We are still screwed: the coming climate disaster

You make that fit on a bumper sticker and I want one.

Does anyone else ever do a Naughty by Nature FUCK THE GOP remix in their heads when reading various headlines? No? Cool, just me then.

100% this. Its why I have become far more absolutist. Republicans want to kill all of us and our children, quite literally.

I will never forgive them.

And now us lilly white straight dudes can begin to grasp what it feels like to be not one of those things!

I think the GOP leadership has moved beyond “it’s not happening” now to “it’s so far gone we can’t do anything to stop it”, and are proceeding to loot the system and set up their protected enclaves as best they can. Don’t think that the “invasion” language is just a backwards-looking dog-whistle; it also looks forward to the generations of refugees and migrants who will be splashing about the world for the next century.

This article seemed more hopeful than most I read:

First of all, in the last 15 years, wind and solar went from extremely expensive green luxury items maintained by subsidy to the cheapest forms of energy ever. That happened because government subsidized wind and solar, made a market for it that companies competed over, and they relentlessly drove the cost down. It’s a remarkable achievement – that conservatives should relish – of market success, but through government subsidy.

With the direct air capture technologies, 10 years ago you would have said that’s just like a fairy tale. But because of diligent activity by a small number of technical people, there’s been very rapid progress, so much so that knowledgeable people who are not starry-eyed, but just hard-headed, believe that there is a very high probability that a research effort within 10 years would produce direct air capture at less than a dollar a gallon of gasoline. That’s $100 a ton [of captured CO2].

I didn’t know carbon capture was already happening on this scale:

Carbon capture and storage has gone from, “Well, maybe it’s possible to do,” to a big business. Sixty-one million tons of CO2 are going into reservoirs and staying there this year in the Lower 48 [U.S. states] alone. That’s a big number.

Some good news in the right direction:

Not directly climate change related, but the same economic arguments that justify pollutants often lead to overriding environmental concerns over dredging. Which, as the article says, can lead to significantly higher flooding and storm surge issues. Combine with more extreme weather events from climate change, and you have some very wet futures for a lot of coastal and riverside areas.

Where would this go? Qatar wasn’t a huge oil producer, but this isn’t good visibility for OPEC.

You got to love really old people who actually care about the future after they’re gone. If only there were more of them.

David Attenborough rules.

Have some more Krugman climate dudgeon:

There are three important morals to this story.

First, if we fail to meet the challenge of climate change, with catastrophic results — which seems all too likely — it won’t be the result of an innocent failure to understand what was at stake. It will, instead, be a disaster brought on by corruption, willful ignorance, conspiracy theorizing and intimidation.

Second, that corruption isn’t a problem of “politicians” or the “political system.” It’s specifically a problem of the Republican Party, which has burrowed ever deeper into climate denial even as the damage from a warming planet becomes more and more obvious.

Third, we can now see climate denial as part of a broader moral rot. Donald Trump isn’t an aberration, he’s the culmination of where his party has been going for years. You could say that Trumpism is just the application of the depravity of climate denial to every aspect of politics. And there’s no end to the depravity in sight.

The Baltic Sea offers a preview of what’s to come with global warming
https://wapo.st/2FRdMmD

Shrinking populations of fish that traditionally live in those waters, and migration of species that like warmer seas. We may see this in larger bodies of water in the near future.

Thanks for the link. I read through it and at the end thought “hmm, I should post this on the Qt3 thread”, I must be getting too old.

Gilded Age 2.0, only hotter

I mean people learn your history. The Gilded age ended peacefully, relatively, because the working class was allowed gains. Had the wealthy of the day behaved as the wealthy of our day? Guillotines. That’s where that ends.

You can only turn the screws so tight.

Thing is… the wealthy are dumber now and don’t think the working class will do it.

History says otherwise.

Zombies can totally get over that wall. Just sayin’.

I keep saying that the basic social problem is that not enough lampposts have been put to their appropriate use.