Senate Global Climate Change

Yup. The cores are cooled with a constant flow of water. And then that water becomes radioactive and the wastewater has to be…disposed of. More radioactive waste. Which is another massive complicating factor.

 

Much of it is the reliance of old, outdated concepts of nuclear reactors.

The molten salt nuclear reactors are a lot less dangerous and wasteful, and the idea has been around since the 1970s, but hasn't been pursued as much until recently because those types of reactors don't produce weapons-grade nuclear material, which seems to be more of interest to most of the larger nations interested in nuclear power.

 

Sooner rather than later?

Potentially 3 years, 2 feet to sea levels.

 

Ya Antarctic has something like 10 times the glacier mass of Greenland.

 

My professional work is dedicated to climate change analysis and policy, and its intersection with human social systems. As we’ve been saying for over a decade, the changes are likely to occur much faster than has often been presented in consensus reports (such as the IPCC aggregate of research), and the scale of those changes will be catastrophic much sooner than that consensus has predicted. That’s because a consensus is by its very nature conservative, and tends to downplay high impact, but medium or low probability risks. But medium and low probability risks happen all the time. After all, would you feel comfortable boarding a plane that had a 30% chance of crashing? Nevermind 60%, which is where the percentage likelihood of “catastrophic sooner than previously predicted” scenarios often landed in scenario exercises and studies? Of course you wouldn’t board that plane. And now we’re seeing evidence of some of these worst or very bad case scenarios come to pass.

2030 is going to look a lot different than 2020. That’s almost guaranteed. And climate action has to get a lot more ambitious in the next two years if the absolute worst of it is to be avoided.

 

I've been out here in 45C temperatures, but not this...

Australia set to become the hottest place on Earth over the next few days, with record temperatures. Hopefully Cairns will dodge this particular bullet. The last time it got into the forties here, the flying foxes were falling dead out of the trees onto the streets. These temperatures are bad enough in the dry interior, but in the high humidity of Cairns, you can barely breathe outside.

https://thenewdaily.com.au/weather/2021/12/15/australian-weather-heat-record/

 

As it is, New Zealand is preparing for this. Norway, Sweden, Ireland, and Iceland may get better at it. But Norway has its own energy hypocrisies, just as Canada and the U.S. do. New Zealand prepares...half-heartedly, given how the emissions should have been reduced. But still...it is what it is.

Greta is right.

 

My friends in Lake Tahoe who had to briefly evacuate their home earlier in the year because of the threat of forest fire are now completely shut in under more than 17 feet of snow.

 

Thwaites Glacier, the size of Florida, breaking off Antarctica within 5 years

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/fuse-blown-doomsday-glacier-coming-140055846.html

PS - can a mod please get rid of "assessment" in the thread title so there's more clarity that this is just the general/official Climate Change thread?

 

9.7 billion people by 2050. All environmental pressures that the world is experiencing now will be 22.8% worse in 2050. Not exactly I guess, since the birthrate of low energy consumers is higher than the birthrate of high energy consumers. Although the U.S. population might be 458 million by 2050, driven largely by immigration, and that's terrible news for everyone. And no matter how modest the circumstances of your birth, everyone needs to eat. Everyone needs water. I try to imagine what India and China's water resource management challenges will look like in 2050, and I can't. I know there are people who can and do try to plan for that. I don't envy them. Mostly I feel relieved that I'll probably be dead by 2050.

 

The carbon footprint of the world's poorest countries where the vast majority of that population increase will take place is tiny compared with any Western country and microscopic compared with the US. in other words, the environmental pressures cannot be measured that way. I dare say they will be worse in terms of resource consumption, but those patterns are very complex.

I feel sorry for India and China when it comes to talk of population increases. Their population growth is modest by comparison with many countries. Sub-Saharan Africa is where the biggest increases will take place. Niger has the highest population growth rate in the world. It comes as no surprise whatsoever that the African countries who have achieved impressive economic growth in the last few decades have experienced the greatest decreases in their rate of population growth as well. More money for education and familiy planning- not least greater control for women over their own fertility, being common features.

Population growth is a concern, without a doubt, but the overall growth rate is slowing quite rapidly as a global average, and is expected to max out at a lower total than previous predictions suggested, before declining. At the end of the day, the global south has a modest impact, despite this, on global climate change. Wealthy countries are overwhelmingly the biggest per-capita producers of greenhouse gases by a country mile; the US being way out in front of everyone else.

 

My gf found this video on 23 December. So...now you know yet another reason why two of our friends (my gf and I met the first in 2010 and 2012, respectively, and the second in 2021 and 2015, sequentially) moved out of Florida.

Indeed, that report I showed you folks some weeks ago said that many coastal cities around the world, including Savannah, may underwater as early as 2030.

A commenter on this video says the following:

Actually, I thought it would be much worse than that - because sea levels were supposed to have varied from 140-220 metres higher than today's levels during the Ordovician period, when all the ice did melt. A 220 metre rise would cover a lot more areas than shown here. According to this, Scotland remains completely safe while only parts of England are submerged. I see China gets its own inland sea which it can dominate in peace without anyone else being bothered about it.

 

Actually based on 2021 numbers, I believe Saudi Arabia and Australia are the highest per capita emitters of greenhouse gases, followed by the US and Canada. If we’re just talking total emissions, it’s China by a significant amount now. And then the US.

 

Yeah, I think Aus may have just overtaken the US, and several Middle Eastern countries are not far behind. Few people here care about GHGs... That's one of the reasons I want to leave and will be leaving by the end of the month, for good. It was the last G20 nation to officially acknowledge that climate change was even a thing.

Yes, China is the biggest outputter of GHGs overall, but then China's population is immense, so it needs to be put into context. If one looks at overall GHG trends, the US is one of the most concerning because so little has changed over recent decades. If the US is anything like Aus (and it is), then I can see why.

Despie everything, China has the ability to rapidly decarbonise. It is invested far more in renewables than the US, and its enormous network of high speed railways has alreadfy largely undermined the domestic airline network. Yes it has a long way to go, yes there's lots of corruption, yes they still invest in coal, etc. But things are definitely slowly but surely swinging the right way.

TBH, about the most concerning trend in China is offshoring its carbon footprint. Russia has the largest deforestation rate in the world right now, due in large part to unregulated tree removal, mostly in the Russian Far East, mainly to supply China, as China's own tree cover increases, not decreases.

 

If only more people cared less about their hair. Instead of big plastic bottles we could use this:


Yes, it's a bar of soap comes in a cardboard box and it washes my hair. At first I loved it, now I realize my hair is a little tougher to brush and probably not as smooth. However, I can't bring myself to go back to bad for the planet plastic bottles. This is really growing on me. $4.95 at Target.

 

My apartment has a gas stove, and it works so well

 

Hmmm.. I didn't know that about avocados. I only eat them when they come on a salad or sandwich. I like them, but not so much that I want to eat them all the time. I'm fairly certain they are really good for you.

 

Electric stoves have dramatically improved over the past 5 years or so.

 

A viable alternative?

 

I've considered myself lucky that I won't live long enough to see the worst consequences of my and my generation's profligate resource consumption, but the new reports of another foot of ocean level rise by 2050 are making me feel bad. I really wanted it to be, literally, après moi, le déluge. Statistically speaking I should be dead by 2045, so there's still hope.

 

Avocados use huge amounts of water and are 'hungry'- by which I mean they wear out the soil quickly where it doesn't have a thick humus layer; but then all crops wear out soil to some extent. I love avocados, and they're very good for you due to their high saturated fat content and micronutrients, but yeah... Unless you can source them locally, then maybe seriously consider their environmental impact. That's why I stopped eating them after moving to the UK last month.

 

IPCC issues another warning that time is running out.

• Everywhere is affected, with no inhabited region escaping dire impacts from rising temperatures and increasingly extreme weather.
  
  
• About half the global population – between 3.3 billion and 3.6 billion people – live in areas “highly vulnerable” to climate change.
  
  
• Millions of people face food and water shortages owing to climate change, even at current levels of heating.
  
  
• Mass die-offs of species, from trees to corals, are already under way.
  
  
• 1.5C above pre-industrial levels constitutes a “critical level” beyond which the impacts of the climate crisis accelerate strongly and some become irreversible.
  
  
• Coastal areas around the globe, and small, low-lying islands, face inundation at temperature rises of more than 1.5C.
  
  
• Key ecosystems are losing their ability to absorb carbon dioxide, turning them from carbon sinks to carbon sources.
  
  
• Some countries have agreed to conserve 30% of the Earth’s land, but conserving half may be necessary to restore the ability of natural ecosystems to cope with the damage wreaked on them.

I'm done with climate change!