Cows, pigs, chickens, dogs, cats, miniature horses and the richest 60% of humans will probably cope. The real truth about the "deniers" is probably more that they don't care than that they don't believe.

I came to this conclusion a long time ago. Feels like the only solution is us going extinct.

I for one can't wait till we're gone.

The planet has and will be around a lot longer than humanity.

Something I can’t stop thinking about is that we only had 1 billion people on the planet in 1804. I can’t help but think that no matter what we do, we will just eventually run out of resources. I try to do everything I can in my restaurant and will never give up hope, but it just seems so grim.

Stop listening to propaganda. Resources have never been more plentiful and there has never been a safer, better time to be alive.

Nic Lewis and Judith Curry again publish a paper on climate sensitivity, and again find much lower values for them than the guesses made by climate models:

https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/10....LI-D-17-0667.1

If correct, would imply that the Earth is going to warm at about half the rate that was assumed.

Pretty interesting article on the legal ramifications of waterfront properties being submerged:

The Fighting Has Begun Over Who Owns Land Drowned by Climate Change

Some smart Harvard guys think they've figure out out to economically pull carbon out of the atmosphere.

Can anybody interpret this? What is its realistic potential?

A Process for Capturing CO2 from the Atmosphere

Well the articles about it seem to think it is legit. It's not theoretical; it's already been tested. I suppose getting the cost down would be the theoretical bit.

There's another group in Iceland that also is doing carbon capture a different way, making solid carbon and then burying it...they also think they can hit $100 a ton in a few years.

Both groups are supported by the Gates Foundation iirc.

So I'd say carbon capture is very realistic, it's the getting-down-the-cost that is the question mark. And then the obvious question of who would pay if this is to be done en masse (and to what extent this should be done). Then there is the question of whether we should take ourselves back to a pre-industrial level of 270ppm, because it is plausible that a lot of plants could die off.

Cost and and scaling are huge issues. A simple calculation is just to multiply cost/ton by 10 billion and you get an idea of the cost of that technology to capture most of CO2 annual emission.

Its however basically a certainty nothing we got now can scale that much without dramatically increasing costs. Another issue is a lot of the green gas emission isn't even CO2.

Still, being able to capture even 10-20% of annual emissions can buy us a lot of time and I think we will see some combination of technologies to pull that off within 2 or 3 decades.

Until then, nuclear is still the most viable source of energy that can dramatically cut emissions. That and a massive build out of EV infrastructure so new sources of energy can be plug and play.

Theoretically when you scale up a technology costs go down, not up.

****ing slob mountain climbers (aka Garbage Patches Aren't Just in the Ocean)

If only that was the case. A planet environmentally devastated by climate change will be ruled by a relatively small number of people who benefited most from causing it.

Humans suck.

http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/l...621-story.html

Canada's last conservative government had a similar policy. Several of my friends were subject to it and many don't realize the sweeping implications. It makes it very difficult to go about the daily work of science, like publishing and presenting at conferences. It stalls research at a time climate science needs to be ramped up. People were literally creating back channels to share results.

A good friend is a highly respected soil scientist in the US. She focuses on climate change and for the past two years has been frantically trying to hide her climate research inside grant applications for other things because she knows climate science is going to be hammered in terms of funding. Her work will literally save lives and she has to act like she is doing something wrong!

On the plus side, the only reason these policies exist is because these awful people know their only hope is to hide the truth.

The derailment this weekend in Iowa is a good time to remind my friends itt who are opposed to pipelines that they are making a serious error if their true goal is public and environmental safety.

Pipelines are the safest way to transport oil and gas. Spills are less common and tend to be less severe in terms of public safety. Additionally, new technologies are making it much easier to prevent ruptures and catch them very early.

As my posting history shows I am all for pouring huge amounts of public funds into subsidizing and research for green technologies. However, even the most optimistic estimates put a non-fossil fuel economy decades in the future.

Till then pipelines should be supported, not protested. These protests will go down in the history books as a huge mistep in the environmental movement. It's a sad example of the pro-science side abandoning science because it's politically convient to do so.

Clovis,

I was thinking of you when I heard the news. I weigh your point, but imo you are participating in bad faith if you don't weigh that agaist the obviously at least highly reasonable point that pipelines make for more efficiency, lower prices, more extraction, and more oil burned. There's a race going on to replace fossil fuels. At some point we'll be leaving them underground. Pipelines make it so less will be left there and more will be in the atmosphere. In other circumstances you act like you took econ 101.

As I've said before, that is reasonable position, although I think misguided for reasons too complex to get into here. Nonetheless, it's not the one argued by the vast majority of pipeline opponents. I would guess if you polled 1000 opponents less than 10 would assert this as the reason for the opposition.

Ok.

Anyway, at the rate at which prices for renewables are dropping (2.3 cents per kwh from a recent solar project in Nevada - prices now around 3.5 cents including storage) I'm not really that concerned. It will be a while before all oil can be eliminated, especially for fertilizer, and it's not clear that it wouldn't be worth it to have safer pipelines for that.

I think a political, rather than scientific, difference is at play here too. Sure carbon tax plus regulations on extraction is a better way to go about slowing the extraction than using trains and trucks instead of pipelines, but I don't trust anyone near power in the US to do that. Maybe in Canada or Norway they can pull off leaving in the ground what can easily be extracted, but in the US even people like Obama can be heard talking about things like "clean coal".

Years ahead of schedule the greenhouse gas emissions of California are at 1990 levels. And doing it did not wreck our economy.

This needs to be a way bigger story. It’s a crime against humanity this doesn’t lead every news cast.

Aren't the total U.S. emissions at about 1993-94 levels?

Apparently so. Emmissions went down in 2016 nationally supposedly because of less coal being burned for electricity and a warm winter.