Climate Change/Mass Extinction Megathread

[fromtia]

Political elimination of certain topics. IE, making it as palatable to be a climate change-denier as it is to be in favor of, say, slavery.

Oh, we are trending for slavery to be making a comeback in a couple more election cycles on current form. 

[PDH]

When I was in grad school James G. Watt (Reagon's former Secretary of the Interior) gave a talk and an informal luncheon with us lowly grads.  He told us that God would not let man destroy the environment unless it was bringing on the End of Times.  He was scary.

[Oexmelin]

(Reagon's former Secretary of the Interior)

Reagon Targaryen?

[Habbaku]

 

[The Larch]

Yeah,gotta agree. It makes an issue that should be a-political explicitly political.

But climate change and how we are going to respond is intensely political already, and it was made that way by conservative media and the Republican party. They aren't going to change their minds anytime soon, and apparently the clock has been running against us for quite some time. I think if we continue to do nothing and wait for conservatives to come around or capitalism to save us then it's going to be a miserable future. I think it might be better to just try to press on without them.

What's sort of fascinating to me is how Climate change denial became such a central policy plank for conservatives. It's really odd in some respects. Why isn't clean air and the enviroment a conservative platform? Solar power ? There's no really compelling reason why they shouldn't be.

I was going to say something like this, climate change and action against it is already a fiercely political and partisan issue in the US, waiting for some kind of magical consensus to appear is disingenious when one of the sides is adamantly against doing almost anything at all and is just willfully blind to facts. I have no idea about that that Green New Deal stuff includes, but somebody giving that debate a kick in the butt to get it started in the US at high political level is more than welcomed.

[Tamas]

Whatever chance ever existed for the US right to accept climate change as a thing is long gone. They (or the parts holding power)  are going for the most retarded and confrontional stances on everything else. Why would they be any different on climate change?

[Syt]

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-019-0300-3

Abstract

Knowledge of the ice thickness distribution of the world's glaciers is a fundamental prerequisite for a range of studies. Projections of future glacier change, estimates of the available freshwater resources or assessments of potential sea-level rise all need glacier ice thickness to be accurately constrained. Previous estimates of global glacier volumes are mostly based on scaling relations between glacier area and volume, and only one study provides global-scale information on the ice thickness distribution of individual glaciers. Here we use an ensemble of up to five models to provide a consensus estimate for the ice thickness distribution of all the about 215,000 glaciers outside the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. The models use principles of ice flow dynamics to invert for ice thickness from surface characteristics. We find a total volume of 158 ± 41 × 103 km3, which is equivalent to 0.32 ± 0.08 m of sea-level change when the fraction of ice located below present-day sea level (roughly 15%) is subtracted. Our results indicate that High Mountain Asia hosts about 27% less glacier ice than previously suggested, and imply that the timing by which the region is expected to lose half of its present-day glacier area has to be moved forward by about one decade.

[PDH]

(Reagon's former Secretary of the Interior)

Reagon Targaryen?

Fine - Reagun

[Tamas]

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-019-0300-3

Abstract

Knowledge of the ice thickness distribution of the world's glaciers is a fundamental prerequisite for a range of studies. Projections of future glacier change, estimates of the available freshwater resources or assessments of potential sea-level rise all need glacier ice thickness to be accurately constrained. Previous estimates of global glacier volumes are mostly based on scaling relations between glacier area and volume, and only one study provides global-scale information on the ice thickness distribution of individual glaciers. Here we use an ensemble of up to five models to provide a consensus estimate for the ice thickness distribution of all the about 215,000 glaciers outside the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. The models use principles of ice flow dynamics to invert for ice thickness from surface characteristics. We find a total volume of 158 ± 41 × 103 km3, which is equivalent to 0.32 ± 0.08 m of sea-level change when the fraction of ice located below present-day sea level (roughly 15%) is subtracted. Our results indicate that High Mountain Asia hosts about 27% less glacier ice than previously suggested, and imply that the timing by which the region is expected to lose half of its present-day glacier area has to be moved forward by about one decade.

I admit I don't get the alarm on this. I mean sure the glacier will go away more quickly than anticipated, but that's because it holds less water than anticipated, isn't it? So we are still fucked, but not more fucked than we thought we were.

[Syt]

Many glaciers are important reservoirs of fresh water:

https://nsidc.org/cryosphere/glaciers/questions/people.html

[Tamas]

Ah, right, forgot about that, thanks.

[fromtia]

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/2/8/green-new-deal

Thursday morning, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY 14th District) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) released a resolution outlining their much-buzzed-about Green New Deal—a proposed large-scale effort to create jobs and address income inequality through federal government spending on programs that would help America curtail its emission of greenhouse gases by drastically reducing the use of fossil fuels. The outline comes following months of discussion of the concept on Capitol Hill and beyond. You can read it here.

The proposal is sweeping. It's idealistic. And, we can't help but notice, it doesn't really talk about one of the biggest factors in carbon emissions: urban land use.

Like... at all...

We're not the only ones who noticed this, of course. Vox's David Roberts pointed it out in his thorough review of the resolution. And Strong Towns member Alex Baca wrote an in-depth take for Slate on this very issue. An excerpt:

But the Green New Deal has a big blind spot: It doesn't address the places Americans live. And our physical geography—where we sleep, work, shop, worship, and send our kids to play, and how we move between those places—is more foundational to a green, fair future than just about anything else. The proposal encapsulates the liberal delusion on climate change: that technology and spending can spare us the hard work of reform.

[Valmy]

where we sleep, work, shop, worship, and send our kids to play, and how we move between those places

City planning and zoning may be a bit outside the jurisdiction of the Federal Government.

The proposal encapsulates the liberal delusion on climate change: that technology and spending can spare us the hard work of reform.

Yeah you are probably never going to get us to endorse intense social control except under very extreme circumstances. It kind of goes against everything we stand for. I mean what if somebody doesn't want to change where they sleep, work, shop, worship, and send their kids to play? We have to force them. Liberals, myself included, lack the stomach for that.

[Oexmelin]

Yeah you are probably never going to get us to endorse intense social control except under very extreme circumstances. It kind of goes against everything we stand for. I mean what if somebody doesn't want to change where they sleep, work, shop, worship, and send their kids to play? We have to force them. Liberals, myself included, lack the stomach for that.

I don't understand this argument, as if the only other alternative to laissez-faire was statist totalitarianism. We force people to do what they do not want all the time - like pay their taxes, or dump toxic waste in reserves of potable water (oh wait). What people want is heavily conditioned by what is actually available to them, and the milieu they grew up in. This article's critique (probably misplaced, as you note), is not about picking people's churches for them. It's about curtailing urban sprawl and stopping urban planning to be at the mercy of real estate developers (who are hardly spokespeople for what 'people want').

[fromtia]

where we sleep, work, shop, worship, and send our kids to play, and how we move between those places

City planning and zoning may be a bit outside the jurisdiction of the Federal Government.

Of course, as it should be. The author does go on to state the same thing more or less but then point out ways in which they believe 'federal incentives profoundly shape local land use already'.

Strong Towns are sort of an interesting bunch. I got involved in advocating for cycling and pedestrian infrastructure in the small town I live in a few years ago, attending the city council meetings and so on. A total nightmare. But it did leave me with a real interest in how our towns, cities and infrastructure get planned, built and paid for and by whom. Strong Towns essentially believe in incrementalism, and generally oppose large infrastructure projects. They also strive to be sort of apolitical, in as much as one can, so I think they came at the critique of the GND deliberately spicy like.