Towards COP21

[emordnilap]

I'm hoping for a plague or nuclear war

One or the other is highly possible. The chances may well be higher for your first choice, given the sort of meat harvesting systems that are in place.

[emordnilap]

I'm feeling a little cross today as I've just found out that our friend George is proposing to make small businesses and the self employed fill in four tax returns a year in order to cut down on tax evasion and get £600 million a year extra in taxation. He could get that just by making DODGY TAX AVOIDERS pay a fair rate of taxation on their profits. Then there would also be Starbucks, Google, Yahoo and probably a dozen other US firms which don't think it their duty to pay a fair share into the running of this country so that they can continue to profit from us.

Then there's Lord Green and all his and George's UK friends who manage to pay less tax than you or I.

Exactly - tabloid myths about 'dole scroungers' are just that and what few there might be are the last thing to worry about.

The tax authorities keep more of their people busy if they go after a little tax here, a little tax there. Little people don't fight back; big people don't fight fair.

[emordnilap]

I was under the impression that coal could form from trees laid down in anaerobic conditions under water such as is found in swamp areas. The hotter, wetter conditions which Global Warming might cause together with higher wind speeds to blow the trees over and much, much less people to disturb the environment could replicate these conditions.

Yes, coal can form from trees that don't rot for the reasons you've given, and also from peat, but during the Carboniferous it was forming from all trees. Coal is still forming, but at a fraction of the Carboniferous rate of formation.

And of course all that carbon taken out of the atmosphere cooled the planet and made it habitable for other species...we're reversing that very very quickly.

[UndercoverElephant]

I was under the impression that coal could form from trees laid down in anaerobic conditions under water such as is found in swamp areas. The hotter, wetter conditions which Global Warming might cause together with higher wind speeds to blow the trees over and much, much less people to disturb the environment could replicate these conditions.

Yes, coal can form from trees that don't rot for the reasons you've given, and also from peat, but during the Carboniferous it was forming from all trees. Coal is still forming, but at a fraction of the Carboniferous rate of formation.

And of course all that carbon taken out of the atmosphere cooled the planet and made it habitable for other species...we're reversing that very very quickly.

Yes. This is also compounded by the fact that the sun is slowly getting hotter.

[emordnilap]

I'm hoping for a plague or nuclear war

One or the other is highly possible. The chances may well be higher for your first choice, given the sort of meat harvesting systems that are in place.

Coincidentally LJ, a friend passed on a piece about antibiotics, which may show us which of the above choices will definitely occur (and 'choices' is a deliberately chosen word).

To quote my friend directly, "We have one antibiotic in the armoury that will work on bacteria that are resistant to all others - the so-called 'superbugs'. That is Colistin. It isn't a new drug; in fact it dates from the 1950s but it's use was discontinued because of its toxicity. It is being used again particularly against resistant pneumonia bugs in intensive care situations. But according to what I heard on the BBC radio farming programme this morning this vital antibiotic is mostly being used in pig farms! Now comes the news that for the first time in the UK bugs have been found that are resistant to Colistin. Where? On three pig farms."

Just a few years ago, scientists in Arizona showed that a methicillin-resistant strain of Staphylococcus aureus in pigs had started infecting farmers. The "pig MRSA" accounts for only a small proportion of human infections worldwide. But scientists think it has the potential to spread.

Source

[emordnilap]

Back on topic, I was having a browse through the 'agreement' from COP21.

It's mostly bollix.

Significantly, it does not mention fossil fuels once. Not a single mention. Likewise aviation. Likewise cars. Likewise animal agriculture. Like I say, it's just above crap.

[biffvernon]

Always worth reading what Kevin Anderson has to say:
http://www.nature.com/news/talks-in-the ... NatureNews

[UndercoverElephant]

Always worth reading what Kevin Anderson has to say:
http://www.nature.com/news/talks-in-the ... NatureNews

Good article. I hope that you take notice of it.

In true Orwellian style, the political and economic dogma that has come to pervade all facets of society must not be questioned. For many years, green-growth oratory has quashed any voice with the audacity to suggest that the carbon budgets associated with 2 °C cannot be reconciled with the mantra of economic growth.

In other words, the only way to get things moving in the right direction instead of getting ever worse is to put an end to economic growth - both nationally and globally. So I very much hope we will never again see you hypocritically saying that immigration into the UK is a good thing because it helps sustain economic growth. I also hope we'll not see you linking to and quoting articles that talk about "sustainable development", which suffers from precisely the same problem.

The human operation has to shrink, both nationally and globally. The only real choices we have are about how, where, and how quickly this happens. Sooner or later it will happen. We all know this, including you. We also know that it needs to happen sooner rather than later.

[kenneal - lagger]

.............Yes. This is also compounded by the fact that the sun is slowly getting hotter.

I thought that the world was in a cooling phase of the Milankovich cycle and descending into the next ice age in about 10,000 years time.

[UndercoverElephant]

.............Yes. This is also compounded by the fact that the sun is slowly getting hotter.

I thought that the world was in a cooling phase of the Milankovich cycle and descending into the next ice age in about 10,000 years time.

I was talking about much longer timescales than that. The long-term trend is hotter.

[fuzzy]

I am presuming UE means the eventual expansion to a red giant as its density reduces as matter is 'consumed'. It will get hotter on earth.

[kenneal - lagger]

So global warming isn't man made after all!!

On that time scale I don't think we have to bother about warming from that source!

[raspberry-blower]

Always worth reading what Kevin Anderson has to say:
http://www.nature.com/news/talks-in-the ... NatureNews

Good article. I hope that you take notice of it.

In true Orwellian style, the political and economic dogma that has come to pervade all facets of society must not be questioned. For many years, green-growth oratory has quashed any voice with the audacity to suggest that the carbon budgets associated with 2 °C cannot be reconciled with the mantra of economic growth.

In other words, the only way to get things moving in the right direction instead of getting ever worse is to put an end to economic growth - both nationally and globally.

On a similar vein, the latest Archdruid Report has a damning analysis of CON-21

Last week, after a great deal of debate, the passengers aboard the Titanic voted to impose modest limits sometime soon on the rate at which water is pouring into the doomed ship’s hull. Despite the torrents of self-congratulatory rhetoric currently flooding into the media from the White House and an assortment of groups on the domesticated end of the environmental movement, that’s the sum of what happened at the COP-21 conference in Paris. It’s a spectacle worth observing, and not only for those of us who are connoisseurs of irony; the factors that drove COP-21 to the latest round of nonsolutions are among the most potent forces shoving industrial civilization on its one-way trip to history’s compost bin.




The core issues up for debate at the Paris meeting were the same that have been rehashed endlessly at previous climate conferences. The consequences of continuing to treat the atmosphere as a gaseous sewer for humanity’s pollutants are becoming increasingly hard to ignore, but nearly everything that defines a modern industrial economy as “modern” and “industrial” produces greenhouse gases, and the continued growth of the world’s modern industrial economies remains the keystone of economic policy around the world. The goal pursued by negotiators at this and previous climate conferences, then, is to find some way to do something about anthropogenic global warming that won’t place any kind of restrictions on economic growth.




What that means in practice is that the world’s nations have more or less committed themselves to limit the rate at which the dumping of greenhouse gases will increase over the next fifteen years. I’d encourage those of my readers who think anything important was accomplished at the Paris conference to read that sentence again, and think about what it implies. The agreement that came out of COP-21 doesn’t commit anybody to stop dumping carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, now or at any point in the future. It doesn’t even commit anybody to set a fixed annual output that will not be exceeded. It simply commits the world’s nations to slow down the rate at which they’re increasing their dumping of greenhouse gases. If this doesn’t sound to you like a recipe for saving the world, let’s just say you’re not alone.

Even if the Paris agreement came up with something meaningful it is far too late in the day to make any difference as many of the dreaded positive feedback loops are already in play.

Trying to continue with the current economic model with added green bling is nothing short of insanity.

[UndercoverElephant]

I am presuming UE means the eventual expansion to a red giant as its density reduces as matter is 'consumed'. It will get hotter on earth.

Yes, but that is just the end of the process. The sun is steadily getting hotter and is noticeably hotter now than it was 100 million years ago. I'm talking about the heat outpute of the sun itself, not the effect of shifting orbits.

Main sequence stars get brighter and hotter throughout their lifetime:

http://www.learnastronomyhq.com/article ... ghter.html

[UndercoverElephant]

So global warming isn't man made after all!!

On that time scale I don't think we have to bother about warming from that source!

But we were talking about the timescale between the Carboniferous era and today. The point I was making is that the sun was dimmer/cooler when all that carbon was taken out of the active biosphere.