human actions, global climate change, global human solutions
POSTED BY: 1kiki
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 19:38
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Quote:It is expensive but not as bad you think.
Originally posted by AURaptor:
There are absolutely winners here. Insane carbon tax policies that yield zero positive results in lowering co2 or pollution concerns as well as costing us billions or trillions in wasted $ make losers of all of us.
There are better uses of the peoples $ and efforts.
Cheap Climate Protection
May 28 3:01 pm http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/05/28/cheap-climate-protection/
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce just came out with its preemptive strike against Obama administration regulations on power plants. What the Chamber wanted to do was show that the economic impact of the regulations would be devastating. And I was eager to see how they had fudged the numbers.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the diatribe. The Chamber evidently made a decision that it wanted to preserve credibility, so it outsourced the analysis. And while it tries to spin the results, what it actually found was that dramatic action on greenhouse gases would have surprisingly small economic costs.
The Chamber’s supposed scare headline is that regulations would cost the US economy $50.2 billion per year in constant dollars between now and 2030. That’s for a plan to reduce GHG emissions 40 percent from their 2005 level, so it’s for real action.
So, is $50 billion a lot? Let’s look at the CBO’s long-term projections. These say that average annual US real GDP over the period 2014-2030 will be $21.5 trillion. So the Chamber is telling us that we can achieve major reductions in greenhouse gases at a cost of 0.2 percent of GDP. That’s cheap!
True, the chamber also says that the regulations would cost 224,000 jobs in an average year. That’s bad economics: US employment is determined by the interaction between macroeconomic policy and the underlying tradeoff between inflation and unemployment, and there’s no good reason to think that environmental protection would reduce the number of jobs (as opposed to real wages). But even at face value that’s also a small number in a country with 140 million workers.
So, I was ready to come down hard on the Chamber’s bad economics; but what they’ve actually just shown is that even when they’re paying for the study, the economics of climate protection look quite easy.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:people LOOOOVE their conspiracy theories.
Originally posted by AURaptor:
" climate deniers " are winning because
Like the nonsense of 9-11 being an inside job. It makes the random seem understandable. Hey! Climate change is a conspiracy! We're really safe then! Cool!
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
That’s for a plan to reduce GHG emissions 40 percent from their 2005 level, so it’s for real action.
U.S. carbon emissions in 2005 were 1.59 billion metric tons (tonnes).
(data from CDIAC: http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/emis/meth_reg.html )
With a 40% reduction by 2030, U.S. emissions would be would be .954 billion tonnes - a .636 billion tonne per year reduction.
Meanwhile, China's carbon emissions are increasing by .145 billion tonnes a year (2011 to 2012 figures), so with no change on their part by 2030 they will be producing 2.32 billion tonnes more per year than they are today.
If you look at China's carbon reduction proposals, they are all based on emissions per capita or emissions relating to GDP, not actual reduction (or even much slowdown in increase) of the total amount of emissions.
The "The U.S. can do something about climate change by ourselves." ship has sailed.
"When your heart breaks, you choose what to fill the cracks with. Love or hate. But hate won't ever heal. Only love can do that."
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Quote:Gloomy Gus.
Originally posted by Geezer:
The "The U.S. can do something about climate change by ourselves." ship has sailed.
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Wait! -- did I miss something?
I thought that the USA & China, actually US exceeded by China, were
the last of the dedicated polluters. That most other industrialized
countries are already implementing environmental protection & clean
up. As per the Kyoto Protocol.
No?
... oooOO}{OOooo ...
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Quote:
Originally posted by Oonjerah:
Wait! -- did I miss something?
I thought that the USA & China, actually US exceeded by China, were
the last of the dedicated polluters. That most other industrialized
countries are already implementing environmental protection & clean
up. As per the Kyoto Protocol.
No?
Look here...
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/CO2_Emission/timeseries/national
...and you can see graphs of carbon emissions increases/decreases by country.
The U.S., Japan, and most European countries have made strides in carbon reduction - some pretty substantial. However, China, India, and developing countries in Africa, Asia, and South America are increasing emissions at a pretty high rate. Check out Indonesia, Brazil, and South Africa, for example.
This is not to say that the U.S. shouldn't try to increase the use of renewable energy or reduce pollution, since those are useful both for local health and the economy, but it's going to take a worldwide effort to reduce total carbon emissions. One that I don't think we're going to get the developing world to buy into.
"When your heart breaks, you choose what to fill the cracks with. Love or hate. But hate won't ever heal. Only love can do that."
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http://www.rdmag.com/news/2015/08/chinas-carbon-emissions-less-previou
sly-thought?et_cid=4755219&et_rid=366206770&type=headline1%20message
China’s carbon emissions less than previously thought
From 2000 to 2013 China produced 2.9 gigatons less carbon than previous estimates of its cumulative emissions. The findings suggest that overestimates of China's emissions during this period may be larger than China's estimated total forest sink—a natural carbon store—in 1990 to 2007 (2.66 gigatons of carbon) or China's land carbon sink in 2000-2009 (2.6 gigatons of carbon).
Published in Nature, the revised estimates of China's carbon emissions were produced by an international team of researchers, led by Harvard Univ., UEA, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Tsinghua Univ., in collaboration with 15 other international research institutions.
SAGAN: We are releasing vast quantities of carbon dioxide, increasing the greenhouse effect. It may not take much to destabilize the Earth's climate, to convert this heaven, our only home in the cosmos, into a kind of hell.
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Beyond Record Hot, February Was 'Astronomical' and 'Strange'
www.biosciencetechnology.com/news/2016/03/beyond-record-hot-february-w
as-astronomical-and-strange
Earth got so hot last month that federal scientists struggled to find words, describing temperatures as "astronomical," ''staggering" and "strange." They warned that the climate may have moved into a new and hotter neighborhood.
This was not just another of the drumbeat of 10 straight broken monthly global heat records, triggered by a super El Nino and man-made global warming. February 2016 obliterated old marks by such a margin that it was the most above-normal month since meteorologists started keeping track in 1880, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The old record was set just last December and the last three months have been the most above-normal months on record, said NOAA climate scientist Jessica Blunden. And it's not just NOAA. NASA, which uses different statistical techniques, as well as a University of Alabama Huntsville team and the private Remote Sensing System team, which measure using satellites, also said February 2016 had the biggest departure from normal on record.
NOAA said Earth averaged 56.08 degrees (13.38 degrees Celsius) in February, 2.18 degrees (1.21 degrees Celsius) above average, beating the old record for February set in 2015 by nearly six-tenths of a degree (one-third of a degree Celsius). These were figures that had federal scientists grasping for superlatives.
"The departures are what we would consider astronomical," Blunden said. "It's on land. It's in the oceans. It's in the upper atmosphere. It's in the lower atmosphere. The Arctic had record low sea ice."
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"Everything everywhere is a record this month, except Antarctica," Blunden said. "It's insane."
In the Arctic, where sea ice reached a record low for February, land temperatures averaged 8 degrees above normal (4.5 degrees Celsius), Blunden said. That's after January, when Arctic land temperatures were 10.4 degrees above normal (5.8 degrees Celsius).
Worldwide, February 2016 was warmer than about 125 of the last 136 Marches.
It was also the warmest winter - December through February - on record, beating the previous year's record by more than half a degree (0.29 degrees Celsius).
Georgia Tech climate scientist Kim Cobb said she normally doesn't concern herself much with the new high temperature records that are broken regularly.
"However," she added in a Thursday email," when I look at the new February 2016 temperatures, I feel like I'm looking at something out of a sci-fi movie. In a way we are: it's like someone plucked a value off a graph from 2030 and stuck it on a graph of present temperatures. It is a portent of things to come, and it is sobering that such temperature extremes are already on our doorstep."
Scientists at NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information in Asheville, North Carolina, were astonished by the "staggering" numbers, said Deke Arndt, the centers' global monitoring chief.
"Usually these are monthly reminders that things are changing," Arndt said. "The last six months have been more than a reminder, it's been like a punch in the nose."
NASA's chief climate scientist Gavin Schmidt usually discounts the importance of individual record hot months, but said this month was different, calling it "obviously strange."
This was due to the long-term warming from heat-trapping gases and the powerful El Nino, so these types of records will continue for a few more months, but probably will not be a permanent situation, Schmidt said in an email.
But other were not so sure, including Arndt, who compared it to moving into a new hotter neighborhood.
"We are in a new era,"
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Given the data on significantly warming oceans, warming land and air, glacier retreat and melting, massive coral-reef die-off, and severe fires around the globe (Indonesia, Australia, Basil, and western North America), global warming is already in progress.
A new study indicates we can't reverse global warming and we WILL exceed the limits we think are tolerable - but we can put it off for centuries, if we act now.
New study
Quote:
Study: Warming already baked in will blow past climate goals
The amount of baked-in global warming, from carbon pollution already in the air, is enough to blow past international agreed upon goals to limit climate change, a new study finds.
But it’s not game over because, while that amount of warming may be inevitable, it can be delayed for centuries if the world quickly stops emitting extra greenhouse gases from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas, the study’s authors say.
For decades, scientists have talked about so-called “committed warming” or the increase in future temperature based on past carbon dioxide emissions that stay in the atmosphere for well over a century. It’s like the distance a speeding car travels after the brakes are applied.
But Monday’s study in the journal Nature Climate Change calculates that a bit differently and now figures the carbon pollution already put in the air will push global temperatures to about 2.3 degrees Celsius (4.1 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming since pre-industrial times.
Previous estimates, including those accepted by international science panels, were about a degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) less than that amount of committed warming.
International climate agreements set goals of limiting warming to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times, with the more ambitious goal of limiting it to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) added in Paris in 2015. The world has already warmed about 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit).
“You’ve got some ... global warming inertia that’s going to cause the climate system to keep warming, and that’s essentially what we’re calculating,” said study co-author Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University. “Think about the climate system like the Titanic. It’s hard to turn the ship when you see the icebergs.”
Dessler and colleagues at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab and Nanjing University in China calculated committed warming to take into account that the world has warmed at different rates in different places and that places that haven’t warmed as fast are destined to catch up.
Places such as the Southern Ocean, surrounding Antarctica are a bit cooler, and that difference creates low-lying clouds that reflect more sun away from earth, keeping these places cooler. But this situation can’t keep going indefinitely because physics dictates that cooler locations will warm up more and when they do, the clouds will dwindle and more heating will occur, Dessler said.
Previous studies were based on the cooler spots staying that way, but Dessler and colleagues say that’s not likely.
https://apnews.com/article/climate-climate-change-pollution-3f226aed9c
58e36c69e7342b104d48bf
read the rest of the article at the link
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