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Something Is Happening Today! [The IPCC's 5th Assessment Report]
The Ender
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Likely to be overshadowed by whatever announcement is going to be made 33 days from now, the IPCC's 5th Assessment Report is going to be presented in Stockholm in September, from the 23rd to the 26th (assuming that there won't be any unforeseen delays. Spoiler: there will be unforeseen delays). That's three whole days (count 'em!) dedicated to this topic, with less hype and buzz surrounding it than the release of the new Kit Kat chunky candy bar. 
The outline for the report can be read here, if you're interested in knowing what to expect.
So I hear that we are fucked. How fucked are we?
That's the exciting part we get to find out about during AR5!
You may remember this graphic from my previous global warming thread:
That's from the 4th assessment report. Now we get to find out if everyone's been good little boys and girls (spoiler: they haven't been), and whether or not the A1B projections looks any better than it did a year ago. Remember, kids: there's a deadline for this. There will come a year where it is just too late to bother trying to lower our emissions.
There will also be discussion of various severe weather events, and whether or not it's appropriate to link any specific events to climate change. And, of course, the usual list of suggestions for government agencies / private companies that will go ignored because, lawdy, think of the ECONOMY!
So should I start buying parts for my sick Mad Max buggy?
This year, unlike last year, part of the presentation is going to be about outlooks. This is a controversial topic that the IPCC has generally shied away from, so it'll be interesting to see what they have to say (and, specifically, which intelligence agencies they use as their sources, if any). Do not expect anyone to talk about worst-case scenario horror stories (and really, they shouldn't do that anyway), but I'm hopeful that we might finally hear some candid exploration from this panel on the sort of damage we're going to do, and on what timescale, if we don't kick certain habits.
...So, like, only a hundred people are even going to read this report or watch the event in Stockholm, right?
Are you kidding? More people are probably going to read this post than are going to read the report or watch the event in Stockholm.
The outline for the report can be read here, if you're interested in knowing what to expect.
So I hear that we are fucked. How fucked are we?
That's the exciting part we get to find out about during AR5!
You may remember this graphic from my previous global warming thread:
That's from the 4th assessment report. Now we get to find out if everyone's been good little boys and girls (spoiler: they haven't been), and whether or not the A1B projections looks any better than it did a year ago. Remember, kids: there's a deadline for this. There will come a year where it is just too late to bother trying to lower our emissions.
There will also be discussion of various severe weather events, and whether or not it's appropriate to link any specific events to climate change. And, of course, the usual list of suggestions for government agencies / private companies that will go ignored because, lawdy, think of the ECONOMY!
So should I start buying parts for my sick Mad Max buggy?
This year, unlike last year, part of the presentation is going to be about outlooks. This is a controversial topic that the IPCC has generally shied away from, so it'll be interesting to see what they have to say (and, specifically, which intelligence agencies they use as their sources, if any). Do not expect anyone to talk about worst-case scenario horror stories (and really, they shouldn't do that anyway), but I'm hopeful that we might finally hear some candid exploration from this panel on the sort of damage we're going to do, and on what timescale, if we don't kick certain habits.
...So, like, only a hundred people are even going to read this report or watch the event in Stockholm, right?
Are you kidding? More people are probably going to read this post than are going to read the report or watch the event in Stockholm.
With Love and Courage
The Ender on
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That's sort-of always been the problem. How do you effectively present the information without being Morbo? There isn't really a sexy way to promote the idea that, "Yeah! You should totally drive your awesome car less often! You should totally use less electricity doing fun stuff! That is RAD, man!" just like there's no sexy way to tell a teenager not to do drugs. So you're left with trying to be clinical (which the IPCC does), which doesn't engage anyone, or trying to scare people into better behavior, which just pisses people off more often than not.
That's why the IPCC has become so focused on trying to get lawmakers, not the public, to listen - which has had the effect of making the topic extremely politicized (and in some countries, even divided along partisan lines).
can you explain what the headers (A1B A1F1 etc) in the graphic mean?
Here's my go-to graphic for any US energy policy related thing.
Just because it gives a great sense of the scale of shit that needs to change. Replace all the coal plants with wind power? Sure, just increase the number of windmills by 17 times. Electric cars, okay that'll take 23x the number of windmills we currently have built.
We passed that point decades ago.
It's becoming increasingly clear that the kind of global coordinated response necessary wouldn't be possible if fucking space aliens were invading the Earth, let alone for something as subtle as climate change. edit: and for icing on the cake, a number of recent nuclear disasters have ensured that nobody wants to move to the only realistic non-fossil-fuel supply for base load power, too.
We need to start having the discussion on "well, okay, let's say hypothetically we're going to burn every last bit of fossil fuels where EROEI > 1. What's the mitigation strategy for the damage?"
Disagree?
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Okay: so is the average person going to perceive living smaller, consuming less electricity, driving less often, etc, as 'making a better world' as far as they're concerned? My bet would be on a rather loud. "NOPE."
There's an attitude of entitlement in the west where people demand that they be able to consume as much as they like (or can otherwise afford), whether that's water, food, energy or physical space. When you tell that that there are limits on any of those things, the reaction is almost always violent rejection.
What's this "in the west" shit?
Except that:
1) We don't even know if geo-engineering projects on a large scale will have any meaningful impact
2) We're then playing around with climate systems in basically a haphazard fashion, without understanding the long-term impacts
3) Any geo-engineering project(s) will have to scale in tune with CO2 output.
The whole geo-engineering angle is, in essence, an appeal to magic technology that does not currently exist at all, but is theoretically possible we think. You may as well be proposing that we start laying down solar highways to solve our problems (except at least that pipe dream is based on existing, today-era technology).
And here's a perfect example of exactly what I mean.
"Fuck YOU! I want to still have mine - tell those dirty Chinese they can't have THEIRS instead!"
Gee whiz, I wonder why we can't fix these sort of problems.
Eh, I see it as a failure of marketing, really.
We had a thread a few years back about this where I pretty much argued things from that perspective. "We HAVE to reduce the amount of consume!" and a number of forum regulars politely pointed out that this was a terrible way of framing the issue.
It took me a while to see it, but they're right.
Example: electric cars. Nissan Leaf is being sold with an explicitly green marketing campaign, down to the name. Chevy Volt a little less so. You know who is outselling both of them? Tesla - granted, just barely, but that's pretty impressive considering that the cheapest Tesla costs twice as much as either the Leaf or the Volt.
Tesla's strategy is to sell their product as a next-generation luxury car. Yeah, it's green, which is nice, but people are buying it because it's a high-tech status symbol. It just happens to be a status symbol that they can feel good about.
Another example: solar panels. The majority of solar panel owners are not in it primarily out of an environmental conscience. They're in it as a long-term investment; hedging bets against rising energy costs. Many of them are tech geeks, the early-adopter and power-user types, who like the idea of integrating technology into the home.
We literally have free energy falling from the sky and it is fucking stupid that we don't avail ourselves of it more.
Yet another example: walkable communities. Developing homes in walking distance to businesses actually increases both the property values of those homes and helps those businesses.
These things aren't reductions, they're improvements. They make our lives better and the fact that they reduce emissions is just icing on the cake.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Sounds pretty awesome to me.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
I agree with Ender to a point, in that most of the discussion of "making the world a better place" involves either long-term or abstract notions that are divorced from immediate, tangible benefits. Honestly, nobody gives a shit about saving the rainforests. Nobody cares about energy independence. I mean, sure, in the abstract, people are going to check the "Let's Save the Rainforests" box instead of the "Let's Burn Them All Down" box. But as soon as that choice costs them real dollars in the right-now, the rainforests can suck a dick as far as most people are concerned.
So yeah, any actions that are going to help us either needed to be handed down via laws and regulations, or couched in terms of immediate gain. Creating jobs? That's salable. Cheaper energy? Better gas mileage? That's salable. Cleaner water? Maaaaaybe, and only if it's cleaner for you, personally. Saving mother nature? Yeah, sorry, not enough people care about mother nature. Not enough to give up their shiny new Camaro.
That is not the point that I was making.
The point that I was making was that even if you got all three hundred million residents of the US to go full carbon-neutral, China and India will more than pick up the slack in the next two decades. Their residents will naturally consume more energy as their economic condition allows a higher standard of living (comparable to the standard of living "in the west") and most of that energy is going to come from fossil fuels.
If a western government tells them that they need to stay at a third-world standard of living just because they showed up late to the party, they will be ignored, and if they try and enforce it, you'll see the "reaction of violent rejection" that you spoke of, potentially involving nuclear weapons.
Right but global co2 output isn't going to be decreasing anytime soon, even if the West manages to get per capita way down. I mean what's the current projection on the global population leveling off at, 12 billion in 2050? Even if we can get global per capita to halve we are still SOL.
So its geo engineering or nothing.
That really wasn't the point of that post at all.
I seem to have missed the point where he said "make the Chinese fix global warming, I want my hummer"
but idk
The problem with mitigation strategies that currently exist is that they are limited to retreat from problem areas, using different buildings and crops and building up water reserves in other areas.
As The Ender said, there currently are no technologies that could work on an industrial scale to take enough CO2 out of the air to matter.
We have the tech to actually change over the industrial and power generation in large parts to clean energy, we are just choosing not to.
@tinwiskers What is the gray rejected vs energy service part at the end of that graphic, I have not seen that on those types before.
I really wish crappy old nuclear power plants were not giving the entire industry a bad name.. but there you have it.
We do not, unless you define "clean energy" to include fission and hydro, which most environmentalists will not do.
Yes, exactly. It's Other Country's fault, really!
No doubt they say exactly the same thing in India and China, given that although they have higher populations than the U.S. or Canada, both of the latter countries use more resources per person.
It's a stupid blame game that serves no purpose other than offer an excuse for doing nothing. Yeah, any solution will have to be an international solution - kind of hard to do that if all anyone can do is point fingers.
I mentioned western countries specifically because this board is full of English speakers mostly from either America or Europe, not from Southeast Asia. I also frankly have no idea what the cultural attitude in Southeast Asia is like as regards global warming.
i'd also say it's ridiculous to assume China & India will totally murder everyone with nuclear weapons if we ever dare establish an international framework for emissions reduction. Far more likely that they'll either just ignore the framework, as happens all of the time, or game the system, or - God forbid - they might even actually cooperate. Sometimes that does happen.
Again, where is he saying It's Their Fault instead of Its Not Just The West.
I think the air up on your high horse is making you a little lightheaded.
How is 'It's Not Just the West!' a useful statement? Explain this to me. How is this a productive part of the conversation about an international effort to solve a problem? It's really just a passive-aggressive way of saying, "...Well, maybe if YOU fix YOUR problems...", in my opinion - and when you put it in context with quotes about how China is going to start a nuclear war because ???, based on ??? evidence, it's pretty clear to me that the person making that argument is more interested in picking out villains than addressing the topic at hand.
Campaigning against hydroelectric power and nuclear power is actively hurting the environment. They cause damage but we need to be realistic about our options in the short term.
The global consequences of climate change are so severe some economic sacrifices must be made on the part of virtually every country. I'd argue that there's a moral imperative on the part of the industrialized world to make up for past emissions, and an imperative on the part of the developing world to "go green" from the start.
But I do not believe substantive policy decisions will be made in time to avert a crisis (or more likely, a series of crises and aggravated events). To some extent, we've already failed to prevent/mitigate serious warming. It's never too late to start mitigating a problem that will only grow worse over time, and we're already signed up for a lot of necessary adaptation so earlier is probably better than later on that front as well. But again, the policy will just isn't there.
Yeah, it's entirely defensible to acknowledge that any realistic and useful solution needs to account for both developed and undeveloped countries. Now, if we can develop awesome climate-friendly technologies or methods, we can talk about speeding developing countries through industrialization so they can get to the not-killing-Earth phase of their development more quickly and cheaply.
But most allegedly serious conversations among western politicians seem to be of the "let's enact carbon emission caps in developed nations to limit the increase in carbon emissions to only 5% per year!" variety. And that shit is next to useless. I mean, if it's a decrease relative to the status quo, yay, I suppose, but that's not the sort of change that's going to do much. We need a comprehensive and qualitative change that accounts for the entire world's population, so if we're taking baby steps, they at least need to be in that direction.
Anyone who isn't at least willing to consider that as part of the solution is pretty much not taking the issue seriously.
Hey, let's not start projecting passive-aggressiveness. I'm not "picking out villains". Any attempt to frame the climate change problem in terms of "villains" is idiotic.
The developing world is going to emit more carbon in the future, not less. That's essentially what "developing" means. Any first-world solution that doesn't address this is going to be at best ineffectual and at worst counterproductive.
Addressing this by forcing the developing world to stay at a lower standard of living is a non-starter; aside from the ethical considerations we straight-up don't have the ability to do that.
Therefore an attempt to solve the climate change problem via reducing carbon emissions will not only need to solve the very difficult problem of curbing climate emissions "in the West" but will also need to, not just curb existing emissions, but bring "the East" into a first-world standard of living without creating new carbon emissions either.
If you have realistic ideas, I'm all ears. "Start a framework and hope that they cooperate" does not count as a realistic idea. "Lead by example" isn't one either -- we already did that! The example we demonstrated was one of moving a nation from an agrarian economy to an industrial economy to a service economy, with commensurate increases in the general standard of living, by burning lots of coal and oil. They're already in the process of following that example, and I can't even come up with a rational argument why they shouldn't.
We have CO2 sequestration as a today-era technology: basically, we can trap some portion of the carbon that would normally be emitted and store it somewhere (usually underground). That's pretty much it.
Carbon capturing - that is, actual machines that filter carbon out of the air - is a pipe dream technology. We don't know how to do this in practice (we have theories, but no working prototypes), there is no industry for it, there is no interest in funding it. We don't even know if it would be a good idea to do on a large scale, because we don't know what the side-effects might be or what the 'right' ways are to fuck around with the Earth's thermostat (there probably really is a 'right' way to play with the Earth's atmosphere, but the trial-and-error phase of figuring that out probably isn't worth the potential risks involved).
Most environmentalists are geese
Greenpeace may have done more to threaten humanity's long-term survival than any other single organization in history, just by being a major player in the demonization of nuclear power.
Now they're all "nuclear is aight but it won't make a dent in greenhouse gases" which is not only not true, but astoundingly hypocritical
No, they haven't. That's a retarded statement.
On that same token, yeah:
Oh, Greenpeace.
I mean, it's carbon neutral, sure, and that's great. Wind and solar ain't going to provide base load power and most available hydro is in use (as I understand it). But there are operator accountability issues that need to be addressed.
And four decades of stagnant research hasn't helped the cost per watt vs. natural gas, either.
If you had a 400 ml container, you could fit all of the nasty waste from a today-era reactor running for a year into that container.
That's pretty clean. Yes, the waste is particularly nasty, and can't be safely handled in some cases for decades or even centuries, but the quantities are so small that it's probably cleaner than most wind farms.
Research stagnation probably isn't going to end until the demand for nuclear power increases.
EDIT: It's also easy to make an argument that nuclear power solves another problem: nuclear arms proliferation. When you look at things like the American warhead recycling program (which we almost also got Russia to sign on with, until Putin decided he wanted to be a genocidal asshole), which has essentially taken all of the really big bombs out of circulation so we can use the material in civilian reactors, it's hard to call the nuclear industry anything other than a force for positive change.
news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/02/110223-nuclear-war-winter-global-warming-environment-science-climate-change/
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
Nuclear waste is a boogeyman, and I stopped being afraid of those when my girlfriend started letting me sleep with a night light.
The fact is that the west needs to seriously commit to renewable and clean forms of energy, then export the expertise in building full systems to developing nations.
Until we do it right as a model it will be a very tough sell.
It explains it a bit in at the bottom of the graph but basically its two things:
For the electrical side:
The smaller part is the waste at the end user, which they estimate at 80% efficient. Basically, you turn on an electric motor at Widget Co, some amount of the energy used to run that motor is going to be wasted because of friction etc.
The much larger part of it is the inefficency in generating electricity. Power plants dump huge amounts of heat out into the environment. I think even the best combined cycle gas plants are only about 65% efficient, and then transmission losses are another 10%(multiplicative not additive).
**It also says in the small text that Wind/hydro is adjusted to BTUs using the heat rate of a fossil plant since they don't actually use heat. So it converts 1000MW of wind into the BTU equivalent an average fossil plant would use to generate that amount.
For the transport side of it: It basically how inefficient cars are. You only get 25% of the energy out of a gallon of gas in GO!!!!!. The rest is the engine inefficiency and breaking and rolling & wind resistance etc.
I also dug up an old chart from '07 If people want to compare
Basically if you take those 4 years of green* energy growth, and repeated them ever 2 years, It'd still take 17 years to phase out all the coal plants, assuming 0 growth in overall energy needs.
*And I'm counting BioMass in here which is questionable on green-ness, but was almost 1/3 of the 'green'-energy gain.