IPCC Report 2018

[kenneal - lagger]

Here's the BBC article on the new IPCC Report from South Korea.

Nor very good from my point of view as it talks about 100mm more sea level rise if we go to 2 deg C when if we go to 2 deg C we are going to get about 900mm rise in total if you belive the last IPCC report of 7 metres if you believe Hanson et al.

[Potemkin Villager]

This article is a good summary of why the latest IPPC report is the latest in a long line of damp squibs.

https://jpratt27.wordpress.com/2018/10/ ... rum-qanda/

"We can picture what it would be like to get eaten by a shark, or die in a mass shooting or an airplane crash.

That leads us to over-prepare for those risks—arming teachers, avoiding the beach, driving instead of flying even though driving is manifestly more dangerous.

But if you ask even the most devout climate change believers how they think it’s going to affect them, they often can’t quite describe it.

If it’s hard to picture, it’s easy to ignore."

[raspberry-blower]

On economics, awards and non-awards:

Peter Dorman: Nobel Award Prizes in Economics Awarded and Withheld: Climate Change Edition

The reality is this is a nonprize for Weitzman, an attempt to dismiss his approach to combating climate change, even though his position is far closer to the scientific mainstream than Nordhaus’. An example of the enlistment of the uncritical media in this enterprise is today’s New York Times, where Binyamin Appelbaum writes:


Mr. Nordhaus also was honored for his role in developing a model that allows economists to analyze the costs of climate change. His work undergirds a new United Nations report on the dangers of climate change, released Monday in South Korea.

Wrong. The work Nordhaus pioneered in the social cost of carbon is mentioned only twice in the IPCC report, a box in Chapter 2 and another in Chapter 3. The reason it appears only in boxes is that, while the authors of the report wanted to include this work in the interest of being comprehensive, it plays no role in any of their substantive conclusions. And how could it? The report is about the dangers of even just 1.5º of warming, less than the conventional 2º target, and far less than the 3+º Nordhaus is comfortable with. Damages are expressed primarily in terms of uninhabitable land and climate refugees, agricultural failure and food security, and similarly nonmonetary outcomes, not the utility-from-consumption metric on which Nordhaus’ work rests.

The Nordhaus/Romer combo is so artificial and unconvincing it’s hard to avoid the impression that the prize not given to Weitzman is as important as the one given to Nordhaus. This is a clear political statement about how to deal with climate change and how not to deal with it. The Riksbank has spoken: it wants a gradual approach to carbon, one that makes as few economic demands as possible.

See also:
Ilargi: A Climate Fit For a Groundhog

You see, what is hardly ever mentioned, let alone acknowledged, is that we have more than one major existential problem, and they exist in such a form of symbiosis that solving only one doesn’t make much difference.

We have a changing climate, we have accelerating species extinction, we have plastics in our fish, and we have a global economy that’s about to topple over. The common thread in all these is an overkill in energy use and therefore an overkill in waste. Thermodynamics, 2nd law. Waste kills. By raising temperatures, finishing off wildlife, plugging rivers and oceans with plastics, making increasing amounts of people economically miserable.

But as I wrote a while ago, our economies exist to produce waste, it’s not just a by-product -anymore-. If we stop making things we don’t need, and things that do harm to our world and our lives, our economies will collapse. We must continue on our path or see our lifetstyles plummet. They will anyway, we’re just delaying the inevitable, but we’re stuck.

[emordnilap]

Ilargi: A Climate Fit For a Groundhog

You see, what is hardly ever mentioned, let alone acknowledged, is that we have more than one major existential problem, and they exist in such a form of symbiosis that solving only one doesn’t make much difference.

We have a changing climate, we have accelerating species extinction, we have plastics in our fish, and we have a global economy that’s about to topple over. The common thread in all these is an overkill in energy use and therefore an overkill in waste. Thermodynamics, 2nd law. Waste kills. By raising temperatures, finishing off wildlife, plugging rivers and oceans with plastics, making increasing amounts of people economically miserable.

But as I wrote a while ago, our economies exist to produce waste, it’s not just a by-product -anymore-. If we stop making things we don’t need, and things that do harm to our world and our lives, our economies will collapse. We must continue on our path or see our lifetstyles plummet. They will anyway, we’re just delaying the inevitable, but we’re stuck.

That's a great article.

These are not the people who will solve the problems. They have too much interest in not doing so. The CEOs have their profits to think about, the politicians their elections. They should be kept out of the decision-making process. But they’re the only ones who are in it.

Repeat: nothing will be done about climate change. Not even after the next ten humungous disasters. Not even if those ten all come at once. What happens once you accept that?

[Little John]

Nothing will be done to solve anything. The problems are too big and too intractable. From peak industrial resources, to climate change, to an ongoing mass extinction event in a collapsing planetary eco-system, to a massive global human population overshoot, which is at the heart of all of it.

Nothing.

The best we can hope for it that we humans act in such a way as to hasten the coming collapse on the basis that the sooner it happens, the lower will be the eventual impact on all of life on earth. Including ourselves.

That's it.

[emordnilap]

Exactly. Even those in power, the errrmm, 'leaders', can see this. In fact, they're more aware than most.

Like Mungo the chef in Monty Python's, "It makes me so maaaaad!"

[raspberry-blower]

Douglas Adams once said that humans were "mostly harmless" - what should be added is, of course, except for its idiotic and self-destructive pursuit of little bits of green paper...

[clv101]

Nothing will be done to solve anything. The problems are too big and too intractable. From peak industrial resources, to climate change, to an ongoing mass extinction event in a collapsing planetary eco-system, to a massive global human population overshoot, which is at the heart of all of it.

Nothing.

The best we can hope for it that we humans act in such a way as to hasten the coming collapse on the basis that the sooner it happens, the lower will be the eventual impact on all of life on earth. Including ourselves.

That's it.

Spot on. The sooner the current system collapse, the better place the planet will be a few hundred years from now.

[kenneal - lagger]

This is what the local environmental group that I belong to is doing. We've got 41 people coming so far with representatives from all the political parties but unfortunately only one school is bringing pupils so far.

[RenewableCandy]

That's marvellous but we really need to crack that thing that says 'the economy' must grow all the time or parts of it will collapse.

[woodburner]

Zero carbon for west Berkshire? I wonder how much was spent on carbon generating in making all the useless items people buy each other for Christmas, all the fuel used on pointless journeys, and all the transport used in ferrying lots of food that in the end was probably tossed in the bin because people overloaded their plates?

Glad it is supported the Right dishonourable Richard Benyon large landowner and culler of buzzards which required yet another government uturn. The cunning way out is to build wind turbines which knock them out of the sky. Good move Richard.

Edited to correct selection of wrong county.

[emordnilap]

Zero carbon for west Yorkshire?

WB, I admire your persistance but, unless you have a dyslexic condition (I hope not), the above sort of thing does you no favours.

[woodburner]

woodburner wrote:
Zero carbon for west Yorkshire?

WB, I admire your persistance but, unless you have a dyslexic condition (I hope not), the above sort of thing does you no favours.

Thanks for pointing that out, I was wondering who would be the first to spot that one. However we all make typos, and if I don’t make enough, the predictive text feature chucks a few extra in. PS doesn’t suffer much from it, but there are some blogs where it is near impossible to work out the intended sense of what’s written. As an aside, I have a couple of associates who are apparently dyslexic, and they are world class experts in their field, so it’s not necessarily a bad thing. The rest of us just have to work out how to understand what they are saying in their writings. Usually done by talking to them.

[kenneal - lagger]

Something that we can agree on, Woodburner, is that we will have to reduce the amount of useless stuff that we buy in order to support the increasing world population and make life and wealth more evenly distributed world wide, Climate Change or no Climate Change. It is impossible for the world's poor to get richer when a third of the world has a three or more planet lifestyle; there just aren't enough resources available to spread the wealth more evenly without someone taking a cut.

As to my local MP building wind turbines to knock buzzards out of the sky you are wrong on two counts there. One, he and the local conservative district council don't support the building of wind turbines locally because they don't want to spoil the look of the Berkshire downs which are an AONB. And, two, not many birds are knock down by large wind turbines in the UK.

[Little John]

It'll be the small ones with a fast RPM that are potentially dangerous to bird-life. The large one's with relatively slow turning blades can be avoided by birds, I would have thought