Flooding of US Coast, Caused by Global Warming, Has Begun
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
USGS: "More than half caused by land subsidence"
"Land subsidence causes more than half the relative sea level rise in Norfolk, largely explained by groundwater extraction." http://pubs.usgs.gov/circ/1392/pdf/circ1392.pdf
The article at least mentions the subsidence issue by saying it will be "worse than average" in areas where the land is "sinking at a brisk clip", but gives a distorted view of the relative contribution.
As usual, nothing about prevention.
Global temperatures and the sea level are rising because of human behavior. If we want different results, we have to behave differently. Engineers and scientists know engineering and science but not so much leading people to change their behavior.
It's easy to blame others: "Listen to me! If you don't you'll be sorry!" isn't effective. Also, what fraction of engineers and scientists have, say, flown in a plane or something similarly polluting in the past twelve months?
If you want to change behavior, you need to learn and practice leadership skills and apply them to yourself as well as others. The science is clear. More is nice and I agree we should keep pursuing it, but the best way to decrease the effects of global warming is to change our behavior. (This is why I moved from science to leadership.)
This article's writing about flood-proof architecture and other rearranging-deck-chairs-on-the-Titanic behavior is necessary since it's too late to stop a lot of change, but it's not too late to stop the change that we -- you and I -- are contributing to now. As much as I wish past generations had changed their behaviors so we wouldn't see these problems today, future generations will wish we had changed our behavior today. Even if you don't have kids or grandkids, I would think caring about human society in general and empathy and compassion for future generations would be enough to focus on changing our behavior proactively, not just reactively fixing problems others bequeathed to us.
Laws are the only drivers of change so massive. We're fighting over oil pipelines to pump more oil for use, not which green energy gets tax breaks. And even with outrageous prices caused by taxes meant to make dangerous activity prohibitive, people still smoke.
Cash-for-clunkers-for-EV? "Infrastructure spending" in EV charging nationwide? Federally supported replacement of coal fired power plants?
People aren't going to change behavior at all because of flooding except for maybe those people under water. But they'll just move.
People born today will have to face the environmental change that past generations heard would happen but they knew they'd die before the worst of it. As an increasing percent of the population cares, and can see the change, we'll see change anyway, maybe people will see SUVs and flying all the time like smoking.
I don't know politics, so I don't know how easy legislative change would be, but reducing subsidies to polluting industries would help. We spend billions on meat, dairy, and the corn to sustain it that pollute a lot. Also, accounting for externalities of pollution that private firms cause but the public has to deal with.
Personally, I'm more interested in helping change public views, seeing how it changed so much with smoking.
Yes, people need to believe that the effects of climate change will affect their lives. Laws do follow social change, in that laws that go against entrenched special interests cannot be passed unless failing to pass them becomes entirely unacceptable to a significant majority of the voting population.
But you are tilting at windmills if you think that convincing people to change their behaviors unilaterally is going to make any difference in climate change. Let's say I'm one of those people who gets on a plane every week to meet with clients. I'm not going to stop doing that because I feel an ethical obligation to prevent climate change; if I did stop, I would just be giving up that business to my competition who doesn't have any of my ethical compunctions.
You are also asking too much from ordinary people if you expect them to modify their personal consumption decisions. Maybe you can get people (in the first world) to stop eating so many hamburgers because beef production is so carbon intensive. Maybe you can get people (again, in the first world) to drive hybrid cars. But how many people are you going to convince of the overriding ethics of your position such that they will act against their own self interest (economic, cultural, social, familial)? Not enough to do what is necessary. And even those people who accept and follow these ethics are not going to have the detailed information required to make environmentally-friendly decisions throughout their lives. It's the same problem experienced with command economies: without a reliable price signal to base purchasing decisions on, counter-productive decisions (decisions that result in more carbon pollution instead of less) will be common.
The only behavioral solution to climate change is a universal carbon tax (which would of course supersede any current carbon subsidies that would need to be repealed). Only a carbon tax will allow corporations to reduce their carbon footprint without worrying about giving ground to their competition. Only a carbon tax will cause ordinary consumers to change their behavior without expecting them to completely re-vamp their ideologies and value systems. And a carbon tax can only be implemented politically.
You site smoking as an example of how focusing on changing public views can be effective. Look at the history, though. Although there had been a gradual long-term decline in adult smoking, student smoking had been climbing significantly in the US until 1998 [0], when a settlement between the tobacco companies and 46 state governments forced the tobacco companies to basically abandon the US market [1]. This demonstrates both that the demand for smoking was being propped up by corporate propaganda, and that only activism with an agenda focused on a specific litigation strategy was ever going to be effective at fighting it.
The other great example is the civil rights movement in the US. Did Martin Luther King set out to end racism in the United States? No, social change at that level would have been laughable. Civil rights leaders had very specific legislative and judicial objectives: to end state tolerance of segregation, guarantee universal suffrage, end ensure de facto equal treatment of blacks under the law. All of the activism, outreach, protest, and public-relations efforts were orchestrated and timed to maximize their effect on those specific outcomes. Broad changes in public attitudes towards race have distantly lagged the legislative and litigative successes of the civil rights movements; I believe that it was changes in the law that created the space required for attitudes to change.
Leadership is essential, but the kind of leadership we need is leadership that organizes people around narrow, actionable, and feasible legislative and judicial objectives. You are right to identify "reducing subsidies to polluting industries" as a worthwhile political objective, as well as "accounting for externalities of pollution". If you count yourself a leader fighting climate change, though, these policies cannot just be something that other people worry about. They need to be the specific and central focus of your entire effort.
[0] http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/tables/trends/cig...
[1] http://publichealthlawcenter.org/topics/tobacco-control/toba...
Of course, as much sense as it would make, raising the tax on gasoline is politically impossible. As is imposing a tax on miles driven.
The problem with making things directly visible to consumers is that everyone is a consumer and if the laws are annoying or harmful to them, they will vote in a government that repeals the laws. Then your carbon reduction measures are gone.
Especially a transportation-based tax. Right now, the major US cities are having an affordability crisis. Bad decisions have led to a housing shortage, and many residents (NIMBY, really) are convinced that these are correct decisions, that people who can’t afford it should just move out. So, we have people living in Stockton who commute to San Francisco for work, because they can’t afford to live in San Francisco.
A tax per mile is a regressive tax on the poor people who don’t live in walking distance of their workplace.
I have deep passions for teaching leadership and for reducing pollution. Professionally, I have decided to focus on teaching leadership for now so I write a lot less on pollution, though I continue to refine my personal behavior, for example http://joshuaspodek.com/wasting-waste and http://joshuaspodek.com/living-with-integrity-means-consider... and links within.
I live in a region of the Middle East that is more part of the problem than the solution I recycle, because we are in a city upon a hill type project, but others laugh at me and see it as pointless. I drive, sadly, but try to minimize it and do multiple errands in one circuit of a trip. Public transportation here is almost non-existent, and the average temp in the summer is over 40 degrees Celsius (no, not a typo). Local political activism is virtually non-existent, and dissenting opinion is punished. There is no local awareness, especially outside our project campus, or support for environmentally friendly policy. The government says otherwise, but minimal top-down politics changes nothing for anyone beyond the narrative.
What is the plan for people like me in regions like this? I see I live in the world majority of developing local economy, global indifference. "You Westerners had your Industrial Revolution, now it's our turn" is hard to counter as the world regime in talks and accords seems to passively prove this true.
Yes, I'd rather think that's by design.
The climatologists and scientists who have spent decades warning people of the dangers, constantly, spending their lives wandering the corners of the earth collecting evidence, getting ignored and ostracized by private industry, by backwards-looking governments at local, state, and federal levels, who have to deal with the public mocking of their life's work with drive-by "snow this winter? how about that global warming" op-ed cartoons; their job is to also perform the legislative and urban-planning-related feats to stop it all?
Do you think that's a reasonable spread of responsibility?
The kind of action you're describing is inevitable IMO. Humans may have to go on mass strike until we get the correct Government action on climate change.
Sadly, strikes might not even be required/optional soon due to impacted health from rising temperatures, air pollution and difficulty commuting.
I'm currently living in Amsterdam now, it's Autumn and it's as hot as Sydney in summer, 30+ C. Bridges are getting stuck and stopping trams which then need to be hosed down with cool water constantly to keep them from ceasing up etc, little things like this along will have a major impact on everyone's pockets and forget getting a good nights sleep in an apartment which is designed for temperatures no higher than 24C. Goodbye productivity.
In the middle of heatwaves in Sydney (reaching 40+ celsius), I've watched people struggling on trains that are delayed due to issues with infrastructure, robbed of proper sleep from the extreme temperatures, heading off to participate in jobs, supporting industries which are clearly the cause of our sleepless nights (major banks, energy resource companies etc).
I often would think to myself, why bother? If the end goal is such devastating destruction and suffering? Why not stop and get out priorities straight before getting back to work? Economies are great, jobs are awesome, fossil fuels and deforestation isn't and they're no longer required to run a model civilization and healthy economy.
http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v4/n3/full/nclimate21...
Here is a non-blocked article on the topic:
http://www.climatecentral.org/news/climate-change-is-increas...
IMHO, the biggest problems will be the changes in sea level and precipitation pattern though, and atmospheric and ocean circulation/currents. It's definitely not just a few degrees C.
Edit: cliche, but history has such examples. The military is becoming more aligned with the needs of economically lower classes, while the political, corporate elites and their intelligence orgs align with their own interests of profit, money and the ruling class. One such example was ex military personnel targetting the "elites system of oppression" by force, where the prison systems make them billions/year with labour costing pennies on the dollar.
The fall of the Roman Republic is one such historical occurrence where the military became more aligned with the common citizen than their own republic government.
It resembles more a corrupt banana state than a hope for equality...
Really? Some references would be good.
Passenger planes are much more fuel efficient per passenger-mile than single-occupancy cars. Most people drive far more miles alone each year than they travel by plane. It makes no sense to me to criticize someone for flying a couple thousand miles at ~100MPG when the average American drives 12,000 miles per year at ~25MPG.
Beyond that, I don't see how refraining from individually polluting activities will help to enact the laws and treaties we need to make a real difference. It's a collective action problem, and those aren't solved by having individuals with strong beliefs alter their own habits to match what they want, they're solved by having individuals with strong beliefs convince everybody to change their habits.
With millions to be saved, I'm sure airlines do a decent job of working out the most efficient combination of large direct flights and smaller commuter planes. I don't think a 3/4 empty 767 to Fargo is the way to go.
If you want to take it to an extreme, imagine if the post office only delivered your mail point-to-point in the interest of efficiency.
It shows the transportation networks that arise if you assume that the link between two points gets better as more traffic uses it. It has different curves for the improvement which produce different patterns. Many of them produce the familiar hub-and-spoke model, all without any such notion in the underlying code.
For tens to hundreds of thousands of years, humans found ways to be happy where they were. Today people fly across the country to go to a party. Or to see the Great Barrier Reef before it disappears, due to pollution.
Yet they don't know their neighbors.
My goal is to help people improve their lives living less wasteful lives, not deprive themselves. It takes changing mental models, which is a big part of what leaders do.
Maybe it's not worth enough considering the damage done to the climate, but the only way to get people in general to care is to bake that cost into the price they pay. Telling them that going to Delaware is as good as going to Australia will just make them think you're a nut.
Going without electricity and central heating would be huge, but reducing your electricity consumption and turning your thermostat down a couple of degrees is a pretty small sacrifice, and can easily save more CO2 than a typical person's airline travel.
And yes, there are plenty of people advocating for conservation in every imaginable area. But it seems like air travel is the first and often only target for complaints of hypocrisy. I haven't seen anyone say, "How many people advocating for action on climate change eat beef, or had fruit from another continent for breakfast?"
Where did you get this idea from? Flying being more efficient than rolling doesn't fit with what little physics I know.
Do you have a better source than:
http://adl.stanford.edu/aa260/Lecture_Notes_files/transport_...
I would be genuinely interested if you have other references to transport fuel efficiency.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_economy_in_aircraft
Typical values are 70+ PMPG, and 100+ isn't uncommon. (I just made up the PMPG acronym, so don't go trying to search with it.) The most efficient gasoline car you can buy today will do about 56MPG.
Flying isn't more efficient than rolling, but big is more efficient than small, and high is more efficient than low. Cars and airliners are massively different in ways beyond just rolling versus flying. Note that small aircraft definitely do not have this efficiency advantage. A 737 gets to carry 180 or so people at a time and travel at 35,000 feet, and that's a big win over a car carrying one person near sea level. Busses and trains win big over airliners, because they get the same scaling advantages without the disadvantage of having to use aerodynamic lift.
Individual behavior changes aren't going to fix this problem. Nothing will. It's a forest fire that will just run its course.
The rate of new global carbon emissions is increasing. This is despite any efforts to be greener or more renewable by individuals or institutions.
Why? Because there's demand for fossil fuels, it's legal to produce it.
How will changing individual behaviour in the west reduce global emissions or even slow their rate of growth? (Am assuming you're western)
I'm being a bit too pessimistic of course. If individuals in the west create demand for technologies that work better than fossil fuels, then we could reduce global emissions. So behavioural changes could help with that.
But as long as carbon benefits some places that need energy, it will be used. That's at least what we've seen over the past 30 years the world has focussed on reducing annual carbon emissions. They've increased instead.
What efforts? Big part of emission reducing by west is simply moving production to devleoping countries.
Interesting. I do recall that in 2012, North Carolina's House Bill 819 prohibited the state's Coastal Resources Commission from calculating sea-level changes using recent data.
But here is the underlying problem, despite us knowing how bad things are, (97+% of scientists who study this field agree we are causing the planet's climate to shift away from the temperate climate we thrived in) not enough is being done at present to truly solve the problem. What really is disheartening and what no one in the media and government is talking about is how in 2015 CO2 levels rose by the largest amount in human recorded history. 3.05 PPM http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/gr.html
We are being lied to, often mislead by our governments that uniform actions are being performed to save the planet for the future of man. Vested interests in the fossil fuel industry continue to drive climate change. Yes, solar and wind energy are starting to become incredibly efficient and cheap but not enough of it is coming online in proportion to fossil fuel burning that persists and is also installed annually. If we do not rally against it, our ability to live on this planet is at stake. The lives of our posterity are also at risk because of the burning. Even if you chose not to have kids, it still makes our work and lives meaningless if our species and other species on this planet go extinct because we allow dumping in our atmosphere to go on unfettered. It will not be until we take extreme actions not on a country level but as humanity together that we will slow the burning and save ourselves.
What are these actions you might ask that will actually be effective? These can range from banning fossil fuels entirely, global carbon pricing system, banning deforestation, changing human diets, extreme uniform investment in renewable energy and potentially fourth generation nuclear reactors, more funding for developing nations to install alternative energy sources, and to shift the transportation grid towards sustainability.
I wonder why on earth more wealthy Governments don't send in the "defense forces" to help stop this illegal activity, instead of going to Syria, it's such a no brainier. Countries like Brazil and Indonesia shouldn't be required to protect everything on their own, nor should activists, murders of activists are a reality because they're just getting in the way of business.
It would also be easy and relatively cheap to start replanting and re-generating damage forests, I know it won't bounce back immediately, but it does regenerate eventually if assisted (apparently).
For those that are unaware, palm oil is in pretty much in all packaged foods sold in super markets, often hidden as vegetable oil, the WWF has information about identifying products that use it http://www.worldwildlife.org/pages/which-everyday-products-c...
After the destruction I saw, if one wants to continue living and has any loved ones, I would cross it off your shopping list now, along with any imported animal products.
Also, be highly skeptical about any "certified products", having spent time in Indonesia and seeing corruption first hand, I doubt such things truly exist, better to just get off the palm for good.
Pardon me, but why the hell do you think that sending in the military, especially foreign military, would effect any changes on the ground? The problem is corruption, a purely political problem, and as the Iraqi surge very well demonstrated, a military solution cannot solve a political problem.
If there is any serious corruption happening, it's in the west, imagine freely being allowed to sell products that contain palm oil with no penalty's or taxes attached. People in these countries are poor and desperate, they have more of a reason for behaving that way, McDonalds et al doesn't.
I also never suggested sending in the cavalry or a repeat of shock and awe, I'm suggesting policing in co-operation with government of said countries to help protect a vital asset to not only humans but all species. Imagine using satellites to help quickly identify fires for example?
When large parts of priceless Indonesian rain forest were burning to the ground, and still are, there was very little international discussion and assistance with:
- Raising awareness, I doubt major western corporations wanted people to know about it.
- Putting the fire out.
- Stopping additional fires being started.
- Regeneration and repair.
Considering people starting fires aren't exactly friendly / educated people, maybe military assisted protection of the forest is better than innocent people just doing there best, I never suggested a war, I'm suggesting a peace keeping / guarding force.
Probably the best idea is to start thinking about risky geoengineering remediation techniques.
If U.S. does nothing, then each individual EU country and Japan and Canada will all be individually too small to do it. EU won't take orders from non-NATO countries. And EU can't risk it's credibility on something that expensive that's not backed by USA. It would fuel exit-populist propaganda too much. Meanwhile USA is not breaking apart in similar fashion.
Looking from a Nordic country, this is the only reason why electing Trump would be a sad mistake. Otherwise Trump is just funny.
All humanity needs to do is spend about $200 billion per year on mining and crushing olivine rocks and spreading it in the ocean. https://eclipsenow.wordpress.com/olivine/
In general, most methods that try to manipulate the planet's radiation budget (eg giant sunscreen in space, white paint, SO2 in the stratosphere) are either prohibitively expensive and risky or require constant upkeep, allowing a full-blown catastrophe to happen should any short- to medium-term problem occur with the upkeep. At least those could be reversed if needed though.
The methods that try to remove carbon are a safer bet, but safely storing CO2 is hard and might not be safe (volcanic lakes have killed thousands by releasing CO2), especially longterm. And storing it in different form such as coal.. well, it's kind of pointless to first burn the coal just to remake it, especially from an energy and thus financial point of view. Storing it in the ocean's biomatter is again risky as we don't have a proper picture of what might happen.
IMHO, the risky geoengineering techniques should be tried on Venus for a few millenia+, before we need them to stabilize the climate against natural variations (an ice age would majorly suck as well, probably far more that global warming. Even if the timescale is different.)
( http://www.iup.uni-heidelberg.de/institut/studium/lehre/Clim... for material on this)
http://curry.eas.gatech.edu/Courses/6140/ency/Chapter10/Ency...
There's probably not much chance of saving florida.
Is the wellwater seepage the biggest problem? Guessing the other things in the list could be fixed with lots of money and infrastructure.
So far, I've heard they have 100 years to sort it out. The "engineers" will find a "solution". They'll build dikes like the dutch (never mind the dutch took 300 years). My favourite is "we'll build houses on stilts".