I saw this article mentioned by Eliot Jacobson on his X/Twitter profile which
argues that our actions will most likely not be enough until there is a big
shock which motivates real change. It also uses the Covid pandemic to
illustrate that people are able to change if they are convinced their lives are
at stakehttps://time.com/6565499/apocalyptic-optimism-climate-change/It fits to
my own observations here in Europe: there are more and more EVs and charging
stations, but not enough. There are more heat pumps replacing gas heatings, but
not enough. There is more use of renewable energy but not enough. I fear people
will only start to change fundamentally if they feel their life is at stake.
Will it be too late then? I don't know. Let's be optimistic. "Keep your face
always toward the sunshine - and shadows will fall behind you"
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2019/03/05/sunshine/-J.
-------- Original message --------From: Steve Smith <sasm...@swcp.com> Date:
1/28/24 8:16 PM (GMT+01:00) To: friam@redfish.com Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Bad
news about the climate
I love me a good dose of Sabine... her flat-delivery of equally
serious and glib lines is killer IMO... and for the most part I
feel compelled to defer to her facts and analyses (almost) without
reserve. (around 13:30 she said "so mind-f#%#%ingly stupid" ).
I'm surprised she didn't actually invoke the biblical "four
horsemen"! Her closing statement with the "stop gluing yourself
to things" sorta made Sabine the anti-Greta? Both of those made
me choke on my coffee <grin>.
The whole North-Atlantic circulation thing (AMOC tipping point)
threatening to undermine the British Isles and Scandinavia's
relatively mild winters (moderated by oceanic heat transport from
the equator) is one of the things I expect to crash a lot of
expectations (and economies and ???) around the industrial
north. New England is also implicated in a major/abrupt local
climate change from this as well.
I did a short stint with a pre-climate (atmospheric-ocean model
coupling) modeling team at LANL in the 90s and what I enjoyed most
was the cognitive dissonance amongst the researchers who on one
hand felt they couldn't predict *anything* confidently but
recognized the incredibly high stakes and the emerging awareness
of the implications of dynamical systems theory on the domain...
how many bifurcation points likely surrounded the relatively
linear "basin" the climate has been wandering in since the Younger
Dryas.
Without exception, every scientist I worked with then privately
declared "we have a problem!" even though they didn't feel they
had anywhere near the evidence to say anything that strongly in
their publications.
Anecdotally, I've been experiencing a fairly steady
winter-warming at my high-desert location 20 miles outside Santa
Fe at about 5400ft where I catch the cold-air flow off of both the
Sangre de Christo and the Jemez mtns. Winters have gotten drier
for the most part and while the lows still maintain (see above),
the highs during the winter (and dead of summer) have risen
consistently for the last 20 years I've lived at this location.
The climate and long-range weather forecasts for the area that
I've checked out are somewhat mutually contradictory and my
half-full/half-empty biases lead me to smug satisfaction when my
fruit trees promise to do better than historically, even if my
tomatoes freeze on Oct 1 no matter what (I've tossed plastic film
over them and had them keep on growing/ripening until Thanksgiving
a few years when I've bothered)... root vegetables can now stay
in the ground until I dig to eat and winter squash on the vine
outside longer and longer.
On the half-empty side, surface water is becoming more and more
dear here, my AC-free summers are getting more uncomfortable and
it is likely enough that all of this is a minor perturbation
compared to what might hit this region in the next few decades as
various major tipping points tip.
<virtue signal>
If I were younger, I'd probably be more (personally) worried.
I tell my 40-something progeny that they should plan on the
possibility that they might live forever and their children are
even more likely to. Me, I'm just happy that when my
hand-carved wooden chompers get too slimy and splintery to use
that the folks with drills and novacaine can make me a "screw-in
set" like Nicks!
Meanwhile the only thing I can think to do is keep lowering my
own personal footprint and readying my home(stead) for another
generation to pick up wherever I leave off with an equally
lowered (residence-induced) footprint. I'm not vegan (yet) but
I try to buy my eggs from local home-raised sources and keep my
agri-industry consumption of milk/cheese/butter down to a
fraction of my former appetite.
I've lowered my heating demand (via wood-burning) to near
net-zero, burning (almost) only the prunings and trimmings from
my own (1.5 acre high desert) property (and some from neighbors
who CBB). PV tech is mature enough that *used* gear on the
order of $10k investment can probably allow me to quit spinning
the hydro-turbines up the river (Abiqui Lake) and spewing
coal-smoke out of the 4-corners plant my co-op draws primarily
from. A couple of mini-split heat-pumps might give me both
relief from the worst summer heat and displace yet-more of the
cellulose I (grow) and burn. A little more PV and I can
displace the 20lb propane cylinder I burn for cooking in the
summer into induction cooking?
Nevertheless, I'm still a big "part of the problem" just by
being a member of the first-world economy... even if I quit
burning any transportation fuel (jet or train or private auto)
entirely and eat mostly plants (not too much as M. Pollan
recommends).
</virtue signal>
On 1/27/24 1:59 PM, Russ Abbott wrote:
I
apologize for this relatively mass email. It was prompted by a video
by Sabine Hossenfelder,
Sabine is a theoretical physicist who has spent much of her
recent life as a popular science writer and video maker. See
her Wikipedia page.
The
video linked to above talks about climate models. The bottom
line is that it appears that most of the current models have
underestimated how quickly earth will warm. The consequences
are frightening.
-- Russ
Abbott
Professor
Emeritus,
Computer
Science
California
State
University,
Los Angeles
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