Aerosols to the rescue?

[comment to ars technica https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/11/former-head-of-nasas-climate-group-issues-dire-warning-on-warming/ ]

We're now getting the kind of disaster that wipes out entire cities as a time. Just a few right now, but that's clearly going to accelerate, and not even be in places already acknowledged as vulnerable (that is, poor people and the global south). Temperatures that stay high evaporate more water, and there's going to be more water available anyway. 

We're used to storms destroying places, but having time to rebuild, sometimes even rebuild with the future in mind (e.g., not rebuilding in a flood plain), but whole new secondary effects are now getting enabled with the temperature rise: things like permafrost melting, fire tornados, and soon, large areas with wet bulb temperatures for extended periods of time that humans can't live in, any more than they can live under water. 

Oh, and it's not just humans, navel gazers, it's all the other plants and animals. 

Photosynthesis becomes less efficient at high temperatures, making the only at scale natural carbon sink less reliable. Aerosols may be increasing albedo, or lowering it, depending on the aerosol. Apparently, there's a lot of microplastic already in the air. Also: any geo-engineering without pumping up the carbon volume is kind of a pipe dream at this point.

Why anyone thinks any semblance of resilience and adaptability will be possible after around 2030 is a mystery to me. P.S.: hot wars are just about the most carboniferous activity people can participate in.

Geriatric candidates on the run!

 More NYT commentary, this time on the handwringing over Biden's age, which for some reason is never handwringing about Trump's already obvious mental decline.

Jhh Lowengard | Kingston, NY
In the past, former presidents and legislators stayed on the scene after leaving office, either by running for a different office or just being one of the smoky voices in the smoke filled room. You can actually see this in the non-governing power of Trump. Part of that power is that the GOP literally has no platform except what Trump says. What he seeks, on the record, is more time to grift, and possibly pardon himself and people who still are loyal to him, and to vengefully persecute his opponents.

Comparing Trump's mental acuity to Biden's is the real comparison, and in the race to get to the end of a sentence, Trump is clearly the loser.

But there's a non-zero possibility that neither of these oldsters will make it to election day 2024. This is what both parties should prepare for. The primaries are set up to emphasize differences between candidates, but the process of running should also clarify how there is continuity of political purpose between leaders and their possible successors.

There's even a possibility that climate disaster issues could finally step in to move aside issues driving politics today to issues like "how can we rebuild", "Where can we move", "How can we help others who have to relocate". Remember: 2023, the hottest year in recorded history, will likely be one of the coolest of the foreseeable future .

Start by stopping carbon mining and consumption.

 My latest NYT comment, on using iron in the ocean as a geo engineering carbon capture solutions:

The idea here is that "We (tech fixers) alone can fix the Climate catastrophe" . Well, we can! Stop producing and using carbon emissions now, worldwide. We can do this in an orderly way, starting with stopping drilling, then stopping mining. Industries reliant on this will be shut down in a similarly orderly fashion, and paid off with money, which is a fiction, so we can make as much as necessary.

You can't geo-engineer out of an ever increasing supply of carbon, especially when the geo-engineering itself would necessarily itself be a huge source of carbon emissions. 

Shutting down fuels would be a tremendous hit to the economy and culture. But guess what? It would be cheaper than a 2+ degree C future, which is what we bought with all that fuel.
Do you have the budget to put the methane back in the permafrost and somehow regrow the glaciers and polar ice?

We're now at the state where small cities are wiped out in single weather events. When the frequency and scope of these events exceeds the means to recover from them, the time for any action will be taken up in emigration, fanciful and ineffective prepping, and faith-based solutions of dubious efficacy.

Forests aren't Our Friends...

[Reply to an article in the NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/06/opinion/columnists/forest-fires-climate-change.html ]

 What forests aren't are a source of permission to continue spewing carbon in the atmosphere. For one thing, the amount to capture is still increasing every year. For another thing, the climate change itself is impeding the capacity for forests to do that sequestration, due to how that process responds to heat. For another thing, we're also either intentionally removing these natural carbons sinks en masse, or sitting by as they die of thirst, are eaten by bugs that aren't killed in winter anymore, burn, releasing even more sunk carbon into the air and water. 

Here's a depressing article to fill you in on some of this:

https://knowablemagazine.org/article/food-environment/2023/dead-trees-shocking-scientists

The right way to act is to do everything possible, and the most effective is to stop with oil/gas extraction, stop with subsidizing those extractions, and get off carbon addiction. If there's less to remove, removing it will be easier. 

We can do this work in an orderly way, shutting down carbon sources while compensating those who lose out on their carbon fueled lives, and relocating them as best we can, or we can let the climate decide for us, and take out ecosystems and civilizations without any human direction. 

"But this will be more expensive than any other previous world project!"  To this I say: we and 8 generations before us have incurred that debt, and we not only have to pay the interest in terms of positive feedback loops, but the massive principle.

Decarbonizing

 You'll be surprised how well the economy will work without burning carbon. 

We can have a gentle decarbonization, first by stopping exploration and opening new sources now, before they start. Then, by shutting down pipelines and refineries one by one, randomly. Removing fossil fuel subsidies, which are artificially depressing the fuel prices.  We can do this, and it needs to be done internationally.  As this happens, we can cut down consumption, find alternatives, not fast enough at first, but faster as the technologies mature. 

Or, we can let the true ruler of the earth, the climate, do it for us, more cruelly, more suddenly, more capriciously. Vulnerable populations will be hurt more at first, forcing migrations to the unwilling not-yet affected areas, but it's only a matter of time - a short time - before smugly secure places are also affected and also made uninhabitable. The lifeboats in this chaotic sea will be the communities that are sustainable - that pay their debt to the earth. But it will not have the flexibility of response that a controlled shutdown would allow. 

The collapse of non-human ecosystems and geological process like ocean steams, jets streams, glaciers, which underlie all economies, no matter which system, will collapse them. You can't claim that working to stop carbon pollution is too expensive. Its expense is pitifully small compared to the collapse of everything underlying value, worldwide.

We know of no processes that can pull the carbon out of the atmosphere as rapidly as we put it in, at scale. So we have to start by not making the problem worse. 

Climate Trigger points

 The Collapse of AMOC is just one working ecological system that can quickly break down due to consequences of too much heat in the atmosphere and sea. We can relate to it because the Gulf Stream has been anomalously heating Northern Europe, where many of its populous cities are above the latitude of Montreal. Without the stream's movement, we can expect more effects, such as the decline in fish stocks, changes in hurricane development, sea level changes independent of the addition of melting land ice's fresh water.

Other predictable systems such as reliable monsoons, permafrost, and glaciation: changes in these can stress the natural world that needs to be predictable for us to exploit it in our current cultures. When to plant and what to plant? Will the birds and insects return to pollinate? Will the forests be there to stabilize the soil? 

A trigger point is where the process is unbalanced just enough to be a self-sustaining cascade, usually exponential in nature. A bit of the energy released contributes to the energy that is doing the releasing.  Humans, who are fairly innumerate to begin with, have a hard time understanding processes with exponential velocities. When we drop rocks off a cliff, that's 32 feet per second squared, but we're rarely high enough or in a place to observe its motion over a period of more than a few seconds. It's just not in our experience. 

The feedback loops we have here not only feed the process releasing the energy, but any other nearby process that by itself would take more energy to reach that tipping point. They are not isolated.

The amount of CO2 in the air already is a huge ecological debt. This is the debt that matters. Innumeracy is keeping decision makers from measuring the cost of shutdowns, conversions and climate refugee migration against the cost of the shutdown of natural processes that were assumed to be free throughout the development of human cultures. Cultures that value property rights - the climate does not value property rights. Cultures that rely on natural growth cycles, natural animal migrations, tide heights, snowpack growth and melting - these cycles will change. Cultures relying on the effect of polar ice on sea salinity and the jet stream - we can't change these but the climate can. 

We have to start by not increasing the debt.  For things we directly control, that means literally not burning carbon emitters to run machinery, or as a source of heat, not removing carbon sinks like forests and oceans. The trouble there is that forests are worse carbon sinks the hotter it gets, and the oceans already have absorbed much of the new CO2 and can't keep up. 

You can watch the interplay of source and sink in the measurements of Co2 from Mauna Loa (and Maunakea while Mauna Loa is erupting). When the global north, which has the most forestry, is growing, the amount of CO2 goes down. When it's more idle, the amount goes back up. But the net addition of carbon outside this cycle pushes the next peak higher than the year before. 

[ https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/ ]

But it does prove that there is a natural process that takes carbon out of the air. As long as those plants don't burn, that carbon can be added to the soil. Can a similar process be optimized and scaled? Can the process that does it actually be carbon neutral or negative? Unfortunately, it's a tech fix, which means it won't happen  unless someone makes money.

 Bitcoins and Energy Use 

One day, the final bitcoin will be mined, since there are a finite number of them. Will that be the end?

On that day, in that country, scorched by drought, swept clean by tornados and floods, burnt dry by wildfires, starved by the consequent soil destruction, and overrun by internal and external climate refugees,  a new crypto currency will be proposed and implemented, resistant to quantum calculations, that will burn up the remaining fossil fuel. 

 1.5°C

Here's a quick reminder of what an average global temperature is. An average temperature is the sum of all the temperatures divided by the number of readings. That means some temperatures are lower, some are higher. At the current 1.1°C, 1.5°C  has already been reached, not constantly yet, not everywhere yet.

1.5°C and 2°C or other numbers are not magic numbers, they are checkpoints of climate models. Reaching any average temperature implies that some places are far above that level, so there are places in the world already where we can see what the effects of more heat are. These places are more or less at the poles, the North Pole the most,  and working their way down the latitudes. 

The poles are effectively linked to other climate zones in our ecosystem. We are already experiencing the effect of more energy in the air and water through the higher absorption of water vapor, itself a greenhouse gas, which adds mass to air masses, and adds chaos to the flow of circumpolar jet streams. 

It doesn't have to be a disaster everywhere for unrecoverable catastrophic weather events to happen right now in some places. The usual story we associate with a disaster is: despite some planning and preparation, a disaster occurs, destroying human and animal lives, infrastructure, and in some cases, the shape of land, seas or rivers. As these are rare events, there's period of recovery where the knowledge that that kind of disaster is possible informs the rebuilding efforts. In our new situation, we won't have time to rebuild and the assumptions for designing civil engineering are now unclear.

 This week (March 20, 2023), there will be a 40-50°F shift in temperature in North Carolina, from 29 to 80+ degrees. This stresses animal and plant life, but  also stresses steel and concrete. Cracks in roads and buildings lets in water and plant roots, two powerful corrosive and destructive  forces. This destruction is not proceeding at the pace of centuries.

Ecological system components influence each other. More water squeezed out of the air means more water on land, more fresh water in the ocean. The higher mass of water in the air means the air moves more slowly and powerfully, and the contrast between the weight of dry and wet air means more powerful winds. The parched earth has less capacity to absorb that water, creating new arroyos in what used to be stable formations.

Poverty

It is expensive to be poor. Cash flow can look adequate if averaged over time, but when it bottoms out and the bank starts charging overdraft fees, and hours are spent trying to negotiate for services that should be human rights, you end up each day - each hour - in worse shape than before. 

As long as we demand that essential services necessary for human rights - shelter, food, heath care, education - be paid for with money, then for social justice, there must be a universal basic income. There must not be means testing. Rich people also deserve a basic income, and their hubris as to perceived needs  versus what their actual needs are, should be revealed and healed through catharsis (that is radical taxation). 

We are about to enter an era where the foundation of wealth, great and poor, is going to be removed through frequent unrecoverable climate emergencies. The bottom is going to drop out of the only economy that matters: the water cycle. As different populations find themselves in unlivable territories, there'll be a new kind of poverty, borne by climate refugees whose land equity has been cancelled. Among these will be many who thought they were living in a sustainable, or growing, security, that they alone were responsible for their wealth. 

The true landlords are the Earth, the seas, lakes, and rivers, the air, and the biosphere that maintains it and enriches it. That's the rent that has to be paid, in the currency of sustainability. 

Happy Bicentennial to Me!

I don't like to talk about it much, but my standard bio claims that I was born in 1823, which was some time ago. The exact date is Jan 27, 1823, so that's coming up in a few short weeks. I'm not planning on having tall ships sail around New York Harbor or set off any fireworks or sing that great tune by Henry Gibson, but I may treat myself to something appropriate for a man of my age. 

You're probably curious about what I remember from the old days. My extreme youth is pretty much lost as it is to many, and diaries my mother was keeping were lost in the Great Fire of 1845 along with much other property down in the warehouse. I was working over on Rector street and it was a constant sequence of blasts and falling debris. I was up in the country for the earlier fire in 1835, but definitely remember buildings that were burned down then too. Sic transit gloria mundi. Yes, lots of people dropped Latin phrases all the time.

All through the first half of the 19th century, even having decisively beaten British forces and established something of an economic presence in the world, the USA still had a cultural inferiority complex. It was up to us to prove we were as good as those governed with the divine endorsement of sovereignty. It was not enough that we started losing our accents. We needed music and art,  poetry and dance that were unmistakably American. This turned out to be the Hudson River School of painting.

The lower class American accent was not really significantly divergent from northern Irish at the time. People would take up idioms slowly, and imitate idiolects until nobody knew who they were imitating. This is the kind of stuff you can notice over a period of 80-110 years. Audio mass communication did a lot to stop accent development.

And really, the times changed rapidly with the steamboat and rail roads. The world moved at two speeds then: walking and riding horses, and the new miraculously faster and reliable engine driven transports. Running a rail line through undeveloped land shrank the distances between city centers, and junctions created centers where there were none before. Communities did not have to be self supporting anymore and could rely on imported food, clothing and building materials.  

There's a whole other thing, which has to do with memory. Once you pass 140 or so, if you don't have good documentation, memory is pretty unreliable, and tends to merge with things you've read. Things I think I know about Lewis Carroll, since I actually knew Alice Liddell and her sister Lorina, just seem unreliable and dream like, or picked up from his letters collections, which of course have an unreliable narrator. The past turns into a kind of pudding. 

Memories have their own timbres, and the older ones are quiet, thin or missing partials and more important, memories to modulate to and harmonize with. But some things are still very strong. There was a lot more sawdust around, sawdust and hay, and whale oil, and those smells are still very sharply recalled. 

Early audio recording technology was VERY impressive in its day, just as early photography was. The first impression of photography was that it had an unbiasedness which still shows up in the phrase "The camera never lies". Of course it lies, but it's very seductive. Phonograph and dictaphone recordings, though, always had a scrim of artifacts that you had to pass through to understand the sounds. It was like listening to someone in another room in a rainstorm - nothing your ears couldn't handle. The music and speeches of home recordings showed how speaking loudly forced a kind of rhetorical dialect, which might be dropped accidentally from time to time during the recording after recovering from a cough or sneeze. 

Things broke all the time. They were mostly hand made, though, which meant someone could fix it. We would marvel at modern materials science, though. Things were heavy. Processes needed manual and animal labor. Food was unregulated and sometimes more poisonous. Housing was drafty and sooty.