Tag Archives: climate change

August 2026 in Review

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Most frightening and/or depressing story: There are some dire projections of severe global famine in the next year. This would be due to the Super El Nino affecting important food-growing regions, closure of important grain-exporting ports in Ukraine, and the sudden loss/price spikes for fossil fuels and fertilizers that have already disrupted planting and growing seasons over the past six months, and will continue to do so. It will be similar to an 1877 El Nino that killed over 50 million people. I am a bit skeptical of the most extreme impact projections though because they do not seem to be a majority view, and the collective view of people participating in financial markets does not seem to be anticipating anything this bad. Still, it seems likely that regional famines and high food prices could affect a lot of people, and the worst projections would represent an existential threat that should not be ignored.

Most hopeful story: There is an effective malaria vaccine in use in Africa. It requires four doses, which hampers widespread implementation, but hopefully the numbers of doses will be reduced, eventually to one. In the United States, amid an embarrassing political dust-up over the measles vaccine (happening to involve my state’s governor, who does NOT at this point make the “top 5” list mentioned in the next paragraph), the FDA has quietly approved an mRNA-based flu vaccine.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: Election Betting Odds provides aggregated stats across the various prediction market platforms for a few categories including U.S. Congressional and Presidential elections. As I write (September 1, 2026), it is telling me there is a 51% chance the Democrats will take majority control of the U.S. Senate this fall (along with 84% chance of House control). The top 5 2028 Presidential contenders are Vance (21%), Occasio-Cortez (12%), Ossoff (11%), Rubio (10%), and Newsom (9%). I suspect at this point the latter is similar to a poll of “which of these names have you heard of?”. It might be a fairly good prediction of who will actually run, however.

July 2026 in Review

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Most frightening and/or depressing story: The idea of a bursting AI investment bubble is pretty scary, especially to those of us approaching retirement. The recent boom in private capital spending seems to be the major thing propping up the US economy. The short-term stimulus effect is fairly obvious, but the question is whether the longer-term productivity effects the markets seem to be expecting are going to show up before the markets lose patience.

Most hopeful story: A carbon price is still a very good idea, even if propaganda has pushed this idea out of the headlines we see on a daily basis. About 30% of the world’s carbon emissions have a price on them, which is more than I would have thought. Several comprehensive academic analyses suggest the carbon price should be in the range of $100-165 per metric ton. Only a few countries are at this level, but the fact that many countries actually have the legal and administrative mechanism for a carbon price in place seems hopeful to me. It proves that when we are being led to believe these policies are politically impossible in the United States, this is in fact just effective propaganda. Political winds can and do shift, particularly when a crisis becomes obvious (I am not hoping for one), and the rational policy options are waiting in the wings.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: I encountered a proposal called “targeted sufficiency“: “a sharp reduction in labour hours and material footprint, a large shift in consumption from material to immaterial sectors (education/health), and a substantial change in food habits, allowing for a strict deforestation ban and a gradual return of global forest cover to the 1900 level…global convergence of all countries to 60k Euros 2025 PPP in per capita GDP by 2100”.

the current carbon price

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According to academic meta-analyses, the carbon price should be in the range of $100-165 per (metric) tonne of carbon dioxide (equivalents, including other greenhouse gases adjusted for their impacts) emitted. Our World in Data found that about 30% of the world’s emissions are priced, which is up significantly but obviously still low. Uruguay, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Switzerland, and Hungary have charges in this range. The typical price across Western Europe is $65-90. Many countries that have a carbon price charge $10 or less. Still, I imagine getting a legal and administrative system in place is a big hurdle, and once you have one the price can be adjusted over time.

June 2026 in Review

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Most frightening and/or depressing story: The latest paper from Johan Rockstrom and company lays out climate scenarios through the year 3,000. There is plenty still to be figured out about the scientific details, but some major uncertainties are the sensitivity of the climate to greenhouse gases – in other words, how much warming will occur per unit of emissions – and how likely the major feedback loops are, such as melting permafrost releasing massive amounts of methane, loss of sea ice reducing reflection of sunlight in an accelerating loop, and major shifts in ocean currents that distribute and rebalance heat across the planet. These are existential risks, and they can potentially reinforce each other in multiplicative ways. So even though there is scientific uncertainty over whether it will get bad, or really catastrophically bad, there is no logical or moral case for not taking precautionary action now to reduce the risk of these outcomes.

Most hopeful story: If AI does in fact accelerate productivity and create significant new wealth, there are many well-known effective policy options for redistributing this wealth. Some of these have the word “tax” in their names, but there are also less efficient but perhaps more politically palatable options like baby bonds. Perhaps if the rate of new wealth creation is really a major departure from the past, our system may have a chance at implementing some of these.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: I wanted to teach my own children not only some basic financial literacy concepts (Johnny wants ice cream today but is trying to save for a new bike) but also how those relate to the idea of a capitalist economy (why does interest exist, what causes inflation, and what the heck is money anyway?) and the real physical world (yes, little Johnny, the consequences of taking natural resources out and putting pollution back into our biophysical system are in fact intertwined with our human economy). A daunting task, considering that Nobel laureates have struggled with this. But the Nobel laureates aren’t going to explain it to the children, so your intrepid blogger waded in and came up with something.

Global Justice?

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Here’s a report called the GLOBAL JUSTICE REPORT: A Plan for Equality & Prosperity Within Planetary Boundaries. The big name on the report is Thomas Picketty. This is an academic report – despite their insistence that it is concrete and practical, it is definitely more of a vision along with a catalog of policies that could be pursued to support that vision. Part of it is about a global wealth tax funneling into a global sovereign wealth fund, and in fact I came to the report through a brutal take-down of the political achievability of that particular idea. Nonetheless, if there is a clear vision, countries that want to can start to review and try to align policies with the vision over time. And if a large enough group of countries agreed to band together to pursue the policies collectively, perhaps they could move the needle.

The idea I found most interesting was an idea they call “targeted sufficiency”, which goes like this:

Sufficiency includes a sharp reduction in labour hours and material footprint, a large shift in consumption from material to immaterial sectors (education/health), and a substantial change in food habits, allowing for a strict deforestation ban and a gradual return of global forest cover to the 1900 level…global convergence of all countries to 60k Euros 2025 PPP in per capita GDP by 2100

So you implement income/wealth redistribution policies; reduce working hours, shift remaining working hours from transportation, food, manufacturing, and construction to health and education; reduce the environmental footprint of those high impact industries, which may require reducing their actual magnitude; and persuade (or force?) people to shift their increased leisure time to experiences and services rather than consumption of physical goods. I think it’s a nice vision, and just pointing policies in this direction and achieving some small fraction of it in the near term would be an achievement. That’s the thing about changing the course of a large vessel – if they had just given the steering wheel on the Titanic a little tweak early enough and stuck to the new course, it would not be at the bottom of the ocean.

To me, value added tax at the individual country level, a portion shifted into either individual accounts for citizens, baby bonds, or a sovereign wealth fund (these all amount to mathematically, economically, roughly the same thing, although vastly different politically); and another portion shifted into sustainable infrastructure and incentives for that shift in labor to education and health, could be an achievable way to steer toward this vision. You can tax (or cap and trade, which amounts to the same thing mathematically and economically…) carbon and/or other forms of pollution, both to raise revenue and provide incentives for sustainable choices. Because these are all real policies being successfully pursued by some countries in the world right now. If technology and market forces deliver large productivity gains at the same time, it might be more politically palatable to phase in these policies. I doubt it is politically feasible to ask wealthy and powerful interests to give up any of their absolute wealth and power. It may be possible to ask them to give up a portion of their relative share while the tide is rising, in exchange for some stability and predictability. This has been achieved in many societies, and even in the United States during the middle of the 20th century.

the latest from Rockstrom et al.

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Johan Rockstrom and company have a new paper talking about possible trajectories for the climate through the year 3000. There is a fair amount here, but one thing I find interesting is that while they are not talking about the highest emissions scenarios anymore (SSP3 under the CMIP6 framework), they are looking at a range of equilibrium climate sensitivities (ECS), and this makes a big difference. ECS, if I remember correctly, is the amount of global warming that occurs from a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. If this value is 4 degrees C rather than 3, our situation gets much worse, with a peak of around 5 degrees C above preindustrial temperatures rather than the 3.5 expected under the lower ECS value. They show the peak sometime between 2200 and 2300. If this sets off catastrophic feedback loops, the system could get to a point well outside human control, even if we found the capacity and geopolitical will to get our act together.

That might happen, for example, in the case of large-scale dying or burning of forests (Reyer et al., 2015), or when carbon release from thawing permafrost (Turetsky et al., 2020) or gas hydrates on the ocean floor (Minshull et al., 2016) increases beyond current expectations. If such “natural” carbon release exceeds a potentially modest threshold (compare residual emissions experiment, Figure 1), warming may continue even if human forcing from GHG emissions or further land-use changes are virtually stopped. These human efforts would then be thwarted by the Earth system itself.

An important point is we don’t know the correct value of ECS yet – that should become clear with more data collection and research in coming decades. But the risk is existential enough that a species and civilization able to act together in a rational manner would be managing it now.

first hints on CMIP7

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This is the first story or post I personally have read on the IPCC’s Coupled Intercomparison Project (CMIP) round 7. I’m sure people who do climate science for a living are all over it. But I am not exactly a layperson – I’m an engineer who should aware of and probably incorporating climate science into my daily work. And not to brag but I am an engineer who has done Ph.D.-level research on how to use climate science and climate modeling outputs in daily engineering work. So if this is only on the periphery of my awareness, it is nowhere in the awareness of the typical intelligent and educated engineer out there designing the infrastructure that is going to be in place for the next decades to century in our cities.

As climate folk will know, the community is currently embarking on a new round of climate model simulations to support analyses and projections for the next IPCC report (due in 2028/9). This new effort has been dubbed CMIP7, because it is the sixth iteration of the CMIP effort (IYKYK), that started in the late 1990s. For each of these iterations, a new set of projections has been formulated for the modeling groups to use and the ones for this round were just published (van Vuuren et al., 2026).

For those who don’t know, the scenarios mentioned here are the inputs to the global circulation models that actually give us projections of what the global climate might look like under various…er…scenarios. Here is the abstract of the reference mentioned above:

The Scenario Model Intercomparison Project for CMIP7 (ScenarioMIP-CMIP7)

Scenarios represent a critical tool in climate change analysis, enabling the exploration of future evolution of the climate system, climate impacts, and the human system (including mitigation and adaptation actions). This paper describes the scenario framework for ScenarioMIP as part of CMIP7. The design process, initiated in June 2023, has involved various rounds of interaction with the research community and user groups at large. The proposal covers a set of scenarios exploring high levels of climate change (to explore high-end climate risks), medium levels of climate change (anchored to current policy action), and low levels of climate change (aligned with current international agreements). These scenarios follow very different trajectories in terms of emissions, with some likely to experience peaks and subsequent declines in greenhouse gas concentrations. An important innovation is that most scenarios are intended to be run, if possible, in emission-driven mode, providing a better representation of the earth system uncertainty space. The proposal also includes plans for long-term extensions (up to 2500 AD) to study slow climate change-related processes, and (ir)reversibility. This proposal forms the basis for further implementation of the framework in terms of the derivation of climate forcing pathways for use by earth system models and additional variants for adaptation and mitigation studies.

May 2026 in Review

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Most frightening and/or depressing story: The people running Palantir and other companies focused on military/security/surveillance applications of information technology seem to have, at best, a faith-based belief that the United States can do no wrong. At worst, their beliefs are based on eugenics and white Christian nationalist attitudes which simply have no basis in fact or logic. I don’t believe the technology itself is good or evil, but pair in with these irrational beliefs and there are many frightening, depressing, dystopian paths I can imagine our country going down.

Most hopeful story: It’s a struggle to find a silver lining to the illegal, unprovoked U.S. war of aggression in Iran, but I mused that the artificial restriction on oil supply might create some long-term gain by accelerating the economic and geopolitical incentives to transition to other forms of energy. Such rational policy almost certainly could not have been achieved through international diplomacy in the current environment. This is not to minimize the very real and very avoidable near-term suffering and death the immoral choices of the Trump administration have caused. Even the cynical economic and financial elites who arguably control most policy have not been served by this irrational violence. In the future, I hope the world has some talented and courageous leaders who can find ways to bring about rational long-term solutions to problems without short-term mass murder.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: On the AI front, I looked at an argument that today’s AIs are pushing people toward the political center relative to social media, which is pushing people toward extreme views. This is true even for AIs like Grok that are demonstrably being trained on data that is intentionally biased toward extreme views. I am not confident this will always be the case, as we are already hearing about a trend toward more customization of AI to whatever the tastes of the paying customer are. And…I looked at David Chalmers’s concept of a “philosophical zombie” which displays all the traits of a human being externally but has no consciousness internally. This would seem to describe today’s large language models pretty well, or at least so the majority of us think at the moment. However, I recall Ray Kurzweil’s argument that there is not and never will be a scientific test for consciousness whether animal/vegetable/mineral (some argue plants are conscious on some level), which is simply a secular counterpart to the idea of a soul, and that over time if AIs act conscious in every respect we will gradually accept them as conscious and stop thinking much about it.

Global Environmental Outlook 7

The UN has a new UN-speak report on what we need to do to fix the global environment. The simplest take-home message is an economic one – the benefits greatly exceed the costs, but it requires up-front investment blah blah blah. UN-speak is off-putting to many, so talented politicians and other leaders need to translate it to platforms and policies that speak to us, and then do it. There’s a full report, an executive summary, and key messages from the executive summary. I’ll highlight just a few actions here in my own words:

  • Eliminate environmentally harmful subsidies in the energy, food, and mining industries.
  • Internalize external costs – the good old “Pigouvian taxes” that raise revenue and/or encourage behavior, and we win either way.
  • Alternative/supplemental measures of progress besides GDP
  • Circular economy – recycling and reducing waste
  • Renewable energy phase-in and fossil fuel phase-out
  • Electrify everything – transportation, manufacturing, housing/buildings, and agriculture

Nature-based solutions and conservation of natural ecosystems seem to be important things missing from from this list, but those are in other reports of course. Still, I find it strange to make a distinction between “ecosystems” and the “environment”.

Are we forgetting about robots? (or Brute’, where are you when we need you?)

In fast-moving current events as I write on March 15, 2026, the illegal, unauthorized by any legislative body international or domestic, unprovoked US sneak attack on Iran continues to rage. I’ll leave further commentary to others except to say that, in totally unrelated news here on this Ides of March, remember it was SENATORS who had the guts to stab Caesar and try to save the Republic (which didn’t work all that well in the end.)]

Here are a couple headlines we could classify as “things China is doing well”.

China’s Clean Energy Push Has Made It Less Vulnerable to Energy Shocks, Including the Iran War [Is this not obvious? The US could be focusing on ramping up proven technology like electrification of all buildings and transportation, energy efficiency, renewable energy, and battery technology while also funding “moon shot” R&D in areas like materials science and nuclear fusion. We could also be using fission energy and, I hate to say it, domestic fossil fuel production as a bridge to get us over the hump while we scale up in these other areas. If the whole world were doing this we wouldn’t be so dependent on boats moving liquefied dinosaur turds through one little war-torn (by choice of the fools claiming to lead the US government) inlet.]

How China’s AI-Powered Robots Could Reshape the Global Order [Now that disembodied AI has became mainstream, the next somewhat obvious step is to get the AI brains into robots.]