Climate Change? Nahhh ...

YankeeFan · Jul 11, 2017

MisterCreosote · Jul 11, 2017

YankeeFan said: ↑

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Wait, what?

Riptide · Jul 11, 2017

Watch Al Franken, David Letterman Talk Climate Change in New Web Series

Cosmo · Jul 11, 2017

Riptide said: ↑

The Uninhabitable Earth
Famine, economic collapse, a sun that cooks us:
What climate change could wreak — sooner than you think.

It is, I promise, worse than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a teenager today. And yet the swelling seas — and the cities they will drown — have so dominated the picture of global warming, and so overwhelmed our capacity for climate panic, that they have occluded our perception of other threats, many much closer at hand. Rising oceans are bad, in fact very bad; but fleeing the coastline will not be enough.

Indeed, absent a significant adjustment to how billions of humans conduct their lives, parts of the Earth will likely become close to uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable, as soon as the end of this century.

Even when we train our eyes on climate change, we are unable to comprehend its scope. This past winter, a string of days 60 and 70 degrees warmer than normal baked the North Pole, melting the permafrost that encased Norway’s Svalbard seed vault — a global food bank nicknamed “Doomsday,” designed to ensure that our agriculture survives any catastrophe, and which appeared to have been flooded by climate change less than ten years after being built.

The Doomsday vault is fine, for now: The structure has been secured and the seeds are safe. But treating the episode as a parable of impending flooding missed the more important news. Until recently, permafrost was not a major concern of climate scientists, because, as the name suggests, it was soil that stayed permanently frozen. But Arctic permafrost contains 1.8 trillion tons of carbon, more than twice as much as is currently suspended in the Earth’s atmosphere. When it thaws and is released, that carbon may evaporate as methane, which is 34 times as powerful a greenhouse-gas warming blanket as carbon dioxide when judged on the timescale of a century; when judged on the timescale of two decades, it is 86 times as powerful. In other words, we have, trapped in Arctic permafrost, twice as much carbon as is currently wrecking the atmosphere of the planet, all of it scheduled to be released at a date that keeps getting moved up, partially in the form of a gas that multiplies its warming power 86 times over.

Maybe you know that already — there are alarming stories every day, like last month’s satellite data showing the globe warming, since 1998, more than twice as fast as scientists had thought. Or the news from Antarctica this past May, when a crack in an ice shelf grew 11 miles in six days, then kept going; the break now has just three miles to go — by the time you read this, it may already have met the open water, where it will drop into the sea one of the biggest icebergs ever, a process known poetically as “calving.”

But no matter how well-informed you are, you are surely not alarmed enough. Over the past decades, our culture has gone apocalyptic with zombie movies and Mad Max dystopias, perhaps the collective result of displaced climate anxiety, and yet when it comes to contemplating real-world warming dangers, we suffer from an incredible failure of imagination. The reasons for that are many: the timid language of scientific probabilities, which the climatologist James Hansen once called “scientific reticence” in a paper chastising scientists for editing their own observations so conscientiously that they failed to communicate how dire the threat really was; the fact that the country is dominated by a group of technocrats who believe any problem can be solved and an opposing culture that doesn’t even see warming as a problem worth addressing; the way that climate denialism has made scientists even more cautious in offering speculative warnings; the simple speed of change and, also, its slowness, such that we are only seeing effects now of warming from decades past; our uncertainty about uncertainty, which the climate writer Naomi Oreskes in particular has suggested stops us from preparing as though anything worse than a median outcome were even possible; the way we assume climate change will hit hardest elsewhere, not everywhere; the smallness (two degrees) and largeness (1.8 trillion tons) and abstractness (400 parts per million) of the numbers; the discomfort of considering a problem that is very difficult, if not impossible, to solve; the altogether incomprehensible scale of that problem, which amounts to the prospect of our own annihilation; simple fear. But aversion arising from fear is a form of denial, too.

When Will the Planet Be Too Hot for Humans? Much, Much Sooner Than You Imagine.

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I found that to be a compelling read, not one loaded down with hysteria. In fact, the most interesting part to me was how some scientists are trying to downplay the hysteria angle of climate change. It's worth the 20-30 minutes it takes the read. Again, how anyone thinks this a Democrat vs. Republican issue (like our VP does), that blows my mind. This isn't about politics.

SnarkShark · Jul 12, 2017

YankeeFan said: ↑

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Well that settles it, then.

Spartan Squad · Jul 12, 2017

YankeeFan said: ↑

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Cherry picking at it's best! We haven't had a Cat-3 or higher hit the US, climate change isn't real! ... Unless you look at the things that haven't hit the US ... but don't look over there!

Ten Years of Hurricanes and Tropical Storms in One Graphic

The U.S. has been lucky since that pummeling summer. No major hurricane (defined as a category 3 or above) has touched U.S. shores since then. Hurricanes have made landfall in the Caribbean, Mexico, and Central America. And storms that weren’t quite hurricanes have caused damage to those areas and the U.S.

And there have been close calls:

Two hurricanes that struck Texas—Humberto in 2007 and Ike in 2008—likely would’ve inflicted severe poundings on the Lone Star State had they stayed over water another 24 hours. Humberto didn’t quite have time to crank up before it made landfall. And while Ike was a devastating storm, it could have been far worse with another day to gather strength.

In 2011, Hurricane Irene’s winds ramped up to 120 mph (193 kph), but the storm weakened before coming ashore in North Carolina. Still, it was the seventh-most expensive hurricane in U.S. history, causing $16.5 billion in damages from North Carolina to Canada.

Hurricane Sandy morphed into “Frankenstorm” as it thundered up the East Coast a few days before Halloween 2012. Sandy devastated the Jersey Shore, knocked out power for millions, flooded New York City subways, and inflicted $65 billion in damage—second only to Katrina. Sandy would’ve been far worse had it not weakened before hitting New Jersey.

Of the nine hurricane seasons since 2005, seven have had above-average activity, and three—2010, 2011, and 2012—were among the most active on record. Since 2006, 21 major hurricanes formed, some of them extremely powerful. Yet those storms stayed at sea, made landfall in Mexico or Central America, or weakened before coming ashore in the US.

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Riptide · Jul 12, 2017

Wasn't Hurricane Matthew a huge close call last fall?

MisterCreosote · Jul 12, 2017

My glib response to that post earlier was meant as a signal to the good folks at USAT that any scale that doesn't rate Sandy as a "major hurricane" is idiotic and should never be used.

Vombatus · Jul 12, 2017

And MC, you can add Hurricane (at the time, Tropical Storm remnants) Camille to that, based on what she did to central VA long, long after coming ashore at Biloxi.

I measure by deaths and damage, not an anemometer.

SnarkShark · Sep 5, 2017

YankeeFan said: ↑

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YankeeFan said: ↑

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Ahem.

Riptide · Sep 5, 2017

YankeeFan · Sep 5, 2017

Jose is the next storm forming.

I'm not worried. No way is Trump letting Jose make landfall in the U.S.

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Climate Change? Nahhh ...

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