Ask Me Anything

This post will be updated before and after the AMA event.

Some points for discussion

Humans are the dominant force in today’s very rapid climate change.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_surface_temperature

there are a lot of reasons to associate this with CO2

https://keelingcurve.ucsd.edu/

but there are other factors

https://archive.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/figure-spm-2.html

Canada has contributed more than its fair share.

https://decarbonization.visualcapitalist.com/global-co2-emissions-through-time-1950-2022/

Climate always changes but rapid climate change is associated with major extinction events -- massive die-off of insects, plants and animals.

The current rate of global warming and species extinction only has parallels deep in the geological record. More specifically, with the previous five mass extinctions in Earth’s history (Fig. 1). Although those previous extinction events were triggered by distinct phenomena (as far as current theories ago), they seem to elicit similar long-term effects on biodiversity.  

incredibly detailed picture of some of these events have come to light. My favourite comparison is with the Permian-Triassic mass extinction at 251.9 million years ago (Ma). Not only this is my current subject of research, but it has also important parallels with current climate change. For instance, both are marked by substantial input of CO2 into the atmosphere (released from hundreds of thousands of years of volcanic activities in what is today Siberia) and potentially aggravated by subsequent release of methane from deep ocean sediments. Perhaps alarmingly, it is estimated that the rate of carbon input into the atmosphere at the end Permian was between 0.42 and 1.52 gigatons of carbon per year (Gt C/yr), whereas current human-induced levels of carbon input are of 31 Gt C/yr! It is not to say that the current warming event is necessarily worse than the one that caused the greatest mass extinction in the history of complex life at 251.9 Ma (this rate would have to sustain for tens or hundreds of thousands of years for that to be true), but only that the current rate of carbon input into the atmosphere is alarmingly high compared to some of the most dramatic events in the geological record.

- Tiago R. Simões https://communities.springernature.com/posts/lessons-from-the-deep-past

Note that recovery times from the great extinction events are millions of years.

Also, when a substantial fraction of species dies, that means a l;ot more species NEARLY died. Most species populations declined severely

Weather everywhere is connected in the global climate system; the physics are well-understood and not controversial.

The weather is the result of energy flows into and out of the earth system. Over the long term these are in balance or the world will warm or cool very quickly. mThey are well understood and mostly well quantified. Best evidence is that there is currently an imbalance of about 1 watt per square meter, which will cause gradual but constant warming until balance is achieved again. But the increase in greenhouse gases continues to disrupt the balance.



 

The evidence that this view is correct is in the accuracy of weather models and the success of climate models in replicating observed climates. These models are properly called "simulations". The properties of the system emerge from the modeled physics.

A climate model, more specifically a general circulation model (GCM), is a mathematical representation of ocean/atmosphere/land systems based on physical principles (e.g., conservation of momentum, mass, and heat). The physical principles are formulated as a set of equations and these equations are numerically solved on every 3-dimensional grid divided on the globe. 

https://cml.jbnu.ac.kr/cml/11846/subview.do

https://hrcm.ceda.ac.uk/blog/plot-of-the-month-mar-2019-10km-global-modelling/

The largest uncertainty in climate prediction is human action -- especially how much fossil fuels we will consume. You ain't seen nothin' yet. Climate change is going to get worse. We can only affect how much worse.

Fossil carbon accumulates. Natural drawdown is very slow. We need to leave a lot of fossil fuel resources untapped.

https://www.carbonbrief.org/explainer-how-the-rise-and-fall-of-co2-levels-influenced-the-ice-ages/

 Canada may get off relatively lightly economically, but the natural impact will be enormous. All our forests are at risk.

 https://sciencemediacentre.es/en/pep-canadell-we-are-heading-much-warmer-world-15-degrees-warmer

 

Threats to species in Canada

Increasing importance of climate change and other threats to at-risk species in Canada

any mention of climate change as a threat increased from 12% to 50% in 10 years. Other anthropogenic threats that have increased significantly over time in the paired analysis included introduced species, over-exploitation, and pollution. Our analysis suggests that threats are changing rapidly over time, emphasizing the need to monitor future trends of all threats, including climate change.

https://cdnsciencepub.com/doi/10.1139/er-2020-0032 

 https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-primary-energy

Global direct primary energy consumption

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-primary-energy

ice sheet instability

 

I know something about art, but I know what I like anyway

Usually, looking at a painting, I think, hmm, okay, I wish I could do that, but once in a while I go whooaaa.... wow.... that's... wow...

Not unlike with a great musical performance.

So now, I'm suddenly, inadvertently, a person who writes about art.

I've noticed that people who write about music, especially popular music, tend to love music a lot; but people who write about art, sometimes give off the impression that they don't care, or they don't even get it.

My problem is that I know what I love but I don't know why. But is that really a problem?

I certainly don't have an overarching theory. Why should I? What makes great reggae and what makes great blues and what makes great jazz are different. I know what I want to listen to and what I don't when I hear it.

I also know what I want to look at when I see it. But I don't have or want some grand theory as to why.

I think basically everyone loves music but only some people love visual art for some reason.

Since everyone loves music, everyone who writes about music loves it. On the other hand, NOT all of the people who write about art are people who love it.

I know what I love in art, just as I know what I love in music. And I know a fair amount at least about art (and perhaps a bit less but still something about music). But I can't explain WHY I like what I like in some broad general terms.

You enjoy each bit of human creativity in its own terms.

I think anyone writing about art has to BEGIN by acknowledging the mystery. We love this stuff. We LOVE this stuff. Why? It's sort of mysterious.

We especially love SOME of this stuff. Which ones? Why?

It's totally experiential. In experiencing any art form, either your socks are knocked off, or they ain't.

If you have a talky personality you really WANT to talk about the stuff you love and what it means to you. And you don't so much want to talk about the stuff you don't love, except maybe to wonder why it didn't work.

But you wouldn't know it from a lot of people who are professional curators and art educators. They seem to have forgotten what they love about art, if there ever was anything.

Anyway, sometimes, the only thing you can say is wow... look at that...

--

painting is a field sketch by Tom Thomson ca 1916

GDJ #2: On crossing 1.5 C

Here's the recent temperature trajectory.  Image via RealClimate

There are two things to look at. One is the astonishing temperature spike of the past two years, which ahs no obvious precedent, and is quite likely an ecceleration of some kind.

The second, and the linked article has a lot to say about this, is whether we have already surpassed the 1.5 C warming threshhold that emerged from the Paris Agreement as an "aspiration" for a warming limit.

I think it's worth me making a few comments on the latter. (This is a revision of a series of tweets on BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/mtobis.bsky.social/post/3lfkiam33kc2g )

So the first thing is that 1.5 C is a benchmark, determined by communication constraints rather than any known physical or environmental constraints. To be sure, there may be points along the warming scale where impacts get dramatically worse, though that's probably an oversimplification. Even if there were such points, we don't and can't know where they are until we pass them. Rather, the point of having benchmarks into the unknown territory into which we are propelling ourselves is to gain some collective awareness of whether we are succeeding in slowing our advance into the unknown (probably a little) or stopping altogether (not close). It's a way to communicate our status.

When this benchmark was far away, it seemed adequate to have a fairly rough idea of what it meant. As we get close it is ill-advised. Gavin's text reveals something of the original vagueness of the goal.

The people have spoken, and they have collectively agreed that ‘pre-industrial’ can be thought of as the average of 1850 to 1900. There were other candidates – but the influence of IPCC AR6 is too strong to fight against. So, while I’ve been holding on to ‘late 19th Century’ (in practice 1880-1899) as a baseline, I have bowed to the inevitable and started producing anomalies with respect to the earlier baseline. But that raises a problem – how do you produce an anomaly with respect to a baseline that isn’t in your data set?

The first sentence implies confirmation of my understanding that at the time of the Paris Agreement the Parties to the COP had not bothered to be precise as to the meaning of "1.5 C' or "2 C" of warming. And much of Gavin's piece works toward making the 1850 to 1900 benchmark precise. It's a sensible pursuit. If we are going to have benchmarks it's better that they not be fuzzy ones. But the fuzziness of the benchmark can be overinterpreted as fuzziness of the trajectory! Admittedly one could make a case that establishing the baseline tells us a little bit about the climate sensitivity (how much forcing leads to a given warming). It's not information-free in that regard. But it's not the best way to address that question or even a good way! It's main import is conventional. As a measure of urgency, our attentions are better dedicated to the much better measured (and concerning) end of the record and what it means than to arguing about the baseline.

GDJ #1: Less people than Los Angeles County

So I found a graphic online claiming to show all teh states with smaller populations than Los Angeles County, but it was incorrect, as it included Michigan, North Carolina and Georgia.

There are 40 states with populations smaller than Los Angeles County. There are nine Canadian provinces in the same category, the exception being Ontario. 

The population of Los Angeles County is 9.6 million. There are a *lot* of people directly affected by the current fire disaster.


 

#graphicdujour

(For what it's worth I did this in an online tool called SmartDraw, which is a Canva competitor. I can't recommend it so far. In the map you see I accidentally moved Kentucky and was unable to put it back where it goes, whence the double border with Tennessee.)

Radical Patience?

When you characterize another culture by its most extreme proponents, you are doing the extremists a huge favour.

Angry people who take ancient books too seriously are dangerous. That's surely true. But it really doesn't matter much which book they are worked up about.

There are sane and crazy people in every corner of the world, saddled with social pressures to profess some religion or ideology. The way to fight extremists is not by hating or abusing all their demographic peers.
For every person who really wants a holy war there are a hundred who just want to get along with their own community. Forgive them. Cut them slack. Give them a way to save face. Don't indulge the them-or-us view. Don't hate them.

As I see it, there are people who benefit from us hating each other; these people are power hungry cynics who want to weaken everyone but themselves.

In today's social media world, they easily masquerade as extremists egging us on to mutual hatred. 

There are plenty of reasons in today's world to be angry at sincere people who are confused and do damage as a result. But they're not what's driving us off the cliff. It's hard to distinguish the cynics from the sincere, but it's suicidal to hate people who don't know they're lying. And even the cynics (not hard to think of one these days is it?) are less than whole people and in some ways deserve our sympathy.

I think maybe what I'm advocating is radical, extreme patience.
I have as much trouble living up to it as anyone. Cynical liars make my blood boil, and of course it's hard to tell who believes their own fabulations. It's easy to get into fights with people whose only goal is to defeat you by any means available. It's also easy to disengage.
But it's not enough to disengage, and it's counterproductive to exchange contempt for contempt.
It may be too late for these insights. Everyplace that isn't an autocracy is coming undone. The totalitarian friendly information environment that Arendt warned us about is upon us, and social media platforms are mostly profiting from it.
I can only hope for an international movement of reasonable, sane people, more motivated by love and awe than by anger, hatred, and contempt. I don't know why there isn't one, really.

On Having an Inkling About How Much You Don't Know

There's this:

and then there's that:

How Long Do We Have to Reduce Emissions to Avoid Catastrophe?

Quora question:

How long do we have to reduce emissions to prevent catastrophic temperature rise?




There is both unclarity and uncertainty making it difficult to answer your question.

Moving Away from Twitter

OK, so it may be time to move on from Twitter.



Let's talk about some risks from the post-Elon Twitter, and what we can do if there's a need for an alternative.

One risk is that you won't be able to avoid Elon at all! He may set himself up a sort of super-account which everybody "follows" and nobody can block! Consequently his eccentric pronouncements will dominate the conversation even more than Trump's did.

And he'll let Trump back in on day 1.

So basically the noise level will skyrocket. This could happen as soon as next week.
Another risk is that his very takeover will ruin morale enough that too many people quit for the system to remain stable. Twitter may just choke on its own scale with the talent lost. This is alluded to in the Times piece:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/05/technology/elon-musk-twitter-predictions.html

As is my wont, I am rereading old futurism. I'd like to call your attention to something Arthur C Clarke said in the early 80s, somewhat in defence of the techno-libertarian free-speech absolutist view.





So Clarke was worried about irresponsible journalism, but he wasn't worried about pseudo-grass-roots propaganda.

This is forgiveable, he was a visionary in so many ways and an optimist, and he didn't foresee quite how much everybody-is-a-publisher would change the picture.

The Holocaust Museum had a traveling exhibit on Propaganda which among other things showed how effective Goebbels was in turning the public against the Jews by a concerted effort at rumour-mongering in the various small towns. Social media weaponizes this technique.

In my view, the precipitous decline of democracy that we're seeing now is only secondarily because of the stresses of the pandemic and the struggles to cope with climate change. I think the primary factor is the resurgence of malicious propaganda supercharged by the new media.

On the other hand, it's hard to argue against free speech. There's a huge appeal to the idea that everyone is a sort of equal on these platforms, and that we can share our evidence, our opinions, our complaints, our hopes. We need some sort of internet public sphere.

So what can we do to decrease the visibility of malign speech and increase the visibility of benign speech; to decrease the visibility of celebrity and increase the visibility of creativity; to decrease the visibility of resentment and increase the visibility of love?

I propose that a key problem with social media is very similar to the key problem with old school journalism. They are set up as for-profit business.

Unconstrained, this is inimical to the public interest.

And we not only can do better, we already have the tech we need!
So I propose we go back to RSS readers and blogs; but we should also each set up some sort of headline "tweet" feed.

(Google Reader was working fine for me. It was its collapse that sent me to Twitter.)

The public sphere needs to move off the for-profit platforms. We can do this just by doing it.

This won't solve the propaganda problem altogether, but it will solve a couple of problems.

An immediate advantage is for those of us who have the skills and understanding to do it - we'll be free of whatever travesties Musk inflicts on this platform as soon as we do, at least to the extent that the folks we follow maintain a suitable RSS feed.

In the long run we can hope and reasonably expect that tools emerge that make the RSS experience as close to that of social media as possible. The general public will then perceive the syndico-sphere as a viable alternative to social media. (And Musk's investment will evaporate!)

I recommend:

• Set up an RSS reader account
• Set up or revive your blog
• Increase participation in blog conversation
• Make sure anything you tweet is duplicated in a syndicate feed 

Follow me here and I'll keep you posted on my progress with this and offer advice. Thanks for your attention.

photo of Elon Musk is in the public domain. see https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SpaceX_CEO_Elon_Musk_visits_N%26NC_and_AFSPC_(190416-F-ZZ999-006)_(cropped).jpg

"The Earth Will Be Fine, It's Humanity that Needs Saving" NOT

I find it odd that people are telling themselves "The earth will be fine; it's humanity that needs saving." I am firmly convinced that neither part of this is true.

Yes, it is all too plausible that humans will encounter a massive mortality event. But neither conclusion follows.

The earth will not be fine because the worse humans do, the more severe the extinction event will be on the way down. Desperate people do much more environmental damage than comfortable ones, for instance, finding wood to burn for fuel. Ocean acidification, soil depletion, microplastic pollution, trace chemical distribution, these sort of things aren't going away when we do. A major extinction event depletes the earth for millions of years.

And humanity viewed *as a species* does not need saving because in the event of a major extinction, we are the most stubbornly adaptable species ever.

The most likely outcome of continuing collective human stupidity will be a great loss of human life, yes, but we will be the LAST vertebrate species to go utterly extinct, and one of the last species altogether, vertebrate or not. We are heading for a much depleted planet with a few people huddling in highly engineered environments, not some imagined return to Eden.

I am sorry to say this, but it is clearly the more likely outcome. I think people want to think otherwise because it helps them to deal with their terror and guilt. Alas, hoping for a return of the natural past after humanity is gone is not the right way to cope, because it is not going to happen.

Always remember that it's easier to Mars-form the earth than to terraform Mars.

mt's position on climate summarized:

 While I am a bit disengaged on climate right now, largely because I think we have more immediate existential threats than climate, I want to say a few things in case we don't succumb to our present dysfunctions.

In brief, I am NOT saying we don't need cost-benefit analysis, nor am I saying that money isn't important. What I AM saying is, hmm, five things.

===

mt's position summarized:

1) Money tells you nothing on century time scales.

2) Even if money did tell you something on long time scales, IAMs tell you nothing about money on those timescales.

3) If we take climate change seriously, we are entering a HIGH growth period, not a low growth one! People get this backwards.

4) Every decarbonization policy is a carbon tax. We're only debating details.

5) Economics as currently constituted can help us reach our objective but can't help us set it. We should just just stick to 2 C.

===

1) Money tells you nothing on century time scales.

Money is a metric that is valuable in the short term but meaningless in the long. We don't know what the cost function we ought to be that we're optimizing for. Total dollar equivalent wealth or total dollar equivalent economic throughput are signs of thriving in the short run but there is no reason to believe that across scenarios the world with the greatest gross economic product or the greatest constant-dollar denominated wealth will be the one we prefer. 

2) Even if money did tell you something on long time scales, IAMs tell you nothing about money on those timescales.

We need economists to think about these things, and we need ways to evaluate tradeoffs and outcomes over the long run, but I see very little sign that economics (or the IAM community if regarded as separate from economics) as currently constituted has any meaningful skill at doing so. The fact that we WISH IAMs were useful, and that IAMs are indeed an inevitable exercise, in no way indicates that their results are useful. I have looked under the hood of DICE. Its approach is risible, and anyone familiar with conceptual modeling and simulation of physical systems would (or at least should) dismiss it as worthless. 

Look. I read Asimov's Foundation series as a child. I love the idea that the future could somehow be predictable using statistical methods. But Salvor Hardin's dream is obviously impossible. And even if in some universe it were possible, it wouldn't be possible in an Excel spreadsheet taking ten year time steps. 

IAMs are toys. You can't be basing policy on them. Just because you wish they were useful doesn't make them so.

3) If we take climate change seriously, we are entering a HIGH growth period, not a low growth one! People get this backwards.

Following on point 1, there's a bit of a conundrum in the observation that short term policy (to me, obviously) optimizes for increasing economic throughput aka "growth" and long term policy (to me, obviously) does not. This requires a direction of serious thinking from specialists of which I have seen precisely none; instead there's some rather simple-minded polarization between "pro" and "anti" growth. I despair for the academy sometimes. It may have once been a bit less stupid; I suspect so.

Fortunately, as Tidal has convinced me in our conversations, there is no rush in resolving this if we take decarbonization seriously. The amount of economic activity required to replace our energy infrastructure in a reasonable time is immense. If we take this on, it will be an enormous, sustained, multi-decadal stimulus to growth, whether we should or do wish it were so or not. 

This is a recent change in my perspective.

4) Every decarbonization policy is a carbon tax. We're only debating details.

I'm opposed to relying on a direct proportional carbon tax as the sole method to achieve carbon neutrality; it puts the burden on small users rather than large ones. It will exacerbate already fierce competition between rural conservative/reactionary impulses and urban liber/radical ones. It basically amounts to a wealth transfer from rural areas to urban ones. It's only going to make the politics of the situation that much harder.

But that said, some people think it's a bad thing when the price of fossil energy goes up and at the same time are concerned about climate. This doesn't work. Any adequate policy of any sort *will* create an artificial scarcity which *will* drive prices up. Any policy which keeps prices down will encourage continued use. This totally obvious to anyone with the slightest sense of what economics is. It isn't Nobel-worthy economics! (I'm not sure, though, that anything is.) 

5) Economics as currently constituted can help us reach our objective but can't help us set it. We should just just stick to 2 C.

One might wish that it were otherwise, but (see points 1 and 2) we don't have enough skill in economics to set a target. Consequently we need to set a target (GMST, CO2 concentration, emissions pathway) more or less intuitively. For a number of reasons I think 2 C is a good one. I would suggest that one reason for using it as a stretch goal is that twenty years ago it was being talked about as a worst case.