Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Environment Page 9 of 15

The Day the World Ended

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On February 23, 2019

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A small point:


The Supreme Court stole the US election of 2000 AD for the Republicans. For George Bush, Jr. It stole it from Albert Gore.

My friend Stirling Newberry was the only person at the Supreme Court protesting.

Afterwards, he said to me and some others (paraphrased): “That was our last chance. We are going to ride this bucket all the way down to hell.”

Turns out he was right.

(Whatever you may think of Gore, and I think he’s a coward, he was, ummmm, serious about climate change.)

We aren’t going to hold global warming at two degrees Celcius. We aren’t even going to come close.

We all know this. More on some specific consequences, in only one country, which will cost hundreds of millions of lives, later.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Our Germophobic, Plastic-addicted Society

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On December 7, 2018

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Recently saw this picture, and had to laugh, because you’d never see this today in the West.


Every sandwich, today, would be individually wrapped, at the least in plastic wrap, but probably with a hard plastic container as well.

We are a bunch of germophobes, but it serves us ill. When I was a child in Malaysia, there was a rule among the ex-pats. The kids who were kept from all contact with “local” germs, were sick as heck. (One friend had his toys boiled regularly. He was sick all the time.) Those of us who were allowed to have normal contact, had no more illnesses than the locals (less, because we were properly inoculated and so on.)

Meanwhile we have vast stretches of ocean which are clogged by plastic. Plastic is showing up in both marine and terrestrial wildlife, and making its way into our own food-chain.

 

The rule for all consumer goods, and indeed, all manufacturing, should be that if it doesn’t degrade, or the manufacturer doesn’t guarantee recycling, with a bond posted to ensure performance and lack of strategic bankruptcy, it doesn’t get made. In those rare (and they should be very rare), cases where as a society, we want to make an exception, waivers should be required, and they should be paid for: the cost should be multiple of the monetary damage they do by not being recyclable. (At least two times, and multiple because monetary damage is not the only damage.)

Add to this laws and enforcement of laws banning “planned obsolescence” and we might be well on our way to un-fucking our environment. Or, I suppose, we could continue to prioritize short-term profit, neurotic fear of germs, and convenience. I mean, who gives a shit if our children and grandchildren have a planetary environment which can support life at the worst, or an environment which is incredibly unhealthy (which plastic’s estrogenic effects have already created)?

(Note: I’m in the hospital (serious, but unlikely to kill me), so things like comment moderation may not happen until I’m out, or may be delayed. Likewise, typos and other errors are unlikely to be fixed.)

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Shun the Climate Change Deniers

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On October 25, 2018

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Guest Post by *Eric A. Anderson* Guest Post

I have a little boy. He is my first, and most likely, only child — and he is everything to me.

I once thought that I knew what love is. I am still learning that I had no idea I could love anyone so deeply. I would lay my life down for him in a heartbeat, and will viciously attack any who dare threaten it.

There are those that threaten it every day.

Those that, in the past, I have professed to love and who, in turn, profess to love my son:

They are my parents.
They are my older sisters.
They are my Aunt, and my Uncle.

They move their mouths as they profess their love for my son, but I know in my heart that it’s not true. They are lying to both him and themselves.

They are lying because they are climate change deniers.

Because they vote for people, parties, policies and platforms that are actively contributing to the destruction of the planet my son depends on for his future survival. Or, they don’t vote at all.

When I confront them on this fact, they argue with me. They cajole and threaten. They scoff at the precautionary principle. Throughout, I am left dumbfounded. I ask them, “If there were even the tiniest chance you could be wrong, why would you risk the future of your family?” To which, they consistently reply in some manner of, “Well, it doesn’t matter anyway. I’m so old I’ll be long gone.” And so, their words of love are hollow. They are selfish. They are hypocrites. They are killers.

They care more about their ideology, than they care for my son. I have to call them what they are.

Therefore, if I continue to profess my love for both them, and my son, what does that make me? What does that make the man who professes that he is willing to go to any lengths to try and ensure that his son has a future that doesn’t read like a dystopian novel? A future wherein, my son doesn’t look at me and say “Daddy, why didn’t you do something???”

To do both makes me the hypocrite. But I’m not a hypocrite.

Which is why I have made the decision to shun them all.

They need to feel the repercussions of their actions.

Everyone one of them do. Immediately. There is simply no time to lose.

I would be lying if I told you this isn’t the most difficult decision of my life.

However, I believe this drastic act of protest is the only thing that will bring them to their senses about how deadly serious I am about the risk that their climate change denying poses to my son’s future.

We live in desperate times. And desperate times, call for desperate measures.
I’ve told them all that they are welcome to join my family again upon photographic proof that they have voted for political candidates who will work to ensure ecologically sane policies.

I exhort you to do the same, if indeed, the love you profess for your children is true.

We all must shun the climate change denying hypocrites that profess to love us from one side of their face, while they sell our future down the road with the other. Enough is enough.

Please think hard about joining me in shunning them all.

Bend Over and Kiss Your Ass Goodbye: IPCC Report Version

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On October 24, 2018

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Read, and weep.

Once more: Climate change is settled science. Climate change is past the point of no return. (If you believe that nations are even going to keep the Paris agreement targets, you’re such a fool you’ll be sold all the world’s bridges.)

These numbers are catastrophic, and the IPCC reports are always over-optimistic. Always.

There are quite a number of scenarios where this stuff happens faster. You’ll notice that this chart has straight line assumptions. That’s almost certainly wrong. What will actually happen is that we’ll get some feedback loop like arctic or permafrost methane release and that will lead to parabolic increases. When it breaks, it will break hard.

At that point, a lot of other problems could also blow up, the most serious of which would be the oceans losing their ability produce oxygen. If that happens, well, we’re dead.

Even if it doesn’t, things like the thermohaline currents flipping or shutting off are possible. Europe could, in the middle of everyone else getting hot, have a mini-ice age.

People don’t realize how far north Europe is. If it didn’t have warm currents, it would be like parts of Canada that are, well, almost uninhabited, and for damn good reasons.

This will also, certainly, screw with weather systems. Imagine Indian monsoons failing for even three years in a row. Can you say hundreds of millions of deaths. Move your lips.

And it isn’t that we are decelerating, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, who will likely win election, has essentially promised to chop down what remains of the Amazon jungle as fast as possible (and also, to commit genocide on the remaining indigenous tribes. No, don’t pretend, that’s what he means.)

We are so far up shit creek we are never seeing clear waters again.

Be very clear on this, and if you want to survive (deciding to not bother is a legitimate decision and if you’re old you may die before the worst of it) start doing what you can for yourself.

We are long past (a good ten years past, at a minimum) any possibility of stopping this.

This is triage time. Are you going to survive? Your family, friends, and loved ones?

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Baked In, Baked Off: The Trump Administration Climate “Admission”

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On September 29, 2018

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MANDOS POST MANDOS POST MANDOS POST

The next century from this point on is likely to be pretty awful, and unless something changes drastically Real Soon Now, a lot of that will be due to very large global temperature increases. Not much will change for the better, though, because the world’s largest economy was willing, after all, to elect a man whose platform includes digging for and burning more coal, doing more offshore drilling, etc. More importantly, be believes shouting out loudly that these are good and praiseworthy things to advertise to the world, which makes it all significantly worse because saying is doing.

There’s a lot of hullaballoo about a report that appeared in the Washington Post (paywalled but sometimes you can get through). Everyone is saying that it reveals that the Trump administration accepts that a four-degree-Celsius increase in temperature is baked in. If you read the fine print, however, what is being argued that if a four degree increase is baked in, then the contribution of some emissions control measures is so small that it is not worth the alleged economic drag created by regulating them. The intended corollary being that if there is no global warming in the first place, there is no point in regulating emissions, therefore there is no point in regulating emissions either way. It is either insignificant or useless.

There is no “admission” here — the Trump administration is not accepting the likelihood of a four degree increase. One should consider who is running Trump’s environmental policy. I have been following the right-wing for a long time, and what were once internet trolls and small-time lobbyists are running the show. One of those characters is Steve Milloy, the tobacco and chemical industry lobbyist who has blogged for a long time at JunkScience.com. In a nutshell, Milloy vociferously denies the worth or necessity of any pollution control, particularly air particulates of the kind people blame for respiratory disorders (after all, if tobacco smoke can’t hurt you, how can small amounts of particulates?), and he most certainly rejects the prospect of global warming. Milloy now also boasts, quite credibly, of having a direct line to the people dismantling the EPA (they cite his work in their justification of doing so).

And for quite a while now, Milloy has been saying precisely what the Trump administration is “admitting” — that if car emissions standards are enforced, they will have a trivial effect on the climate, if the worst forecasts — which he and other denialist lobbyists love to emphasize — are true. But under no circumstances are they advising “resignation” to a fate they have consistently claimed they don’t believe is going to happen. (Whether they secretly believe it and are knowingly lying is one of those “stupid or evil” debates that are, on the whole, rather distracting and pointless. Maybe there will be a smoking gun screenshot of Milloy’s phone or something.) The draft government report to which the WaPo article refers uses a reference scenario in which no climate action whatsoever is taken to emphasize how small the effect of the regulations being relaxed really are.

So if the Trumpists don’t really believe in global warming, why would they deploy an argument based on the premise that regulation would have a trivial effect even if it were true? After all, it would be more straightforward to deny global warming full stop as a justification to cancel regulation. The reason is ideological: They know that other people believe in anthropogenic catastrophic global warming, so they know that regulation is tempting. And they believe firmly in a regulatory slippery-slope argument (this goes along with the deeply embedded libertarianism/anarcho-capitalism) — that if they allow a little regulation that has small effects, the regulatory system may entrench itself and produce much larger regulations. (And worse, people might like those regulations.)

And they’re right. The — alas — too-slow path to large-scale regulation under our present systems of government do mostly work their way through using small/insufficient regulations as wedges or levers to much larger regulation. That is why they vociferously scuppered US participation in the Paris Agreement, because the Paris Agreement admits that regulation is necessary, regardless of how small the Paris Agreement’s actual goals were.  And saying is doing: The minimal regulatory “admission” is necessary for anything else to proceed.

Much of Western America Will Be Uninhabitable in 40 Years

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On August 21, 2018

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Large parts of the US will be riven by permanent drought in the rather forseeable future. And fracking is making it worse… much worse.

The game-changing study from Duke University found that “from 2011 to 2016, the water use per well increased up to 770 percent.” In addition, the toxic wastewater produced in the first year of production jumped up to 1440 percent…

… first generation wells used three to five millions gallons of water, current third generation wells use ten to 30 million gallons….the federal government “forecasts a million more such wells in the next 20 years.”

Moreover, many of these wells are in western areas of the US, which are already water-stressed.

Plus, fracking tends to poison groundwater and aquifers, making those sources permanently unusable, no matter how much remains.

This is the sort of insanity which is routine today: Burning seed corn to heat the house. We know what we’re doing is insanely short-sighted. We know it will come back to burn us badly later on. We do it anyway because it makes money in the short term.

And, of course, in addition to the hydrocarbons it produces, which will increase global warming, fracking produces methane, an even more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

What we should have done, in the 80s, is pushed hard on renewable energy, but we didn’t. What we should be doing now, oh, is the same thing, but we aren’t nearly as hard as we could be.

As an aside, the hidden truth of the solar miracle, is that it happened because of German subsidies. Solar wasn’t feasible, Germany made it feasible.

If the US had done that, it would have been feasible far, far sooner. But Americans wanted Reagan and “Morning in America” and endless suburbs full of SUVs.

And that’s what the US got. And so a large part of the US is going to become uninhabitable within the next two generations.

Meanwhile, hundreds of fires burn on the west coast of the US and Canada. This is climate change changing the ecology of local areas. This change will be permanent. The new ground cover will not be what was there before the fires.

Climate change is here. It is making itself known. It started with the great storms–more frequent and more powerful than in the past. It continues now with record high temperatures, especially in the arctic, and widespread forest fires. The arctic heat puts us in danger of massive methane releases from the permafrost and the ocean floor. If these releases happen, we can bend over and kiss our asses goodbye.

More on that soon.

This isn’t a disaster, it is a slow motion catastrophe. And it is going to become much worse and much faster…

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

(A Just World) Hang’em High

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On August 5, 2018

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In a just world, all the leaders responsible for doing nothing (including corporate leaders) would be hung high and all their property confiscated (including that given to relatives and friends). This is going to lead to well over a billion preventable deaths, is genocidal for other species and may be genocidal for ours. As crimes goes it will be seen to exceed those of Genghis Khan by a wide margin.

Criminal negligence IS a crime.

As for those who were active deniers, since I don’t believe in torture, there is no punishment severe enough.


Also, as I have pointed out in the past, this is going to de-legitimize every ideology which failed to deal with it, including representative Democracy and Capitalism.

I’ve seen fools saying that the failure to deal with climate change wasn’t a failure of democracy. Such people are indeed fools. The major nations during the period when something should have been done were democracies.

Let me be clear, this is going to lead to famines and droughts which kill hundreds of millions of people, minimum. It will lead to water and land wars. It will lead to mass migrations which make past refugee “crises” seem as nothing.

With luck, it will transition to a new stable state which is not too bad for humans. It may even be plenty fine (even if most of the tropics will be uninhabitable for half the year if you want to, y’know, go outside.)

But getting there will suck, and we don’t know that we won’t get a runaway cycle that doesn’t stop anywhere good, or even survivable. I like to think it probably will, but the truth is that our understanding of climate is still too incomplete to be sure.

(Oh, ok, probably shouldn’t capital punish. Just lock’em up for life. Somewhere in the tropics.)

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Rate of Antarctic Ice Loss Has Increased Three Times Since 2007

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On June 15, 2018

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So, yeah. Again, as I have said for a long time, the consensus reports are always wrong and when new data comes in it is almost always worse than predicted. There appear to be self-reinforcing cycles involved. I expect that we will see significant rises in sea level well before 2100.

We will also see widespread droughts, large areas around the equator that are uninhabitable for months at a time due to being too hot for humans to cool down and entire current breadbasket regions no longer producing significant food.

This will be exacerbated by how much we have drained and poisoned our aquifers.

This will effect, among others, the United States, China and India, all of whom will take huge hits. I expect the death of hundreds of millions of Indians before the century’s end, in massive famines and droughts.

This will also lead to waves of migration like we’ve never seen–exceeding even the migration from Europe to the New World in the last half of the 19th century. There will be wars. I fully expect a war between Russia and China, over Siberia, because much of China’s cropland will become defunct.

Nothing we are doing is more effective than a spit into a hurricane. The Paris Accord is a joke: It wouldn’t be enough even if implemented, it’s not mandatory, and most countries won’t make their voluntary targets.

There are a lot of moving parts, the most important of which will be the arctic methane release (once that starts, it will self-reinforce and the game will be over), but for people on the ground it’s going to be about heat, rainfall, and water. Also, about water. And water.

This can no longer be stopped, in any meaningful sense, but we could prepare and try to mitigate. We aren’t even doing that.

If you have children, or if you’re young, you need to factor this stuff into your life plan. I’m 50 and unhealthy, I’ll probably miss most of it. But if you’re 20 or even 30, probably not.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

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