Global Climate Report – September 2021
ncdc.noaa.gov
ncdc.noaa.gov
> "This graphic compares the year-to-date temperature anomalies for 2021 (black line) to what were ultimately the ten warmest years on record: 2016 (1st), 2020 (2nd), 2019 (3rd), 2015 (4th), 2017 (5th), 2018 (6th), 2014 (7th), 2010 (8th), 2013 (9th), and 2005 (10th)."
Now, consider the lag effect on climate response and atmospheric forcing (i.e. the ocean absorbs a fair amount of the extra heat, but as the ocean warms, that heat gets injected back into the atmosphere, especially polewards, so there's a lag time before current atmospheric forcings are full realized, and that's a multidecade effect, so we won't feel today's forcing completely for decades, even a century).
Conclusion as I see it: every year for the next 50 years is going to be bracketed in the top ten hottest years, meaning the years 2030-2040 will all be hotter than 2010-2020 and so on. Decade by decade for the rest of the lives of people alive today, this will continue - and while getting off fossil fuels is needed, is indeed the only way to slow this trend, it's only going to slow down the year-to-year increase.
Additionally, as polar melt proceeds, permafrost melt and outgassing becomes self-sustaining even if humans completely stop fossil fuel use and deforestation.
Practically, this means adaptation is simply a must. People have to move out of flood plains, waste treatment plants in low-lying coastal zones needed to be moved uphill, people need to realize the global refugee crisis is going to be 10X as bad as anything seen yet at least, perhaps a steady rate of 1,000,000 per year fleeing climate disaster zones.
In reality we are heading back to climate conditions last seen ~3-5 million years ago, before the ice ages set in, with sea levels dozens of meters higher than they are now. Nobody likes to hear this it seems, but the science does seem to be saying that this has already happened, sort of.
I don't know how much hope we have to actually see major advances in these areas, but given what we all expect of how much pressure we will be in collectively I can imagine a lot more money being thrown at is as people get desperate.
Look how well the world did with covid-19. Low income countries are still desperately short of vaccines, which means that covid is going to be endemic from now on.
Or look how well the world coped when there were commodity food price spikes in 2005-2008, and 2010-2011. Countries banned exports, rather than co-operating.
We're going to have more of those (food price spikes), btw.
Something that has been vanishingly low probability (once per 5_000 years, say), until now, is simultaneous harvest failure by say 10% or more in two or more of the four "bread-basket" (grain) regions of the world.
Simulations suggest that probability will rise over the course of the century to about 50% per decade starting in the '40s.[1] I hope we're planning for it.
1. Daniel Quiggin, Kris De Meyer, Lucy Hubble-Rose and Anthony Froggatt, Climate change risk assessment 2021, Royal Institute of International Affairs, Chatham House Environment and Society Programme Research Paper 2021. ISBN 978-1-78413-491-4.
But isn't the point moot, since all climate change solutions suffer from the same effect?
If people are already buying something, like electricity or cars, then buying clean substitutes that are cheaper and better than older dirty products doesn't suffer from free rider effect.
Each person makes their own decision and gets more value with the clean option if it is better than the old product at what it does. The clean option takes over automatically thanks to individuals each looking out for themselves.
I used Musk's name as a short-hand for this approach targeting individual self interest because he has a very high profile in cleaner transport in the US. I did not mean to imply that Musk will somehow make CCS a desirable thing for individuals to buy. That's not possible.
Sucking carbon out of the atmosphere is not something that people get individual value from, or have been willing to pay for to date. So left to themselves, no-one would pay for it. That's why it needs co-ordinated action. Which we're not good at.
Yes, we can't reach climate goals without CCS. But it's going to be hard to scale up to approximately the same size as the global oil and gas industry.
Among other things he talks about is the possibility of unilateral geoengineering by some of the nations that will be feeling the effects sooner and more, uh, compellingly than others:
> I talked–actually, the head of the Bangladesh Institute of Strategic Studies about this (you didn’t even know that existed, did you?). Well, there is one, it’s quite serious–run by a General, bright guy. I said, “have you heard about geoengineering?” and he smiled–seraphically–and he said, “Mmm. Yes. Your question?”
> And I asked the question, “Do you think that this is something the Bangladesh government might want to do a little bit, before, let’s say, the US government or the Chinese government?”
> He said, “yes it has crossed our minds.”–and then he stopped talking.
It is not just about temperature, or sea level, is a system where we thrived while it was stable enough, going to a long period of chaos. Agriculture and food production in general, infrastructure, travel and more will be increasingly disrupted.
Passive adaptation may not be the way out, just letting the water to boil up till the frog is cooked, or risk ending things faster with the some of the surprises that climatologist are getting year to year. Stopping or compensating emissions, and aggressive/extensive carbon capture may be a way out. Going into silos much like what happened in Wool may be another (where a lot of things can go wrong, anyway).
Last thing we need is a new administration in 2024 completely undoing all the progress we’re making again.
There is still a lot of losses and a lot of inaction. I don’t know if humanity will have a peaceful time mid or late century, but I don’t think the situation is as dire as it used to be.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/environment...
I’m paying for this. And so are you. And we should expect nothing but excellence. It’s harsh but this is what I feel.
It seems like a pretty thankless job, and I would by no means want to do it.
For an example relevant to here, consider how movies depict operating a computer and how that relates to one's own lived experiences.
Our governments are deeply disincentivized to cleanup these inefficiencies because it means higher unemployment.
This is one of the reasons I'm a strong supporting of an actual UBI + universal healthcare. If people's lives aren't destroyed and driven to death by poverty if they don't have a job, then there won't be as much moral and political hazard to eliminating bullshit jobs in favor a system that works better for all of us.
I disagree entirely. The practical and moral reason why it's difficult to fire workers is because it generally results in the worker losing his income and healthcare, leading to personal and familial hardship. If healthcare were de-coupled from employment, then the hardship experienced by a fired worker is reduced. If some amount of income is de-coupled from employment, then the hardship experienced by a fired worker is further reduced (unemployment insurance works fine enough as a temporary band-aid, but it's not the real deal).
If we can get enough social infrastructure in place so that fired workers experience minimal hardship, then it becomes morally acceptable to make our government and companies more efficient, by laying off inefficient or unnecessary workers. Society then gets to equitably reap the rewards of this increased efficiency.
Yet I also have bills to pay and kids to feed, so they languish. This would help.
If we make sure everyone's basic economic needs are met, then maybe they'll surprise you and find a job or social niche where they legitimately are useful and valued. But if you're economically imprisoned to your current job, then you won't have the time or freedom to explore.
Also, unemployment insurance and welfare as they are now are fundamentally different from UBI. The nature of these programs is "stay unemployed or economically useless, or else you lose the benefit" and it actively disincentivizes people from trying to contribute to society.
And it's pathologically toxic that we as a society believe the only valid way to meet those emotional needs is by providing value to a company in exchange for the means to survive.
https://www.iea.org/fuels-and-technologies/coal
Of course we’ve known this for decades. Google even took a crack at it in 2007:
https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2007/11/google-hopes-t...
> The National Smart Water Grid{trademark} will pay for itself in a single major flood event.
Weather patterns will likely change dramatically and violently. We cannot relocate our farmland fast enough. We need a system capable of absorbing extreme precipitation and reclaiming it for food.
This isn't about stealing water from the Great Lakes(that's a common worry). Yes, pumping water takes energy, but it also provides an infrastructure for gravitational storage of solar energy for night time use.
We need to think big, and we need to think fast.
We in the first world need to radically reduce our consumption and reassess our relationship with this planet, and we need to do it now.
Good luck - hope you find a good community.
Also; many have argued cities are more efficient than the alternative: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/environmental-advantages-citi...
Not that I disagree with your sentiment, but 8 billion people going back to a primitive way of life doesn't seem like a sustainable option either. Nice that you have the privilege to do it, though. Ironically, we are in need affordable housing where the city jobs are. That way we aren't forcing low paid workers to commute 1+ hours each way each day to put food on their families table. Here's the ironic part: depending on where you live, selling your city house in the current market only makes that problem worse!
This is such a common attitude in the US, but it's also a very US attitude. I mean, when I lived in Italy, there were just always other people around. High mountains, small towns, walk in the countryside... you're quite likely to see someone anywhere you go. So you just deal with it.
These things are personal preferences, so difficult to reason about, but I feel that a lot of people in the US would be happier if they didn't have this hangup about "other people", while participating in a society that is entirely and completely dependent on other people.
I feel like it's not tenable to maintain this attitude of "it's only good if there's no one else", which you see here a lot.
But this was a pre-existing condition - the last half decade really unleashed and enabled the full scope of our national insanity with the pandemic and 2020 election the coup de grace IMO.
I’d love to learn more about these places.
The key is your community. If shit really does hit the fan, I'd imagine that your chance of survival is much higher if you have a community around you where there is mutual support, rather than being entirely alone in a 200 acre woodlot.
(Not saying that your goal is to be 100% self-sufficient -- just pointing this out because I've idealized this before. It's an understandable reaction to the craziness of the modern world.)
I'm not sure why you think that should be the goal.
If they're mostly self sufficient they'll be off to a much better start then others. Even if it's not perfect, its definitely better
And if it actually does get really bad... They'll probably have people join them so self sufficiency won't be necessary anymore.
To be clear, I think becoming more self-sufficient is definitely a good thing, and I strive toward that myself.
Why? I live in Paris, and get my food (vegetable, fruits, bread, eggs, peas...) from an AMAP. It's like a coop for about 100 families where we pay the farmer one year in advamce for their whole annual production. It's cheaper than most supermarkets, it's local and organic, it's self sufficient (no competition, we pay the farmer well, according to their actual costs). We only have to organize the distribution weekly (take a few hours per year for every member). I bet the farmer will do better for our organization than any "self sufficient" family.
there have been several documentaries about related topics, this is a recent one: https://www.arte.tv/en/videos/095178-000-A/supermarkets-the-...
(the farmers are addressed later on in the video)
"What will you do when public servants leave their posts and infrastructure fails" is a fair question considering our ecological predicament.
If a professional farmer (with the best knowledge and equipment but also the full support of the coop members) can't feed us, how do you expect to better resist to floods and heatwaves on your own? As far as I know, small groups with good ties have always better fared than single families.
Thanks for your kind words, and best of luck.
Living in a remote environment limits your income. (Or used to, anyway. I guess we'll see in five or ten years.) Nearly everyone's spending closely follows their income.
The pendulum might swing back in five or ten years -- companies might start requiring their staff to be on site. I'm suspending judgement for a while.
Living rural can work if you reduce your consumption and travel. If you're getting your water from a well in your land with electricity from natural renewables, and you also grow your own vegetables and raise your own chicken, you're self-sufficient.
If you shared the farm and solar panels with a few friends you trust, is this close enough? Because you can have that in a city (search for Enercoop in France for the energy, and AMAP for _Association Pour une Agriculture Paysanne_).
Local, clean, self sufficient, etc. but with a minimum of solidarity. Also, you have a much smaller footprint by living in a city so it's a scalable model (i.e not one man for himself and après moi le déluge).
It might be possible to create a less densely populated city-like structure which works like this, the question is whether it is worth the effort. For those who see this as a fulfilment of some ideological drive it might, just like living off-grid in the middle of nowhere does for others. For the general population this is unlikely to be true though.
We won't be lacking space if we eat less meat (like our ancestor). We've only started eating so (too!) much meat quite recently and that's what taking all the space. Switching to mostly plant-based diet would resolve most issues.
>It might be possible to create a less densely populated city-like structure which works like this, the question is whether it is worth the effort.
No need to reduce density. Even big cities (like Paris) can procure most of its food from local farms. We just need to focus on local types of food (less exotic but not necessarily less diverse: for instance I get far more diverse vegetable from my farm than most Parisians).
Going vertical is unneeded and would require far more efforts than making farming more reasonable.
It does not make sense to waste time doing penance by "reassessing out relationship with this planet" - the planet couldn't care less whether we live or die - when the capabilities of "the first world" are much better suited for developing and implementing technologies to improve the quality of life for anyone who cares to implement them. This does not mean churn out more useless commercial crap to be produced by the lowest bidder. What it means is developing and producing effective desalination systems to ensure the availability of fresh water, effective energy storage systems which actually work, can be affordably produced now in enough quantity, design and series-build nuclear (fission) power generation systems which can be delivered and installed on locations without needing to type-approve each and every installation as if it is a from-the-ground-up design, etc. Whatever impact a changing climate - whether that change means a warmer or cooler climate - has it will be worldwide but the mitigations will need to be implemented on a local/regional/national level.
So, no penance is wanted nor needed nor would that be of any help. It is good old human ingenuity which we should turn to. A species which looks towards colonising other planets should be - and is - capable of facing this much smaller challenge and emerge victoriously.
What do you mean by saying "it's not that simple"?
Looks like India and parts of Canada/Alaska experienced slightly cooler temps, as well as a decent area over water.
For 2019, large parts of interior Canada and the US, as well as parts of Oceania.
https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cag/global/mapping/2019
One of the other noticeable things about those maps is Siberia. Affected quite a bit by warmer temps in both years.
A better measure is the number of incidents of weather extremes: heat, cold, rain, drought, storms.
I'm not going to look those up right now, but there's a ton of evidence that those incidents are going up dramatically.
Isn't this a predicted observation in the case of increased media reporting?
We're seeing a lot of that indeed: this is the second tropical storm season in a row we've exhausted the prepared number of about 22 alphabetical "English first names" and have moved on to Greek letters and other stopgaps.
We've seen tropical storms hit more places, including some big activity in what used to be "far north" for tropical storm season such as New York state.
We've seen an expansion/shifting of "Tornado Alley" in the United States. States that never previously had tornado drills have had to add them and start trying to educate their residents.
We have seen some record snow storms and some record single day lows in many cities, especially in "wind chill" lows that factors in increased cold wind velocity, even if no one city can claim to be that much cooler than it was before.
The US military used to call climate change a "force multiplier". It turns all the existing stresses up to 11. (Water shortage, ideological and ethnic conflict, great power dick-measuring, etc. etc.)
[Sorry, I can't lay hands on the PDF right now, and I think the research unit was disbanded about 10 years ago, so the report will be difficult to find on the internet. But it was in about 2005 or 2006.]
Nuclear is the real clean energy.
If you’re suggesting hydro, wind and solar are not clean energy though I think you need to expand on that.
Plus, fusion likely has the same kind of practical, economic limitations (huge upfront capital cost and long build time) that make fission hard to justify in an environment of small, cheap fossil fuel burners and wind/solar units.
That said the cheapest fusion power we'll ever have access to will always be solar power because the capital costs of building our solar system's sun are already well and easily sunk/amortized.
I'll add that as well as reaching Qtotal > 500, we need continuous operating life to be of the order of 10 million seconds, "only" 13 orders of magnitude away. Not going to happen in 2 years, or 5 years, or 40 years.
---
The mininum viable Qplasma would be in the neighborhood of 100.[1] Fusion may get competitive for electricity generation with a Qtotal > 500.[2]
1. Sabine Hossenfelder, How Close Is Nuclear Fusion?, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ4W1g-6JiY&t=8s
2. Nicholas Hawker, A simplified economic model for inertial fusion, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33040650/
Nuclear is finite but so is coal and oil and we are nowhere close of running out of it. New reserves will be discovered once there's demand. And used fuel can be recycled in breeder reactors.
If we had scaled up on nuclear, there's no way every reactor would have had the best engineers, best contractors, best governance -- there would certainly be some that cut corners or got built on a fault line or vulnerable to some other unpredictable disaster or terrorist attack.
“Stabilising the climate is urgent, nuclear power is slow. It meets no technical or operational need that these low-carbon competitors cannot meet better, cheaper, and faster."
"The report estimates that the average construction time for reactors worldwide was ten years, significantly longer than the World Nuclear Association’s estimated construction time of between five and eight years. Nuclear reactors are also slow to start and a number have closed, with nine units closing over 2018 and a further five units expected to close over 2019."
"The report also states that nuclear power is more expensive than renewables. Nuclear energy costs around $112-189 per megawatt hour (MWh) compared to $26-56MWh for onshore wind and $36-44MWh for solar power. Levelised cost estimates for solar and wind also dropped by 88% and 69% respectively, while they increased by 23% for nuclear power."
https://www.power-technology.com/news/nuclear-energy-report-...
"All power plants, coal, gas and nuclear, have a finite life beyond which it is not economically feasible to operate them. Generally speaking, early nuclear plants were designed for a life of about 30 years, though with refurbishment, some have proved capable of continuing well beyond this. Newer plants are designed for a 40 to 60 year operating life. At the end of the life of any power plant, it needs to be decommissioned, cleaned up and demolished so that the site is made available for other uses."[1]
I was actually really pro nuclear power until I started reading about how they're starting to be outclassed by wind and solar and are just too slow to build to meet fossil fuel reduction targets in time, especially those set for 2030 considering their ~10 year build times. I still think it's fine if anyone wants to pursue building new plants, it just seems like less people are willing to fund new ones because of these issues.
But I agree there have been some that have been shut down purely for political reasons or due to pressure from certain green activists (I don't think there's a green hivemind and I've seen many people concerned about climate change support nuclear power and think it's quite safe, especially considering the alternative of climate disaster), and those should not have been shut down.
[1]: https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c...
Throughout the US and Europe, all recent attempts at building new nuclear have suffered from massive construction failure. Not from regulatory burdens, but from just building what was designed by engineers. Vogtle, Summer, Flamanville, Hinkley, and Olkiluoto have been huge disappointments.
France's only hope for new nuclear to replace their aging fleet is now small modular reactors, a technology that in the past has been rejected foe being too costly since the costs are supposed to go down with larger reactors, not smaller.
If we get new nuclear, it will either be because Russia builds it (and there's no evidence that Russia could take a US construction crew and get a completed project), or because we try a new form of nuclear.
I think it's time to realize that nuclear technology does not fit our current skill set. And that wind, solar, and storage have leapfrogged nuclear in terms of advanced technology.
So lobby your senator and congressperson to create and pass legislation enabling nuclear (changing radiation limits to be scientifically based, and banning NIMBY lawsuits, for example), and to fast-track the whole approvals process. (Type-approval of factory-made designs, for example. And automatic approval of coal furnace replacement with type-approved reactors.)
California's last nuclear plant is almost done. Environmentalists are against nuclear and so it's difficult to build more.
In all the world, I believe only about 100 nuclear plants are even planned. Most of which are in China.
Looks to be about 1,000 new coal plants being built or at least planned. Most of which are in China. Which will no doubt operate for decades.
Obviously North America is more interested in Solar, Wind, and Natural Gas. Eventually we will get to gridscale power storage. Suddenly it'll be problem solved.
Check out the autopsy of VC Summer's failure, or the delays at Vogtle, and you won't find any environmentalists to blame. At least I haven't been able to find any hint of that, and if it were possible to blame environmentalists, I would think that the contractor and utility would be screaming it.
We have already kickstarted positive feedback loops like thawing of the tundra, reduced albedo due to smaller ice sheets, ... . We actually need to go carbon negative for a while to offset those. The technology you mention surely will help greatly in avoiding speeding things up, but they won't take us back to preindustrial levels alone.