hekatonkheire’s Recent Comments

• Click here to view comment in original post

  It's (hopefully) unjustifiably pessimistic

  Garnaut assumes that reaching international agreement to stabilise carbon emissions at 450ppm or less is virtually impossible, and that the only internationally politically feasible target will be 550ppm, despite the fact that (as he acknowledges) this virtually guarantees the loss of priceless national assets such as the Great Barrier Reef, and runs the considerable risk of truly catastrophic outcomes. His report therefore describes the most economically prudent path through that particular world. The carbon reduction target he presents is the one Australia would likely be required to adopt under that 550ppm regime. He also says that stabilising at 450ppm would be very much more preferable and would cost only 1% of GDP more than 550ppm, but regards this as a moot point as this lower target is politically unattainable anyway.

  A carbon reduction scheme is coming, and the question for business now is who is going to get the most free money under the scheme in order to 'soften the blow of transition'. Every industry group has therefore produced its own report describing its special vulnerability to carbon trading, forecasting catastrophe for that sector if special concessions are not made. If you listen to them all at once, you'd think the Australian economy itself won't survive the introduction of the legislation, but their modelling was never intended to be taken seriously anyway, and Garnaut's own just-published figures offer a much better estimate of the economic effects.

  Garnaut is deeply, deeply pessimistic. He believes that the 550ppm target entails catastrophe, with the only question being how much catastrophe how soon. His report adopts this target anyway only because no other target is politically feasible in his view. When politicians refer to his report they naturally leave out this reasoning and talk only about his numbers, which they then describe as economically prudent, ignoring the dismal logic behind them. Garnaut's low expectations of the political process seem to be becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.On Australia's Garnaut Report gets usual reactions from usual suspects posted 1 year, 1 month ago 8 Responses

• Click here to view comment in original post

  Convincing people

  I think what you're describing is just the difficulty people have believing something that nobody around them seems to believe. If the world really is ending, why isn't everyone acting like it is? And correspondingly, if everyone was acting like the world was ending, even if you happened to know it wasn't, it'd be hard to keep from wondering whether you're completely sure.

  Momentum seems to be building; it seems generally accepted now that climate change is real and that it's bad enough that it needs to be fixed. Opinions differ on how fixed it needs to be though, and when the fixing needs to happen. I think that once the science reaches a point where our knowledge about clathrates allows us to say things like "clathrate release is adding 0.4ppm CO2e per year every year right now, and if we get to 450ppm CO2e that's going to go up to 1.2ppm CO2e" then it will be much easier to talk to people about arctic methane than it is now, when all we can say is "there's a lot of it down there and we don't know how much of it is going to be released, or when, and to be honest we might all already be screwed depending on your definition of screwed, but really, we don't know". It'll be easier because in the former case you can then follow up with "so that means if we spend more than five years over 420ppm CO2e then we're going to have to more or less shut down the economy to compensate" whereas in the latter case all you can say is "look, all you can really do at this stage is worry. And try to fly less. Assuming it's not already too late".

  Well, hopefully the science will get to that point pretty soon. I find it a little bit reassuring to remember that there are an awful lot of really clever, highly motivated and also quite scared people up in the Arctic (and elsewhere) right now working on figuring out exactly this kind of thing.On Methane releases from under the Arctic seabed could jeopardize GHG stabilization posted 1 year, 1 month ago 31 Responses

• Click here to view comment in original post

  Are you sure?

  Ok, so I've read all the coverage I could find on this. The new finding seems to be that plumes are appearing where formerly there were none, so more methane is now being released than was previously, and a new mechanism has been observed that gets more of the gas into the atmosphere. Plumes have already been observed in other parts of the world and they're not necessarily a new phenomenon in those other places. The question then is, how much more methane than is presently being released is likely to be released, and how quickly? How many extra PPM of CO2 equivalent per year does this work out to right at this moment, and how many PPM can we reasonably expect it to work out to in, say, ten years time? Is it enough to qualify as a massive sudden extinction-event-type release or is it a sustained release that's going to mean humanity has to work that much harder on its own emissions to compensate?

  You mentioned that recent spike in atmospheric methane. How much of that is due to submarine methane release, how much is due to release from thawing permafrost, and how much is due to changes in hydrology?

  Nobody seems to know the answers to these questions. But this article suggests a pretty clear logical chain: methane released from clathrates caused the extinction event at the end of the Permian, and now it's happening again (you can see it in that spike in the graph) so runaway climate change has begun. The time to do something about it was yesterday (when you should have written to your congressman) but now it's today, so the only thing really left is suicide.

  Which is depressing if it's true, but if it is true you haven't presented convincing evidence; rather, you've just presented something that looks like an argument to a reader who trusts you enough not to examine the logic. And again I find myself wondering, what's the point of coverage like this? It scares the crap out of people, and I suspect, tends to shock them into inaction - but is that the right thing to do? If the time to act was yesterday, then maybe. If there's still a point to acting today, then maybe not. On Methane releases from under the Arctic seabed could jeopardize GHG stabilization posted 1 year, 1 month ago 31 Responses

• Click here to view comment in original post

  I don't think it's all that bad an analogy

  Yes, you need a little bit of sunlight every day for the vitamin D, and yes, there are things in sunscreen lotion that are probably bad for you. So make sure you get out into the sunlight for a little while every day, and use clothing to protect yourself from sunburn. Deliberately exposing yourself to enough UV to turn yourself from white to brown every couple of months is something else entirely, and that's what the Indoor Tanning Association is promoting. At least in terms of how disingenuous their arguments are, I think they have a fair amount in common with Americans for Balanced Energy Choices.

  Admittedly we have kind of a different perspective on skin cancer here in Australia. Presumably there aren't ads like this running in the US, for example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0ZRuZ513uE&feature=re ...On Similarities between the skin cancer and climate change 'scams' posted 1 year, 7 months ago 173 Responses

• Click here to view comment in original post

  On being scary

  Mr Romm,

  You posted on Climate Progress recently about how scaring the crap out of little kids (and everyone else) is probably counterproductive in the long run.

  I would tend to agree. In particular, your tendency to report climate change research as seen through the lens of your apparent operating assumption that, basically, we're all doomed, and with the scary words conveniently highlighted for easy skimming, is really, really relentlessly depressing. I'm all for solving the problem. I just find it hard to do what needs to be done if I have to reconvince myself that there's even any hope left at all after reading one of your articles (which is something I typically do by going and reading your original sources, which are inevitably less pessimistic than your summaries).

  James Hansen, by contrast, has a lot of scary things to say, but I'm eternally grateful that his position on all of it - soot in the arctic, the precedent for really rapid sea level rise, all of that - is that, well at least this means that that utopian renewable-energy future we need is coming that much sooner, because humanity collectively now has absolutely no choice but to develop it. And that's something to look forward to. Whereas all your articles offer is the prospect of inexorable catastrophe.

  Alex Murray.On The ocean carbon sink is saturating posted 2 years, 1 month ago 3 Responses