5657

We boiling frogs are certianly no longer oblivious to our predicament.

5658

I’m really encouraged that climate change was a big topic at this year’s Google Summer Camp in Sicily, considering that, according to Italian media reports, the arrival transportation for the 300 invited guests included 114 private jets and five mega-yachts.

5659

Yeah, I don’t care about the private jets and such as long as everyone gets on board with making big structural changes to protect the planet.

5660

I agree, but the best way to get people on board is not to present the message with “do as I say, not as I do” hypocrisy.

5661

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/usda-scientist-quits-claims-trump-administration-tried-to-bury-his-climate-study/ar-AAFnNNn?li=BBnb7Kz

Anything related to climate change was seen as extremely vulnerable, he said.

“We were careful,” he said. “And then it got to the point where language started to change. No one wanted to say climate change, you would say ‘climate uncertainty’ or you would say ‘extreme events.’ Or you would use whatever euphemism was available to not draw attention.”

5662
5663

Why ‘probably’ in that lede, I wonder?

5664
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5667

Letitia James said she would kick ass and she is. She’s a great example of why it’s important to vote down ballot.

5668

What are the chances that the planet is saved by… lawyers?

5669

We’ll also need guns. And money. Send them!

5670

A precis of the Trump administration’s environmental policy: “Fuck you.”

5671

Owning the libs by destroying all life on Earth.

5672

Including your voters in Australia. :(

5673

If only we could stop Queensland from voting, we’d be good.

5674

The Arctic is supposed to be cold, of course, making thunderstorms—much less the dozens, perhaps hundreds of strikes that materialized near the north pole over the weekend—a rarity. But no longer.

5675

Three things strike me about that article.

  1. In The Uninhabitable Earth, Davis Wallace Wells points out that “the new normal” is not a good way to describe worsening weather related phenomena because normal implies a steady state and all sorts f these phenomena will just continue to get worse, exponentially so in many cases.

  2. “ This summer, the drier, warmer Arctic has been burning to an unprecedented degree, which raises the question of whether more frequent thunderstorms might spark more wildfires, releasing still more carbon into the atmosphere… making for yet more warming. Swain says the phenomenon is too new to say for sure.”

What’s that? Unanticipated feedback loops that we have not factored into our models yet? I am Jack’s complete lack of surprise.

  1. ‘“Scientists already knew the Arctic was going to change much more rapidly than the rest of the world, and yet we’ve still been surprised at the rate of change we’ve been observing,” says Swain. There’s the rapid rate of permafrost melt, for instance, and the melting of ice sheets. “All of those processes have started to accelerate and in many cases have accelerated even faster than had been projected.”’

This is becoming a common theme — Changes are happening much much faster than projected. On the one hand, scientists are conservative by nature and training. Sound science involves conclusions drawn from observation, existing data and precedent but we are experiencing something unprecedented. Further, the IPCC, which summarizes the current science, does not want their audience (politicians, corporations, the public at large) to tune out their news as alarmist or to give in to climate fatalism so they are also conservative by nature in summarizing the conclusions of conservative by nature scientists.

Finally, building a model that accurately projects the effects of climate change is virtually impossible because there are so many factors at play simultaneously and we only understand a tiny fraction of them. Worse, we are only aware of a tiny fraction of them. Everything is connected in the global ecosystem and everything effects everything else, directly or indirectly. None of the changes are happening in isolation. They are all occurring simultaneously so, once the system starts to breakdown, there is a real danger of cascading effects.

5676

This vaguely reminds me of the east-coast cod fishery collapse in Canada. Supposedly the fisheries were monitored to prevent just such a collapse, but my vague recollection is that the data passed through successive layers of “let’s not be alarmist, surely it’s not really that bad, what about jobs” - so that when the collapse happened, it seemed to the public that it was basically overnight.