Climate Change

[stevebrooks]

Aaw lookitim, the poor rich man spent half a million on a sand dune that got washed away in 3 days!

“I don’t know what the solution is,” Guilmette said.

The solution is, get a time machine, go back 30 or 40 years or more when they were warning of erosion threatening low lying coastal communities due to rising sea levels caused by global warming...and take it fucking seriously. I mean he is one of the causes and he can't get his head around that. The solution is take global warming seriously, sure it might not help you now because you are fucked because you took no action half a century ago, but it might help your grand children in 50 years time, so get fucking serious you twat!

I mean the sheer block pigheadedness of some of these people is astounding!

https://www.thedailybeast.com/dollar500 ... ust-3-days

[Irrev-Black]

I have found many of the Oz ski enthusiast type to be 'orrible. Mind you, this is from the perspective of a person dealing with all sorts of entitled demands while he tries to be the sole evening shift joker at a service station positioned between big cities and the snowfields.

For most of them, feh: no concern.

It's the critters I'm sad about. This will probably extinctify a few species.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-03-14/ ... /103577562

[stylofone]

Actuaries deal in risk management, my superficial understanding of it makes me think of it as a business/money type of endeavour. But climate change is a big deal for their clients, so they are right into it. A key finding they make is that 1.5 is pretty much dead, but no-one has acted on it yet. Emissions targets are too weak. On the money side of things, they are warning that insurers run the risk of going out of business, but another one they talk about is pension funds who might not be able to pay people because the income from the funds is slashed by climate change disasters.

A couple of quotes from their report:

The Earth’s climate may be more sensitive than we thought,
meaning the planet may warm more quickly than expected
for a given level of greenhouse gases. This would reduce
carbon budgets. It is unclear how much more warming we
are committed to post 2030. This is uncertain due to many
factors, including ice melt rate decreasing Earth’s albedo,
the impact of aerosol cooling, climate tipping points, and
the pace of the energy transition.

There is an increasing disconnect between current net zero
carbon budgets and the 1.5°C temperature goal, with several
scientific agencies reporting that levels of global warming
in 2023 were close to or already at 1.5°C. An overshoot of
the 1.5°C temperature goal by 2030 is increasingly likely
and current net zero carbon budgets give a low probability
of limiting temperature. We need to re-calibrate carbon
budgets, given uncertainty and experience to date.

https://actuaries.org.uk/media/g1qevrfa ... orpion.pdf

[pipbarber]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... ur-climate

A good article here on Britain's immediate future, but applicable to everywhere in one form or another. Refreshing in so far as the focus was on mitigation rather than alternative fuel sources. This is what 2050 could be:

It seems that neither of the major parties are especially bothered by the meteorological mayhem that awaits us. Extreme weather, especially heatwaves and floods, is set to be all-pervasive and will have a colossal impact on our lives and livelihoods. A recent report by the European Environment Agency warned that climate breakdown would bring “catastrophic” consequences for an unprepared Europe, most notably through heat stress, river flooding and flash floods. And this applies equally to the UK. Disruption to transport and utilities, interference with industrial and business operations, serious pressures on food production and supply, and increased burdens on the health service and hospitals, will conspire to make day-to-day living harder and far more unpredictable.

Mitigation is where the climate discussion should be because the next two decades will only reflect the greenhouse gasses we've already emitted. There's nothing we can do for the next twenty years other than to prepare for what's coming. I find that much of the climate change public discussion still has a futuristic quality to it, 'energy transition' being the obvious example. But as Bill McGuire in the article above argues, there are plenty of small practical policies that could, and need, to be enacted and that could help people survive.

[stevebrooks]

'Oh no', says Toyota, 'these new Australian emission rules are going to cause problems!'

The fuckers, they've been dealing with stringent emission rules in the US for decades and having free reign in Australia because previous governments were to stupid to actually do anything about emissions because they loved fossil fuel. Of course California alone exceeds our population so they will bend the knee to the US, tell em to fuck off a sort it out or go sell cars somewhere else and we'll take EV's from China!

Major motoring company Toyota has issued a dire warning after strict new car rules for utes and SUVS were introduced today.

Toyota Australia President and CEO Matthew Callachor told news.com.au in a statement that the industry is currently facing “huge challenges” that need to be addressed before these new rules announced by the Albanese Government can be implemented.

“Toyota has long supported the introduction of an ambitious fuel-efficiency standard that is calibrated to the unique requirements of the Australian market and leaves no-one behind,” Mr Callachor said.

And there's a statement with precisely zero content, implement the rules, tell Toyota to catch up or be left behind, looks like they have chosen the latter though as other companies go full blast ahead with EV's and Toyota is still stuck in Hydrogen land!

https://www.news.com.au/technology/moto ... 2d6108d113

[stylofone]

Oh no', says Toyota, 'these new Australian emission rules are going to cause problems!'

The way things are going, by the time the rules come into effect, the climate crisis will be so bad that there will be much more stringent rules to implement. Also no-one will be resisting them because there will be massive protests in the street demanding the new measures, and governments won't survive if they don't do something... even though it will be decades too late.

[stylofone]

Better increase the amount of hopium in our delusional drip, so we can feel good about about "reducing" emissions. The untenable reality is that we continue to increase emissions dramatically. Australia is doing its bit, with Chalmers this month promising to speed up approvals for new oil and gas.

The US, which has produced more crude oil than any country has ever done in history for the past six years in a row, led the way in new oil and gas projects in 2022 and 2023

https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... els-report

[Irrev-Black]

Climate change is even fucking with the planet's rotational speed.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00932-w

[stevebrooks]

Well so much for the coalitions plan for cheap power by spending 10 or 20 years and potentially billions of our dollars building nuclear power stations to replace coal and gas fired power stations. I suspect one of the paradigms they used in working out the power dynamics and power cost was that there would be no new developments of renewable energy production in the meantime, but now new research from China has revealed a new type of solar panel twice as efficient and 70% cheaper than traditional solar panels. It's a rather long bow to draw that renewable power development would remain static and generate power at the same price for the 10 or 20 years it took to build nuclear power stations

I mean even if it was just twice as efficient that would halve the cost of installing solar panels on houses if you were just intending to keep to the same required power, 360W instead of 200W makes a big difference, you could have the same number of panels cheaper but producing more power, or halve the number of panels, effectively cutting the cost of panels you need by nearly 75% for a standard home installation. If the coalition ever got around to building their grand dream, by the time it was finished it would be just another hugely expensive white elephant.

Of course it's early days yet, got to see where this goes, new more powerful and reliable batteries, more efficient solar, they would be much better off subsidising solar panel installation and home batteries on all new housing developments than building nuclear, they could power Australia more cheaply and quickly than any grand nuclear ambition. As usual they are 40-50 years out of date!

[stylofone]

The taxonomy of human response to climate change. I generally agree with the author's position, except that I think that the currently dominant form of capitalism (neo-liberal free market zeal) is actually incompatible with meaningful action. Until we (i.e. humans) pull our fingers out and actually reduce emissions, I am much more pessimistic. But I am nowhere near the pure doomist definition here, that it's too late, we might as well do nothing because we're fucked. I think we need to fight like hell to make it less terrible.

-Climate deniers. With climate denial, there’s nothing to worry about, nothing to do, because there is no problem. Or, if there is a problem, it’s with these Soros-funded “one world order” pinkos who want us all driving EVs and drinking wheatgrass, gunless and helpless against our Big Government.

-Techno-optimists. Here there’s plenty to worry about, but we should be able to science our way out of the worst of it, provided we get the right people in government, the right people with incentives and funding mechanisms to build the gigafactories, launch the marine cloud brightening ships, drawdown carbon with our cutting edge technology.

-Most liberals. Most liberals I know understand climate change, have read the books, are even willing to discuss it in polite company, nod somberly and agree how bad it is, and then fly off to London or Costa Rica or Fiji like one has nothing to do with the other. Perhaps because, as Britt Wray puts it in her book “Generation Dread,” they’re experiencing “disavowal,” a psychological defense that’s “having one eye open and one eye closed at the same time.”

-Doomers. The doomers tend to say nothing can be done to “fix” climate change. There’s a difference, they say, between a problem (it can be solved) or a predicament (it can’t be solved.) When you explain that “solution” includes “mitigation,” some then claim that even mitigation is impossible. Yet mitigation means “the action of reducing the severity, seriousness, or painfulness of something,” and global warming comes in literal degrees, hurricanes in wind-speed scale, floods and wildfires and everything in between in billions in damage and lives lost. It’s all measurable, and so mitigation never ends.

Non paywall link