Modeling Climate
This article talks about a manipulable model for climate change.
Understanding climate is a tricky proposition because it is a long-term phenomenon that involves so many variables that they cannot possibly all be evaluated or even measured. For example, we cannot really predict cloud formation or volcanic activity. Therefore, we must rely on models that make many unverifiable assumptions. At best, they can take into consideration some of the physics that influences climate and a consensus of the assumptions regarding climate.
Admitting what we don't know and can't do is a good first step.
As a result, there are a number of models that predict a variety of outcomes, depending on how the modelers selected variables. This can be baffling even to real scientists, let alone to politicians chosen for that elusive quality of “electability.”
Always remember that a model is only as good as what people put into it, and they can only input what they know, or think they know. The real danger of climate change is what people don't know, or realize, or believe -- and what they have misinterpreted. Watch climate science news and you'll see a relatively brisk stream of "this is so much worse than we predicted, because we didn't know about or account for Factor X." The world is much more complicated than scientists understand and it can move a lot faster than they believe.
So, what are concerned citizens to do? Should we compost our food scraps, buy a Tesla, or what?
One of the most useful things science has done, that is rock-solid, is identify greenhouse gases and their respective impact based on how much heat they trap and how long they stay aloft once extruded into the atmosphere. This allows any person to look at that list, look at things which increase gases on that list, realize that this is hazardous, and look for alternatives that generate less or no greenhouse activity -- or better yet, sequester greenhouse gases.
Some of the squirming around is an attempt to avoid this basic equation. Teslas run on electricity, and are only as clean as the source of that electricity. A lot of electricity comes from coal. If you want to shrink your carbon footprint, don't buy a Tesla, buy a bicycle. Many of the best steps rely on doing less, or doing things slower. Think human-scale and human-power rather than taking energy from somewhere else. People hate that, and most of them won't do it. Therefore, climate change will not be stopped until human civilization gets smacked down below the capacity to do large-scale harm.
Pinning down the exact actions to take, when comparing the efficiency of different options, is a lot harder. But there are some places with potential for a lot of improvement, or better yet, where we could kill two birds with one stone. For example, livestock in general is a huge contributor to climate change, and beef most of all. So the best bang-for-buck there is to declare beef a special occasion food (or that's all there is food) and choose other options most of the time. A vegan or vegetarian diet tends to have the lowest carbon footprint, but these are hard to maintain for most people and the health dynamics can be very tricky -- and you have to count in all the food miles of shipping produce. Happily, a flexitarian approach is excellent for the environment and also competes well against other options in terms of health and keeping it up over time. The Mediterranean diet, despite having a different name, has the same mostly-plants approach; it is healthy, Earth-friendly, and reasonably feasible to keep as a lifestyle choice. The secondary benefit of this is that all the land not used in raising animals and their feed can go into plant foods or wilderness, and the part of it that goes back to wilderness would not only store carbon but help patch up the ravaged ecosystem.
If you're looking for personal changes to impact climate change, ignore government and target areas based on consumer activity. If nobody bought beef, people would quit raising it; if nobody bought cars, people would quit making them. None of that requires prodding a dinosaur to do anything, just lots of people using their folding vote.
The problem, of course, is that most people damn well don't want to do it. They've been told for decades that human-powered travel and plant-based diets are necessary for survival -- Diet for a Small Planet is 50 years old now -- and a miniscule number have responded accordingly. The preponderance of choices is what creates climate change.
The point to making the changes is not to stop climate change, because we're already fucked there. It's to keep your personal conscience clean by minimizing your unethical behavior. Just because everyone else is acting like an ignoramus doesn't mean you have to do it too. You're not responsible for their choices, only yours, where you have free choice among more or less harmful options.
What is unique about En-ROADS is that it is interactive, with a simple interface that allows each user to explore most of the variables that are thought to affect climate.
This can be very useful in illuminating which actions to back or not bother with.
The variables assume that the actions are taken globally, not just in the United States. Thus, any actions that are implemented only in the U.S. will have much smaller effects.
This is much less useful, because we're not getting all the nations acting together, it's a hodgepodge. Without granularity per national participation, you won't be able to see the real impact unless you calculate that by hand, which most people can't do. You'll always get a drastically inflated impact.
The current values for each variable are the baseline and result in a predicted rise of 3.6° C by 2100 if no new actions are taken. The accuracy of this model is unlikely to be better than ±10%, in other words ±0.36° C. So, in this article, we will call any effect that results in less than a change of ±0.36° as being negligible.
I'm thrilled to see someone calculating the actual "statistical significance" for their model, rather than the standard which is usually 3-4%. This is vital in determining what really matters and what's just a bobble.
If we slide the slider for “Renewables” all the way to the right, the temperature drops only 0.2° C by the end of the century. That’s negligible. How about electric cars? Slide the “Transportation Electrification” bar all the way to the right. The drop is 0.1° C - again, negligible. How about punitive taxes on coal? Still negligible at 0.2° C. Planting more trees - negligible. Bioenergy has no effect at all. Thus, the important bottom line: Much of what is in the Green New Deal has little scientific justification.
That's for each one alone. If you add them you get 0.5° C which is significant. That's not as good as one action hitting that mark, but it is better than doing only one thing.
Which measures could have an appreciable effect? There are a few. Extreme reductions in methane emissions result in about half a degree drop. This would not be easy to accomplish but is worth exploring.
See above re: beef. That's very simple in concept -- quit raising cows -- but the difficulty comes in convincing people to do it.
Carbon removal could result in a drop of about 0.4° C.
We'd get a great result if we just quit taking it out of wherever it is now. Coal is more valuable as carbon sequestration than fuel, in terms of "Let's not saw off the branch we're standing on and fall to our doom." Forests actually continue to soak up carbon over time.
The big winner according to En-ROADS is a very large carbon tax. At a price of $250 per ton of CO2 generated, En-ROADS predicts a reduction of a full degree. But a carbon tax is not part of the Build Back Better proposal and for good reason: such a tax likely would stifle the economy and would disproportionately impact the poor.
And yet I don't see any white people admitting that an economy that is killing the environment and also civilization might possibly be a bad idea that should be replaced with something saner.
The good news is that investing in reasonable methane reduction, industrial efficiency, and carbon removal technologies, along with a moderate carbon tax on a global scale could result in a drop of 1.3° C in the expected temperature rise. The figure below shows the effect of these changes.
The bad news is that this still means a rise of 2.3° C. And that is if the entire world were to implement these actions; acting alone, the United States will spend trillions and have a negligible impact.
Like I said, people know a lot of things they could do to solve the problem; they just won't.
Finally, it must be noted that the temperature rise, while significant, will be gradual and will not have sudden inflection points. Thus, the notion that we are approaching some “tipping point” beyond which there will be a global catastrophe resulting in human extinction is simply insupportable.
Bullshit. Tipping points are very real. To pick one example not at random, ice caps tend to melt gradually until they hit a tipping point, and then a vast sheet calves off at once. Ignore anyone who says that climate change will be "gradual." The planting map has shifted half a zone in just a few decades. The Earth can move at blinding speed when riled, and right now, she's just starting to wind up into a real "What the fuck are you doing?" rant. Starting. You have seen nothing yet.
Let’s not panic but put our heads together and work.
Sure. Few situations are so bad that panic can't make them a lot worse.
But don't imagine it's going to stop climate change or prevent currently bad problems from turning catastrophic. If governments had listened to environmentalists 50 years ago it would've been mostly fine. Even 30 years ago would've been somewhat tolerable. Now? We don't even have time to make it a little less worse. What we have left to us is damage control, harm reduction, and choices that preserve an individual's right to say "I fucking told you so" in the foyer-ever-after.
Understanding climate is a tricky proposition because it is a long-term phenomenon that involves so many variables that they cannot possibly all be evaluated or even measured. For example, we cannot really predict cloud formation or volcanic activity. Therefore, we must rely on models that make many unverifiable assumptions. At best, they can take into consideration some of the physics that influences climate and a consensus of the assumptions regarding climate.
Admitting what we don't know and can't do is a good first step.
As a result, there are a number of models that predict a variety of outcomes, depending on how the modelers selected variables. This can be baffling even to real scientists, let alone to politicians chosen for that elusive quality of “electability.”
Always remember that a model is only as good as what people put into it, and they can only input what they know, or think they know. The real danger of climate change is what people don't know, or realize, or believe -- and what they have misinterpreted. Watch climate science news and you'll see a relatively brisk stream of "this is so much worse than we predicted, because we didn't know about or account for Factor X." The world is much more complicated than scientists understand and it can move a lot faster than they believe.
So, what are concerned citizens to do? Should we compost our food scraps, buy a Tesla, or what?
One of the most useful things science has done, that is rock-solid, is identify greenhouse gases and their respective impact based on how much heat they trap and how long they stay aloft once extruded into the atmosphere. This allows any person to look at that list, look at things which increase gases on that list, realize that this is hazardous, and look for alternatives that generate less or no greenhouse activity -- or better yet, sequester greenhouse gases.
Some of the squirming around is an attempt to avoid this basic equation. Teslas run on electricity, and are only as clean as the source of that electricity. A lot of electricity comes from coal. If you want to shrink your carbon footprint, don't buy a Tesla, buy a bicycle. Many of the best steps rely on doing less, or doing things slower. Think human-scale and human-power rather than taking energy from somewhere else. People hate that, and most of them won't do it. Therefore, climate change will not be stopped until human civilization gets smacked down below the capacity to do large-scale harm.
Pinning down the exact actions to take, when comparing the efficiency of different options, is a lot harder. But there are some places with potential for a lot of improvement, or better yet, where we could kill two birds with one stone. For example, livestock in general is a huge contributor to climate change, and beef most of all. So the best bang-for-buck there is to declare beef a special occasion food (or that's all there is food) and choose other options most of the time. A vegan or vegetarian diet tends to have the lowest carbon footprint, but these are hard to maintain for most people and the health dynamics can be very tricky -- and you have to count in all the food miles of shipping produce. Happily, a flexitarian approach is excellent for the environment and also competes well against other options in terms of health and keeping it up over time. The Mediterranean diet, despite having a different name, has the same mostly-plants approach; it is healthy, Earth-friendly, and reasonably feasible to keep as a lifestyle choice. The secondary benefit of this is that all the land not used in raising animals and their feed can go into plant foods or wilderness, and the part of it that goes back to wilderness would not only store carbon but help patch up the ravaged ecosystem.
If you're looking for personal changes to impact climate change, ignore government and target areas based on consumer activity. If nobody bought beef, people would quit raising it; if nobody bought cars, people would quit making them. None of that requires prodding a dinosaur to do anything, just lots of people using their folding vote.
The problem, of course, is that most people damn well don't want to do it. They've been told for decades that human-powered travel and plant-based diets are necessary for survival -- Diet for a Small Planet is 50 years old now -- and a miniscule number have responded accordingly. The preponderance of choices is what creates climate change.
The point to making the changes is not to stop climate change, because we're already fucked there. It's to keep your personal conscience clean by minimizing your unethical behavior. Just because everyone else is acting like an ignoramus doesn't mean you have to do it too. You're not responsible for their choices, only yours, where you have free choice among more or less harmful options.
What is unique about En-ROADS is that it is interactive, with a simple interface that allows each user to explore most of the variables that are thought to affect climate.
This can be very useful in illuminating which actions to back or not bother with.
The variables assume that the actions are taken globally, not just in the United States. Thus, any actions that are implemented only in the U.S. will have much smaller effects.
This is much less useful, because we're not getting all the nations acting together, it's a hodgepodge. Without granularity per national participation, you won't be able to see the real impact unless you calculate that by hand, which most people can't do. You'll always get a drastically inflated impact.
The current values for each variable are the baseline and result in a predicted rise of 3.6° C by 2100 if no new actions are taken. The accuracy of this model is unlikely to be better than ±10%, in other words ±0.36° C. So, in this article, we will call any effect that results in less than a change of ±0.36° as being negligible.
I'm thrilled to see someone calculating the actual "statistical significance" for their model, rather than the standard which is usually 3-4%. This is vital in determining what really matters and what's just a bobble.
If we slide the slider for “Renewables” all the way to the right, the temperature drops only 0.2° C by the end of the century. That’s negligible. How about electric cars? Slide the “Transportation Electrification” bar all the way to the right. The drop is 0.1° C - again, negligible. How about punitive taxes on coal? Still negligible at 0.2° C. Planting more trees - negligible. Bioenergy has no effect at all. Thus, the important bottom line: Much of what is in the Green New Deal has little scientific justification.
That's for each one alone. If you add them you get 0.5° C which is significant. That's not as good as one action hitting that mark, but it is better than doing only one thing.
Which measures could have an appreciable effect? There are a few. Extreme reductions in methane emissions result in about half a degree drop. This would not be easy to accomplish but is worth exploring.
See above re: beef. That's very simple in concept -- quit raising cows -- but the difficulty comes in convincing people to do it.
Carbon removal could result in a drop of about 0.4° C.
We'd get a great result if we just quit taking it out of wherever it is now. Coal is more valuable as carbon sequestration than fuel, in terms of "Let's not saw off the branch we're standing on and fall to our doom." Forests actually continue to soak up carbon over time.
The big winner according to En-ROADS is a very large carbon tax. At a price of $250 per ton of CO2 generated, En-ROADS predicts a reduction of a full degree. But a carbon tax is not part of the Build Back Better proposal and for good reason: such a tax likely would stifle the economy and would disproportionately impact the poor.
And yet I don't see any white people admitting that an economy that is killing the environment and also civilization might possibly be a bad idea that should be replaced with something saner.
The good news is that investing in reasonable methane reduction, industrial efficiency, and carbon removal technologies, along with a moderate carbon tax on a global scale could result in a drop of 1.3° C in the expected temperature rise. The figure below shows the effect of these changes.
The bad news is that this still means a rise of 2.3° C. And that is if the entire world were to implement these actions; acting alone, the United States will spend trillions and have a negligible impact.
Like I said, people know a lot of things they could do to solve the problem; they just won't.
Finally, it must be noted that the temperature rise, while significant, will be gradual and will not have sudden inflection points. Thus, the notion that we are approaching some “tipping point” beyond which there will be a global catastrophe resulting in human extinction is simply insupportable.
Bullshit. Tipping points are very real. To pick one example not at random, ice caps tend to melt gradually until they hit a tipping point, and then a vast sheet calves off at once. Ignore anyone who says that climate change will be "gradual." The planting map has shifted half a zone in just a few decades. The Earth can move at blinding speed when riled, and right now, she's just starting to wind up into a real "What the fuck are you doing?" rant. Starting. You have seen nothing yet.
Let’s not panic but put our heads together and work.
Sure. Few situations are so bad that panic can't make them a lot worse.
But don't imagine it's going to stop climate change or prevent currently bad problems from turning catastrophic. If governments had listened to environmentalists 50 years ago it would've been mostly fine. Even 30 years ago would've been somewhat tolerable. Now? We don't even have time to make it a little less worse. What we have left to us is damage control, harm reduction, and choices that preserve an individual's right to say "I fucking told you so" in the foyer-ever-after.