Tag Archives: climate change
boo, Onion, not funny!
The Onion has this concise, dead-on, 100% accurate assessment of our species’ reaction to climate change, which is not funny at all:
MYTH: There is nothing mankind can do to prevent climate change
FACT: There is nothing mankind will do to prevent climate change
carbon emissions and other data
Even though Donald Trump has decided the U.S. will not help reduce the world’s carbon emissions, at least you can get data from the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center, part of Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Get it now because it sounds like they are going out of business in September.
May 2017 in Review
Most frightening stories:
- The public today is more complacent about nuclear weapons than they were in the 1980s, even though the risk is arguably greater and leaders seem to be more ignorant and reckless.
- The NSA is trying “to identify laboratories and/or individuals who may be involved in nefarious use of genetic research”.
- We hit 410 ppm at Mauna Loa.
Most hopeful stories:
- Electric cars may be set for a boom in the next five years or so.
- The Dutch public insisted on safe streets, and got them. The Dutch are a type of human being, I think, which suggests there could be hope for the rest of us.
- Buzz Aldrin and NASA have plans for Mars colonization around the 2030s. Stephen Hawking thinks this is a good idea to hedge our bets against bad things that might happen here on Earth.
Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:
- Some experts think the idea of national sovereignty itself is now in doubt.
- Taser wants to record everything the police do, everywhere, all the time, and use artificial intelligence to make sense of the data.
- The sex robots are here.
climate, economics, and agent based models
This journal article is mostly over my head, but I found the introduction interesting. It talks about the use of equilibrium models most common in economics compared to emerging research into agent based models.
Complexity and the Economics of Climate Change: a Survey and a Look Forward
Excerpt:
Mitigation and adaptation to climate change represent governance challenges of an unprecedented scale because of their long-term horizon, their global nature and the massive uncertainties they involve. Against this background, equilibrium models generally used in Integrated Assessment Models (IAM) represent the economy as a system with a unique equilibrium, climate policy as an additional constraint in the optimization problem of the social planner and consider the uncertainty of climate-related damages to be predictable enough to be factored out in the expected utility of a representative agent. There is growing concern in the literature that this picture might convey a false impression of control (seePindyck,2013; Stern, 2013, 2016; Weitzman, 2013; Revesz et al., 2014; Farmer et al., 2015, among manycontributions) and that IAMs might underestimate both the cost of climate change and the bene fits resulting from the transition to a low carbon-emission economy (Stern, 2016).
Network and agent-based models have been increasingly advocated as alternatives t to handle out-of-equilibrium dynamics, tipping points and large transitions in socio-economic systems (see e.g Tesfatsion and Judd, 2006; Balbi and Giupponi, 2010; Kelly et al., 2013; Smajgl et al., 2011; Farmer et al., 2015; Stern, 2016; Mercure et al., 2016). These classes of models consider the real world as a complex evolving system, wherein the interaction of many heterogeneous agents possibly reacting across different spatial and temporal scales give rise to the emergence of aggregate properties that cannot be deduced by the simple aggregation of individual ones (Flake, 1988; Tesfatsion and Judd, 2006). The development of agent-based integrated assessment model can overcome the shortfall of equilibrium models and ease stakeholder participation and scenario exploration (Moss et al., 2001; Moss, 2002a). Indeed, the higher degree of realism of ABMs (Farmer and Foley, 2009; Farmer et al., 2015) allows to involve policy makers in the process of the development of the model employed for policy evaluation (Moss, 2002b).
410 ppm
Climate Central says we have hit 410 ppm:
On Tuesday, the Mauna Loa Observatory recorded its first-ever carbon dioxide reading in excess of 410 parts per million (it was 410.28 ppm in case you want the full deal). Carbon dioxide hasn’t reached that height in millions of years. It’s a new atmosphere that humanity will have to contend with, one that’s trapping more heat and causing the climate to change at a quickening rate…
“The rate of increase will go down when emissions decrease,” Pieter Tans, an atmospheric scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said. “But carbon dioxide will still be going up, albeit more slowly. Only when emissions are cut in half will atmospheric carbon dioxide level off initially.”
Even when concentrations of carbon dioxide level off, the impacts of climate change will extend centuries into the future. The planet has already warmed 1.8°F (1°C), including a run of 627 months in a row of above-normal heat. Sea levels have risen about a foot and oceans have acidified. Extreme heat has become more common.
All of these impacts will last longer and intensify into the future even if we cut carbon emissions. But we face a choice of just how intense they become based on when we stop polluting the atmosphere.
So things are not only not getting better. They are not even getting worse at a slower rate. They are getting worse at a faster and faster rate, and our not-too-ambitious goal is to make them get worse at the same rate. High school calculus teachers are probably the only ones enjoying this.
April 2017 in Review
Most frightening stories:
- A misapplied equation might have crashed the world financial system in 2007.
- Shell was well aware of climate change science in 1991, and made a movie to educate the public about it. But nothing was done.
- The U.S. health care market is screwed up seemingly beyond repair. Why can’t we have nice things? Oh right, because our politicians represent big business, not voters. Also, we have forgotten the difference between a dialog and an argument.
Most hopeful stories:
- There are ideas for better traffic lights.
- Tesla’s market share eclipsed Ford’s. Mercedes is promising self-driving taxis within three years. I put these in the win column because creative destruction of the automobile industry status quo is long overdue. In other creative destruction news, e-commerce is starting to eat the bricks-and-mortar retail industry alive, possibly because people are realizing they can buy stuff and have time left over for things other than sitting in their cars on the way to and from stores.
- The value added tax is a boring but good idea. Why can’t the U.S. have nice things? Oh, right…
Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:
- I first heard of David Fleming, who wrote a “dictionary” that provides “deft and original analysis of how our present market-based economy is destroying the very foundations―ecological, economic, and cultural― on which it depends, and his core focus: a compelling, grounded vision for a cohesive society that might weather the consequences.”
- Judges are relying on algorithms to inform probation, parole, and sentencing decisions.
- I finished reading Rainbow’s End, a fantastic Vernor Vinge novel about augmented reality in the near future, among other things.
Climate of Concern
It wasn’t just Exxon that knew about climate change decades ago. But unlike Exxon, which not only denied it but used the foulest of propaganda tactics to confuse the public and delay progress, Shell made an accurate movie about it in 1991 to inform the public, called “Climate of Concern”.
Perhaps there is a parallel universe where Shell developed a sustainable business model, put Exxon out of business, and saved the Earth. Of course that is not the universe you and I are in right now.
March 2017 in Review
Most frightening stories:
- La Paz, Bolivia, is in a serious crisis caused by loss of its glacier-fed water supply. At the same time we are losing glaciers and snowpack in important food-growing regions, the global groundwater situation is also looking bleak. And for those of us trying to do our little part for water conservation, investing in a residential graywater system can take around 15 years to break even at current costs and water rates.
- Trump admires Andrew Jackson, who I consider a genocidal lunatic and the worst President in U.S. history.
- Fluoridated drinking water could eventually be looked back on as a really stupid idea that damaged several generations of developing brains, like leaded gasoline. Or not…I’m not sure who to believe on the issue but caution is clearly warranted.
Most hopeful stories:
- A new political survey says there is a chance that a majority of Americans are not bat-shit crazy. Which suggests they might not be too serious about Steve Bannon, who believes in some bat-shit crazy stuff. There are a number of apps and guides out there to help sane people pester our elected representatives when they fail to represent our interests.
- South Korean women are projected to be the first to break the barrier of an average life expectancy of 90, with a 50% probability of this happening by 2030.
- Advanced power strips can reduce the so-called “vampire loads” of our modern electronic devices that are never really off.
Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:
- This long NASA article first gets you excited about the possibility of life on eight new planets it has just discovered, and then throws cold water (actually, make that lethal X-rays) all over your excitement.
- Bill Gates has proposed a “robot tax”. The basic idea is that if and when automation starts to increase productivity, you could tax the increase in profits and use the money to help any workers displaced by the automation. In related somewhat boring economic news, there are a variety of theories as to why a raise in the minimum wage does not appear to cause unemployment as classical economic theory would predict.
- CRISPR could be used to create new crops out of the wild ancestors of our current crops.
sea level rise and high tide flooding
From PLOS One:
Sea level rise drives increased tidal flooding frequency at tide gauges along the U.S. East and Gulf Coasts: Projections for 2030 and 2045
Tidal flooding is among the most tangible present-day effects of global sea level rise. Here, we utilize a set of NOAA tide gauges along the U.S. East and Gulf Coasts to evaluate the potential impact of future sea level rise on the frequency and severity of tidal flooding. Using the 2001–2015 time period as a baseline, we first determine how often tidal flooding currently occurs. Using localized sea level rise projections based on the Intermediate-Low, Intermediate-High, and Highest projections from the U.S. National Climate Assessment, we then determine the frequency and extent of such flooding at these locations for two near-term time horizons: 2030 and 2045. We show that increases in tidal flooding will be substantial and nearly universal at the 52 locations included in our analysis. Long before areas are permanently inundated, the steady creep of sea level rise will force many communities to grapple with chronic high tide flooding in the next 15 to 30 years.