I’m reading Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut at the moment and just read a relevant passage. Truer today than when he wrote it:
And here, according to Trout, was the reason human beings could not reject ideas because they were bad: "Ideas on Earth were badges of friendship or enmity. Their content did not matter. Friends agreed with friends, in order to express friendliness. Enemies disagreed with enemies, in order to express enmity.
"The ideas Earthlings held didn’t matter for hundreds of thousands of years, since they couldn’t do much about them anyway. Ideas might as well be badges as anything.
"They even had a saying about the futility of ideas: ‘if wishes were horses, beggars would ride.’
"And then Earthlings discovered tools. Suddenly agreement with friends could be a form of suicide or worse. But agreement went on, not for the sake of common sense or decency or self-preservation, but for friendliness.
“Earthlings went on being friendly, when they should have been thinking instead. And even when they built computers to do some thinking for them, they designed them not so much for wisdom as for friendliness. So they were doomed. Homicidal beggars could ride.”
Global warming is not expected to end anytime soon, despite what Breitbart.com wrote in an article published last week.
Though we would prefer to focus on our usual coverage of weather and climate science, in this case we felt it important to add our two cents — especially because a video clip from weather.com (La Niña in Pacific Affects Weather in New England) was prominently featured at the top of the Breitbart article. Breitbart had the legal right to use this clip as part of a content-sharing agreement with another company, but there should be no assumption that The Weather Company endorses the article associated with it.
The Breitbart article – a prime example of cherry picking, or pulling a single item out of context to build a misleading case – includes this statement: “The last three years may eventually come to be seen as the final death rattle of the global warming scare.”
In fact, thousands of researchers and scientific societies are in agreement that greenhouse gases produced by human activity are warming the planet’s climate and will keep doing so.
Along with its presence on the high-profile Breitbart site, the article drew even more attention after a link to it was retweeted by the U.S. House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology.
The article goes on to refute Breitbart’s claims point by point. And of course The Weather Channel is now being labeled by some as part of the biased liberal media.
Yesterday former VP Al Gore met with Trump and Ivanka, saying this:
“I had a lengthy and very productive session with the President-elect,” Gore said, according to the pool report. “It was a sincere search for areas of common ground. I had a meeting beforehand with Ivanka Trump. The bulk of the time was with the President-elect, Donald Trump. I found it an extremely interesting conversation, and to be continued, and I’m just going to leave it at that.”
I don’t have kids, so my frustration level is just about reaching the point where I want to say “Fuck it, if you idiots want to let the world burn, knock yourselves out. I’ll be dead before it really effects my life”.
Of course I could never not care, but damn if it isn’t frustrating.
Well I do, so I would love nothing more than to have the power to manipulate the multiverse so I could eject these blithering idiots from our reality an into the world of global ecological collapse they seem so hell bent on creating.
And then hope it gives them the life them like they so richly deserve.
I just want you to know that it’s for this reason that I could never not care. I’m with you, I wish there was a way I could make these idiots suffer the consequences of their actions, not the poor people in a generation or two down the line.
The Smithsonian has an article up with 8 stories related to the oceans from 2016, a couple of which are climate-related: ice melt and reef bleaching. It’s not all bad news in that article, which also covers some trash clean-up efforts and the most adorable squid ever.
Of note, The Weather Channel was founded by meteorologist John Coleman who is a climate change ‘skeptic’. Once the Good Morning America weatherman, of late he was on a local San Diego station, KUUUUUUUSI.
I care about the people that is gonna risk in places where storms are part of life (like the south of usa, but mostly poor countries and the south east asia). What I fear most is positive feedback loops. I hope that fear is irrational and the reality of climate change is mostly about slow change, not drastic changes.
I feel bad my generation is not implementing change here. My generation (I am 42 years old) should be doing something about this with whatever means we have available.
According to the geological record, climate can change drastically and fast.
As the Laurentian ice sheet melted, the fresh water drained through the Mississippi since an ice dam blocked the St. Lawrence. But after something melted the dam(possibly a meteorite) and instead flowed through the St. Lawrence into the North Atlantic. This killed the Gulf Stream and a 1200 year "Big Freeze" started almost immediately
Positive feedback loops are scary; there is a ton of methane locked into the ocean floors and the Arctic permafrost; should that get released, climate change will accelerate rapidly (and it will not result in just balmier climate for Canada and a few centimeters of ocean rise, either.)
But hey,we all know the most important endeavor any human can pursue is profit at any expense, because really how else are we going to measure moral superiority? /s
I think it’s better to look at Arctic and Antarctic sea ice separately, not together as the “Global Sea Ice” graph does. Nevertheless, it looks pretty bleak on both ends of the earth.
Starts off very general and shallow, but has some interesting insights on the carbon bubble and the current “administration.”
The Carbon Lobby and the Trump Gang
For high-carbon industries to continue to be attractive investments, then, they must spin a tale of future growth. They must make potential investors believe that even if there is a Carbon Bubble, it is decades away from popping — that their high profits today will continue for the foreseeable future, so their stock is worth buying.
How would you maintain this confidence?
You’d dispute climate science — making scientists’ predictions seem less certain in the public mind— and work to gut the capacity of scientists to continue their work (by, for instance, defunding NASA’s Earth Sciences program).
You’d attack global climate agreements, making them look unstable and weak, and thus unlikely to impact your businesses.
You’d attack low-carbon competitors politically, attempting to portray the evidence that they can replace high-carbon industries as fraudulent (or at least overly idealistic).
You’d use every leverage point to slow low-carbon industrial progress — for example, by continuing massive subsidies to oil and gas companies, while attacking programs to develop new energy sources.
You’d support putting a price on carbon, since this makes you look moderate and engaged, but you’d make sure that the definition of a “reasonable” price on carbon was so low and took so long to implement that it was no real threat to your business, and at worst would replace the dirtiest fossil fuels with others (switching for example from coal to gas).
You would ally with extremists and other sources of anti-democratic power, in order to be able to fight democratic efforts to cut emissions through the application of threats, instability and violence.
Most of all, you’d invest as heavily as possible in new infrastructure and supply. For oil and gas companies, this means new exploration and new pipelines. Why would you do this, if you know you may have to abandon these assets before they’ve paid off? Two reasons: First, it sends a signal of confidence to markets that you expect to continue to grow in the future. Second, it’s politically harder to force companies to abandon expensive investments than it is to prevent those systems from being built in the first place — the mere existence of a pipeline becomes an argument for continuing to use it. This, too, bolsters investor confidence. (Note that whether these assets are eventually abandoned or not is of little concern to current investors looking to delay devaluations).
Here’s the kicker: If you were going to put in place a presidential administration that was dedicated to taking these actions, it would look exactly like what we have now: a cabinet and chief advisors in which nearly every member is a climate denialist with ties to the Carbon Lobby.
