This is a Reblog of “The toxic rhetoric of climate change” by Judith Curry. Posted on December 14, 2019 (link here). I highly recommend you check out the comments on original blog and to explore Judith Curry’s other posts.
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The Environment
“…A new report by the Global Commission on Adaptation, a group convened by 20 advanced and emerging economies, identifies $1.8trn in potential adaptation investments which, if realised between 2020 and 2030, would yield estimated net benefits of $7.1trn.” The Economist Humanity will find ways to adapt to climate change. September 19, 2019…All the adaptations in the above list would be good ideas even if the climate stopped warming today. Meaning that even climate change skeptics could get behind these adaptations because they address current threats to humanity and the environment.
For the record, there is nothing in the UN Report about “mass extinctions” or large parts of the planet becoming “uninhabitable” unless we abide by the Paris Agreement (check for yourself, here). And despite the scary introduction, the UN report’s specific recommendations are quite doable without “fundamental structural changes”. Here are the main recommendations:
The Promise of Science: “…truth [will emerge] as a large number of flawed and limited minds battle it out.” (Jonathan Haidt).
According to the just released Responding to Rising Seas: OECD Country Approaches to Tackling Coastal Risks, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Chile, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Korea, Latvia, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, and United Kingdom all have coastal adaptation plans in place.
Lecturing, guilt-tripping, or trying to scare farmers into sustainable practices will not work and is likely to invite resistance - especially in the US, where there’s already a lot of bad blood between the farming community and environmental activists. Forcing farmers to change their ways with new laws and regulations could very well backfire come the next election cycle. Nope, advancing the cause of sustainable agriculture requires an attitude of respect and a solid understanding of farmer priorities, constraints, and concerns. And that requires getting answers to a bunch of questions, such as…
Why is self-efficacy so important to how we approach the challenge of climate change? Because self-efficacy is associated with persistence, tolerance of uncertainty and risk, creativity, resourcefulness, and resilience. Qualities we all could use in the coming decades.
The study authors applied a new model to calculate the global land area below high tide lines this century. Based on this model, they estimated 110 million people already occupy land lower than current high tide lines and that somewhere between 150 - 630 million people currently occupy land that would be lower than the high tide lines in 2100, depending on the emissions scenario.
…global beef consumption will continue to rise due to increasing demand outside the US. Beef consumption destroys carbon-storing habitats and contributes to climate change. However, much of the damage done by beef consumption happens outside the US. If Americans ate less beef, there would be more beef available to export. If the US exported more beef, fewer forests and wetlands abroad would be cleared for cattle.
The inspiration for these thoughts was a recent paper, “Techno-Optimism and Farmers’ Attitudes Toward Climate Change Adaptation”, in which the authors initially define techno-optimism as “the belief [in industrialized societies] that human ingenuity, through improved science and technology, will ultimately provide remedies to most current and future threats to human well-being”.
I’m starting this What If thought experiment with a What Is. Specifically, what is the current breakdown of US electricity generation by source, amount, and share? Glad you asked…
Here’s what the Audubon Society has to say about Working Lands:
“Working lands represent one of the best hopes for conservation. These parcels of forests, ranches, and farms add up to roughly a billion acres—or about half the land in the entire Lower 48 states. Audubon collaborates with landowners, land managers, government agencies, and private industry across the hemisphere to increase the quality of habitat on privately managed lands to benefit 20 flagship bird species. Audubon also helps landowners and land managers apply bird-friendly practices on their lands and develop market-based solutions to build economic incentives that have the potential to engage many more landowners.”
Original Study published in Nature on November 1, 2018: “Our result—which relies on high-precision O2 measurements dating back to 1991 —suggests that ocean warming is at the high end of previous estimates…” … Nature issues an editor's note about the errors on November 19, 2018: : We would like to alert readers that the authors have informed us of errors in the paper. An implication of the errors is that the uncertainties in ocean heat content are substantially underestimated.” …Retraction published online in Nature on September 25, 2019….
To hear Elizabeth Warren tell it, Agribusiness is ruining the family farm and Big Chicken is making life miserable for US chicken farmers….agricultural economists have a different take…and here is what chicken farmers have to say about the matter.
The mid-Pliocene climate may be a decent proxy for the earth’s near-future climate, under the mid-range emissions scenario Representative Concentration Pathway 4.5, otherwise know as RCP4.5, The mid-Pliocene was around three million years ago. The global climate was wetter and 2-3 °C higher than today. Atmospheric CO2 and sea levels were also higher. There was much less ice in the northern hemisphere. Forests, woodland and savanna dominated the landscape.
Note the term “anomaly” means a departure from a reference value or long-term average. The above graph starts at 1°C in 2005, because by then global mean temperatures had already increased by one Celsius degree since pre-industrial times (1850-1880). Unfortunately, the rise in global temperatures has accelerated since 2005, but it’s too early to tell if the above RCP-generated warming trajectories will need to be modified. …How about future sea levels?
Long story short: controlling for energy generated, coal emits about 80% more CO2 than natural gas. Then again, natural gas emits a lot of methane, another greenhouse gas. Then again…
The inspiration for this post was the Fall 2019 issue of The Nature Conservancy Magazine, which included the article, “A More Sustainable Path to 2050”. Quick summary:
Luckily, “smart sprayers” have arrived! These sprayers use machine-vision technology that enables weed recognition and the targeting of individual weeds. According to a recent survey, 20% of precision technology dealers indicated they were already offering the sprayers, and half the dealers foresaw offering the sprayers in the near future, given farmer interest and product improvements. …Precision spraying means less herbicide residue outside the target. Good for the soil, good for the water, and good for endangered species everywhere.
Between pasture and feed-stock crops, beef consumption accounts for roughly half of land use and agriculture-related emissions in the US. Americans eat around 80 pounds of beef a year. Of course, that’s not every American. …