Tag Archives: climate change

how bad would a “small” nuclear war between India and Pakistan be?

It would be really, really, really, really really bad, and not just for the region but for the whole world.

Simply put, soot would block about 20% to 30% of the Sun’s light, globally. That’s a decrease of about 30W to 60W per square meter of the Earth’s surface. For comparison, the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo caused a decrease of 4W per square meter. The result would be a 2°C to 5°C (about 4°F to 9°F) global cooling. Temperatures would reach their lowest after about three years and maintain that level for another four years. Getting back to previous temperatures would take over a decade.

The cooling would slow the hydrologic cycle and decrease rainfall by 15% to 30% percent globally, with impacts varying in different regions. In India and Central China, for example, precipitation would drop to nearly zero. The Northeastern and Midwestern United States would see a decline of 50%.

The temperature, precipitation, and sunlight change would obviously impact photosynthesis on land and in the ocean. The model estimated a 15% to 30% drop in growth on land—known as Net Primary Productivity—and a 5% to 15% drop in the ocean.

If global warming gets really bad, maybe we can just blow up a nuke or two on some out of the way continent. Antarctica won’t work because there isn’t much combustible material there. So no, never mind, I never said that.

Koch propaganda techniques

It’s human nature to adjust your beliefs to justify actions that benefit you. That’s why the Koch brothers probably don’t (didn’t, since one passed away recently) think they are evil. But here is how they conspired to murder your grandchildren, and my grandchildren, and possibly their own great-grandchildren, although of course the ultra-rich will tend to fare better in a world of storms, fires, floods and food shortages than the rest of us.

So when you look at this equation of what would happen if we put a price on carbon emissions and greenhouse gas emissions, the real threat is that that might reduce demand for fossil fuels going out five, 10, 20 years. If that happens, the sunk value of this massive, industrial, globe-spanning infrastructure, the value of it, declines dramatically. And I interviewed a Koch Industries attorney who worked in the lobbying shop back in 2009 who told me, you know, Koch saw the efforts to put a price on carbon emissions as an existential threat to the company.

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(wow, this version of WordPress is complete garbage, there is no way to get rid of this white space without messing up the paragraph above or below)

So here’s what they did. They created a fake non-profit group to organize fake grass-roots protests that lawmakers considering voting for the cap and trade bill would see. They basically paid people to attend.

They also created a fake research organization to do fake studies about cap and trade. Then they paid for political ads that cited the fake research done by their fake organization, and again targeted lawmakers who supported cap and trade.

And it worked. There was bipartisan support for cap and trade based on a real understanding of the science and risk represented by climate change. A concerted campaign of lies masquerading as a citizen movement was able to derail it, all in support of cynically maximizing profits for evil, mega-rich people at the expense of everyone else on the planet for generations to come.

September 2019 in Review

Most frightening and/or depressing story: Most hopeful story:
  • I think Elizabeth Warren has a shot at becoming the U.S. President, and of the candidates she and Bernie Sanders understand the climate change problem best. This could be a plus for the world. I suggested an emergency plan for the U.S. to deal with climate change: Focus on disaster preparedness and disaster response capabilities, the long term reliability and stability of the food system, and tackle our systemic corruption problems. I forgot to mention coming up with a plan to save our coastal cities, or possibly save most of them while abandoning portions of some of them in a gradual, orderly fashion. By the way, we should reduce carbon emissions and move to clean energy, but these are more doing our part to try to make sure the planet is habitable a century from now, while the other measures I am suggesting are true emergency measures that have to start now if we are going to get through the next few decades.
Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both:
  • I mentioned an article by a Marine special operator (I didn’t even know those existed) on how to fix a broken organizational culture: acknowledge the problem, employ trusted agents, rein in cultural power brokers, win the population.

the climate town hall

A blog called “DeSmogBlog” has a pretty good run-down of the Democrats’ “town hall meeting” on climate change. I have to admit, I have not watched the whole thing, or very much at all.

Here’s my take. First, there are short- to medium-term practical issues that need to be tackled immediately and simultaneously. The first is disaster preparedness and disaster response – storms, fires, floods, droughts. We need to be ready for a major earthquake, plague or terrorist attack too although we can’t blame the climate directly for these. The second is the long-term stability of the food system under projected temperature and water supply trends. The third is dealing with the systemic corruption that has allowed the fossil fuel industry to buy and control our politicians for decades.

I think Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren understand these issues best. I don’t think other candidates understand them at all. I think they divorce them from larger socioeconomic issues to a certain extent, and that is a mistake. It should be possible to take advantage of fluctuations in the economy, employment, and financial system to make the right investments at the right time and minimize the pain.

Beyond these, we need to deal with our interwined land use, energy, transportation, food, and ecosystem issues. It could be done in ways that would be a win for everyone. Invest in the right kinds of infrastructure, education and training for workers, and innovation. It is unlikely to be done because our education system does not provide the public with the mental tools needed to understand systems, and therefore we do not elect politicians who understand systems and have workable ideas on how to fix them. This will still be true even if the corruption issues can somehow be solved.

August 2019 in Review

My work-life balance situation continues to not favor a lot of blog posts. Or is it work-life-family balance? Or is family part of life? Yes, I guess so. Anyway, what there is not a lot of time for is personal leisure activities like reading, writing, and thinking. Not that I don’t enjoy reading Green Eggs and Ham for the 50th time. I do. Anyway, here are a few highlights of the slim pickings that constituted this blog in August 2019. Most frightening and/or depressing story:
  • Drought is a significant factor causing migration from Central America to the United States. Drought in the Mekong basin may put the food supply for a billion people in tropical Asia at risk. One thing that can cause drought is deliberately lying to the public for 50 years while materially changing the atmosphere in a way that enriches a wealthy few at everyone else’s expense. Burning what is left of the Amazon can’t help. 
Most hopeful story:
  • I explored an idea for automatic fiscal stabilizers as part of a bold infrastructure investment plan. I’m not all that hopeful but a person can dream.
Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both:

the Mekong

Similar to the situation in India, the Mekong depends on a mix of snow/glacial melt from the Himalayas, and on seasonal monsoon rains. Both are becoming less reliable, and countries in the headwaters, including China and Laos, are going on massive dam-building binges. (Disclaimer: This website looks like a reputable source of journalism, but I am not familiar with it.)

The crisis began when critical monsoon rains, which usually start in late May in the Mekong region, failed to arrive. Dry conditions, driven by the El Niño weather phenomenon and exacerbated by climate change, persisted well into July. At that time, observers say, the situation was made worse by hydropower dam operators upstream, in China and Laos,withholding water for their own purposes...

Originating in the Tibetan highlands, the Mekong River flows through six Asian countries, including China, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam, before emptying into the South China Sea. The river basin is home to the largest inland fishery in the world and more than 60 million people depend on it for their livelihoods.

the role of drought in migration from Central America

The Guardian has an article on the role that drought and climate change play in migration of people from Central American countries such as Guatemala to the U.S.

Central America remains one of the world’s most dangerous regions outside a warzone, where a toxic mix of violence, poverty and corruption has forced millions to flee their homes and head north in search of security.

But amid a deepening global climate crisis, drought, famine and the battle for dwindling natural resources are increasingly being recognized as major factors in the exodus.

the Amazon

No, not Amazon.com. As I was explaining to my six year old son recently, before it was a tech company, it was a river and a river basin. Anyway, if you want to be depressed, you can read this Intercept article stating that the current Brazilian government is systematically and intentionally trying to destroy the rain forest as fast as possible.

In the last half-century, about one-fifth of this forest, or some 300,000 square miles, has been cut and burned in Brazil, whose borders contain almost two-thirds of the Amazon basin. This is an area larger than Texas, the U.S. state that Brazil’s denuded lands most resemble, with their post-forest landscapes of silent sunbaked pasture, bean fields, and evangelical churches. This epochal deforestation — matched by harder to quantify but similar levels of forest degradation and fragmentation — has caused measurable disruptions to regional climates and rainfall. It has set loose so much stored carbon that it has negated the forest’s benefit as a carbon sink, the world’s largest after the oceans. Scientists warn that losing another fifth of Brazil’s rainforest will trigger the feedback loop known as dieback, in which the forest begins to dry out and burn in a cascading system collapse, beyond the reach of any subsequent human intervention or regret. This would release a doomsday bomb of stored carbon, disappear the cloud vapor that consumes the sun’s radiation before it can be absorbed as heat, and shrivel the rivers in the basin and in the sky…

Imazon, a Brazilian research center, reports deforestation in the first months of 2019 jumped more than 50 percent compared to the amount during the same period in 2018. Half of this deforestation has occurred illegally in protected areas, including hundreds of Indigenous lands that cover a quarter of Brazil’s Amazon and provide a crucial buffer for much of the rest. (In the rainforest bastion state of Amazonas, Indigenous lands account for close to a third of the standing forest.) The Indigenous groups of the region have seen this before. During the runaway deforestation of the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, they witnessed and were devastated by an “arc of fire” that blazed along the routes of the first penetration roads into the western Amazon. By the late 1980s, a burning crescent swept down from the northern Amazonian city of Belém, through the states of Pará, Mato Grosso, Rondônia, and Acre. It burned brightest in Rondônia, where the smoke and ash from hundreds of raging fires were visible to the naked eyes of astronauts in high orbit.

the India water situation

I’m reading that a major city in India, Chennai, has run out of water. (This article is a couple weeks old – the situation might have changed since then, but they are on a knife edge regardless.) Chennai is India’s sixth largest city, with a population around 4 million. It is also a major business center. My employer for example has a large operation in Chennai, and it is not exactly what I would call a major multinational corporation. So if professional workers are being told to go home and get in line for drinking water rations, that sounds pretty serious.

I remember hearing about groundwater depletion in India for years, and it appears that has gotten to the point where if rainfall patterns are unexpected, there is no groundwater to fall back on as they have in the past. And if cities don’t have drinking water, what does that mean for industry and agriculture? This would seem to be bad news for the food supply. Sure, India can import food, but what happens when this occurs in other food-producing countries (like the U.S. Great Plains and major rice growers in Southeast Asia), and India is also competing with China and other populous countries in Asia and Africa for dwindling food stocks. Food is the nexus of land, water, and climate.

It is not just Chennai. According to the World Economic Forum,

As of 10 June, around 44% of the country was affected by various degrees of drought, due to a heatwave that has seen Delhi record its highest ever June temperature of 48℃. While south of the capital, the Rajasthan city of Churu saw highs of more than 50℃, making it one of the hottest places on Earth.

Around 600 million people are dealing with high-to-extreme water shortages, according to a 2018 report by NITI Aayog, a policy think tank for the Indian government…

By 2030, it’s predicted that 40% of the population will have no access to drinking water – and 21 cities, including Chennai and New Delhi, will run out of groundwater, impacting 100 million people, according to NITI Aayog.

Here are a few more eye-opening, if not jaw-dropping, quotes from Hong Kong-based Asia Times:

The southwest monsoons remain the biggest source of water in the subcontinent. The monsoons lead to a combination of water sources supporting human habitats that includes glaciers, surface irrigation and ground water. But redundancy and surplus have gone missing from this once abundant system. Taking their place are galloping shortages…

Mukherjee is one of the editors of a landmark study that was published earlier this year. It predicts a terrible loss of the glaciers that dot the Hindu Kush-Himalaya region. “The Hindu Kush Himalaya Assessment” says that even if urgent global action on climate change is able to limit global warning to 1.5 degrees centigrade, it will still lead to a loss of a third of the glaciers in the region by the year 2100…

This has major implications for India, China, Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh. While the nearly 250 million who live in the Hindu Kush-Himalaya region will be most impacted from the outset, another 1.65 billion people who depend on the glacier-fed rivers are primarily at risk.

So there you have it – India historically has been supplied by redundant water sources including glacier-fed rivers, groundwater, and seasonal rainfall. Two of those three seem to be in doubt, and that leaves them at the mercy of whether the monsoon happens as expected each year or not.

India is a major democracy with a lot of technical and agricultural know-how. If they are not solving these problems, it does not seem to me to bode well for the rest of the world.

It also occurs to me that reducing carbon emissions is not the solution to this urgent problem. At least, governments can’t put all their eggs in that basket. They will have to invest in major water conservation and water reuse initiatives, and possibly high-tech and energy intensive measures like desalination.