun’s radiation to be absorbed.
* For Africa, the western and southern regions are expected to experience both large warming (up to 10 °C [18 °F]) and drying.
* Some land areas could warm by seven degrees [12.6 F] or more.
* Rainfall could decrease by 20% or more in some areas, although there is a spread in the magnitude of drying. All computer models indicate reductions in rainfall over western and southern Africa, Central America, the Mediterranean and parts of coastal Australia.
* In other areas, such as India, rainfall could increase by 20% or more. Higher rainfall increases the risk of river flooding.
* Large parts of the inland United States would warm by 15°F to 18°F."

Curt also recommended this video, modeling out the cost of climate mitigation:

When Deprived of Propaganda ...

A followup on a previous post, I'm not sure how long it will take the right-wing propaganda model on climate change to shift. It seems pretty robust.

Anyone who believes in climate change is a fool, and a tool of the global elite:

"The people who believe the fictional UN story of man-made-global-warming also believe that people are kidnapped by space aliens and injected with non-existant material, or that the Egyptian peramids were built by ancient space aliens, or that the movie Star Wars is a documentary...or they are just servile puppets of the world's elite billionairs."

Climate change is a method of enriching scientists and government workers:

"(I)t is the Mother of all eco-hoaxes. It is perfect for politicians. It is very expensive to study and they can control the funding of studies. The scientists in the field (as well as "environmental journalists") have a vested, pecuniary interest in keeping the myth alive...and funded. The politicians gain power and control. The financial industry stands to make a killing by inventing a commodity out of a naturally occurring trace gas critical to life on Earth."

(Of course, there's no mention of the much much larger amounts of money being made by extractive industries that contribute to climate change).

If a crack appears in that armor, well ... you know ... we can't do anything about it anyways. So why bother?:

"I submit that even minimizing man's impact on the planet is all but useless. For one thing, it is a useless endeavour. China, India, Russia, flat out don't care. Meanwhile their populations are increasing and their "carbon footprint" (what a useless term) grows exponentially ever minute."

And if that all fails, well ... there's always geoengineering:

"(T)he most promising avenue is to invest $9 billion in accelerated research on so-called marine cloud whitening technology. The idea is to create vast fleets of robot ships to pump seawater droplets into the clouds above the oceans to make them reflect more sunlight back into space." Source

It seems like there's about 3 failure points already built into this propaganda model. Breaking through propaganda this powerful will probably take a generational shift.

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Source for most quotes: http://comments.americanthinker.com/read/42323/432787.html

(I didn't want to provide a direct link, but I do need to offer an attribution)

Residual Warming and Clathrate Bombs

There are a lot of changes coming to our world, but I tend to think that most of them are surmountable. Our civilization is massively wasteful, humans can be pretty resourceful when pushed against the wall, and not every country is as stupid as America.

I don't expect that the 2 billion poorest people in the world will see it this way when their food is turned into motor fuel, but neither do I expect that we'll see the wealthiest countries to turn into Mad Max overnight. I also don't expect a massive world war over resources -- there are many powerful actors on the international stage these days who depend on controlled intercine warfare that would stand to lose if an actual large scale 'hot war' broke out.

Change on the scale we're talking about tends to happen in a series of minor crises, over a number of years and decades ... and while you're living through it, these kinds of massive changes in lifestyle tend to happen relatively slowly.

However, the wild card in all of this is climate change.

Humans have added around 100 parts per million of carbon to the atmosphere. What is so insidious about this, however, is that most of the effects of this Co2 is being masked by air pollution:

"(S)ince 1950, the planet released about 20 percent of the warming influence of heat-trapping greenhouse gases to outer space as infrared energy. Volcanic emissions lingering in the stratosphere offset about 20 percent of the heating by bouncing solar radiation back to space before it reached the surface. Cooling from the lower-atmosphere aerosols produced by humans balanced 50 percent of the heating. Only the remaining 10 percent of greenhouse-gas warming actually went into heating the Earth, and almost all of it went into the ocean." Source.

This is a process called global dimming, which was documented in a great Nova piece. Actual real-world data confirmed this process in the week following the 9/11 attacks, when shutting down air travel led to an increased temperature in the continental United States.

Why? We removed a major source of air pollution; this pollution is more effective at blocking solar energy if it's deposited into the upper atmosphere (from the back of a jet engine).

Lou calculated that, "If we reduce our burning of fossil fuels enough to trim even 50% of the effect of their aerosol emissions (and we likely have to cut far more than that), we’ll add 0.6 W/sq. meter to the net effect of human-induced warming. That would push our net “contribution” from all human activities from about 1.6 W/sq. meter to 2.2 W/sq. meter, an increase of 37.5%."

So when we finally get around to reducing particulate pollution, we'll unmask the true effects of the global warming we've unleashed so far. Quite literally ... we have seen only a small percentage of the climate change effect of the 100 ppm of Co2 we've pushed into the atmosphere so far.

The potential of all this residual heat setting off a clathrate bomb scares me a hell of a lot more than running out of cheap oil does.

A Very Sick Culture

A few things I ran across today remind me that we have diverged very, very far from anything approaching rationality.

"I've always though that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City. Only the lamentable facts that so much pollution is generated by non-tradable industries (transport, electrical generation) and that the unit transport costs of solid waste are so high prevent world welfare enhancing trade in air pollution and waste."

A blurb about the movie Crude reminded me that this mother fucker was almost made Obama's Treasury Secretary.

"My message on this topic is clear and direct. We are at a crucial moment in human history. 2009 is to climate change what 1939 was to WWII. Poland has been invaded – the Arctic is melting, the bushfires are burning, the droughts are strengthening and the floods are sweeping away communities. There is only one question you have to ask yourself: “what will I tell my children?”

This article is right on point. We have already passed the climate tipping point; the question now is whether we will merely precipitate a massive shift in the Earth's climate, or whether we will cause the extinction of most complex multicellular life.

By 2100, perhaps half of the planet will have entirely new climates to which no current species on Earth are adapted. We don't have to go down this road. We can stop digging up coal, sucking oil out of the Alberta tar sands, and develop a sane energy policy which produces less toxicity and less greenhouse gasses.

But the people in charge are virulently opposed to this, because it they fear any change which might result in a loss of power or wealth for them. They are the same class of people who took all the land, and killed our native forebears ... they killed the ones ones who dared to fight back, or be born free from indoctrination.

They sold the land back to the broken, the afflicted, and to those who did not fight back. They sold the land back with conditions attached, with a price -- make the land productive. Make a profit. Or else we take the and back and leave you cold and destitute, lying in the gutter.

The Rockafellers, Fords and Carnegies of this world have already taken our pride, the fruits of our labor, and most of our self-respect. They have divorced us from the price of a job well done. They found a way to make even more profit by taking the land back from our ancestors, finding them new and better places to work called factories. Very efficient! Coal smoke is good for you! Our 50 page book of regulations will make the workplace more fair! It was far cheaper to work a man (or a woman, they're not picky) for bare subsistence wages -- then profit anew from their rent, heat, car, food and medical bills.

The Union Carbides, Dow Chemicals and Monsantos of this world have already come for large portions of our lives. We live in a toxic stew of carcinogens, mutagens and neurotoxins. We eat carcinogens, mutagens and neurotoxins. We drink carcinogens, mutagens and neurotoxins ... with a dash of prozac, birth control hormones, and all the other drugs that wash into the sewers and find their way back into our drinking water. They kill us quickly, sometimes. Sometimes they kill us slowly. Most often of all, they simply make us suffer from unexplained illnesses that are caused by (or exacerbated by) the toxins they produce in enormous quantities.

And now their conglomerated power comes for the lives of generations to come. There is great profit to be had! And so they lie, they trick, they deceive. The blood of the trickster god Loki flows in their veins. They are wounding the planet's air, water and land in a staggering display of hubris. They are destroying the ability of this planet to nurture the complex web of life that sustains all living things.

Do we listen?

Do we accept the creature comforts they throw at us
listen to their lies
and accept that the Earth is simply too big to worry about?

There is no attic to hide in
we cannot ride out the coming storm

If no one stands up for us
if we do not stand up for ourselves
then there will be no generations left to curse our names.

Despite this chorus of anger, I am left inspired by another author, who writes:

"The situation is so immense, so mind-numbingly complex and difficult, so lost in the labyrinth of humanity’s perverse perceptions, that I’ve now moved beyond any notion of being “optimistic” or “pessimistic”. I will simply continue to fight as creatively and as hard as I can, and hope that my own perception is wrong."

In this sense, Derrick Jensen is quite correct. We are indeed at the "endgame". 10,000 years of cultural domination by the food hoarders, money lenders and lawgivers of this world have brought us to the precipice.

What do we do about it? I don't know.

But like most things in life, imperfect action beats sitting on your butt trying to come up with "the perfect plan".