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Climate change a different take on what to do about it.

#3461 User is offline   johnu 

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Posted 2019-November-15, 16:22

View PostAl_U_Card, on 2019-November-15, 07:26, said:

Speaking of being under water, all that terrible CO2 is fertilizer and the stuff of life, you say? Duke University seems to agree, as their study of plankton and tuna feeding rates seems to show that with more food, you eat more. Oh noes! Whatever shall we do?

Just when you thought it wasn't safe to go back in the water...

I think it is just wonderful that you are finally using your degree in Climatology from Trump University.
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#3462 User is offline   johnu 

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Posted 2019-November-15, 16:26

View PostAl_U_Card, on 2019-November-13, 07:58, said:

Just more of the same from those denialist hotbeds of Princeton, Yale, Harvard, NASA and yes, The IPCC itself:


UN Solar Particle Forcing For 2022 (CMIP6): https://solarisheppa.geomar.de/cmip6
Princeton on Clouds: https://www.princeto.../news/2018/0...
Yale's Cold Climate Bomb: https://e360.yale.ed...tures/how-a-...
Harvard Ocean Data Condemnation: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1910.04843.pdf
NASA Cloud Page: https://www.giss.nas.../research/br... [The ultimate smackdown of climate discourse in public today]

here is the resume in video form https://www.youtube....h?v=Vu8pgBscpmo

Weather may be weather but the climate has always been a known unknown...

Did you actually have to go to classes at Trump University to get your degree in Climatology?

A bunch of links, most of them broken, and no clear analysis of how those results fit in with climate science. I didn't really expect much more from you, but you are embarrassing your prestigious alma mater.
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#3463 User is offline   Al_U_Card 

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Posted 2019-November-16, 13:51

A bunch of links, 3 OF THEM (BROKEN ON POSTING?)

FYP

https://solarisheppa.geomar.de/cmip6

https://www.giss.nas...1/computer.html

https://agupubs.onli...29/2019GL084385

https://nicholas.duk...ceanic-food-web

https://e360.yale.ed...imate-in-europe

FMP (hopefully) as Sinclair Lewis's famous quote also applies to those disinterested in changing opinions with (new) facts.
The Grand Design, reflected in the face of Chaos...it's a fluke!
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#3464 User is offline   hrothgar 

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Posted 2019-November-16, 14:45

View PostAl_U_Card, on 2019-November-16, 13:51, said:



Al, just how ***** stupid are you?
Do you even bother to read any of the content that you copy and paste onto the forums?

Case in point: The Yale article is describing the effect that a massive amount of fresh water melting from the ice caps in Greenland and the Arctic might have on the climate in Europe. You've spent years claiming that these ice caps are growing.

Moreover, no one claims that the impact of global climate change is uniform. On average, world wide temperatures are expected to increase significantly. However, its entirely possible that some areas might experience cooling. (Case in point, North America has experienced some extremely cold winters over the last decade because the polar vortex is collapsing)

And it's not like these dramatic temperature decreases in Northern Europe are likely going to be any better than the heat waves that have been devastating Spain and France over the past few summers.
Alderaan delenda est
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#3465 User is offline   y66 

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Posted 2019-November-18, 13:24

Tobias Buck @FT, on 11/17/2019, said:

From the glass-fronted living room of his house in Ober-Ramstadt, Günther Schulz points towards the wooded hills that rise on the other side of the valley. It is a fine view, but one that will soon be transformed. 

Over the next few months, workers will cut down a section of forest, pour a concrete base and assemble a pair of wind turbines whose blades will reach 200m into the sky. 

For Mr Schulz, who has campaigned tirelessly against the project for years, the masts are an environmental abomination, a danger to birdlife and a threat to groundwater. 

They are also, in his mind, the symbol of a much greater problem: the failure of the Energiewende, Germany’s much-vaunted shift from nuclear and coal power to renewable energy: “We have more than 30,000 wind turbines in Germany now and we can’t build any more. This has to stop,” he said. 

In Ober-Ramstadt, a small town south of Frankfurt, his battle against wind power may have been lost. But the broader war is swinging Mr Schulz’s way. Construction of new wind parks in Germany has collapsed over the past year, not least in response to growing resistance from local activists. 

In the first nine months of 2019, developers put up 150 new wind turbines across the country with a total capacity of 514MW — more than 80 per cent below the average build rate in the past five years and the lowest increase in capacity for two decades. 

The sharp decline has raised alarm among political leaders, industry executives and climate campaigners. The German government wants renewables to cover 65 per cent of the country’s electricity needs by 2030, a key target in Berlin’s campaign to drive down greenhouse gas emissions and help combat climate change. 

It has pledged to shut down the last nuclear power plants in 2022 and phase out coal power by 2038. Without more wind turbines, Europe’s largest economy could soon face an unenviable choice: scrap the climate targets or risk running out of power. 

“For the fight against climate change, this is a catastrophe,” said Patrick Graichen, the director of Agora Energiewende, a think-tank in Berlin. “If we want to reach the 65 per cent renewables target we need at least 4GW of new onshore wind capacity every year. This year we will probably not even manage 1GW.” 

The problem was two-fold, he said: “The federal states have not made available enough areas for new wind turbines, and those that are available are fought tooth and nail by local campaigners.” 

Polls show that popular support for wind power remains high, though concern among politicians about a voter backlash is on the rise. One recent government move that angered the wind industry was a plan to enforce a minimum distance of 1,000m between wind masts and the nearest built-up area. According to Henrik Maatsch, energy expert at environmental group WWF,this would remove up to 40 per cent of available land for new turbines. “This has created huge uncertainty for the wind sector,” he said. 

The proposal has also caused a row inside the government itself - with the environment ministry demanding a less onerous approach.

The escalating fight has created strange alliances, with climate campaigners standing shoulder to shoulder with erstwhile enemies in the energy sector. A recent paper signed by both Greenpeace and the BDEW association of energy companies urged the government to relax planning and animal conservation laws to allow more wind parks.

“Right now it takes five to seven years before you even know whether you will be able to realise your project,” said Markus Krebber, the chief financial officer at RWE. “Germany should not forget that it is in competition with other countries when it comes to investment in renewables. Businesses can only spend their euro or dollar once. If you spend it in the US you know the plant will be up and running in a year’s time.” 

EnBW, the utility building the turbines in Ober-Ramstadt, has encountered similar problems. “Authorities are now more cautious when it comes to new approvals, and . . . more and more approvals are then taken to court,” said Andreas Pick, head of project development for onshore wind at EnBW. 

The projected shortfall cannot be compensated for by ramping up construction of solar plants and offshore wind, analysts say. The latter face serious infrastructure challenges: with current generation capacity, Germany’s transmission network can barely cope with the flow of electricity from the wind-intensive northern coast to population centres and industrial regions further south. There are plans to expand north-south grid connections, but those are due for completion in 2025 and 2026 at the earliest. 

Mr Schulz insisted his resistance to wind farms had nothing to do with climate change denial or aesthetic appeal. The problem, he argued, was that Germany had shifted its energy mix towards renewables — at great financial cost — without enhancing security of supply or achieving a meaningful reduction in carbon emissions. “The damage done by these wind installations is out of all proportion to the benefit,” he said. 

Every new wind mast that appeared on the horizon, he added, would only serve to turn popular opinion his way: “The more turbines are built, the more people come into contact with them and the more people will resist.” 

https://on.ft.com/2XpGsZf

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#3466 User is offline   y66 

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Posted 2019-December-04, 16:08

From Florida Keys Deliver a Hard Message: As Seas Rise, Some Places Can’t Be Saved by Christopher Flavelle and Patricia Mazzei at NYT:

Quote

KEY WEST, Fla. — Officials in the Florida Keys announced what many coastal governments nationwide have long feared, but few have been willing to admit: As seas rise and flooding gets worse, not everyone can be saved.

And in some places, it doesn’t even make sense to try.

On Wednesday morning, Rhonda Haag, the county’s sustainability director, released the first results of the county’s yearslong effort to calculate how high its 300 miles of roads must be elevated to stay dry, and at what cost. Those costs were far higher than her team expected — and those numbers, she said, show that some places can’t be protected, at least at a price that taxpayers can be expected to pay.

“I never would have dreamed we would say ‘no,’” Ms. Haag said in an interview. “But now, with the real estimates coming in, it’s a different story. And it’s not all doable.”

The results released Wednesday focus on a single three-mile stretch of road at the southern tip of Sugarloaf Key, a small island 15 miles up Highway 1 from Key West. To keep those three miles of road dry year-round in 2025 would require raising it by 1.3 feet, at a cost of $75 million, or $25 million per mile. Keeping the road dry in 2045 would mean elevating it 2.2 feet, at a cost of $128 million. To protect against expected flooding levels in 2060, the cost would jump to $181 million.

And all that to protect about two dozen homes.

“I can’t see staff recommending to raise this road,” Ms. Haag said. “Those are taxpayer dollars, and as much as we love the Keys, there’s going to be a time when it’s going to be less population.”

The people who live on that three-mile stretch of road were less understanding. If the county feels that other parts of the Keys ought to be saved, said Leon Mense, a 63-year-old office manager at a medical clinic, then at least don’t make him pay for it.

“So somebody in the city thinks they deserve more of my tax money than I do?” Mr. Mense asked. “Then don’t charge us taxes, how does that sound?”

She suggested the county could offer residents a ferry, water taxis, or some other kind of boat during the expanding window during which the road is expected to go underwater during the fall high tides.

“If that’s three months a year for the next 20 years, and that gets them a decade or two, that’s perhaps worth it,” Ms. Haag said. “We can do a lot. But we can’t do it all.”

At a climate change conference in Key West on Wednesday, Roman Gastesi, the Monroe County manager, said elected leaders will have to figure out how to make those difficult calls.

“How do you tell somebody, ‘We’re not going to build the road to get to your home’? And what do we do?” Mr. Gastesi asked. “Do we buy them out? And how do we buy them out — is it voluntary? Is it eminent domain? How do we do that?”

Administrators and elected officials are going to have to start to rely on a “word nobody likes to use,” Mr. Gastesi said, “and that’s ‘retreat.’”

The county’s elected officials must now decide whether to accept that recommendation. The mayor of Monroe County, Heather Carruthers, said she hopes the cost of raising the roads turns out to be lower than what her staff have found, as the need for adaptation leads to better technology.

Still, Mayor Carruthers said, “We can’t protect every single house.”

Asked how she expected residents would respond, Mayor Carruthers said she expects pushback. “I’m sure that some of them will be very irate, and we’ll probably face some lawsuits,” she said. “But we can’t completely keep the water away.”

The odds of the county winning future possible lawsuits over the policy are unclear. The novelty of what the Keys’ officials are proposing is perhaps best demonstrated by the fact that nobody can say for certain whether it’s legally defensible.

The law generally requires local governments to maintain roads and other infrastructure, because failure to do so will reduce the property value of surrounding homes, according to Erin Deady, a lawyer who specializes in climate and land-use law and is a consultant to the county on adapting to rising seas. But local officials retain the right to decide whether or not to upgrade or enhance that infrastructure.

What’s unclear, Ms. Deady said, is whether raising a road to prevent it from going underwater is more akin to maintaining or upgrading. That’s because no court has yet ruled on the issue.

“The law hasn’t caught up with that,” Ms. Deady said.

She said she thinks the county is within its rights to refuse to elevate the road at the end of Sugarloaf Key, so long as it’s transparent about the rationale for that decision. “At some point, there’s an economic consideration,” she said. “We can’t manage every condition.”

The debates over county spending and legal precedents will determine the future of Old State Road 4A, two lanes of asphalt tucked between mangroves that mostly obscure the water threatening it from all around. On a recent afternoon, the only signs of life on this road were the occasional passing car, along with the gates many of the road’s few residents have erected to keep unwanted visitors out of their driveways.

How do you tell somebody, ‘We’re not going to build the road to get to your home’? You tell 'em what the oil industry and Republicans have been telling them for decades: 'It's not happening.'
If you lose all hope, you can always find it again -- Richard Ford in The Sportswriter
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#3467 User is offline   johnu 

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Posted 2019-December-07, 05:54

An article from earlier this year, but the topic has been revisited in several other articles this month.

The Ocean Is Running Out of Breath, Scientists Warn

Quote

In the past decade ocean oxygen levels have taken a dive—an alarming trend that is linked to climate change, says Andreas Oschlies, an oceanographer at the Helmholtz Center for Ocean Research Kiel in Germany, whose team tracks ocean oxygen levels worldwide. “We were surprised by the intensity of the changes we saw, how rapidly oxygen is going down in the ocean and how large the effects on marine ecosystems are,” he says.

It is no surprise to scientists that warming oceans are losing oxygen, but the scale of the dip calls for urgent attention, Oschlies says. Oxygen levels in some tropical regions have dropped by a startling 40 percent in the last 50 years, some recent studies reveal. Levels have dropped more subtly elsewhere, with an average loss of 2 percent globally.

The article reinforces the fact that even ocean dwelling plants and animals need oxygen (who would have thought?)
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#3468 User is offline   Cyberyeti 

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Posted 2019-December-07, 06:21

View Postjohnu, on 2019-December-07, 05:54, said:

An article from earlier this year, but the topic has been revisited in several other articles this month.

The Ocean Is Running Out of Breath, Scientists Warn


The article reinforces the fact that even ocean dwelling plants and animals need oxygen (who would have thought?)


I thought PLANTS needed carbon dioxide and put out oxygen
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#3469 User is offline   johnu 

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Posted 2019-December-07, 15:38

View PostCyberyeti, on 2019-December-07, 06:21, said:

I thought PLANTS needed carbon dioxide and put out oxygen

Do plants have to have oxygen to survive? Or can plants (other than the plants in wetlands) live without oxygen?
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#3470 User is offline   fromageGB 

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Posted 2019-December-08, 04:45

I'm not going back through all 170 pages, but recent entries seem all about the veracity of global warming rather than discussing solutions. OK, you don't need solutions if there is no problem, but assume for sake of discussion that climate change is happening, adversely, with a large and ever-growing human input of greenhouse gasses. What should "we" do about it?

There seem to be some odd ideas around. Is it really going to make any significant difference if we use LED bulbs rather than incandescent, or electric cars rather than oil-based fuels, or have wind turbines rather than coal power? I think not. The problem is the number of people in the world. Yes, you could make an impact if you shot all cows and pigs and we became vegan, but it would only delay the inevitable. Pursuing economic growth, which seems to be most peoples' strategy, is the wrong way to go. We need less (or negative) growth, and fewer numbers. Nobody seems to be talking about how we should bring down the world population to a sustainable figure. It might even be sustainable at the current level if we take action to stabilise it. But if we don't stop world population growing, you might just as well power your incandescents from a diesel generator, and enjoy the heatwave.
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#3471 User is offline   hrothgar 

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Posted 2019-December-08, 06:14

View PostfromageGB, on 2019-December-08, 04:45, said:

Nobody seems to be talking about how we should bring down the world population to a sustainable figure. It might even be sustainable at the current level if we take action to stabilise it. But if we don't stop world population growing, you might just as well power your incandescents from a diesel generator, and enjoy the heatwave.


I agree and think that we should start by killing off a bunch of old white English racists...
Its not like their productive members of society anymore.
I'm sure that their savings could be put to more productive use.
Alderaan delenda est
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#3472 User is offline   Cyberyeti 

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Posted 2019-December-08, 08:28

View Posthrothgar, on 2019-December-08, 06:14, said:

I agree and think that we should start by killing off a bunch of old white English racists...
Its not like their productive members of society anymore.
I'm sure that their savings could be put to more productive use.


tbf the old white English racists may be causing some of the issues, but are not living in the places where you have too many people in too little land (and that land will shrink with climate change) with insufficient food production, so it won't save those people.
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#3473 User is offline   hrothgar 

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Posted 2019-December-08, 09:36

View PostCyberyeti, on 2019-December-08, 08:28, said:

tbf the old white English racists may be causing some of the issues, but are not living in the places where you have too many people in too little land (and that land will shrink with climate change) with insufficient food production, so it won't save those people.


One of the challenging issues with climate change is that the overwhelming majority of the costs will be born by people living in the third world while the its folks in the developed countries (most notably the United States) who dug us into this hole.
Alderaan delenda est
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#3474 User is offline   Cyberyeti 

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Posted 2019-December-08, 09:51

View Posthrothgar, on 2019-December-08, 09:36, said:

One of the challenging issues with climate change is that the overwhelming majority of the costs will be born by people living in the third world while the its folks in the developed countries (most notably the United States) who dug us into this hole.


Exactly, although Europe is dealing with this while the US isn't. The problem now is India/China as well as the US.
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#3475 User is offline   Chas_P 

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Posted 2019-December-09, 19:00

View Posthrothgar, on 2019-December-08, 06:14, said:

I agree and think that we should start by killing off a bunch of old white English racists...


So where are you planning to start the purge Slobodan?
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#3476 User is offline   Zelandakh 

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Posted 2019-December-10, 07:26

View PostCyberyeti, on 2019-December-08, 09:51, said:

Exactly, although Europe is dealing with this while the US isn't. The problem now is India/China as well as the US.

This goes to some extent to the crux of the problem ahead. About 150 or so pages back I posted that we have the technology already available for a solution in the form of aeroforming devices, commonly known as artificial trees. The issue is more about who pays and who benefits from the contracts in constructing new technologies relating to the solutions implemented. As an example, if you assume a complete solution and compute costs based on the last year's emissions per land then India and China are indeed problematic. This is the USA's preferred metric. If you instead compute those costs including historical emissions on a per capita basis then the share from India and China is tiny. This would be China's preferred model. Until there is some agreement about what the fairest way of implementing costs might be there can be no complete solution. I am genuinely not that worried though, certainly much less than most left-wing media sources, as I am confident that a technological solution is available should it prove to be required and it will be many years yet before a tipping point is reached that will force more drastic measures.
(-: Zel :-)

Happy New Year everyone!
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#3477 User is offline   johnu 

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Posted 2019-December-30, 16:30

‘I Wouldn’t Have Wasted My Time’ On Trump At UN Summit, Greta Thunberg Says

The alleged leader of the free world had enough time between watching Fox Propaganda programs that kowtow to him that he recently tweeted insults about the Swedish teenage climate change activist.

Quote

Asked what she would have said to the president if they had spoken, Thunberg said: “Honestly, I don’t think I would have said anything because obviously he’s not listening to scientists and experts, so why would he listen to me?

“So I probably wouldn’t have said anything, I wouldn’t have wasted my time,” she said.

To be fair to President Impeached, besides climate change experts, he doesn't listen to military or intelligence experts, foreign affairs experts, trade experts, or economic experts because he knows more than all of them. He is the smartest guy in the room (well, that would be one of the White House Throne rooms B-) )
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#3478 User is offline   hrothgar 

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Posted 2020-January-06, 10:32

I'm going to miss marsupials...
Alderaan delenda est
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#3479 User is offline   johnu 

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Posted 2020-January-09, 01:39

Is the world cooling down? B-)

No Surprise, 2019 Was The Second-Hottest Year On Record

Quote

“2019 has been another exceptionally warm year, in fact the second warmest globally in our dataset, with many of the individual months breaking records,” Carlo Buontempo, the head of C3S, said in a statement.

Only 2016 was hotter, but just by a razor-thin margin of 0.04 degree Celsius. The 2010s were also the warmest decade on record, researchers noted.

Only the 2nd warmest year in history? There must be a cooling trend from the hottest year in history that the climate change deniers can come up with. Obviously the world is not warming enough to have the hottest year on record :rolleyes:
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#3480 User is offline   y66 

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Posted 2020-February-26, 10:57

From A Very Hot Year by Bill McKibben at NY Review of Books:

Quote

This year began with huge bushfires in southeastern Australia that drove one community after another into temporary exile, killed an estimated billion animals, and turned Canberra’s air into the dirtiest on the planet. The temperatures across the continent broke records—one day, the average high was above 107 degrees, and the humidity so low that forests simply exploded into flames. The photos of the disaster were like something out of Hieronymus Bosch, with crowds gathered on beaches under blood-red skies, wading into the water as their only refuge from the flames licking nearby. But such scenes are only a chaotic reminder of what is now happening every hour of every day. This year wouldn’t have begun in such a conflagration if 2019 hadn’t been an extremely hot year on our planet—the second-hottest on record, and the hottest without a big El Niño event to help boost temperatures. And we can expect those numbers to be eclipsed as the decade goes on. Indeed, in mid-February the temperature at the Argentine research station on the Antarctic Peninsula hit 65 degrees Fahrenheit, crushing the old record for the entire continent.

It is far too late to stop global warming, but these next ten years seem as if they may be our last chance to limit the chaos. If there’s good news, it’s that 2019 was also a hot year politically, with the largest mass demonstrations about climate change taking place around the world.

We learned a great deal about the current state of the climate system in December, thanks to the annual confluence of the two most important events in the climate calendar: the UN Conference of the Parties to the Framework Convention on Climate Change, which met for the twenty-fifth time, this year in Madrid (it ended in a dispiriting semi-collapse), and the American Geophysical Union conference, which convened in San Francisco to listen to the newest data from researchers around the world. That latest news should help ground us as we enter this next, critical phase of the crisis.

The first piece of information emerged from a backward look at the accuracy of the models that scientists have been using to predict the warming of the earth. I wrote the Review’s first article about climate change in 1988, some months after NASA scientist James Hansen testified before Congress that what we then called the “greenhouse effect” was both real and underway. Even then, the basic mechanics of the problem were indisputable: burn coal and oil and gas and you emit carbon dioxide, whose molecular structure traps heat in the atmosphere.

Human activity was also spewing other gases with the same effect (methane, most importantly); it seemed clear the temperature would go up. But how much and how fast this would occur was a bewildering problem, involving calculations of myriad interactions across land and sea; we came to fear climate change in the 1980s largely because we finally had the computing power to model it. Critics—many of them mobilized by the fossil fuel industry—attacked those models as crude approximations of nature, and insisted they’d missed some negative feedback loop (the effect of clouds was a common candidate) that would surely moderate the warming.

These climate models got their first real chance to shine in 1991, when Mount Pinatubo erupted in the Philippines, injecting known amounts of various chemicals into the atmosphere, and the models passed with flying colors, accurately predicting the short-term cooling those chemicals produced. But the critique never completely died away, and remains a staple of the shrinking band of climate deniers. In December Zeke Hausfather, a UC Berkeley climate researcher, published a paper showing that the models that guided the early years of the climate debate were surprisingly accurate. “The warming we have experienced is pretty much exactly what climate models predicted it would be as much as 30 years ago,” he said. “This really gives us more confidence that today’s models are getting things largely right as well.”1

We now know that government and university labs were not the only ones predicting the climatic future: over the last five years, great investigative reporting by, among others, the Pulitzer-winning website InsideClimate News unearthed the large-scale investigations carried out in the 1980s by oil companies. Exxon, for instance, got the problem right: one of the graphs their researchers produced predicted with uncanny accuracy what the temperature and carbon dioxide concentration would be in 2019. That this knowledge did not stop the industry from its all-out decades-long war to prevent change is a fact to which we will return.

The rise in temperature should convince any fair-minded critic of the peril we face, and it is worth noting that in December one longtime skeptic, the libertarian writer Ronald Bailey, published a sort of mea culpa in Reason magazine. In 1992, at the first Earth Summit in Rio, he’d mourned that the United States government was “officially buying into the notion that ‘global warming’ is a serious environmental problem,” even as “more and more scientific evidence accumulates showing that the threat of global warming is overblown.” Over the years, Bailey had promoted many possible challenges to scientific orthodoxy—for example, the claim of MIT scientist Richard Lindzen that, as mentioned, clouds would prevent any dangerous rise in temperature—but, to his credit, in his new article he writes:

Quote

I have unhappily concluded, based on the balance of the evidence, that climate change is proceeding faster and is worse than I had earlier judged it to be…. Most of the evidence points toward a significantly warmer world by the end of the century.

If scientists correctly judged the magnitude of the warming—about one degree Celsius, globally averaged, thus far—they were less perceptive about the magnitude of the impact. Given that this infusion of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere is a large-scale experiment never carried out before during human history, or indeed primate evolution, it’s not really fair to complain, but many scientists, conservative by nature, did underestimate the rate and severity of the consequences that would come with the early stages of warming. As a result, the motto for those studying the real-world effects of the heating is probably “Faster Than Expected.”

The warmth we’ve added to the atmosphere—the heat equivalent, each day, of 400,000 Hiroshima-sized bombs—is already producing truly dire effects, decades or even centuries ahead of schedule. We’ve lost more than half the summer sea ice in the Arctic; coral reefs have begun to collapse, convincing researchers that we’re likely to lose virtually all of them by mid-century; sea-level rise is accelerating; and the planet’s hydrologic cycle—the way water moves around the planet—has been seriously disrupted. Warmer air increases evaporation, thus drought in arid areas and as a side effect the fires raging in places like California and Australia. The air also holds more water vapor, which tends to drop back to earth in wet places, increasing the risk of flooding: America has recently experienced the rainiest twelve months in its recorded history.

In late November a European-led team analyzed what they described as nine major tipping points—involving the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, the boreal forests and permafrost layer of the north, and the Amazon rainforest and corals of the tropical latitudes. What they found was that the risk of “abrupt and irreversible changes” was much higher than previous researchers had believed, and that exceeding critical points in one system increases the risk of speeding past others—for instance, melting of Arctic sea ice increases the chance of seriously slowing the ocean currents that transport heat north from the equator, which in turn disrupt monsoons. “What we’re talking about is a point of no return,” Will Steffen, one of the researchers, told reporters. Earth won’t be the same old world “with just a bit more heat or a bit more rainfall. It’s a cascading process that gets out of control.”

That all of this has happened with one degree of warming makes clear that the targets set in the Paris climate accords—to try to hold temperature increases to 1.5 degrees Celsius, and no more than 2 degrees—are not “safe” in any usual sense of the word. Already, according to an Oxfam report released in December,3 people are three times more likely to be displaced from their homes by cyclones, floods, or fires than by wars. Most of those people, of course, did nothing to cause the crisis from which they suffer; the same is true for those feeling the health effects of climate change, which a December report from the World Health Organization said was “potentially the greatest health threat of the 21st century.”

What’s worse, we’re nowhere close to meeting even those modest goals we set in Paris. Indeed, the most depressing news from December is that the world’s emissions of greenhouse gases rose yet again. Coal use has declined dramatically, especially in the developed world—the US has closed hundreds of coal-burning plants since 2010 and halved the amount of power generated by coal. But it’s mostly been replaced by natural gas, which produces not only carbon dioxide but also methane, so our emissions are barely budging; in Asia, continued fast-paced economic growth is outstripping even the accelerating deployment of renewable energy.

The United Nations Environment Programme released its latest annual report on the so-called emissions gap in December, and it was remarkably dire. To meet the Paris goal of limiting temperature increases to 1.5 degrees Celsius, the world would need to cut its emissions by 7.6 percent annually for the next decade.4 Stop and read that number again—it’s almost incomprehensibly large. No individual country, not to mention the planet, has ever cut emissions at that rate for a single year, much less a continuous decade. And yet that’s the inexorable mathematics of climate change. Had we started cutting when scientists set off the alarm, in the mid-1990s, the necessary cuts would have been a percent or two each year. A modest tax on carbon might well have sufficed to achieve that kind of reduction. But—thanks in no small part to the obstruction of the fossil fuel industry, which, as we have seen above, knew exactly what havoc it was courting—we didn’t start correcting the course of the supertanker that is our global economy. Instead, we went dead ahead: humans have released more carbon dioxide since Hansen’s congressional testimony than in all of history before.

That we have any chance at all of achieving any of these targets rests on the progress made by engineers in recent years—they’ve cut the price of renewable energy so decisively that the basic course is pretty clear. Essentially, we need to electrify everything we do, and produce that electricity from the sun and wind, which are now the cheapest ways to produce power around the world.5 Happily, storage batteries for the power thus generated are also dropping quickly in cost, and electric cars grow both more useful and more popular by the month—Tesla is the brand name we know, but the Chinese are already rolling out electric cars in large numbers, and, better yet, electric buses, which could lead to dramatically cleaner and quieter cities. In his State of the City address in early February, New York mayor Bill DeBlasio announced that every vehicle in the city fleet would be electrified in the years ahead. Despite such dramatic announcements, we’re adopting none of these technologies fast enough. In seventy-five years the world will probably run on sun and wind because they are so cheap, but if we wait for economics alone to do the job, it will be a broken world.

Radically speeding up that transition is the goal of the various Green New Deal policies that have emerged over the last year, beginning in the US, where the youthful Sunrise Movement recruited Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as an early supporter and used a sit-in at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office to draw attention to the legislation. Negotiations have been underway ever since about the exact shape of such a program, but its outlines are clear: extensive support for renewables, with an aim of making America’s electricity supply carbon-neutral by 2030, and a program to make homes and buildings far more efficient, coupled with large-scale social plans like universal health care and free college tuition. At first glance, combining all these goals may seem to make the task harder, but advocates like Naomi Klein have argued persuasively that the opposite is true.

The wide scope of the proposed Green New Deal may make it sound utopian—but it may be better to think of it as anti-dystopian, an alternative to the libertarian hyper-individualism that has left us with economically insecure communities whose divisions will be easy for the powerful to exploit on a degrading planet, where the UN expects as many as a billion climate refugees by 2050. A million Syrian refugees to Europe (driven in part by the deep drought that helped spark the civil war) and a million Central American refugees to our southern border (driven in part by relentless drought in Honduras and Guatemala) have unhinged the politics of both continents; imagine multiplying that by five hundred.

On the campaign trail, the Democratic nominees have mostly embraced the Green New Deal. Its sweeping economic and social ambition fits easily with the other campaign promises of Senators Sanders and Warren, but most of the rest of the field has also backed its promises of dramatic reductions in carbon emissions. For instance, Joe Biden’s climate plan says that “the Green New Deal is a crucial framework for meeting the climate challenges we face. It powerfully captures two basic truths”—first, that “the United States urgently needs to embrace greater ambition…to meet the scope of this challenge,” and second, that “our environment and our economy are completely and totally connected.” Biden has waffled and wavered on the practicalities, at times endorsing a continued reliance on natural gas, but it’s pretty clear that, whoever the eventual nominee, the party will be at least somewhat more progressive on climate issues than in the past. And in one way the nominee will be more progressive even than the Green New Deal legislation. Sanders, Warren, Biden, Pete Buttigieg, Tom Steyer, Michael Bloomberg, and others have all called for an end to oil, gas, and coal production on public lands—something a new president could do by executive action. Some have gone farther, calling for an end to fracking across the nation.

These so-called Keep It in the Ground policies are less popular with labor unions that want to keep building pipelines, and therefore those writing the Green New Deal legislation have not yet included them in their bill, wary of losing congressional support. But the mathematical case for such action was greatly strengthened in November with the publication of the first production gap report, intended as a counterpart to the emissions gap research I described above. For almost thirty years, global warming efforts have focused on controlling and reducing the use of fossil fuel—which is hard, because there are billions of users. But in recent years activists and academics have looked harder at trying to regulate the production of coal, gas, and oil in the first place, reasoning that if it stayed beneath the soil, it would ipso facto not be warming the planet.

The first edition of this new report, issued by a consortium of researchers led by the Stockholm Environment Institute and the UN Environment Programme, makes for startling reading: between now and 2030 the world’s nations plan on producing 120 percent more coal, gas, and oil than would be consistent with limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius and 50 percent more than would let us meet even the 2 degree goal.6 That’s more coal and oil and gas than the world’s nations have told the UN they plan to burn: “As a consequence, the production gap is wider than the emissions gap.” “Indeed,” the authors write, “though many governments plan to decrease their emissions, they are signalling the opposite when it comes to fossil fuel production, with plans and projections for expansion.” Another way to look at it, as the Financial Times calculated in February, is that to meet the 1.5 degree target, the fossil fuel industry would have to leave 84 percent of its known reserves in the ground, writing off their value.

You would think that, compared with the billions of users, it would be easier to take on the handful of petro-states and oil companies that produce fossil fuel; after all, more than half of global emissions since 1988 “can be traced to just 25 corporate and state-owned entities,” according to the Climate Accountability Institute. By definition, those are among the most powerful players in our economic and political systems, and so far they’ve been able to escape any effective regulation. At the very top of the list is the United States, which, according to a December report from the Global Gas and Oil Network, is on track to produce four-fifths of the new supply of oil and gas over the next half decade.

Partly, this is the result of President Trump’s fanatical effort to eliminate any obstacles to new oil and gas production, including recently opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska—the nation’s largest wildlife preserve—to drilling. But there’s a fairly long lag time in building the necessary infrastructure—the fracking boom really had its roots in the Obama administration, as the former president boasted in a 2018 speech at Rice University in Texas. “I know we’re in oil country,” he told the cheering crowd. “You wouldn’t always know it, but [production] went up every year I was president. That whole, suddenly, America’s, like, the biggest oil producer and the biggest gas…that was me, people,” he said. “Just say thank you please.”

The one cheerful development of the past year has been the continuing rise of a global climate movement, exemplified by the young activists who brought seven million people into the streets for global climate strikes in September. (Greta Thunberg is the best known, and rightly celebrated for her poise, but fortunately there are thousands of Gretas across the planet offering provocative challenges to their local officials.) The question is where to aim all that activism. The natural impulse is to direct it at our political leaders, because in a rational world they would be the ones making decisions and shaping change. This is part of the answer—it’s crucial that this year’s election in the US has the climate crisis at its center, and thanks to the Green New Deal that’s a real possibility.

But political change is uncertain—despite the remarkable activism of Extinction Rebellion across the UK, December’s elections there seemed little affected by the issue—and even when it comes it is slow. A new president and a new Senate would still mean a Washington rusted by influence and inertia. And winning this battle one national capitol at a time is a daunting challenge given the short time physics is allowing us.

A small but growing number of activists are also looking at a second set of targets—not Washington, but Wall Street. Over the past few years a mammoth divestment campaign has persuaded endowments and portfolios worth $12 trillion to sell their stocks in coal, oil, or gas companies, and now that effort is expanding to include the financial institutions (mostly banks, asset managers, and insurance companies) that provide the money that keeps those companies growing. A handful of American banks—Chase, Citi, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America—are the biggest culprits, and incredibly they have increased their lending to fossil fuel companies in the years since the Paris accords. Take Chase Bank, which is the champion in this respect: in the last three years it has provided $196 billion to the fossil fuel industry. If Exxon is a carbon heavy, in other words, Chase is too (and in many ways they’re joined at the hip; Standard Oil heir David Rockefeller led Chase to its current prominence, and former Exxon CEO Lee Raymond is its lead independent director).

This financing—which has included supporting the most extreme oil and gas projects, like the huge pipelines planned in Canada’s uniquely filthy tar sands complex—is perhaps the single least defensible part of the fossil fuel enterprise. You can almost understand the refusal of oil companies to shift their business plans: they really only know how to do one thing. But banks can lend their money in a thousand different directions; they don’t need to fund the apocalypse. Given the trouble banks have already caused, it’s no wonder that environmentalists have begun using the phrase “Make Them Pay”—or at the very least make them invest in the renewables and conservation measures desperately needed to get us on the right track. My colleague at the grassroots campaign 350.org Tamara Toles O’Laughlin has compared this kind of funding to nineteenth-century support by financial institutions of slavery—it’s not the same crime, of course, but “the same instinct to abuse and extract, deplete, discard, and disavow holds.” It’s no surprise that the same demand for reparations—compensation for all those whose lives and communities are being wrecked—is being raised.

There’s no question that taking on one of the biggest parts of the planet’s economy is a daunting task. It’s possible that the Chases of the world can go on lending money to their friends in the oil industry without suffering any consequences. On the other hand, in the same way that the electoral map favors Republicans, the money map favors those who care about the climate. Chase branches, for instance, are concentrated in those small pockets of blue around our big cities (I was arrested in a protest in one of them, in Washington, D.C., in early January). And perhaps these institutions are beginning to bend: in mid-January the world’s largest financial firm, BlackRock, announced that it was taking broad, if still tentative, steps to include climate change in its analyses of potential investments. “Awareness is rapidly changing, and I believe we are on the edge of a fundamental reshaping of finance,” its CEO, Larry Fink, wrote in a letter to CEOs of the world’s largest corporations. That’s perhaps the most encouraging news about climate change since the signing of the Paris climate accords, because if these pillars of global capital could somehow be persuaded to act, that action could conceivably be both swift and global.

Anything is worth a try at this point, because we’re very nearly out of time.

If you lose all hope, you can always find it again -- Richard Ford in The Sportswriter
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