The Day the World Ended

I have to admit that I used to make fun of Al Gore just like so many other people did at the time. Remember that South Park episode where they made fun of Gore? I heard that the South Park guys apologized for that episode since it turns out Gore was right about climate change.

In my opinion Gore is somewhat similar to Jimmy Carter. You could argue that both were neoliberals (some argue that the neoliberal turn in America started under Carter and not Ronald Reagan) but they were right about the environment which is probably the most important issue facing humanity today.

Unfortunately, Americans don’t want to listen to people like Carter and Gore. At most we want to have our cake and eat it too, meaning we say we want to fight climate change and protect the environment but nobody wants to give up their materialistic, high-consumption lifestyle. That is one of the reasons why I am skeptical of programs like the Green New Deal that do not ask Americans to make any sacrifices to save the environment. It is similar to our modern approach to war. Since we no longer have a draft our wars can go on indefinitely since most Americans are not asked to sacrifice anything, not even higher taxes.

Sorry, but I don’t believe Gore would have done anything about global warming as president since it would have killed his reelection chances. “The American way of life is non-negotiable,” Cheney said, and the vast majority of stupid Americans agree, which is why the last two Dumbocratic administrations squandered 16 vitally important years between them.

+1 for nihil obstet

Yes, someone needs to answer how shipping stuff all over the world to make then sell is ‘green’ or sustainable in any sense of the word. That’s even more true when you consider not the oil burned in moving stuff all over the planet, but add to that the deliberate intent to avoid laws to protect the environment.

There is possibly one bit of good news, and that is that the world population bust may hit us sooner than anticipated, perhaps in just three decades:

https://www.wired.com/story/the-world-might-actually-run-out-of-people/

Though that, if true, may be more disaster mitigation than prevention.

The hard part might be keeping folks from learning that soylent green is people.

But.. come to think of it, if there’s money in it they’ll fucking hoax it. FUD works. So forget that part. A lot of people wont care. Or they’ll consider it part of God’s plan as long as there’s ketchup.

The trick is to make greening cool, and the deniers uncool.

Here is an article which illustrates my point.

https://gizmodo.com/how-google-microsoft-and-big-tech-are-automating-the-1832790799

The geoenginneering approach reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of what is killing the planet. When “the” problem was Freon destroying the ozone, it was a narrow problem susceptible to a targeted solution. A lot of people still fumble about trying to think about global warming due to fossil fuel use as a somewhat narrow problem susceptible to a targeted solution. We will switch to “sustainable” everything and we will be able to on as we have.

First of all, all energy use entails waste and error. You can “mix your poisons” to some extent, but it is the sure scale of human population and industry that is creating hazards. To talk of “risk” in regard to global warming is stunted thinking. The industrial revolution continues to accelerate the rate and scope of change. From his first practical steam engine design around 1765 and the expiring of his major patents around 1800, Boulton and Watt produced and installed fewer than 500 engines worldwide. How long do you think it takes today to roll out a new generation of cellphone to a billion users?

I think human beings could grasp and embrace the insight that, collectively, we need to restrain ourselves: that we need in total less work, less activity, and to slow the rate technological progress so that there is to recognize and deal with unexpected consequences at scale. But our overseers do not share that view, as different clue says.

I expect the rich are already calculating that being infinitely rich on a finite planet requires massive population extermination to get to their idea of “sustainable” prosperity, for those remain. It might work, or it might be too late to prevent total unraveling, for nature or for civilization or both.

Thanks to Stirling for at least making the effort.

Greg Palast thinks Gore lost the election because his rudeness to Ross Perot during their debate alienated the millions of voters that supported Perot. Watching video of that debate these days is chilling, when Gore rolls his eyes while Perot tries to warn him about NAFTA.

I was in full agreement with that comment until I got to this sentence. It was human “management” of the environment that created this problem in the first place, and even if some sort of miracle happens that allows geoengineering to not make everything worse, the overall outcome would be to reward the brain circuitry which says “See? We can do whatever we want to the universe and never suffer consequences!”

I have strong doubts that geoengineering would work from a technical standpoint, but that is the entire point of geoengineering, etc. I think it would be great to not have to suffer global consequences, who could possibly be against that?

I think a strong case could be made that the day the world ended was when the big corporate lap dawg Clinton, after lobbying and pressuring Congress to pass it, signed the bill that granted China permanent normal trade relations. Google Gore on his stance on that! That led to an incredible amount of industrialization, and inefficient and prolific use of fossil fuels, that I’d imagine contributed handily to our global warming. Not to mention the huge environmental damage that’s been done to this planet by China’s rapid industrialization, funded by the flood of U.S. dollars. You can also make the case that that bill, signed as $Bill was ready to leave office to go on his cash-in tour and only a few months before the 2000 Presidential election, led to Bush winning the election, or it being close enough to be stolen, if you’d like.

I don’t think highly of Donald Trump. I’m sure he has screwed over and taken advantage of a lot of people in his business dealings, but between Clinton and all the damage he’s done to the economic structure of this country, and still dutifully does now while continuing to enrich himself, Bush and his casual arrogance and insecure ego that led to hundreds of thousands undeserved Iraqi deaths and all the corporate and Wall Street corruption that he also oversaw during his Administration, and Obama and his outright evil delight in betraying the American people and his narcissism that led him to want to become president and coldly crush those who believed in his hope and change deceit, I’d have to say that Trump is the best human being of the four. As bad as he is, he has less contempt for the American people.

Z

@Ché Pasa,

The desire for at least some non-Overclass survivors through mitigation or survivalization is what has led me in the past to express the hope that Ian Welsh might decide to create a category of “actionable information for practical survival” to which readers might bring actionable information bearing on all aspects of survivalism and/or links and sources to dump-heaps of such information.

It is only a few more years till the Internet either frays down to extinction or is overtily Kill-Switched by the Overclass to stop us from getting and giving that information. It would be good to spend the next few years remaining until Internet Jackpot harvesting all this information and weaponizing it for dissemination and viralization and downloading back into long-term analog storage media. And also living real-time deployment and practical application along the way.

In my opinion Gore is somewhat similar to Jimmy Carter. You could argue that both were neoliberals (some argue that the neoliberal turn in America started under Carter and not Ronald Reagan) but they were right about the environment which is probably the most important issue facing humanity today.

Both were indeed neoliberals. While Gore was right about global warming he likely wouldn’t have taxed the rich at the considerably higher rates necessary. Don’t forget that Gore was among the first crop of DLC Democrats. He was in their leadership.

The right views the problem as being defined in such a way as to, suspiciously, favour a political programme that is based on an ethical outlook they don’t share, ie, climate rescue/mitigation as a means to sneak in an ethical programme in by the back door.

I hadn’t thought about it from that perspective, but it makes sense of a lot of right-wing denialist behavior. Thanks for the insight.

I’d agree with you, that

you can’t really have a piecemeal program of climate mitigation separate from climate and economic justice

…but I’d go further and say that if the underlying functional structure of the culture is flawed, there will inevitably be emergent outcomes similar to the ones we’re talking about WRT climate change. To pick two examples off the top of my head, agriculture appears to be strongly correlated to if not outright based in cultural assumptions that it is morally necessary to provide the greatest possible food resources for as many humans as your society has as is possible, and as an outcome agriculture has been destroying topsoil for a very long time. There is a cultural idea of “away” – as in “to throw something away” – that assumes there is such a place on Earth where waste can be put as it will not negatively affect human habitats, and the outcome result is that even when that waste is put in the middle of the Pacific Ocean it has detrimental effects on human activity. I don’t particularly believe in a micromanaging God or instant Karma, but it seems clear to me that any discordant belief structures people hold (discordant as related to the “harmonies of natural law”, sorry about all the poetic language) have the potential to snowball into physically obvious “punishments”.

And I have no idea what to do about that. Yes, I feel fine being ethically opposed to the ethics of the right-wing. But I don’t at all feel up to the task of changing their minds about these ethical issues. So what’s the best outcome that I can hope for here? Is it possible for a left/right multicultural society to pull through these sorts of problems?

I’m inclined to think that can’t work. I don’t think Nature has the leeway for it. This makes for a very fatalist outlook. I’m just thinking out loud at this point, sorry if anyone considers this rambling a waste of their time.

To limit climate change, manage population, and create sustainable societies and economies would require coordination on a global scale. This is not going to happen. There are too many competing agendas too easily exploited by too many looting elites. This gets wrapped up in: poor and developing countries who also happen to be the most susceptible to the effects of climate change demanding that they should be allowed to continue to pollute/produce CO2 because developed countries got to pollute and are responsible most of the CO2 already out there. So developed countries ship their most polluting industries to these developing countries. Problem solved, right ? As for managing population, this runs into religious taboos in both developed and developing countries as well as cries of genocide in developing ones. Then too we have the phenomena of window dressing efforts like the Paris Accords, and Trumpism, that is climate denialism in developed countries.

So nothing much is happening or is going to happen to confront climate change or population. There is the Green New Deal. It is broad and vague. At most it brings climate change back into the national conversation, but so far it is just talk.

Developed countries remain, despite their lack of serious action, best positioned to survive in some form what is coming. But most of the developing world and with it most of its people is not and they and it will not survive.

As for climate change denial, it is a form of irrationalism. As with flat earthers, libertarians, and Holocaust and evolution deniers, this is not a case where there are two legitimate sides to the debate. It is pointless to argue or negotiate with such people. You won’t change their mind with logic or evidence. All you will do is elevate their delusion and give it a veneer of legitimacy. If you do debate them, do it for laughs because that is all you will get out of the exercise.

As for climate change denial, it is a form of irrationalism. As with flat earthers, libertarians, and Holocaust and evolution deniers, this is not a case where there are two legitimate sides to the debate. It is pointless to argue or negotiate with such people. You won’t change their mind with logic or evidence. All you will do is elevate their delusion and give it a veneer of legitimacy. If you do debate them, do it for laughs because that is all you will get out of the exercise.I

That denial makes argument pointless may be a feature, not a bug from the standpoint of the denialist, no? I am not so certain that denial is “irrational” so much as it is motivated reasoning of a sort, motivated by resentment and a desire to resist when given no choice when confronted with a sweeping cultural and economic agenda.

I think we underestimate how much thinking-thru needs to happen before a sufficient policy regime could be conceived let alone instituted. Denialism on the right may be a problem with the right, but right-wing tribalism has become a problem for left or progressive thinking as well, because instead of thinking-thru, so many leftish are satisfied with feeling superior to the denialists, without exposing their own glib understanding to critical revision.

Declaring “the science is settled!” is not the same as either really understanding the science or the economic implications and imperatives. Mainstream economics is worse than useless, per usual, but that just compounds the problem that the general public has not invested much real effort in understanding the issues. Much of the Media are pre-occupied with simple, dramatic narratives, that are less than educational.

Beyond a modicum of public understanding, there is also the need to have some calculated estimate of how the infrastructure of political economy could be structured to achieve the threshold necessary to the survival of some civilization and most of the natural world. Basic magnitudes have been neither calculated nor published — I am referring to economic variables and parameters rather than climate system or ecological dynamics.

@George Job,

I feel confident in assuring you that there are no members of the Overclass on these threads. And I don’t think that we think that the Overclass will survive Condition Venus any better than the rest of us . . . down there in their underground bunkers.

But I think that they think that they will. And I was offering my best guess as to how the Overclasses think they can make Global Warming work for them.

\”We should encourage all deniers everywhere to buy coastal seaside oceanfront property, and go live there, and make their lives and careers there, for example.\”

Interesting! It appears the AGW advocates and loudest voices are buying such properties? Gore et al.?

Bruce wilder, I agree. Reading through the Green New Deal, it seemed like a wishlist to me. It lacked structure. How did it all fit to together and how could it be executed? I think we need to start with a kind of census of where we are now. Where does most of our green house gas production come from in our society? In this, we need to take into account CO2 production from goods we buy abroad and the amount of CO2 created in transporting them here. We need to factor in things like urban sprawl, car-size/car-use, immigration, and population. And then we need to provide alternatives and how to get to them. And we should make what we learn to everyone on the planet to at least give them the chance to act upon it.

Someone I was talking with recently commented that with irrational thought it is conclusion first, argument fit and twisted to arrive at it. To me, that sounds like your “motivated reasoning.”

different clue, I always wonder how it is that the same scientific method which gave climate change deniers electricity, their cars, computers, smart phones, the drugs they need to cure their infections, the operations to save their lives somehow fell down with climate change or evolution. I asked one once, and he said, “It’s all about grants, the money.” That seemed sufficient for him even though it implied a mind-boggling complete fraud perpetrated by one group of scientists on everyone else, including all other scientists. He would also occasionally reference some unknown “scientific” study which took issue with some aspect of climate science and say it took out the whole field. He would then ignore or say was bought the thousands of reports which contradicted his view. So sure, we can encourage them to put their money and lives where their mouth is, but mostly to see what dodge they use to change the subject.

Billikin, it all depends on what you mean by growth and progress. If we can guarantee that everyone will get the medical care they need, food, shelter, a meaningful job, the education they want, and be covered in their old age, then to me that’s progress. It is progress if we can manage our society responsibly and sustainably, if we can minimize our carbon footprint, pollution, and impact on our environment and ecologies.

@ Hugh

I first started reading economics blogs early in 2008, not because of the looming crisis, which I did not perceive, but to try to find out about the possibilities for ecologically sound economies. I already knew that sustainable ecologies were in energy balance with their environments. Humans are not. I also knew that rapid and increasing energy use rapidly and increasingly generates entropy, that is, makes energy unavailable. A term for maximum entropy is heat death. On a global scale the maximum sustainable energy usage is that provided by the sun, and that is not just for humans, but for all life. I guess we should include geothermal energy, as well. What humans are doing is raiding our piggy bank of stored energy, in the form of fossil fuels. Somehow we seem to think that that can go on forever. The Venus effect tells us that by releasing stored carbon into the atmosphere the time for our scale of energy usage is much more limited than the amount of coal, oil, and natural gas would indicate. The only sustainable energy is renewable energy, i.e., energy from the sun, in the form of wind, water, and solar power, and only a fraction of that is for human use.

If we move to sustainable energy use, what standard of living can we sustain? That of the Middle Ages? The Dark Ages? Now we have electricity, so maybe that of Africa today. Maybe that of 1970s Germany. The models of ecologically sound advanced economies that I had in 2008 were ancient Egypt and Tokugawa Japan, one because it was limited by the Sahara desert, the other because it was a self-sufficient island with an official environmental policy to preserve its forests. Neither had our modern ideas of economic growth and progress. IIUC, Tokugawa Japan experienced slow economic growth through cottage industry.

What do I mean by economic growth? What the economists say. By progress I mean our modern Western idea of progress. In our era, both are generated by massive energy use, mainly through the burning of fossil fuel. Our scale of energy use is unsustainable, and burning fossil fuel is even less sustainable. We will stop using energy like we do, one way or other. The question is when, and the question is whether we do so voluntarily.

@different clue

thanks for the clarification, it probably was obvious for anyone except for the occasional newbie as myself. Seems I always have an issue with class difference. Would love for people to be seamless…

Models are very hard to get right. Even simple systems are difficult at scale. Pretending like we understand such a complex system as earth’s climate is a mistake. It invites uncertainty whenever the models are updated. So is much pseudo science, I cringe when I see someone talking about Entropy destroying the planet. It’s ok, get a steam engine for the house. There’s this big heat sink called Space, that will keep us going at least until the sun swallows the earth.

Whatever the outcome, panic isn’t going to help. Careful, reasoned preparation is necessary. There will be a lot of migrations, and push for new resources, but that’s part of the human condition. Unless you are on the coast it’s probably not that big a deal. It’s a much bigger deal if we continue to poison what we have left. Wilderness survival skills aren’t going to help. Neither is calling wildfires or hurricanes “proof”. Reason doesn’t have a political affiliation, stock options in Carbon futures, or a vested interest in click throughs.

@ ponderer

Sure, when we have lost our atmosphere, the surface of the earth will be as cold as space. That may be the ultimate heat death for any kind of life on earth. As for entropy as the unavailability of energy, if the surface of the earth ever reaches 451 degrees Fahrenheit, we will be unable to burn carbon for energy. OC, we will be long dead. 😉 More close to home is the question of peak production of oil, which occurred in the US in the 1970s and seems to have occurred worldwide in the first decade of this century. Consider the devastation of hurricanes, tornadoes, and wildfires. That is an example of entropy. Another word for entropy is disorder. The more profligate we are in our energy use, the more disordered the world becomes. The time constant, up to now has been on the order of decades, but when so-called hundred year storms have become the norm, we are reaping the whirlwind.

That’s not what “heat death” means (when we are talking about entropy). It means there isn’t enough free energy left to do anything. No temperature differential to perform work. Its like 10^106 years away and will be very cold by our standards. Complete darkness, etc. Natural disasters are not an example of entropy. If the planets didn’t dissipate heat energy they would be as luminous as the sun. That’s where the entropy (energy / temperature) goes, space. When the stars don’t have enough fuel left to generate and give off heat, that’s “heat death”. If the equilibrium of the energy given off by the earth minus the energy received by the earth + that generated here (burning fossil fuel), goes positive it gets colder. If negative, it gets warmer. Of course that’s amortized across the planet.

Questioning a model doesn’t invalidate the science. So if we can predict a large volcanic eruption in 15 years that lowers the temperature by some amount OR melting permafrost releasing methane that increases the warming 2x what we predicted, then we could start calling each other idiots. We can’t do that. The point is that tribalism is no substitute for science. Science is about being open to possibilities which includes being wrong, and sometimes spectacularly wrong. Too many are using the science of climate change to make a buck so it behooves us to be level headed. The tobacco companies screwed us over when they started pushing fake science to help their legal and PR issues. Look up junk science.com some time.

My point was that every time we see a (perceived) success or failure in the model we’ll be at each others throats. Like with the California wildfires Climate Scientists say weren’t an indication of global warming, or record snow storms that don’t mean there isn’t any warming. Instead we should be honest with each other about what a model is and set specific short term goals that we can actually accomplish.

Not to be misunderstood, I do not think that our rate of energy usage, without the production of greenhouse gases, would heat up the earth as much in the limit.

Donna Curtis, my view is that if the Democrats choose a candidate they describe as centrist/moderate/pragmatic/bipartisan, i.e. conservative, or if it is some neoliberal who only plays lip service to progressives, then they are telling me they don’t want my vote. No one owns my vote but me. If someone wants my vote, they must give me substantive positive reasons for it. I have been done with the lesser of two evils for years. So if all the Democrats have to offer me is that their candidate is marginally less horrible than Trump or whoever the Republican candidate is, they can go to hell.

As someone who has studied thermodynamics, what your saying about Entropy is incorrect. It’s one of the more complicated measures sure basically, its some abstract term that doesn’t have a lot of physical meaning at least in the way you would think. It’s not energy, its not lack of energy but its related. In an open system such as the earth it’s the inverse of the temperature differential. As long as we have a large heat sink (space) and a heat source (solar, gravitational, etc.) it’s going to be low entropy. When a hurricane travels up the gulf coast and it gets energy from the warm water, that’s not entropy, its the opposite. You get more energy from the difference in the temperatures. If the air and water are closer in temperature you get less energy. In a closed system the air and the water have the same temperature, so no hurricane. High entropy, but no thunder storms. It has nothing to do with fossil fuel or any of that other stuff.

But global warming does indicate an increase of entropy in the earth system.
Not really. Because its an open system our ability to do work increases with temperature differential. If people would use the term energy instead of entropy there wouldn’t be so many issues. Even scientists have trouble with entropy. I suspect they bandy it about to the public as a form of trolling.

@ ponderer

If you don’t mind, what about Venus? Underneath the cloud cover it is very hot. Is the Venus system high entropy or low entropy? Thanks.

metamars illustrates the irrational conclusion first, argument second I was talking about. Note he does not quote from the most recent IPCC special report or the 4th US Climate Assessment. Meanwhile Trump is reportedly going to put together his own panel to assess climate change. The likely head of this panel is a notorious climate change denier William Happer. Happer is a retired Princeton physicist, but not a climate scientist. He currently is a member of Trump’s National Security Council in charge of emerging technologies, which is scary enough. Happer loves himself some CO2. He has talked of the demonization of CO2 as akin to the Holocaust. No seriously, you can not make this shit up.

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/02/white-house-climate-panel-william-happer/

As for an Inconvenient Truth, it came out in 2006. In early 2007, educational authorities decided to show the film to UK high school students. In May 2007, a truck driver Stewart Dimmock sued. Dimmock was a supporter of the New Party and a stand-in for its founder the hereditary peer Lord Monckton, a neocon, neoliberal, climate change denying conservative kook. The judge found nine errors for which guidance was suggested, but allowed the film to be shown since he found it broadly accurate. You can see the nine Gore points, the judge’s assessment, and other scientific views here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimmock_v_Secretary_of_State_for_Education_and_Skills

All this is about a film from 13 years ago. Ages in terms of climate research. Even the wiki article is a bit dated in its citations, but the point is the scientific consensus since has on several of the “errors”: coral bleaching, effects on polar bears, storm severity, effects of ice melt, moved much closer to Gore’s positions.

Climate change deniers fundamentally do not understand the scientific method. Instead of theory improving, expanding, and correcting as more data come in, explanations become more sophisticated, and predictions more accurate, climate change deniers demand that climate change theory must be perfect and comprehensive from the get-go. Even as they demand this of the consensus scientific view, they take as gospel every oddity coming from their own cottage industry of climate change denying goofs.

It is inaccurate to call Happer a “climate change denier”. Like other scientists, with some background or awareness of the field, who are similarly slimed, he has never denied that climate changes.

Likewise, he doesn’t deny that adding CO2 to the atmosphere will create a heating effect on the earth. By his own account, he has actually worked on a climate model that tried to account for the green house gas effects of CO2. (It also ran hot, contrary to subsequent observations.)

As CO2 catastrophism is basically premised on computer models, one could say that Happer is more of a climate scientist than David Suzuki, a famous but amusing guy that went around parroting memes about a great, ONGOING extinction, but couldn’t name a single species that had gone extinct, when challenged to do so. https://www.therebel.media/should_david_suzuki_be_jailed

There’s no point asking you to explain the obvious distinction between the two – how one guy is classified as a “climate scientist”, but the other one is not – but other people should be able to figure it out, if they have an open mind.

We can probably agree on this point, however: One of these two gentlemen – Suzuki or Happer – is a clown.

Here’s another clue: http://tinyurl.com/ycsjwyml

Bonus link: here is Happer bamboozling (or whatever) the physics community at Berkeley (one of the top physics programs in the world). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_OjGxrlloE

@Billikin

Venus has very little temperature differential across its surface. Low temperature difference = high entropy. Now lets look at the moon. It has almost no atmosphere. Temps during the day up to 127C and at night -173C, big temperature difference, very low entropy. Do you want high entropy or low entropy? Either way you die very quickly. This is why we shouldn’t use entropy when talking about climate. It’s not a measure like Temperature or concentration (O2,CO2, etc.) that makes intuitive sense to people. Like imaginary numbers its good for some calculations, but it’s usefulness outside those domains is limited. It sounds fancier than heat or enthalpy or internal energy, but we should use those instead.

@ ponderer

Thanks for your reply about Venus. I did think that the Venus system was high entropy, as you said. That was why it seemed to me that the result of the greenhouse effect upon the earth, which is a step towards a Venus-like system, raised the entropy of the earth system.

If you truly believe that the science of climate change is unsettled, shouldn’t the response be one of prudence and caution, not full speed ahead?

This is a way more complicated issue than a lot of people on the “climate left” seem to think. The Precautionary Principle seems like common sense, right? But it too is an ideological and ethical question. For many deniers/doubters, the “prudence and caution” is not implementing restrictions on the “natural” development of commerce/property and technology, and “recklessness” is following models with high error bars into a planned economy.

It is not possible to get around this ideological difference with More Scientific Debate.

The world metamars appears to be advocating for is one where no human or human group can possibly be an authority unless they proclaim to be in league with some higher spiritual power.

So if one is working in a technical field and they find themselves under political attack disguised (as is often the case) as an attack on one’s competency, they shouldn’t defend themselves?

Climate change denialists do not mean “debate” in the sense of “defend oneself in the public eye”. They mean someone designated to argue with them, on an equal footing.

Science is a never-ending debate of sorts and science presumes epistemic equality among the participants.

I would not say that translates well to a shoutfest on CNN, which I do not think anyone should participate in.

I do think people need to participate in some kind of educative process in order to understand the basic outline of the science of climate change and that probably does not entail having some half-baked dogma shoved down their throats. People are going to disagree — they will always have different values, different interests. Accepting and understanding in some minimal way and in common the climate science has to allow for people continuing to have opposed viewpoints. Which indicates to me the need for something more like a dialectic and less like a debate.

metamars made some points about the Al Gore visual polemic, An Inconvenient Truth, which highlighted for me the self-defeating nature of polemic in this context. The attacks on the veracity of various Gore claims were not pure of motive, but it was the failure to respond adequately with revision and clarification that defeated the educative purpose I think is needed. For some people, Gore’s film has been “discredited” and that’s it.

Engaging in a clarifying back-and-forth can be difficult and challenging, and may be especially so when critics and paid opponents are calling out “fraud” and so forth. But, that’s politics. It ain’t beanbag, as some wag put it. Whether it is televised or not, that’s the way political debates are conducted — that is, with at least some amoral engagement.

I cannot gaze at the recent history of public opinion in the U.S. regarding any number of issues and be very optimistic. The country that responded to 9/11 by invading a country that had nothing to do with it and whose leaders paid no price for that fraud is pretty useless when it comes to collective critical thinking.

A centrist Left that offered the country a monster like Hillary Clinton and cannot explain why she lost except by reference to Russia,Russia,Russia is at least as stupid in its own way as the Right they nominally resist. Insisting that my tribe is rational and their tribe is irrational and cannot possibly be engaged respectfully is a lot like insisting that Trump supporters are deplorable racists/sexism and racism/sexism are the only and sufficient explanation of their discontents.

I am not re-assured by the sophistication of, say, the IPCC reports, which seem to be written by committee with a constipated insistence on being impenetrable, compounded by a complete inability to get thru the economics to an outline of actionable policy strategies.

The basics of climate change and ecological collapse are challenging for people to absorb. Its time-scale, the sometimes abstract modes of discussion and analysis can be daunting. Even very, very smart people who try to engage deeply with it seem prone to go off into the dark and never come back. And, the desire of an author or pundit to get a reaction from any available audience for whatever is said about climate change or the broader problems of resource depletion, overpopulation or ecological collapse runs up against the strong preference of the audience for satisfying soundbites and easy-to-grasp moral narratives (and that includes feeling superior to those others).

Climate change denialists do not mean “debate” in the sense of “defend oneself in the public eye”. They mean someone designated to argue with them, on an equal footing.

There will always be skeptics of every kind. AGW denialism is at almost on the same level as moon landing hoaxes or scientology. I think it was Buzz Aldrin who told the stalking hoaxer to “go fuck himself” – a reasonable response, which the hoaxer (of course) declared was proof enough of a hoax. The problem here is that deniers control the levers of American power. What should Buzz have done under those circumstances?

“So you’re going to root out this corruption by quoting the Big Lebowski?”

The Dude abides. Never underestimate his abilities.

What part of turning Earth’s climate into Venus do you not understand?

I never said that. At what particular expressions or arguments level do you believe deniers are at? I’ve already stated my case in this thread and in many previous discussions. Here’s a basic common sense angle:

I’ve known a few PhDs. While a few can be a bit “my way or the highway”, even those few have had enough ‘scientific method sense’ to test their theories first before putting them out there for all their peers to see. Climate scientists have already done all that for many years. The heavy lifting of skeptical testing has been done.

When deniers pick through the garbage cans of well-tested and fully-refuted theories, it isn’t skepticism anymore. It’s professional denialism. They’re either junk dealers or have some personal vested interest in big energy/industry, which to be honest, we all do. And as you’ve said, this is where the discussion should be.

There are only two common sense ways that all these climate scientists can together, be in it for the money:

1. They’re in cahoots with deniers, so they can all together, believers and deniers, maintain a high enough level of FUD so they all get to keep making a decent living circling round and round with their ‘life on earth danger!’ theories.

2. They’re in cahoots with green industrialists. I’m sure they’re out there, but all 97-99% of them? That would have to be proven.

( from Sinners In the Hands of an Angry Mother Earth) . . .

” The God of Selection is a Callous God, and Its first True Prophet was Darwin.”

” If Mama Corn ain’t happy, ain’t NOOO body happy.”

BTW this article just came out with an interesting and disturbing idea:

https://www.quantamagazine.org/cloud-loss-could-add-8-degrees-to-global-warming-20190225/

While certainly not Venus level, it suggests that cloud thinning associated with higher levels of CO2 , 1200 ppm, would be one tipping point leading to significantly increased temps.

Hugh: Climate change is settled science.

This expression strikes me as an odd formula. What is a “settled science” ? Outside of a polemic against the straw man “denialists”, does it have application?

I think people generally struggle with trying to wrap their heads around the emerging outline of the implications of climate science. It isn’t just those being deplored for their alleged “denialism”.

Climate science, itself, is clearly burgeoning. There is a great deal of activity, both in developing new insights into possible dynamics and in ascertaining facts, both historical and from current monitoring.

The sheer volume of activity and the high proportion of researchers new to the field compound the difficulty of tracking what is crossing the threshold from speculation or suspicion to reasoned expert judgment of probable consequences based on verifiable knowledge of processes and magnitude. Science being a human activity in which the ambitious chase fame, there is great deal of clamoring for attention for speculative insights that might become colorable claims of priority in later recognition of the achievement of discovery. Journalism compounds the ensuing confusion by favoring the sensational, even where it must be fabricated from unjustified leaps of logic or misunderstanding.

Like it or not, climate science suffers credibility problems from the way journalism has exploited the science of nutrition and weight loss and the science of cancer, not to mention the sciences of psychology and sociology.

The IPCC are not doing science, per se. That is, they are not engaged in discovering or measuring. They are trying to digest the science into judgments and assessment useful to responsible policymakers.

In the context of what the IPCC is doing, “settled science” might be trying to distill an essential consensus about what is reasonably certain of expectation from the clamor of speculation and claims of significance that the actual science is producing in abundance.

I think one of the key understandings that needs to become widespread, but is hard to express and grasp is that despite the frenzy of speculation and the chaotic nature of weather (as distinct from climate), there is a core certain of knowledge that the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere and oceans is increasing inexorably and there will be consequences, natural consequences. Because there will be natural consequences amplifying what man has done there is a serious danger of catastrophe playing out over hundreds of years, over the course of which man may have little power of control or remedy.

Saying that those people, the denialists, are the wilfully ignorant ones is a comforting self-flattery, but ultimately unhelpful.

Those of us who are alarmed and trying to understand the science and our responsibility in good will still do not know what to do and are not organized to do it. “The science” may be “settled” but it does not dictate a practical program. At best, we can come up with a wishlist like the Green New Deal.

1st grade is let out now.

nihil obstet: . . .we’re still exclusively working on the physical changes. There are huge social and economic questions that we’re ignoring.

Yes.

The IPCC reports have been remarkably unbalanced and an important reason is that while climate science has been gaining remarkably in sophistication, mainstream economics is agnatology. The Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C that came out in October seemed to express the frustration of climate scientists with the stubborn stupidity of neoliberal economists.

Really basic points that ought to be clearly understood such as the necessity of radical measures for energy conservation are completely overlooked by many politicians and media pundits. The importance of the chart Ian headed this post!!!

Billikin: This should not give us any warm and fuzzy feelings.

Indeed.

But, whether you choose to feel an appropriate degree of alarm for posterity is not the same as thinking thru supporting a collective response.

IPCC reports are assessments based on an extensive review of a highly technical literature. The “I” in IPCC stands for “Intergovernmental.” This underlines a process problem in that panel members are appointed by their governments. They get no special funding for their IPCC work. The findings of the IPCC institutionally err on the conservative side. And the timing of reports has gotten longer over time. Reports appeared in 1990, five years later in 1995, six years later in 2001, six years again in 2007, seven years in 2014, and the next, the sixth, in 2022 eight years later. Special reports are a way to cover these lengthening gaps and focus attention in special areas. But it is important to understand, the fifth assessment which came out in 2014 is based on data from as far back as 2007, that is up to twelve years ago. IPCC assessments are out of date within one to two years of their publication. It is one of the reasons why there is pressure to overhaul the process, turning it into something more open-source and continually updated.

What does it look like for humans to be in energy balance with our environment?the

Having watch you shred entropy, I am afraid to even ask what you imagine “energy balance with [the] environment” ought to mean and why it would be desirable.

It sounds like a leap to what it all means neatly avoiding how it all works (or doesn’t).

What is our picture of a good workable, sustainable society? . . . we need to . . . figure out how we get there without too much pain in the process. . . .

It is plain that we have to cease our reliance upon fossil fuels, and as soon as is feasible. We also have to develop and utilize renewable energy. We have to develop public transportation. But are such measures enough? Even if we avoid mass starvation, ecological dislocation, and wars, and achieve sustainable civilization around the world, what does that look like? How does it work? How do we get there, without a realistic picture of where we want to go?

Indeed.

I actually think we need an effort on the same scale as global climate modeling to create simulation models of the global economy that explore in transparent and intuitively accessible detail the sources of economic productivity and prosperity, with the goal of constraining radically the waste.

Mainstream neoclassical economics does not have a good explanation of how the industrial revolution(s) worked: the so-called “experts” do not have much insight into what mattered: the contribution of fossil fuels, the contribution of scientific advance, the contribution of increased specialization and global scale; the contribution of unsustainable waste (for surely, many apparently highly productive expansions rested on a failure to renew and replace).

The capitalist model to date has been built on profligate waste and heedless expansion, and it will be necessary to constrain fairly radically, both population and energy use. And, to create an infrastructure that allows us to operate a highly productive economy within such constraints.

I suppose that that does mean going “backward” in certain respects, though the steampunk fetish of people like John Michael Greer or James Howard Kunstler is based on a profound misunderstanding of what is feasible.

The actual technologies of the early 19th century were, in fact, ridiculously inefficient and wasteful. The only thing that saved that world from imminent self-destruction — and it was a near thing, remember — was the relatively small size of the global human population — a billion, perhaps, in 1800. Vast areas of the planet remained very lightly populated. Still, rapidly industrializing Britain could not feed itself — nutritional standards for the working classes in the cities fell dramatically and famine killed off a million Irish. Tokugawa Japan, too, experienced periodic famines — a society that cannot reliably feed itself even with a cuisine as severely ascetic as Tokugawa Japan is not, imho, an attractive model.

The 21st century has far more productive and efficient technologies available: our wastefulness is, in an important sense, more voluntary. Think about LED technology for electric light: much cheaper to make and consumes much less electricity to produce a given quantity of lumens. But, instead of using that innovation to radically reduce our use of electric power for light, we are, if anything increasing it. The planet at night has become noticeably brighter when viewed from space in less than a decade! We do not need more light at night, but it has become cheaper and so, unconstrained, we consume more of it. Economists call it the Jevons Effect, named for the 19th century economist who first drew attention to the phenomenon of increasing efficiency leading to greater consumption. And, the Jevons Effect is now the mortal enemy of all humanity.

The call to switch the economy to “sustainable” energy technologies misses the mark in several ways. We really do need to constrain ALL energy use and build a infrastructure for an economy that needs much less energy to operate. And, in some respects, that may look a bit like going backward: transportation by rail in place of autos and airplanes. But, not a return to 19th century rail technology — duh! — rail is attractive, because the technologies of digital control can be applied so effectively to reduce radically the use of energy, while still allowing people and goods to travel great distances within reasonable time frames.

And, we need to act to constrain ourselves in our use of the planet. The movement to largely exclude humans from at least half the planet, in order to preserve the ecologies of the natural world as well as the capacity of the natural world to assimilate human waste, seems very sensible to me. Constraining human population is going to be very challenging.

On the other hand, the 21st economy in the advanced or developed world is so absurdly wasteful that artfully constraining its excess would be a welcome relief. Something like half the U.S. labor force is dedicated to salesmanship in one form or another, and much of that is selling things no one needs, or just hiking the price of things that could be very cheap if it were not “necessary” to finance the marketing. If we did not do this “work” no one need be worse off at the end of the day, as the effort to produce and deliver actual goods need not be reduced.

The cheapness of communication has been subject to a Jevons Effect, so that, as Ian points out occasionally, we are actually making ourselves miserable checking social media and our phones every ten seconds. Constraining that in some way could be a boon to human happiness. And, it is still true that modern communication technologies can substitute for a lot of travel — we probably do not need to commute to work so frequently.

The need for radical constraint is a long way from making it into the conventional wisdom, where economists, at least, are still chattering mindlessly about carbon pricing schemes. I do not know why people are so stupid.

Trump, the uber narcissist and political incompetent, may yet surprise me by putting his proposed “Presidential Committee on Climate Security”, headed by Dr. Happer, to good political use.

Trump definitely sees this through a political lens, and not just one of scientific controversy.

However, in spite of Trump’s rising poll numbers, I still view him as politically incompetent. Thus, my default expectation is that he would do basically nothing to educate the American public about the skeptical scientific position. Some tweets here and there, maybe a mention in occasional Presidential speeches, and of course some zingers and laugh lines at his rallies, which are replete with his adoring, uncritical fan base.

I welcome Trump to surprise me.

Two reasons that he might surprise me:

1) AOC, champion of the “Green New Deal”, who seems to get under the skin of Republicans and the Fox News crowd
2) The various children’s marches against climate change, which REALLY seems to get under the skin of some skeptics. See the various nasty comments, directed against children, here: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/03/02/we-the-young-open-letter-from-the-student-climate-change-strikers/

I think a good part of the reason for the antipathies shown to AOC and the student strikers is that both represent a potentially large political threat. These are threats that people with political brains are looking to nurture and actualize. (See, e.g., https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/03/03/german-chancellor-backs-climate-change-student-strikes/ . Globalist Angela Merkel is supporting the student strikes.)

Now, Trump, with his podium, COULD have set about debunking CO2 catastrophism, by educating the public as to it’s gross deficiencies, distortions, and dishonesty. Ah, but Trump is Trump; and he is surrounded by people who look to sabotage his agenda. His political IQ is low,
his golf-centric work ethic is antithetical to political mastery, and some of his nearby enemies love to encourage him to be ineffective. From my perspective, he’s wasted half his Presidency wrt “climate change”. Anything he attains via executive fiat can be undone by his successor. The only way to make that politically unfeasible was to wake up the large majority of Americans. E.g., this intelligence squared debate managed to collapse support for CO2 catastrophism in the space of about an hour and a half: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-28qNd6ass

Tweeter-in-chief Trump has been too clueless to get that job done, but maybe, just maybe, somebody will whisper in his ear about what happens when the subject is treated more seriously.

Stay tuned!

@ different clue

You ask good questions, but your framing and innuendo is rejected. No serious scientist would ever ask if “climate change” is real, but rather how, exactly, does climate change, and what is causing these changes. In a hard science like physics, you want to make quantified statements with as much precision as circumstances allow.

(Similarly, no serious scientist would ask if the earth is rotating. A serious scientific question is what are the exact periods of rotation, and what causes the variations, and what are the effects. I won’t get into it, but the details related the earth’s rotation about it’s axis, as well as it’s orbit around the solar system’s center of mass, is probably highly related to some aspects of climate change.)

If anthropogenic climate change isn’t likely to be catastrophic, then there’s no political motivation to deal with climate change. For amoral and immoral political animals and Agenda 21 social engineering types, of course, there’s lots of motivation to lie about catastrophes, if, indeed, climate change short of apocalyptic asteroid strikes promises no catastrophes beyond historical norms for floods, droughts, etc.

Likewise, citizens seriously concerned about dire climate change predictions will lose interest to the degree that “dire” fades into “normal”.

Your questions mostly amount to “OK, so what constitutes a CATASTROPHIC climate change”. This is a fair question, though not one I care to get into. I’m not knowledgeable about the details of his work, but Lomborg has tried to quantify losses, as well as various attempts at CO2 remediation, taking as gospel various IPCC warming scenarios.

I interpret a cost/benefit approach as not only worthy, but required, to responsibly try and assess various public policy implications. Whether Lomborg’s analysis is a gold standard, or whether he’s way off, he’s at least pointed in the right direction.

In this vein, I recently heard an interesting interview by Ralph Nader of a dyed-in-the-wool CO2 catastrophist, Paul Hawken, who wants to completely erase anthropogenic global warming. He prioritized a list of most important actions (implying a cost/benefit analysis for each of his suggestions, which were then compared), and has declared that the most important issue to tackle is greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere from refrigerators and other coolers. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rYRqzW2bh4&t=3315s

While Hawken may be out to lunch in describing the IPCC reports as, IIRC, “impeccable”, he gives every indication of approaching his analysis and proposed remedies rationally, given his biases.

We could use more Lomborgs and Hawkens, and fewer smear merchants and grifters, who run from scientific challenges and rational debates the way vampires flee sunshine.