Science news: Climate change cheating at Paris, atmospheric red flags — important as COP29 approaches

Not that this will actually affect anything undertaken at COP29, starting with the hypocrisy of it once again being held in a petrostate, this time, Baku Azerbaijan. (Yale Climate Connections notes that countries of the world need a "quantum leap" just on meeting current, and currently unfulfilled, commitments from past climate "accords.")

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The cheating at Paris? I'm talking about the Paris round of climate change "accord" talks, which I have long ago called "Jell-O" that was made such by two people: Dear Leader Obama and Xi Jinping.

Now, more evidence in that general direction? Two Swedish academics talk about what was essentially game-rigging on trying to stay below 1.5°C, which we of course have broken already.

(S)oon, the ambitious Paris agreement limit turned out to be not much of a limit at all. When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (or IPCC, the world’s foremost body of climate experts) lent its authority to the 1.5°C temperature target with its 2018 special report, something odd transpired.

Nearly all modelled pathways for limiting global heating to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels involved temporarily transgressing this target. Each still arrived back at 1.5°C eventually (the deadline being the random end point of 2100), but not before first shooting past it.

OK ....

They then spell this out:

De facto, what they said was this: staying below a temperature limit is the same as first crossing it and then, a few decades hence, using methods of removing carbon from the atmosphere to dial temperatures back down again.

From some corners of the scientific literature came the assertion that this was nothing more than fantasy. A new study published in Nature has now confirmed this critique. It found that humanity’s ability to restore Earth’s temperature below 1.5°C of warming, after overshooting it, cannot be guaranteed

Fantasy! Many of us have already faulted the IPCC for being overly conservative. Now, per further items in the piece, it appears that this overt conservativism (contra climate change Obamiacs like Michael Mann and Katharine Hayhoe, with Mann even attacking James Hansen) was deliberate for political reasons.

Read on, MacDuff: 

If reversal cannot be guaranteed, then clearly it is irresponsible to sanction a supposedly temporary overshoot of the Paris targets. And yet this is exactly what scientists have done. What compelled them to go down this dangerous route?

Our own book on this topic (Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown, published last week by Verso) offers a history and critique of the idea.

When overshoot scenarios were summoned into being in the early 2000s, the single most important reason was economics. Rapid, near-term emissions cuts were deemed prohibitively costly and so unpalatable. Cost optimisation mandated that they be pushed into the future to the extent possible.

Politics! Also note the phrase "Climate Breakdown," in the book.

Politics!

(B)ecause modellers could not imagine transgressing the deeply conservative constraints that they worked within, something else had to be transgressed.

One team stumbled upon the idea that large-scale removal of carbon might be possible in the future, and so help reverse climate change. The EU and then the IPCC picked up on it, and before long, overshoot scenarios had colonised the expert literature. Deference to mainstream economics yielded a defence of the political status quo. This in turn translated into reckless experimentation with the climate system. Conservatism or fatalism about society’s capacity for change flipped into extreme adventurism about nature.

There we are.

And read that Nature study. (I'll be trying to find that book!) It notes the real cost is that of carbon removal. IF possible. It also goes into more detail about how climate change feedbacks that are likely already being cooked into the system can't necessarily be undone by negative human GHG emissions.

Update, Nov. 25: Grist takes a further look at "Overshoot," the book by the academics, Andreas Malm and Wim Carton.

“Overshoot is here not a fate passively acquiesced to,” Carton and Malm, both professors at Lund University in Sweden, write in the book’s introduction. “It is an actively championed programme for how to deal with the rush into catastrophe: let it continue for the time being, and then we shall sort things out towards the end of this century.”

And, this is part one of a two-part book set, reportedly.

AND? They're reportedly Marxists. If that's behind callouts like this of Nordhaus:

One of the first examples of overshoot thinking in the mainstream was an influential 1991 paper by the economist William Nordhaus, referred to by Carton and Malm as “the Genghis Khan of bourgeois climate economics.” The article, titled “To Slow or Not to Slow: The Economics of the Greenhouse Effect,” asked what an optimal economic policy would be for dealing with climate change. Nordhaus concluded that a rapid transition away from fossil fuels would carry a steep cost for the economy and that the task should be put off for future generations. Fossil fuels will help the world develop faster, he reasoned, making societies richer and better equipped to deal with climate fallout. (Despite experts flagging a number of errors with this logic, Nordhaus won a Nobel Prize for his life’s work in 2018.)

All the better.

And, per that Jell-O I mentioned up top?

This:

“If there was equality in Paris, it came in the form of a shared unaccountability: the agreement required that no one was required to act at any certain level,” Carton and Malm wrote. “Now what do you get when a seemingly strict target is combined with such lax rules? You get overshoot.”

Is so true. 

Finally, the authors tackle the issue of stranded assets, and note how much of an obstacle they will continue to be.

Sadly, nobody will be listening.

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The atmospheric red flags connect. A new study shows that global methane emissions continue to rise. And, guess who's one of the worst offenders of a 2021 global methane emissions agreement? China is also in the top five, as are the rest of the BRICS countries not named South Africa.

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And, a friendly reminder — it's not fundagelicals vs the liberally religious that's the big divide on taking climate change seriously, as a climate crisis. It's secularists/non-metaphysicians/atheists vs everybody else AND that "everybody else" includes the so-called Nones or religiously unaffiliated.

Jeff Goodell hits a bit of a foul ball on handling the high Heat

I wound up being somewhat disappointed by Jeff Goodell's new-of-2023 book "The Heat Will Kill You First."

I'd read "Big Coal" years ago and thought it was great. I'd heard some good reviews about "Heat."

The reality, in precís form, before an expanded version of my Goodreads review?

The anecdotal parts of the book, about individual people struggling with, and sometimes dying in and from, the heat? Great.

The actual science? The sea level rise was mainstream. The effect of heatwaves was mainstream.

But, the biggie of "where are we headed"? To take 2100 as a break point, is it 2.5C? 3C? 4C? Even higher? Goodell makes no projection of his own, nor does he ask any climate scientist to make one.

Then, the what do we do? part is half nothingburger, half non-reality.

The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet by Jeff Goodell
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

OK, first the best.

The best part on the science side is the chapter on Friedericke Otto and extreme event attribution. Personalized stories, such as the migrant dead at the Willamette Valley nursery, are a solid second, and first on the narrative.

Back to the "where are we headed"? Is it 2.5C or so (we're using the metric here, contra the book), like "climate change neoliberals" such as Michael Mann and Katharine Hayhoe? (I think that's where they'd sit if you forced them to pick a number, but, to be honest, I think they'd do their damndest to avoid picking a number in the first place.) Or 4C by the end of this century, as James Hansen said recently, if you do his math, and with whom I very much agree? See how easy that was, Jeff?

Goodell pulls punches and won't tell us anything.

To put it another way, in terms of the different temperature possibilities per the above?

Is he a Michael Mann/Katharine Hayhoe climate change Obamiac? Is he Hansen? Is he James Kunstler or beyond, if you think 5C or even a "runaway" is possible?

He gives every appearance of being a climate change Obamiac.

Then, the what do we do? part is half nothingburger, half non-reality.

The non-reality part is the issue of how much, or how little, can we really "harden" cities that are already in hot climates. Goodell listens to a person from Phoenix, Mark Hartman, the city's "chief sustainability officer," but neither in the interview, nor on his own afterward, does he say that the correct answer is: "move away." Just like "move away" rather than blow money on it is the right answer for the Salton Sea. (I said a dozen years ago that, rather than HARP, HAMP and all the other subprime bubble-bursting reinflation, Dear Leader should have told the recent moves to Phoenix that their in arrears mortgages would be ripped up if they'd move back to Cleveland, Des Moines or whatever. He would also have told developers and mortgage originators that they would be made whole IF IF IF they cut their home building and home sales in Phoenix by 10-20 percent for the next decade, otherwise, no Fannie or Freddie help on future mortgages.)

The nothingburger? Since he won't plump for a 2100 temperature point, he won't tell us about carbon taxes and tariffs or other actions we should be taking. No bueno. 

Related? Those "vaunted" Paris accords? You mean the totally voluntary Jell-O, made so by Dear Leader Obama and Xi Jinping? The accords that stayed voluntary at the 2019 global climate summit and the just-completed one in 2023? And, no, Goodell tells you none of that, Dear Reader.

(This is also a good spot for a reminder that the real, true divide on taking climate change seriously is not between Republicans and Democrats, nor is it between fundagelicals and more liberal Christians, but it's between secularists and everybody else.)

I felt Goodell had a chance for more outreach, and fell short. (And so, contra others, I did NOT think this was "doom porn." If only it hit people that much over the head.) If you think we're going to be at 2.5C at the end of the century, then this book is OK. If 4C, then it's not. Those polar bears are doomed to death, zoos or inbreeding with grizz. The pikas are trapped. Etc., etc.

Where's it not so good otherwise?

Couple of science errors, first.

There are four normal jet streams, two in each of the northern and southern hemispheres, not “the jet stream.”

Great Barrier Reef is 1,400 miles long, not 14,000. That one was glaring.

More to the point?

Narrative issues, maybe?

Lesser ones first.

I don't think the A/C chapter was totally off point, because Goodell talks about how it has killed off, or nearly so, in many parts of the world, old-style ways of constructing buildings to keep them cooler. Other than the carbon-boosting energy costs, if AC is not powered by renewables, there's the added issue of CFC leaks from refrigerant lines and pumps. And, these CFCs, differing among themselves, are also greenhouse gases.

The Arctic and Antarctic visits, though? Both interesting. Both certainly connected to climate change and to the global warming part of them. But, Goodell doesn't really tie either one into global warming that much, especially not the Arctic visit. For instance, we're not told how much sea ice has decreased in the last 30 years. 

Also, like another 3-star reviewer, I noted that (outside of AUS/NZ) there's little Global South here, especially on urban adaptations. Pakistan does get play in the non-developed Global North, but because of the extremes it faces. And, as far as solutions, the Global North is asking the Global South to suck it. So far, low-carbon developmental help has been all hat on promises, no cattle on actual help. Goodell doesn't discuss that, either.

Finally, on the personal side, he says that getting outside more in hot weather (while being smart about it, of course) increases one's adaptability to the heat, and thus lessens the need for AC. I'm not sure how much he practices what he preaches. I'm not in Austin, but I am in North Tex-ass, and I exercise by powerwalking in 100°F or hotter temperature.

View all my reviews

IPCC confirms we're facing climate change shit creek

Yes, that's the most straightforward way to describe the latest quadrennial report on climate change by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Here's your nutgraf, up front, emphasis mine at the end:

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on Monday released its latest report, which found that nations are falling short of their pledges to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in order to avert catastrophic climate change. While the technology exists to stay below 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) of average global temperature increase — the goal that virtually every nation agreed to in the 2015 Paris climate agreement and reaffirmed last year in the Glasgow Climate Pact — current policies put the world on a trajectory toward at least twice as much warming.

Again, let's note that "current policies put the world on a trajectory toward at least twice as much warming."

Within that, let's further zero in on "at least twice as much." In other words, 3C may not be the stopping point above 1.5C. Could be 3.5C or 4C.

That's climate change shit creek and no other way to describe it.

Despite the angst by ruling class Democrats when Trump pulled the US out of the Paris Accords, and the same #BlueAnon huzzahs when Biden put us back in, the bottom line remains the same, and that is that:

The Paris Accords are toothless Jell-O.

And, with that, we need to start taking seriously the possibility that climate change Obamiacs like Katharine Hayhoe, Michael Mann and Bob Kopp are not only wrong, they're actually at Not.Even.Wrong, and that alarmists like James Kunstler just might be right. At a minimum, until the BlueAnon tech-neolib capitalists accept that Paris is toothless Jell-O, Kunstler will be more right than wrong. And, given the way the Glasgow round of climate talks went last fall, Team Democrat will continue to pretend to act and team MSM media will continue to pretend to take this seriously. That includes both the Monthly AND the Observer in Texas, in one of those instances that made Bernard Rapoport turn in his grave, in all likelihood. And also, Texas Observer, I haven't forgotten that it was YOU, not the Monthly, that spin-cycled Hayhoe, about whom I have a special climate change Obamiac animus. All of the above also goes for Sunrise Movement, really the youth wing of Sierra Club. (Does it hate Palestinians like Sierra?)

I also tweeted to the Observer if they wanted to edit the worst of that turd-polishing, where Hayhoe claimed, a year before Winter Storm Uri, that the Texas electric grid was "resilient." AND, good neoliberal, said that this was because it's independent of the rest of the nation's electric grid. Seriously. This is the person that Texas librulz hold up as a Texas exceptionalist exemplar of what Texas could really do on climate change.

And, as I type this, Status Quo Joe wants to expand LNG port termnails, cuz, you know, exporting natural gas and wrecking the climate will "own the Russians" or something.

Needed: Climate radicalism

Joe Biden returning us to the Paris Accords without admitting their actual Jell-o, or "the Squad" accepting his 10 percent of their 10 percent knockoff of the original Green New Deal, while still paying full devotion to capitalism, doesn't get us bupkis on climate change.

Ben Ehrenreich tells the truth, noting that Biden had issued drilling permits before the pause on them, and taken many other half-steps. It's in the larger framework of analyzing a paper co-written by 17 scientists about just how self-screwed we're getting.

Ben even channels his inner Ed Abbey.

As innocuous as it may sound, “growth” should be understood to describe the frenzied ruination of nearly every ecosystem on the planet so that its richest human inhabitants can hold on to their privileges for another generation or two. Rejecting the idolatry of growth means tilting the organization of our societies toward other social goods—health, for instance, and the freedom to exist on a planet that is not on fire. This should not be unimaginable.

Can't be much blunter than that.

He ties this to Biden's pledge of racial "equity" and the issue of long standing of climate justice.

That said, contra "The Squad's" knockoff, Ehrenreich holds zero hope for the future under the current dispensation:

It is of course foolish to the point of derangement to imagine that Joe Biden would consent to any such transformation.

He does end with a glimmer of hope.

(I)t would be just as naïve to believe that current political configurations are any more stable or permanent than the climate, or any less vulnerable to concerted human action. If we do actually listen to the science, then we understand what ghastly futures await us and we know how bold we must be to avoid them.

But, there never was much hope. Ben notes that carbon offset pledges by big companies would require an area more than half as big as the US become entirely forested. (And that ignores that rising temps may lower forests' ability to be carbon sinks.) He also notes that most of the current climate plans rely on aggressive use of the still largely unproven technology of carbon capture.

The original paper is worth its own read. It's "we" is the whole world, including the Global South. Sub-saharan Africa is a ticking time bomb, for example. It looks to face some of the worst problems with climate change, while most of the countries with the world's highest birth rates are there at the same time.

Mass extinctions continue as the nations of the world failed to meet a vacuous 2010 pledge.

That's a vacuous pledge based on UNCC claims that are too conservative. As World Met notes, per Counterpunch, we're almost certain to break 2C. My own prediction is that we've got a 1-in-4 chance of 3C by 2050 and will almost certainly be that high if not higher by 2100. Sadly, though, the author of that Counterpunch piece is a career Democrat bureaucrat at the EPA who claims Status Quo Joe's infrastructure plan is like the Green New Deal.

Biodiversity loss continues, perhaps contributing to COVID-19.

IPCC modeling remains on the conservative side (it DOES, Michael Mann, Katherine Hayhoe and other climate change conservatives), meaning most people don't know how bad it is.

Finally, per Yale Climate, how does equity factor in?

In reality, it makes good talk, but unless Biden's prepared to set aside money to relocate millions of non-rich people who can't do that on their own, especially if they're renters who can't leverage homeowners' insurance in some way, equity doesn't factor in.

 

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At the same time, this is NOT just a US problem. Allegedly climate-woke Europe is not so much; it loves it some biomass burning. I know that Europe doesn't have the same solar power potential as the US, but it's not that far off on wind. And, because of an overall milder climate and other factors, it's less energy-intensive than the US. (We're not the worst, though; that's the Aussies.)

Not only is it not carbon-neutral, but any idiot can see that deforestation affects the environment in other ways. And, there's surely a risk of "better burner" trees that are also relatively fast growers being touted for biomass monocrop reforestation. To some degree, that's already happening, with loblolly pine being planted as a replacement tree in the Southeast. And, it's not "waste wood,"either.

Linked within that piece is another one, from 2015, reminding us that Dear Leader, with his "all of the above" strategy on energy production, came close to going down Europe's road.

Here's your nutgraf, from the main link, about the biomass "harvesting" in the US:

Even if new trees are planted in their place, many studies suggest they will take decades, and in some cases centuries, to absorb enough carbon to “pay back” the carbon debt from burning the older trees. That’s a problem, because scientists don’t believe the world can wait decades, much less centuries, to cut emissions. So at a time when global demand for pulpwood is already rising, the U.S. is already the top supplier, and the world is supposed to be expanding its carbon sinks to avoid climate calamities, the green-sounding technology of bioenergy is pulling even more carbon-rich wood out of U.S. forests.

Exactly. We need radicalism here, too.

Will Status Quo Joe give us that?

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In case you suspected otherwise, Gang Green neoliberal environmental groups aren't going to give us climate radicalism, judging by the Massachusetts chapter of the Audubon Society selling carbon credits to Big Oil companies via the Cal Air Resources Board for trees it (I HOPE) never intended to log in the first place, then getting all butt-hurt when Pro Publica et al started asking questions.

Meanwhile, the CARB itself looks like a gutless wonder in all this. Shock me. California's water sustainability system is almost as loophole-ridden as Arizona regs requiring new residential developments to have a guaranteed 30-year water supply.

And, as the likes of Fancy Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Betty Crocker, Dianne Feinstein, show, California "librulz" are wasted space in national politics, courtesy of a willfully hypercapitalist Cal Democratic Party.

 

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And, while it's nice that a climate-concerned hedge fund has now gotten its candidates on eXXXon's board of directors, remember that the bottom line is the capitalist bottom line for these companies. Engine No. 1 even admits this. Remember, per Einstein, expecting more of the capitalism that got us into this situation to fix it is insanity.

And, per the World Meteorological Organization, that situation, re the target temperature of the Paris Accords' nonenforceable 1.5 C, has a 40 percent chance of arriving in the next five years. Sadly, Michael Mann (along with many of his "climate MSM" fellow travelers) appears to be, not a climate change minimalist, but a climate change "moderate." He, Katharine Hayhoe and others of their ilk are like GangGreen environmental groups. Hayhoe and some others have been political noobs before, including doubling down on attacking those who pointed this out. Like me. Per that link, we could perhaps call them "climate change Obamiacs," who think that singing Kumbaya enough will fix this. It's people like them that lead me to continue to wonder if the James Kunstlers aren't right after all.

Greenwashing Joe Biden

Trees and other plants may already be past their peak on their ability to absorb carbon dioxide. As Status Quo Joe gives little indication he'll even sign off on "the Squad's" weak tea Green Party-ripoff version of a Green New Deal, let alone what's really needed, this is serious.

So is the likes of a Mark Hertsgaard greenwashing Biden when he knows it ain't so. Or, if he doesn't, even for non-public consumption, know it ain't so, it's scary on his part.

As I Tweeted him: There is NOT "a climate realist now in the White House." Nor (which I missed originally) did Biden "dramatically strengthen his climate proposals" during last year's presidential campaign.

"We" who know such things know that his climate "plan" didn't even directly address fracking.

The rest of the piece, the non-Biden stuff, is decent.

But, we don't need to be greenwashing Joe Biden.

At least Hertsgaard didn't try to tell me the Paris Accords are real and not their actual Jell-o.

Ben Ehrenreich tells the truth, noting that Biden had issued drilling permits before the pause on them, and taken many other half-steps. It's in the larger framework of analyzing a paper co-written by 17 scientists about just how self-screwed we're getting. More in a separate post.

Update: That said, a new study from the Journal of Environmental Psychology says that people who have strong "national narcissism" (ie, big time American exceptionalism, Polish exceptionalism, etc.) are likely to believe greenwashing by/about their political leaders. A TL/DR summary is at Psy Post. The survey focused on Polish President Andrzej Duda, a conservative populist claiming to be an environmentalist, hence my use of "Polish exceptionalism." But, it did reference Trump twice, in indicating Duda is like him in some ways in general, and on this issue.

But, many neoliberal Dems (as in Dear Leader's new memoir) ALSO believe in American exceptionalism. And, with Obama, and now with Status Quo Joe, they tribally believe that their Dem leaders are great gunz on environmentalism.

Neoliberal Dems are also climate change semi-minimalists

So are many of their media friends, like William Wallace-Wells at NY Mag, claiming the war over climate denial has been won.

Whether it has or not is one thing. I don't think it has, but, if claiming it has is because you think neoliberal market-based actions will fix everything, as Wallace-Wells does, it certainly has not been one.

Or, it HAS been won, because per Pogo, "We have met the enemy and he is us."

WW does halfway admit that 2.5C or more, not just 2C, is semi-baked in unless we act now.

But, after that, it's a fail.

Reality, as noted here before? The Paris Accords are toothless Jell-O and Biden having the U.S. rejoin them does noting to make them less toothless. And, Biden's old boss, Dear Leader, was one of two people, along with Xi Jinping, to make sure they're toothless. (This, in addition to his lies on Uyghur camps, is another reason to despise Howie Hawkins and any other leftists and left-liberals who give Xi a pass on anything.)

Further reality? I don't know what he thinks about Xi Jinping, but at the Nation, John Nichols (shock me) loved him some of Biden's pseudo-green taint.

Further reality? 

The curves are bending even more slowly than WW claims. 

Coronavirus didn't bend the curve that much, and its effects are temporary.

The slow bending is likely too late, unless we do a real, non-Democrat Green New Deal.

The bipartisan foreign policy establishment likes to lick Xi's pseudo-green taint.

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Another neoliberal climate change minimalist, or  to be technical, a salvific technologist? Elon Musk, who still believes carbon capture is both doable and a real too. (Salvific technologism is also part of WW's schtick.

So, Democrats, like Republicans, will fiddle will LA and DC burns. They'll just play nicer, louder music.

And, a reminder: The most recent switch in weather in California is why we talk about "climate change" and not just "global warming," wingnuts.

Climate change: Were the James Kunstlers right after all?

James Kunstler has been a huge alarmist about the future of Merika in particular and "the west" in general on two issues.

One is Peak Oil, where he's turned out to be Not Even Wrong, and in a way that the Peak Oil movement has become dismissed as a cult by many. I'll have more about this in an upcoming post.

The other is climate change. And just maybe, he's not so all wrong there.

A new study claims we've already baked in a LOT of shit. 

"The world is already past a point of no return for global warming," the study authors report in the British journal Scientific Reports. The only way to stop the warming, they say, is that "enormous amounts of carbon dioxide have to be extracted from the atmosphere." 

"According to our models, humanity is beyond the point of no return when it comes to halting the melting of permafrost using greenhouse gas cuts as the single tool," lead author Jorgen Randers, a professor emeritus of climate strategy at the BI Norwegian Business School, told AFP.

The study said that by the year 2500, the planet's temperatures will be about 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than they were in 1850. And sea levels will be roughly 8 feet higher. The authors suggest that global temperatures could continue to increase after human-caused greenhouse gas emissions have been reduced.

Those are eye openers! But, are they true?

A lot of the people whom I call things like "neoliberal climate scientists" say they're not. Here's one of the leaders:

One expert, Penn State University meteorologist Michael Mann, told USA TODAY that he was skeptical of the computer model used in the study: "The climate model they have used is a very low complexity model. It doesn’t realistically represent large-scale atmospheric circulation patterns, such as ocean circulation, etc. 

"While such models can be useful for conceptual inferences, their predictions have to be taken with great skepticism. Far more realistic climate models that do resolve the large-scale dynamics of the ocean, atmosphere and carbon cycle, do NOT produce the dramatic changes these authors argue for based on their very simplified model. 

"It must be taken not just with a grain of salt, but a whole salt-shaker worth of salt," Mann said.

Another is somewhat more nuanced, thinking it's overblown but appreciating the warning.

Another expert, Mark Maslin, a professor of climatology at University College London, also pointed to shortcomings in the model, telling AFP that the study was a "thought experiment." 

"What the study does draw attention to is that reducing global carbon emissions to zero by 2050 is just the start of our actions to deal with climate change," Maslin said.

Personally, I think Mann, while not QUITE as bad as a Katherine Hayhoe has shown herself to be, is a punch-puller. In other words, on a little petard-hoisting, you sometimes have to take HIM with a whole salt-shaker.

The research, even if a "stripped down" model, has some basic findings, contra Mann, that have popped up in some climate scientists' more complex models. (And I know he knows that.) The biggest is the authors' claims that we've gone past certain tipping points. Two of them are Arctic ice melt and permafrost melt.

PLUS, per where the study was first reported within the science world? Even the shibboleth Paris accords agree with one point by the new authors:

Even the more sophisticated models used in the projections of the UN's scientific advisory body, the IPCC, show that the Paris climate pact temperature goals cannot be reached unless massive amounts of CO2 are removed from the atmosphere.

To me, the biggest failures of the new research are on the prescription, not description, side.

Namely, how do we yank that much carbon out of the atmosphere and do it in a ... carbon-neutral way?

Per the link immediately above:

One way to do that is planting billions of trees. Experimental technologies have shown that sucking CO2 out of the air can be done mechanically, but so far not at the scale required.

In other words, the new authors are more honest about our screwing, but not any more helpful about how to try to avoid it.

Katharine Hayhoe and the climate change spin cycle

The Texas Observer recently interviewd Katherine Hayhoe. And? It's "meh" what the climate scientist famous for trying to convince fellow evangelical Christians that even her slightly-squishy level of concern is anything more than socialism has to say.

First of all, IMO, she's a bit squishy about the severity of climate change. I've thought that for several years and tangled with her and others on Twitter, summing that up in this blog post.

Let's not forget, as I said then, that she comes off as a nice polite Obamiac, and considering she's from the Great White North, she's surely a nice polite Canadian. And, she and co-nice polite climate change scientist Bob Kopp fellated the Paris Accord.

IMO, as of right now, we have 50-50 odds of hitting 5C by 2100. And, as I've said repeatedly, the Paris Accord is little more than Jell-O.

Within the interview, she spins, about how Texas is decarbonizing about as fast as any other state, among other things. Untrue. Until the Lege adopts a feed-in tariff system for rooftop solar, this will surely remain untrue. Until Texas joins many Western states with a fixed target for renewable energy, this will remain untrue.

As for Texas' energy resilience? It was less than a decade ago that, because ERCOT is largely disconnected from other portions of the US power grid, that it had to get electricity from Mexico in a severe cold snap.

(Update, April 4, 2022: Hayhoe got away with saying this bullshit because it was before Winter Storm Uri. And, I just Tweeted the Observer asking if they asked her for a "retraction." And yes, that's the word I used; those aren't scare quotes, they're quote marks regular style.

Specifically, she claimed that the Texas electric grid was "resilient." AND, good neoliberal, said that this was because it's independent of the rest of the nation's electric grid.

And 19.2 percent of the power on the [statewide] ERCOT grid last year was wind and solar. This is all happening because of the state’s energy policy, not because of our climate policy. Texas’ independence has actually made it more resilient

Seriously. This is the person that Texas librulz hold up as a Texas exceptionalist exemplar of what Texas could really do on climate change.

She's got the goods, squish level of climate change aside, on what's going to happen to Texas. She's just spinning on how she claims Texas is already adapting.

As for the Observer? Why? Is this one of those pieces where it dives into a defensive version of Texas exceptionalism?

(Update, April 4, 2022: She's also wrong about the role of fear, and emotions in general, in human living. She needs to read some Hume, among other things.)

More neoliberal MSM-blog stupid Trump bashing on international postal rates and Chinese cheap costs

File this one from Talking Points Memo, and the link within TPM from Vox, as with many, under "the neoliberal mainstream media not getting it." Burying the lede about Trump having legitimate beefs with the Universal Postal Union as backdoor vote suppression (TPM) is just stupid. Vox burying the lede on UPU member listing is almost as bad.

I mean, the Paris climate change accord essentially moved China out of "developing nation" to "semi-developed nation status. Why can't the UPU do the same? The analysis of Vox is all wet otherwise, unless Trump expands this to a mail trade war beyond China. And, Jen Kirby, the steno there, does give up the game when she says that "experts tell me ... a better deal ... is the most likely scenario."

If the concern really is about overseas voters, as in TPM, Bill Daniels over at Kuff (where I first saw this) has the easy solution. You bring them to an embassy or consulate, or mail them there, in China or whatever foreign country you the voter live, and they go to America by diplomatic pouch. That, in turn would address states' concerns about mail time stamps, as well.

Otherwise, effect-wise, this isn't that much different from a carbon tariff, which I highly support (and which would require a carbon tax first). And, otherwise, this strikes me overall as more #TheResistance stupidity.

As far as what an agreement would do in the big picture?

Not much. If this makes the made-in-China crap too expensive to be made in China then shipped to the USofA, those jobs won't come here. They'll move to places like Vietnam.

Actually, if we're lucky, and not wishing people out of work, but ...

If we're lucky, some of those jobs will disappear, and more importantly, the made-in-China crap created in those jobs will simply disappear.

Americans don't need this cheap crap. Dollar stores don't need to sell it.

We need to de-capitalize away from some of this stuff.

That's especially true because a lot of this is made with oil-derived plastics. (Not that Trump is thinking about climate change and environmental degradation.)

#ClimateChangeIsReal so get ready to sweat, Texas

Two months ago, the Dallas Morning News ran a story that had some climate scientists predicting Dallas and environs could have 120-degree summer days by 2050.

In other words, take Phoenix now. Add Dallas' summer humidity, which is closer to that of Houston than that of Phoenix. That's Dallas in 25 years, while many readers of the Snooze are still alive.

Alarmist? I don't think so. I'm no James Howard Kunstler, but I am more worried than the the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as well as more worried than Michael Mann and many US climate scientists.

A non-climate scientist who is more worried is an emeritus engineering prof from Cornell, Anthony Ingraffea.

He does know something about fracking, and he expects that will push the world over that 2°C doorstep within 15 years, per DeSmog Blog. That's less than the 25 years for Dallas to become a sweatier version of today's Phoenix.

Specifically, he knows about methane leaked from fracking for both natural gas (methane) and oil.

People who know much at all about climate change know that methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, even if relatively shorter-lived. Over a 100-year period, per the pre-Trump EPA, it's about 30 times more potent. And, governments try to make methane look even that benign by using a 100-year period rather than 20 years, per Scientific American.

And, speaking of leaks, per Wikipedia, let's not forget that HC-134a filling modern air conditioners.

So, no, 120-degree days in Dallas is not an alarmist prediction at all. It's also why I say that people tut-tutting about Trump exiting the Paris climate accord are tut-tutting about something toothless, while they are something clueless.

#ClimateChange news parsing, #ParisAccord BS, scientific punch-pulling

Katharine Hayhoe: more 'frenemy' than
true friend on real climate change action
like a carbon tax, and alarm levels.

Yes, this is one of those blog posts where I pull various ideas of the header together into a seamless whole.

The New York Times' "breathless" story Wednesday about the draft version of the latest installment of the the quadrennial National Climate Assessment is very good — but too breathless; as many media outlets have noted, like the WaPost, it wasn't "private." And, per a comment near the end of that blog, you've got to double-dot every "i" and double-cross every "t" with the current White House.

(Update, Nov. 3: And, the National Climate Assessment's first half, the Climate Science Special Report, has officially been released. And a draft version of the impact assessment is also out.)

So, this technically can't be about climate change censorship. However, per climate scientist Bob Kopp, also quoted at Erik Wemple's blog, the Trump Administration does face an Aug. 18 review deadline.

And, per the scientists who talked to the Old Gray Lady, it is possible that without publicity, it IS possible, Mr. Kopp, Mr. Wemple, et al, that Trump, Scott Pruitt, et al, would indeed have shit-canned, or butchered the hell out of, the version scheduled for release.

Update, Aug. 15: Andrew Revkin, who knows his way around the worlds of both climate change reporting and anti-climate change politics, reports at Pro Publica that this could indeed be the case, and cites the history of previous NCAs under Shrub Bush. In his piece, Revkin mentions Steve Koonin as calling for the "red team, blue team" approach to "critique" the NCA. Per Wiki, Koonin is, at a most charitable interpretation, a climate change minimalist. Per less charitable interpretations, he's a denialist. Add in that his op-ed was in the Wall Street Journal, going as far right as he could while still trying to plump for mainstream credibility.

I also finally got Kopp's attention. And, no, I didn't say you disagreed with a co-author of the report; I said, per Wemple's piece, you arguably were downplaying the suppression risks. That said, I wouldn't have cross-tweeted that co-author, Katharine Hayhoe, off Revkin's piece, today, if I had noticed her Tweets on Wemple's piece last week earlier. Because, she arguably did the same thing that Kopp arguably did.

And, per said Twitter exchange, both Hayhoe and Kopp? Nice, polite, Obamiac type climate scientists, as far as I can tell. Wouldn't surprise me if they've flung around the term "climate change alarmist" before, or at least words kind of like that. Whether or not that's in their particular book, I have decided that, if I ever hear that, not only addressed to myself, but wrongly addressed to others in the future, I'll use the phrase "climate change neoliberal."

(Update: Nov. 3 — per the link up top, Kopp was one of the commenters to the piece, talking about how "strong" it is. Maybe the leak helped, per the next few paragraphs below?)

Gary Yohe says that a Trump shit-canning of the NCA, referenced by him under alternate title of the Climate Science Special Report, would be worse than withdrawal from Paris.

 Hayhoe is a nice, polite Canadian who didn't suspect an underground agenda from eXXXon when it funded some of her graduate study. No wonder she's also gullible about Trump possibly shit-canning the NCA. And, the evangelical Christian misinterprets 1 Corinthians 15 as attempt to justify herself. She also ignores that Paul was even breaking "Noahide laws" that Jews considered to apply to all humanity, as far as meat needing to have the blood drained from it. That was NOT a "kosher law" for Jews only.

And, also, this ignores whatever differences existed between the January draft posted online for public comment and the July draft filed for final administrative review. The July draft is identified as a fifth-order draft, indicating right there it's not the same as the January one. And indeed they're not; the January draft is a third-order one. And Kopp and Hayhoe can choose to tell the general public, if they don't want to wade through the whole thing, what changes have been made.

That said, that's going to get us to other things.

First, Kopp himself is "breathless" in his optimism about how little damage Trump's withdrawal from the Paris Agreement will cause. That's because, in turn, he's breathlessly optimistic about the Paris Accord itself, even though it's ultimately aspirational bullshit, as I've called it before.

And now, as of July 7, 2018, it appears more than ever that Paris, even if as good as Kopp claims, leaves little margin for error. The rapidity of today's temperature changes mean that a climatological homeostasis will take some time to achieve.

So, too, are domestic measures passed by Dear Leader. The tighter EPA mileage regs? Carmakers can pay fines — and will, with cheap gas prices — if they don't meet them. They also have loopholes for flex-fuel vehicles, which will almost never burn E85. In turn, that's actually good, perhaps, because the amount of climate change that would be caused by trying to grow enough corn to actually meet significant E85 use would itself be a problem.

Kopp either does know that, and is pulling his own punches, or he doesn't, and needs to do some more reading himself.

That said, per Counterpunch, the leaked, uncovered, revealed, or pointed-to National Climate Assessment is itself not much above the aspirational bullshit level.

First, it's based on the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's 2014 report, which itself is a matter of issue, and now we're going to get to the third part of the header.

The IPCC's reports in general are known for taking conservative stances on how much of a concern the present course of climate change is. (Cue Michael Mann and others worried about "alarmism.")

Second, per Counterpunch, that 2014 IPCC report has been overtaken by some events. More permafrost craters in Siberia, not only, surely, releasing carbon dioxide but possibly leaking methane too, which may indeed be causing some of the craters. Loss of another section of the Larsen Ice Shelf in Antarctica.

The only real answer is the one I said even before Paul Krugman did — carbon tax plus carbon tariff. And, no, Bob Kopp, neither the EU nor China is "taking the lead" on climate change until one or the other of them pushes this through if the US won't.

Oh, and claims that China has peaked in carbon emissions? Well, if President Xi Jinping plumps for more and more of a consumer sector economy, that means more polluting cars (if not electric), more polluting airline flights (no way to electrify), more Chinese consumer plastics, etc.

#ParisAccord is little more than high-aspiration #climatechange Jell-O (updates)

Glaciers in Glacier National Park were already shrinking from climate change
a decade ago, as shown above. The Paris Accord that President Trump has
left had no teeth in it to force the world to start cutting carbon emissions.

I had blogged earlier this week warning that Jell-O was likely all we would get out of the Paris climate talks.

And we know the details, per the Washington Post. Per that link, the Guardian, and what I heard on NPR this afternoon, there's no enforcement of anything that is enforcement-worthy.

Update, June 1, 2017: If you're a tribalist Democrat just looking to hit Trump over the head, and don't believe me that nothing in the agreement is enforceable? It's true. Oh, the whole accord is just 25 pages. Or the back dozen of the 31 that included the agreement to implement the actual deal. (Different sizes depend on different fonts, etc. on different documents.) Have you actually read it? Have you seen that many countries signed with caveats? Have you seen that Nicaragua didn't sign it precisely because it was unenforceable aspirational bullshit that actually did nothing? And, Obama's "green fund"? Neoliberal, aspirational, focused more on mitigation than prevention.

Sadder yet? This tweet, from someone who should know better:

Trump's withdrawal from #ParisAgreement would condemn us to #climate catastrophe. We need a #GreenNewDeal instead! https://t.co/Tp5UpjEvki

— Dr. Jill Stein🌻 (@DrJillStein) May 31, 2017

Stein knows that it will in no way "condemn us to climate catastrophe. Or she should. If she actually doesn't know that, she has no business representing the Green Party in any way. That said, since Stein is an AccommoGreen on many issues, the Green equivalent of a ConservaDem, I'm sure she does know better.

Yes, governments are required to craft action plans, and update them every five years. Yes, there's an international body that's supposed to oversee these plans.

And? What powers does that body have? Erm, none?

The Post:

The agreement binds together pledges by individual nations to cut or limit emissions from fossil-fuel burning, within a framework of rules that provide for monitoring and verification as well as financial and technical assistance for developing countries.

See the word "enforcement" in there, as part of, or after, "monitoring and verification"? Nope, me neither. 

Per the Post's header, "historic" Jell-O is still Jell-O at the end.

Further down, the Post says:

The accord is the first to call on all nations—rich and poor—to take action to limit emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, with additional reviews required every five years to encourage even deeper pollution cuts.

See any "enforcement" after "call on"? The only "historic" is developing as well as developed nations are involved. A wider-spread Jell-O is still Jell-O in the end.

The Guardian:

(N)egotiators from nearly 200 countries signed on to a legal agreement on Saturday evening that set ambitious goals to limit temperature rises and to hold governments to account for reaching those targets.

“Goals,” again, doesn’t have the word “enforcement” behind it.

The Post then salutes Dear Leader:

The agreement is a major diplomatic achievement for the Obama administration, which has made climate change a signature issue in the face of determined opposition from congressional Republicans

Well, sure, it's a victory.

First, NPR says his stance is this is not a treaty, but rather comes under the umbrella of implementing the Rio 1992 treaty. (Penumbras of Justice William O. Douglas, even?)

Second, the "voluntary" is also what he wanted in general.

Per Time, before the deal was finalized, other than the issue of carbon emissions transparency, Dear Leader's team wanted as much of the accord to be voluntary as possible.

The Guardian, on that:

The US president, Barack Obama, hailed the agreement as “a tribute to strong, principled American leadership” and a vital step in ensuring the future of the planet.

I guess “strong, principled” is spelled “J-e-l-l-O.”

As for environmental groups? The neolib, plugged-in and connected ones like it; the real ones don’t.

First, a politically connected enviro group:

“This is a pivotal moment where nations stepped across political fault lines to collectively face down climate change,” said Lou Leonard, vice president of climate change for the World Wildlife Fund. “For decades, we have heard that large developing nations don’t care about climate change and aren’t acting fast enough. The climate talks in Paris showed us that this false narrative now belongs in the dustbin of history.”

And now, a realistic one:

“The United States has hindered ambition,” said Erich Pica, president of the U.S. chapter of Friends of the Earth, an environmental group. “The result is an agreement that could see low-lying islands and coastlines swallowed up by the sea, and many African lands ravaged by drought.”

True, the summit did express an ambition even higher than the goals of stopping climate change at 2C of higher temperature versus the pre-industrial age. (Don’t forget that we’ve already done a full degree of that.)

But, there were tradeoffs for that “ambition” of 1.5C:

“The idea of even discussing loss and damage now or in the future was off limits. The Americans told us it would kill the COP,” said Leisha Beardmore, the chief negotiator for the Seychelles. “They have always been telling us: ‘Don’t even say that’.”

More "strong, principled leadership."

Another group, Sierra Club spinoff Earthjustice, for whom another Texas Progressives member works, has gone political enough to try to split the difference.

From its President Trip Van Noppen:

Today marks a new era in global cooperation on climate change.

But:

Despite the agreement’s laudable goals, the combined climate action pledges submitted by 186 nations would still leave the world on a path to over 3° global average temperature rise by the end of the century.

Yet, it too uses “historic” in its header. I'll give it two-thirds of a kudo.

Guardian environment columnist George Monbiot got it right:

By comparison to what it could have been, it’s a miracle. By comparison to what it should have been, it’s a disaster.

He continues:

In fairness, the failure does not belong to the Paris talks, but to the whole process. A maximum of 1.5C, now an aspirational and unlikely target, was eminently achievable when the first UN climate change conference took place in Berlin in 1995. Two decades of procrastination, caused by lobbying – overt, covert and often downright sinister – by the fossil fuel lobby, coupled with the reluctance of governments to explain to their electorates that short-term thinking has long-term costs, ensure that the window of opportunity is now three-quarters shut. The talks in Paris are the best there have ever been. And that is a terrible indictment.

James Hansen is harsher yet:

“It’s a fraud really, a fake,” he says, rubbing his head. “It’s just bullshit for them to say: ‘We’ll have a 2C warming target and then try to do a little better every five years.’ It’s just worthless words. There is no action, just promises. As long as fossil fuels appear to be the cheapest fuels out there, they will be continued [sic] to be burned.”

Can’t put it more bluntly than that, especially since he’s using my word “bullshit.”

Hansen’s harshness includes Dear Leader:

“We all foolishly had such high hopes for Obama, to articulate things, to be like Roosevelt and have fireside chats to explain to the public why we need to have a rising fee on carbon in order to move to clean energy,” he says. “But he’s not particularly good at that. He didn’t make it a priority and now it’s too late for him.”

Well, I didn’t have such hopes for him, and thus voted for Cynthia McKinney in 2008 for the same reasons I’ll vote for Jill Stein or whomever the Greens nominate in 2016. That’s definitely true if Hillary Clinton is the Democratic nominee, and 98 percent if Bernie Sanders is.

Setting aside the issue of any naivete over China, scientists agree with Hansen, Monbiot and myself. Mark Hertsgaard notes the deal doesn't even include the phrase "fossil fuels." The initial text was weaker than Copenhagen's final text, and even the final text is perceived as kicking the can down the road, and scientists warn that's simply not acceptable.

That said, at least the Paris deal did expose bullshit out of Beijing, bullshit that I called out a year ago when the U.S. and China supposedly came to what was also called a "historic" deal.

(Another note to the gullible: "Historic" ≠ "significant.")

The exposed bullshit was that China was quite resistant toward the five year plans for emissions reductions. Setting aside the hypocrisy and irony of nominal Communists opposing five-year plans, we found out the Chinese have already been cheating bastards on announced carbon emissions in the past.

Of course, India exposed its own bullshit before the deal was finalized.

Sadly, despite China’s own bullshit on climate change being brought to light just a month ago (see below), Hansen is kind of naïve about Beijing and it allegedly taking leadership on this issue, IMO.

Louis XV said, reportedly,  “Après moi le deluge,” based on his mistress, Madame Pompadour, originally saying “Après nous le deluge.”

I guess we need to start saying “Après nous l’enfer.”

Plus, even if it’s not considered a new treaty, good luck getting money for it, Dear Leader. Congressional wingnuts have already vowed to block any new spending; I presume that would include the developing world mitigation aid.

So, don't pour warm, pre-congealed Jell-O on my leg and tell me it's raining.

That includes you, neoliberal Obama fellators like Jon Chait, who has fellated Obama on this issue now, too.

Call me back when either the US, or the EU as a group, passes a carbon tax plus a carbon tariff to force the whole world to financially play along on actually taking action.

We need action both deep and broad at the same time. A carbon tax and tariff is a large part of that, but ultimately, per Jacobin, we need to reframe the entire issue, and "wrong foot" modern capitalism.

And, as of July 2018, it appears more than ever that Paris leaves little margin for error. The rapidity of today's temperature changes mean that a climatological homeostasis will take some time to achieve.

Ken Salazar and Hillary Clinton's #fail on #climatechange, #fracking, #DeepwaterHorizon

Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton announced earlier this week that, if she were elected, former Colorado senator Ken Salazar, President Obama's first Secretary of the Interior, would serve as leader of her transition team.

That would be the Kenny Boy Salazar:
• Who lied about issues related to the Deepwater Horizon blowout;
• Who was a non-transparent part of the (not) "most transparent administration in history;
• Who "cheerled" for federal coal sales;
• Who lied about what the Endangered Species Act covers;
• Who threatened to sue, as a private individual, to block ESA enforcement;
• Who refused to clean house at Interior; and
• Whose brother was once in bed with the Koch Bros.

So, anti-frackers are right to complain, but Salazar's anti-environmentalism runs a lot deeper than anti-fracking.

Well, for all the Democrats, and the David Brock machine, who smear Jill Stein as being anti-science, along with a Green deserter like Dan Arel for a far more minuscule Socialist party in a fractured Socialist landscape who does the same, this proves who is really anti-science.

I've long said the Paris accord of this spring, with zero enforcement mechanisms, is aspirational bullshit. This just underscores that.

Democrats don't truly take climate change seriously, and Hillary Clinton is going in reverse.