[Plantagenet]

Peter---from the August 2017 climate data compiled by NASA, it looks like your summer temps there in the Humboldt area have been running about 1.5° C warmer then northern California was just a few decades ago---

So far so good.

CHEERS!

[asg70]

Much like the weather. Which is merely . . . the weather.

I find it comical that you disregard the cause and effect of CO2 to global warming and yet continue to bolster a spurious cause and effect between peak oil and the credit crisis.

I mean, here you are laying back in your chair saying "hey, the weather near me is fine, no problem" and in the same breath trying to convince us with post over post that we're living in a post-peak collapse because poor brown people in Venezuela and others are suffering. So you have this sort of highly selective provincial tunnel-vision.

[asg70]

It's the constant obsession with climate doom that I find disconcerting here . . . at the PEAK OIL web site.

And here we get to the crux of the matter. AGW can't be real merely because it would steal attention away from peak-oil. Look, the two are NOT mutually exclusive.

[jedrider]

It's the constant obsession with climate doom that I find disconcerting here . . . at the PEAK OIL web site.

And here we get to the crux of the matter. AGW can't be real merely because it would steal attention away from peak-oil. Look, the two are NOT mutually exclusive.

Well, they're closely linked, as the more we run out of oil, that means the more we have already burnt, releasing CO2 into the atmosphere, causing our climate to run amok. It appears that the timeline on both items are intersecting. So, the glass is half empty of Oil, but half-full of CO2

[asg70]

While currently, in the present, climate has not run amok. Do I really need to debate that?

Yes, because you're wrong. It's starting just now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polar_vor ... ate_change
https://phys.org/news/2017-06-climate-gulf-stream.html

Plus Cid's famous narrative of the methane bomb.

What do you want to see happen to convince you, the complete failure of agriculture? Apparently you're one of these smart men.

It won't take the earth becoming Venus to triggering a massive die-off. Civilization exists within a narrow band of climate stability that we're disrupting.

[asg70]

why not move to the poles?

If it happens that fast, then survival is pretty much impossible anyway, so why bother? I gave up a survivalist stance a long time ago.

[jedrider]

why not move to the poles?

If it happens that fast, then survival is pretty much impossible anyway, so why bother? I gave up a survivalist stance a long time ago.

When the going gets rough, I'm going to get myself a few extra cases of wine to stash away. Hopefully, nobody will take them from me.

Only the younger lads should be prepping by being mentally and physically prepared.

[Plantagenet]

why not move to the poles?

Precisely.

James Lovelock has predicated that climate change will eventually reduce the human population to a few breeding pairs along the shores of the Arctic Ocean.

My goal is to spend my senior citizen years on the shore of the Arctic Ocean in one of those breeding pairs--- doing my part to help humanity survive.


Time to do our bit for humanity again...

[dohboi]

To sum up the whole thread in two words:

It's here!

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... a-droughts

[Plantagenet]

To sum up the whole thread in two words:

It's here!

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... a-droughts

In 2015 Bill McKibben was one of the apologists for Obama's wretched Paris Accords climate treaty.

Now here we are, just two years later, and McKibben seems to have smartened up a bit. He writes in Dohboi's link above: The problem is, our current business-as-usual trajectory takes us to a world that’s about 3.5C warmer. That is to say, even if we kept the promises we made at Paris

Wow. Who could've seen that coming.

So what to do now? McKibben has to figure out that we have to get rid of the useless Paris Accords and set up a new climate treaty that actually reduces CO2 emissions. Sadly, by the time that ever gets done, it will be 2025 or later and most of the islands in the Caribbean will be more or less wrecked and uninhabitable without a bomb shelter to run to when a new super collossal hurricane comes rolling in.

Cheers!

[Ibon]

Welcome everyone. We are here!

[onlooker]

To sum up. It is here Dohboi. Humanity is unwillingly and largely incapable of foregoing FF and even if done, feedbacks have been activated insuring more warming and secondary effects. So, Consequences are both the menace and the solution or cure. Let us hope the cure does not end up killing the patient

[dohboi]

From yesterday:

heat index now up to 106°F in Minnesota -- 24 degrees hotter than Death Valley at the moment.

https://twitter.com/ericholthaus/status ... 9399248897

[Ibon]

My goal is to spend my senior citizen years on the shore of the Arctic Ocean in one of those breeding pairs--- doing my part to help humanity survive.

It might be too late unless you father a mutant off spring that is more adaptive to volatile environmental conditions

Older men five times more likely to father children with birth defects

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/artic ... fects.html

[asg70]

To sum up the whole thread in two words:

It's here!

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... a-droughts

So, um, PStarr, care to retract what you said about climate chaos not being now?

[Outcast_Searcher]

To sum up the whole thread in two words:

It's here!

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... a-droughts

When the MSM equates weather to climate, I wish they'd stay off my side. All they're doing is acting like AGW denialists, whether it's idiot Senators displaying snow balls, or idiot right wing blogs talking about how some spot is cool for a few weeks or a season, so claiming we have global cooling.

Things like global temperatures rising over decades, sea level rise over decades, GHG's rising, and global ice melting tell us systematically, without a doubt, that AGW is real.

Why is playing the same game the AGW deniers play helpful?

Until we can show that strong storms are systematically getting worse, year after year, decade after decade, talking about storms only when they're bad is just talking about weather.

The credible articles and discussions I've seen are still at the level of 'storms are PREDICTED to get more frequent and more intense in coming decades'. That's cause for concern, and IMO cause to evaluate policy for coastal infrastructure, building, etc. However, that's not (yet) solid proof of AGW, however many opinion pieces say it is, whether in the MSM, or sites like this.

...

And before someone lacking reading comprehension (or not bothering to read) calls me an AGW denier, I'm an AGW alarmist. I'm the guy repeatedly calling for a dollar a POUND carbon tax for FF transport fuels to make the switch away from ICE's much faster.

[asg70]

Until we can show that strong storms are systematically getting worse, year after year, decade after decade, talking about storms only when they're bad is just talking about weather.

The problem with following your advice is that by the time the data is in it will be too late to do anything about it. It's probably already too late.

Right now the statistical data is anecdotal. How often have you seen news coverage of an extreme weather event and then they point the cameras at a senior citizen from the area who shakes his or her head and says "I've never seen anything like this in my life". It's become a cliche'. That may not seem like hard evidence, but it is probably some of the strongest data we have so far, a sort of feeling in your gut based in our collective memory.

I think a LOT of people over 40 are having that "feeling in the gut" that the weather just isn't as consistent. We know that the seasons aren't proceeding normally. Spring coming earlier. Plants blooming earlier. There's a LOT of data out there and it does intersect with "weather".

I feel the change, and I've had my share of discussions with my parents or my grandmother about how weather has changed. That confirmation of McKibben's "Eaarth" is happening at a subtle but visceral level in everyone.

[Ibon]

It is possible, you know. It's not necessarily a one-way ticket to doom. See IPCC.

It has been a nature too benign which has lead to the chaos of human overshoot. Forces that curtail the parasitic advance of kudzu apes represent the brakes on chaos.

After all these years most people here on this site still do not get this fundamental truth. Most are still stuck in calling forces that will contain human overshoot as chaos. They are the opposite.

When will we finally learn to embrace this?

I do agree the door has opened only a crack and the sliver of consequences sneaking through already has most folks over reacting..

Patience.

Pstarr, you play devils advocate as if these oscillations are still within normal parameters. The ship of consequences has left the harbor make no mistake. How well armed this ship is remains to be seen.

If before the end of my life I can see a dent in parasitic kudzu ape, say a cool 5% die-off, around 500 million, I will exit with a peace of mind... even more so if this event or one of a series of events carries me to the beyond.

I must practice the patience that I preach. At times my impatience has lead to adolescent comments. I will refrain from that and keep my desires for human die-off tucked in the same place most people respectfully keep their religious sentiments. In that secret place one worships the OP.

An evangelist I care not to be.

[GHung]

pstarr said; "I just don't see the climate driving the catastrophe."

THE driver? Certainly can't help, along with death by a thousand other cuts.

[Ibon]

Ibon, while I agree we are essentially in overshoot (and will dieoff sooner rather than later) I just don't see the climate driving the catastrophe. And I sure don't see demographic transition saving the day either.

Even if heretofore 3rd-world folks get educated and secure, and stop making babies, they are going to want 1st-world luxury with natural capital that's increasingly in short supply. I have been saying the very same for 13 years here at po.com yikes


Dieoff won't be consequence of runaway global warming and climate chaos. Rather it'll be peak oil, peak fresh water, peak arable land, peak phosphorus, peak copper, peak H-3, peak this and peak that. Even lithium supplies are showing a frightening tightening. Who knows which straw breaks the camels backs? And who know where the dieoff begins? but it must.

What ghung said death by a thousand cuts. No need to split off climate change from the rest of the consequences. It will be a factor, big or small. It is only in the last two years that I have increasingly recognized climate change as a bigger factor in the equation of overshoot. I see climate disruptions not as a mass extinction event but as a factor aggravating human migration, disease, etc.

My view is somewhat unorthodox perhaps but also ecological in that resiliency goes way down when you are in overshoot and external environmental stresses that normally can be tolerated when within carrying capacity suddenly can wreak havoc when a species is already in ecological overshoot. Diseases spread faster, less resilience to drought, less energy reserves to accommodate migration, for humans increased likely hood of wars, etc. All of these factors converge to compound forces that will depopulate humans from the planet. You can't take climate change out of this equation and either exaggerate or underestimate its affects just like you can't do that with peak oil either.

Many other species may go extinct but there is one species in particular that will disproportionately contract due to external environmental feedbacks, and that is the species most in overshoot today..... Homo sapiens... Human overshoot has evolved to such an extreme that our role in the ecosystem has actually changed from predator/omnivore over to parasite.

That is remarkable.

I don't know of any other species that shifts ecological roles when going into overshoot. Our parasitism is global and we don't discriminate on our hosts, even hosting on our future generations. Remarkable in the history of life on our planet are we humans. Truly remarkable. And very very vulnerable at the moment to corrective forces. Much more so than many other species waiting on the sidelines with relic populations but ever so ready to recolonize habitat we will slowly relinquish.

In reference to human overshoot the corrective forces can be seen from this phase shift of the role our species plays on the planets eco systems. We will phase shift back down to our historical role of predator/omnivore and relinquish parasitism as the correction unfolds. Before we can get to the cultural benefits of this phase shift in ecological roles we still have some ugly chapters ahead as a global parasite.

This phase shift to return our species to its historical role in global ecosystems will require enormous ecological stress.

You can embrace it or fight it but you can't stop it.