Comment on NYT: "A Big Climate Goal Is Getting Further Out Of Reach"

We're pretty obviously galloping madly in the "More Carbon" direction. The feedback loop of more heat means:

 - more release of methane from permafrost

 - less efficient uptake of CO2 from forests

 - Wildfires put their own carbon load in the atmosphere, which lasts after the cooling effect of the ash has precipitated. 

 - Extinction events for the biosphere due to moving growth zones and the reduction or cessation of the AMOC mean those creatures who survive will have a harder time of it.

- Positive feedback loops work faster and more reliably than economic growth.

There are a few straightforward solutions that are totally politically impossible. Stop drilling and processing now. Stop military action, which is a wanton carbon emitter at all stages of production and deployment. Plow those resources into sustainable tech, relocation off the coasts, housing for the upcoming waves of climate refugees. Whatever it costs - and money is largely fictional - it will be a tiny fraction of the cost of continuing. 

Regarding:

[https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/14/climate/climate-action-tracker-temperatures-emissions.html?smid=url-share]

Comment on NYT "Climate Doom Is Out. ‘Apocalyptic Optimism’ Is In."

In re: climactic optimism:  as seen in the  NYTimes:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/21/arts/television/climate-change-apocalypse-optimism.html

Take a look a the book "I Want a Better Catastrophe" by Andrew Boyd. If you think we are not going to surpass +1.5°C , well, the sine qua non of that, i.e. ACTUALLY surpassing +1.5°C in the last 12 months, each of which has been the hottest of that particular month ever, has already happened. 

Also: the oceans are radically warmer. Really, every climate metric you examine is going the wrong way. 

The solutions are stunningly simple, of course. Shut down all oil production now, and stop all petroleum powered vehicles when their tanks empty. Stop war - the destruction and prep for it, and logistics for it are a major source of atmospheric carbon. Getting rid of petroleum traffic will go a long way toward dropping consumption, and the waste of all sorts that that produces. Stop eating meat. You don't need to eat meat. Get food that doesn't need refrigeration or air travel. 

There's really no tech fix that can replace these wasteful, carboniferous practices in a timeline fast enough to avoid the even worse consequences than the economic downfall these actions will produce.

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.

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. 

Climate deadlock

 It is not "the Left" or "The Right" that have the actual votes. The Climate does. It does not check your vote before burning down your hillside, flooding your city, dropping a tornado or derecho just anywhere, or evaporating your reservoirs.  

It's only coordinated international work that can drive us off of carbon burning as an energy source. Nuclear has a whole other set of problems - guarding its waste for longer than recorded human history being just one of them. 

Progress in transitioning to a sustainable energy future is not something that should be hoarded by those making progress. Solutions for carbon free energy, and getting the unbalanced amount of carbon out of the atmosphere that's there is technology that must be rapidly shared without regard for profit or traditional rivalries. We have a common crisis. 

We consider acts of war justifiable - even though every act of war is a crime. As Pres. Carter remarked: we need the moral equivalent of war to attack this problem. That means we must disregard a status of protecting business and property that stand in the way of this victory, just as it is morally and civilly  justified in a war.