Octopus Overlords

Paingod wrote: ↑Fri Aug 31, 2018 3:01 pm On one hand, I'm giddy that we won't be melting too badly up in Maine by the time I'm 80. On the other hand, I expect a lot more people to think it's better up here than where they are and we should buy up some land before it's all gone.

GreenGoo wrote:Geezus. Humanity has to be dragged kicking and screaming into the future. It's depressing.

Zaxxon wrote: ↑Fri Aug 31, 2018 6:06 pm Well, they're focusing on one very specific metric: days above 90F. Your area could very well be warming by metrics other than that one.

Zaxxon wrote: ↑Fri Aug 31, 2018 6:06 pm Well, they're focusing on one very specific metric: days above 90F. Your area could very well be warming by metrics other than that one.

Paingod wrote:In Maine, our 90+ degree days almost always come with high humidity. Yesterday was a doozy. We all melted and huddled around the AC unit.

So while we might shift from 5-7 90+ days to 9-11 90+ days, we're also going to get more 80+ days that will feel like 90+ thanks to the humidity.

Paingod wrote: ↑Tue Sep 04, 2018 9:01 am In Maine, our 90+ degree days almost always come with high humidity. Yesterday was a doozy. We all melted and huddled around the AC unit.

So while we might shift from 5-7 90+ days to 9-11 90+ days, we're also going to get more 80+ days that will feel like 90+ thanks to the humidity.

Last month, deep in a 500-page environmental impact statement, the Trump administration made a startling assumption: On its current course, the planet will warm a disastrous 7 degrees by the end of this century.

A rise of 7 degrees Fahrenheit, or about 4 degrees Celsius, compared with preindustrial levels would be catastrophic, according to scientists. Many coral reefs would dissolve in increasingly acidic oceans. Parts of Manhattan and Miami would be underwater without costly coastal defenses. Extreme heat waves would routinely smother large parts of the globe.

But the administration did not offer this dire forecast as part of an argument to combat climate change. Just the opposite: The analysis assumes the planet’s fate is already sealed.

The draft statement, issued by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), was written to justify President Trump’s decision to freeze federal fuel efficiency standards for cars and light trucks built after 2020. While the proposal would increase greenhouse gas emissions, the impact statement says, that policy would add just a very small drop to a very big, hot bucket.
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Administration estimates acknowledge that the policies would release far more greenhouse gas emissions from America’s energy and transportation sectors than otherwise would have been allowed.

David Pettit, a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council who testified against Trump’s freeze of fuel efficiency standards this week in Fresno, Calif., said his organization is prepared to use the administration’s own numbers to challenge their regulatory rollbacks. He noted that the NHTSA document projects that if the world takes no action to curb emissions, current atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide would rise from 410 parts per million to 789 ppm by 2100.

‘‘I was shocked when I saw it,’’ Pettit said in a phone interview. ‘‘These are their numbers. They aren’t our numbers.’’

Defiant wrote: ↑Tue Oct 16, 2018 10:27 am‘Hyperalarming’ study shows massive insect loss

Article wrote:“Holy crap,” Wagner said of the 60-fold loss.
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The food web appears to have been obliterated from the bottom.
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In the same 40-year period as the arthropod crash, the average high temperature in the rain forest increased by 4 degrees Fahrenheit. The temperatures in the tropics stick to a narrow band. The invertebrates that live there, likewise, are adapted to these temperatures and fare poorly outside them; bugs cannot regulate their internal heat.
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“It’s bewildering, and I’m scared to death that it’s actually death by a thousand cuts,” Wagner said. “One of the scariest parts about it is that we don’t have an obvious smoking gun here.” A particular danger to these arthropods, in his view, was not temperature but droughts and lack of rainfall.

It took a giant laurel oak puncturing her roof during Hurricane Florence last month for Margie White to consider that perhaps there was some truth to all the alarm bells over global warming.

“I always thought climate change was a bunch of nonsense, but now I really do think it is happening,” said White, a 65-year-old Trump supporter, as she and her young grandson watched workers haul away downed trees and other debris lining the streets of her posh seaside neighborhood last week, just as Hurricane Michael made landfall 700 miles away in the Florida Panhandle.

Storms have grown more frequent — and more intense — over the 26 years she and her husband have lived in Wilmington, White said, each one chipping away at their skepticism. Climate change has even seeped into their morning conversations as they sip coffee — ever since the neighbor’s tree came crashing onto their home and property, coming to rest along nearly the entire length of their driveway.
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Separately, fishermen have noticed in recent years that black sea bass are migrating north because of warming ocean temperatures. Other watermen say they’re finding more saltwater fish such as flounder upriver as the sea level rises.

“I’m not a scientist. I just know what I see,” said Carl Marshburn, a Republican who has operated tour boats along the Cape Fear River for three decades. He said he’s had to start coating the bottom of his river boats with antifouling paint to prevent barnacles and other marine organisms from growing amid saltwater intrusion.
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An Elon University survey taken in early October, after Hurricane Florence hit, showed that 37 percent of Republicans believe global warming is “very likely” to negatively impact North Carolina coastal communities in the next 50 years. That is nearly triple the percentage of Republicans — 13 percent — who felt that way in 2017.

The percentage of Republicans who felt climate change is “not at all likely” to harm the state’s coastal communities dropped by 10 points over the past year — from 41 percent in 2017 to 31 percent now.
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Moreover, nearly half of Republicans surveyed said that incorporating findings from climate-change scientists into local government planning is a good idea and three-quarters said real estate development should be restricted along flood-prone areas.

Zaxxon wrote: ↑Thu Oct 18, 2018 1:24 pm For fuck's sake.

Just two years ago, amid global fanfare, the Paris climate accords were signed — initiating what seemed, for a brief moment, like the beginning of a planet-saving movement. But almost immediately, the international goal it established of limiting global warming to two degrees Celsius began to seem, to many of the world’s most vulnerable, dramatically inadequate; the Marshall Islands’ representative gave it a blunter name, calling two degrees of warming “genocide.”

The alarming new report you may have read about this week from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — which examines just how much better 1.5 degrees of warming would be than 2 — echoes the charge. “Amplifies” may be the better term. Hundreds of millions of lives are at stake, the report declares, should the world warm more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, which it will do as soon as 2040, if current trends continue. Nearly all coral reefs would die out, wildfires and heat waves would sweep across the planet annually, and the interplay between drought and flooding and temperature would mean that the world’s food supply would become dramatically less secure. Avoiding that scale of suffering, the report says, requires such a thorough transformation of the world’s economy, agriculture, and culture that “there is no documented historical precedent.” The New York Times declared that the report showed a “strong risk” of climate crisis in the coming decades; in Grist, Eric Holthaus wrote that “civilization is at stake.”

If you are alarmed by those sentences, you should be — they are horrifying. But it is, actually, worse than that — considerably worse. That is because the new report’s worst-case scenario is, actually, a best case. In fact, it is a beyond-best-case scenario. What has been called a genocidal level of warming is already our inevitable future. The question is how much worse than that it will get.

Barring the arrival of dramatic new carbon-sucking technologies, which are so far from scalability at present that they are best described as fantasies of industrial absolution, it will not be possible to keep warming below two degrees Celsius — the level the new report describes as a climate catastrophe. As a planet, we are coursing along a trajectory that brings us north of four degrees by the end of the century. The IPCC is right that two degrees marks a world of climate catastrophe. Four degrees is twice as bad as that. And that is where we are headed, at present — a climate hell twice as hellish as the one the IPCC says, rightly, we must avoid at all costs. But the real meaning of the report is not “climate change is much worse than you think,” because anyone who knows the state of the research will find nothing surprising in it. The real meaning is, “you now have permission to freak out.”

At two degrees, the melting of ice sheets will pass a tipping point of collapse, flooding dozens of the world’s major cities this century. At that amount of warming, it is estimated, global GDP, per capita, will be cut by 13 percent. Four hundred million more people will suffer from water scarcity, and even in the northern latitudes heat waves will kill thousands each summer. It will be worse in the planet’s equatorial band. In India, where many cities now numbering in the many millions would become unliveably hot, there would be 32 times as many extreme heat waves, each lasting five times as long and exposing, in total, 93 times more people. This is two degrees — practically speaking, our absolute best-case climate scenario.

At three degrees, southern Europe will be in permanent drought. The average drought in Central America would last 19 months and in the Caribbean 21 months. In northern Africa, the figure is 60 months — five years. The areas burned each year by wildfires would double in the Mediterranean and sextuple in the United States. Beyond the sea-level rise, which will already be swallowing cities from Miami Beach to Jakarta, damages just from river flooding will grow 30-fold in Bangladesh, 20-fold in India, and as much as 60-fold in the U.K. This is three degrees — better than we’d do if all the nations of the world honored their Paris commitments, which none of them are. Practically speaking, barring those dramatic tech deus ex machinas, this seems to me about as positive a realistic outcome as it is rational to expect.

At four degrees, there would be eight million cases of dengue fever each year in Latin America alone. Global grain yields could fall by as much as 50 percent, producing annual or close-to-annual food crises. The global economy would be more than 30 percent smaller than it would be without climate change, and we would see at least half again as much conflict and warfare as we do today. Possibly more. Our current trajectory, remember, takes us higher still, and while there are many reasons to think we will bend that curve soon — the plummeting cost of renewable energy, the growing global consensus about phasing out coal — it is worth remembering that, whatever you may have heard about the green revolution and the price of solar, at present, global carbon emissions are still growing.

Zaxxon wrote: ↑Fri Aug 31, 2018 6:06 pm Well, they're focusing on one very specific metric: days above 90F. Your area could very well be warming by metrics other than that one.

Kraken wrote: ↑Fri Oct 19, 2018 6:55 pm 100 years from now, Trump will be remembered as the president who condemned the world to climate catastrophe.

Blackhawk wrote: And in a couple of thousand years people will

Zaxxon wrote: ↑Fri Oct 19, 2018 9:07 pm

Blackhawk wrote: And in a couple of thousand years people will

So optimistic.

em2nought wrote: ↑Fri Oct 19, 2018 7:27 pm we can't balance a budget

Unagi wrote: ↑Fri Oct 19, 2018 10:16 pm

em2nought wrote: ↑Fri Oct 19, 2018 7:27 pm we can't balance a budget

em2nought wrote: ↑Fri Oct 19, 2018 7:27 pm <Bemoans a lack of a balanced budget after voting for a man who has now driven the deficit to its highest in 6 years. Bitches about death by nuclear arsenal less than 48 hours after his chosen leader pulls out of a treaty that was created to help prevent that.>

hepcat wrote: ↑Mon Oct 22, 2018 10:22 am Let me paraphrase.

em2nought wrote: ↑Fri Oct 19, 2018 7:27 pm <Bemoans a lack of a balanced budget after voting for a man who has now driven the deficit to its highest in 6 years. Bitches about death by nuclear arsenal less than 48 hours after his chosen leader pulls out of a treaty that was created to help prevent that.>

hepcat wrote: ↑Mon Oct 22, 2018 1:58 pm You certainly closed your eyes when voting in 2016.

Researchers say that the world has seriously underestimated the amount of heat soaked up by our oceans over the past 25 years.

Their study suggests that the seas have absorbed 60% more than previously thought.

They say it means the Earth is more sensitive to fossil fuel emissions than estimated.

This could make it much more difficult to to keep global warming within safe levels this century.

According to the last major assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world's oceans have taken up over 90% of the excess heat trapped by greenhouse gases.

But this new study says that every year, for the past 25 years, we have put about 150 times the amount of energy used to generate electricity globally into the seas - 60% more than previous estimates.

That's a big problem.

Scientists base their predictions about how much the Earth is warming by adding up all the excess heat that is produced by the known amount of greenhouse gases that have been emitted by human activities.

This new calculation shows that far more heat than we thought has been going into oceans. But it also means that far more heat than we thought has been generated by the warming gases we have emitted.

Therefore more heat from the same amount of gas means the Earth is more sensitive to CO2.