Why we’re failing to stop climate chaos
by David Zetland
Why we’re failing to stop climate chaos
Climate chaos (CC) is the largest threat to our collective prosperity. (Water scarcity, biodiversity loss, increasing vulnerability to viruses and bacteria are a few more.)
But “we” (citizens of rich countries) are having a hardER time understanding and addressing CC due to a few strategic mistakes, i.e.,
- Most discussions of impacts focus on 2100, which is too far away from our time now to take seriously. It also “hides” the fact that we are now seeing weather patterns (due to changes in climate) that are harming our way of life.
- Most discussions focus on +2C increases in average temperatures, when the focus should be on increasing risks at the extremes (the changes in the distribution), i.e., fat tails or black swans causing massive damages in surprising places. Examples: Houston getting three “500-year” storms in a decade a few years ago; the Pacific Northwest recently breaking high temperature records by a huge margin; Texas facing “record” cold then “record” warmth within a month; Hurricane Sandy; etc.
- Economists recommending a global cap and trade system rather than a series of national carbon tax and rebate systems at Kyoto (1998). The former requires global coordination, a political willingness to send money to “foreigners”, and trustworthy supra-national institutions. Local tax/rebates do not suffer these issues, but we’ve allowed the perfect to be the enemy of the good.
- Economists (led by that incompetent fraud, Nordhaus) have used flawed models to justify inaction (their logic is that action now limits growth that will give us resources in the future to deal with damages in the future) rather than implementing action now that can be tightened/loosened as we learn how taxes affect emissions affecting CC.
- Most people do not understand how the change from stationarity to non-stationarity will disrupt their habits, food production, infrastructure performance, etc. These are the same people who hesitate to take the COVID vaccine until they are offered lottery tickets. Their choice inconsistency shows they misunderstand probabilities.
- Few people understand the consequences of missing +2C targets due to lag effects. Hitting that target (a long run increase) means reducing emissions (and deforestation) at a radical rate now and still waiting for decades for forcing momentum to dissipate and warming to slow and reverse. Put differently, it would take 50-100 years for currently “baked in” forcing to manifest in CC-impacts assuming we went to zero emissions today, and another 10,000 years (±) for current CO2 concentrations of 409ppm (a level not seen for 800,000 years) to fall back to “pre-industrial” levels of 280ppm last seen 170 years ago. We’ve passed the point of no return.
- Forgetting that non-CO2 factors matter. If all GHGs are included, then we’re looking at 456ppm CO2-equilivalent, so we’re in far worse shape than the most-discussed number would suggest.
- I’m not even talking about the problems of greed (converting rainforest into palm oil, soy beans or more oil fields), lobbying (politicians need to be re-elected often and fossil fuel companies have lots of money to pay for protection or inaction), the massive market failure/collective action problem, our psychological desire to maintain “progress” at all costs, and so on.
My one-handed conclusion is that we — humans, as a species — have put ourselves in a difficult situation that we’ve made even harder to tackle by a series of strategic communication blunders.
Speaking of greed:
Two huge ethane cracking plants (one in Cancer Alley, LA, and the other near Pittsburgh, PA) are nearing completion. The purpose? To produce the pellets used in the manufacture of plastic that isn’t really recyclable.
These plants are huge emitters of GHGs. Each produces GHGs equivalent tw0-million cars. By 2030, if the industry grows as predicted, the emissions from ethane cracking will equal that of 295 coal-fired power plants.
Tester, Manchin, Inhofe, Cornyn, … are Senators from fossil fuel.
Ref https://www.kalw.org/show/your-call/2021-07-12/one-planet-20-companies-produce
@~ 9 to 15 mins
Great . . .
an infrastructure package that appears to have the largest carbon footprint of any domestic policy initiative since Eisenhower built the Interstates ain’t helping…
The one in LA, Formosa Plastic, is Taiwanese-owned.
Dan,
Thanks.
David Zetland provided a reasonably good summary despite that a reasonable conclusion might be far worse than even he would want to consider. Sir David Attenborough had long be a CC sceptic, but he is over that now albeit way more than a day late and a dollar short. Forty years ago I was at least a little hopeful, but now I am just waiting for the lemmings to shit their shorts after realizing how badly they screwed up.
Dan,
Zetland says, “I’m not even talking about the problems of greed…”
and so pretty much misses the whole point.
That doesn’t mean his essay is not important for us to read. We need to be reminded.
But the fact is most people don’t understand this, and have no power to change it even if they did understand it, and kind of like the products of all that greed.
Those who do have the power to do something are probably not all that different from the rest of us,
At least, I don’t really believe they are reptile hearted beings from outer space terraforming our planet to their own needs and tastes.
Coberly,
Materialism replaced spiritualism as the only rational basis for any modern philosophy all the way from Nietzsche to Marx. We just Kant allow spiritualism to get in the way of progress. So, one man’s greed is another man’s natural order of things. First God is dead, then mankind.
Don’t get me wrong. I am not schilling for God. I worship at the alter of sardonic irony.
Why humans aren’t doing much to combat global
climate change, or whatever you want to call it.
Because as a species, we are incredibly short-term thinkers.
Dinosaurs lasted roughly 250 million years, without doing
much ‘thinking’ at all, apparently. We should be so lucky.
Dobbs
Thanks for reminding me. We don’t have to look to space to see reptile hearted beings. They have been here on earth for a long time. They used to rule the place. They haven’t forgotten, and they haven’t forgiven.
rjs
re carbon footprint of infrastructure package:
thanks for pointing this out. i nearly missed it because of the peculiar way AB has of inserting comments non-chronologically.
Ron
so does God.
Hell, even physics gave up materialism in favor of occult forces like gravity.
Recent efforts to repair “action at a distance” have fallen afoul of Voltaire’s observation that “you don’t even understand action at no distance.”
General field theory, particularly due to Maxwell,
generally supplanted puzzlement about action
at a distance. But, there are possibly a bunch
more fields out there to be discovered.
It’s exactly like the (supposedly debunked) boiling-frog paradigm. Wikipedia: if a frog is put suddenly into boiling water, it will jump out, but if the frog is put in tepid water which is then brought to a boil slowly, it will not perceive the danger and will be cooked to death.
Not true, it is said. At least of frogs.
Dobbs
re Maxwell: did it solve the action at a distance problem or did it just provide a mathematical model that made it easier to solve problems “at a distance.” I remember reading (but can’t find a reference) that Voltaire responded to the “occult force” objections to Newton’s action at a distance (gravity). by telling the objectors that they did not understand action at no distance either or anyway. If I remember, Michaelson and Morley were still looking for a lumineiferous ether long after Maxwell.
As for boiling frogs. The image is generally used to describe human reactions to sudden as opposed to gradual change. Yet I can’t seem to persuade the Powers and pundits that a gradual change in the payroll tax would go unnoticed (except by the Liars…whose whole case depends on postulating not only a sudden catastrophic default but an imaginary burden of Trillions of Dollars … which turns out to be tens of dollars when distributed across hundreds of millions of people over tens of years).
All ‘forces’ in physics are now represented by fields. This started with Maxwell.
All forces also involve particles, even gravity, except ‘gravitons’ are yet to
be observed. Gravity being the weakest of all forces found to date, such
particles are presumed to be very, very difficult to detect.
Actually, it seems extremely likely that whenever ‘action-at-a-distance’
seems to be in play, yet another field is eventually/soon to be found.
Newton famously wrote ‘Hypotheses non fingo’ about gravity.
‘I have not as yet been able to discover the reason for these properties of gravity from phenomena, and I do not feign hypotheses. For whatever is not deduced from the phenomena must be called a hypothesis; and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, or based on occult qualities, or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy.’
Did this trouble him? Perhaps. But not too much. Physics
generally does not provide deep understanding of why
things work the way they do. That would be found in
the reference manual that hasn’t yet been located.