80 Barton Paul Levenson says:
13 Jul 2021 at 6:02 AM
K 65: You two are representative of the most dangerous class of people on the planet today: Centrists advising incremental responses as the Titanic sinks.
BPL: Except that I don’t, and never have, advocated “incremental responses.”
What the actual hell do you think non-systemic change is?
I’m just not for YOUR solution and ONLY YOUR solution, like you are.
I did not create regenerative agriculture in any of its forms.
I did not create basic egalitarian decision-making in any of its forms. I am the first to propose a fractal, non-hierarchical, scale-based application of it, to my knowledge.
I am the first to bring these and other concepts together in a single model.
To call the overall approach mine is dishonest and/or ignorant and is nothing more than attempting denigration by association.
Please Bore Hole crap like this where BPL puts their ego before the lives of billions with personal attacks rather than engaging on issues.
Carbomontanussays
Meine Damen und Herren
Now you better discuss what you were supposed to discuss, not just extreme heat ande wildfires, but also sudden and extreme percipitation.
I red of 120 mm rain in Köln on Thursday, and the event is large. Not just Nordrhein Westfalen, but also Rheinland Pfalz and further into Belgia. With well over 100 victims and over 1000 missing becaquse communications have broken down.
I think of the “Delta”. The combined landscape with Rhein, Maas, and Waal is drained out via Rotterdam, and is highly artificial with channels, Dijks, and Bridges. To my conscepts, it looks dubious and dangerous because it is also partly severely flat.
Do think a bit in terms of the “Netherlands”, Pays bas, and even “Niedersachsen” when you think of climate change, and of “Hochwasser” and “Dat Water” they call it.
Luckily we have it steep enough here where I live, but I do often think in terms of climate- refugees when I think of the future. That may become a worst problem, especially where it is steep enough and quite close to those obviously overpopulated and threatened areas.
Well, I hope that enough people will begin to dislike unnecessary wars and waste of money for unnecessary and unhealthy Luxury because of such cathastrophies, and begin to see their true values better.
But do you see that as a step towards the “control of weather events”?
Yes, understanding of course always comes first. But what might be controllable is the preparation in advance of knowing when the next El Nino event occurs. Could this be billions or even trillions of $$$ saved and potential lives lost if farmers knew how much seed and irrigation allowances to make and governments knew where to spend in preventative disaster control?
I am not going on much of a ledge since there is lots of ongoing research to back this up, but it’s likely that El Ninos in the future will readily be predicted years in advance. Most think this is impossible because of the butterfly effect, but as we are seeing determinism caused by forcing is over-riding that, which is the subtext of the Miyoshi & Sun paper
nigeljsays
Research paper: “Large and increasing methane emissions from eastern Amazonia derived from satellite data, 2010–2018”
“Our results show that the Amazon alone was responsible for 24 ± 18 % of the total global increase in CH4 flux during the study period, and it may contribute further in future due to its sensitivity to temperature changes.”
Adam Leasays
82, 83
A Google search will come up with some papers relating climate change to storminess. A few I found:
I agree we need to find out how to adapt to a future with more frequent climate extremes. Where I live in the UK is, unfortunately, not great when it comes to the more extreme weather that our temperate climate can deliver, because it seems our ways of life are optimised for the current normal, and cope very badly with even modest deviation from normal. Even a modest windstorm or a couple of inches of snow can cause significant disruption in SE England, because of the high population density and because transportation systems are running at almost maximum capacity, with no slack to take up perturbations caused by things like severe weather.
Welcome to the future if some of the predictions over the next century come to pass.
Carbomontanussays
Ladies and Gentlemen:
There will be many upset comments following the rainy situation in Germany and the Netherlands, I hope.
Such things is rather what our political and personal responsibility for the climate is about.
Personally, I am very happy that our community did totally renovate the local water and sewage and draining system here a few years ago, and seeing it dug up again what was done cheaply and hasty from the beginning in our new suburb area, I was really upset. It was high time!
Thus if you love to blame the politicians, then blame them for such betrayal. Which is not private responsibility. It is social, official, and political responsibility. It is about official enterprizes and workers being qualified.
I have a cellar- pump with level switch, my private “waterstaat” of which I am very proud. It goes on and off in intervals, and that system has gone on and off more and more often, precisely proportional to the Keeling Curve for the last 45 years.
And thus one of my basic references in order for me to judge the validity and the honesty of the IPCC.
Then, what I really hate and what makes me quite upset, and the reason why I disturb you all here, is that when I am able to put one and two and tree and a few further simple tings together, things that are in my own experience and under my own responsibility and control because it rather is part of my own trade and own economy and existance,… and come to a general conclusion on the basis of that…
… and some people dare to fight and to deny boldly that general conclusion,…
… then they actually fight my person, my knowledge, my vital interests, my personal trade, and my style, existance, and economy. And political opinion & religion, and my “Waterstaat” in the cellar, and my Community and society..
They are frighting my flowers and my trees, my personal worrying, my horizons, my own skills, and my 2 cellar- pumps.
Greta Thunhberg has a similar wiew of it.
And we hope that it will touch the German election this autumn.
nigeljsays
This is interesting: “Climate change is fueling mass-casualty heat waves. Here’s why experts say we don’t view them as crises.”
Try not to assume I’m somehow downplaying the issues of heatwaves or being centrist or whatever. I’m very concerned that climate change is making heatwaves worse, and is hurting a lot of people. But the commentary drills down into the psychology of WHY we (mostly) dont react with as much alarm to killer heatwaves as for example hurricanes.
Killiansays
92 Mike
Yup.
There are those who see what is and let the facts lead them, then there are those who see what eases their fears. This is why the first principle is…
Observe: See, don’t guess. Adapt to what is. Then you can design so that you…
Don’t impose design; let it emerge: No igloos in Florida. Also, no condos built on (reclaimed) beaches and limestone. Maybe don’t tell The Elders to fuck off when they tell you to use resources with the 7th generation at the forefront of your thinking so you don’t create a slow-rolling Chicxulub and instead…
Design so every element has *at least* two functions, and the more the merrier; and design so that every element is supported by the functions of at least two other elements: Maintain the web of life. Recreate ecosystems.
Etc.
Guest (O.)says
Storms were not the problem during the last few days in Europe.
The problem was, that the clouds did not move fast enough and there was too much rain on the same land area. I think, very likely windy/stormy weather would have helped to reduce the flooding problems.
nigeljsays
Killian @101, I largely agree with Barton Paul Levensons comment @80 about incrementalism and crackpot ideas. I have nothing in principle against systemic change or revolutionary scale change or rapid change if its a workable plan and the right solution. Its your version of systemic change that looks unconvincing at least in part. Im quite happy with a new energy grid built as quickly as possible. This is systemic change of the energy system.
“I am the first to bring these and other concepts together in a single model. To call the overall approach mine is dishonest and/or ignorant and is nothing more than attempting denigration by association.”
This is completely contradictory. You have just said the overall approach is yours then said its dishonest to suggest it is. It’s also not significant whether the ideas were yours or ideas you supported. The point being made is about the ideas.
nigeljsays
Killlian @101, addendum to previous comment.
“I am the first to bring these and other concepts together in a single model.To call the overall approach mine is dishonest and/or ignorant and is nothing more than attempting denigration by association.”
On second thoughts maybe he isn’t contradicting himself. He probably means the individual ideas are not his. His use of english language is so confusing. But he cannot distance himself like this from ideas he clearly supports.
Paul Pukite(@whut) @103,
We are in agreement that an improved understanding of ENSO to the point of being able to forecast it with confidence at an inter-annual timescale would be very useful for those who live in its shadow.
And I do see in that context, the Abstract of Miyoshi & Sun (2021) does make sense in saying they consider their work as a step “toward possible future applications to reduce weather disaster risks.”
But am I being overly pedantic to see this ‘prediction of weather events’ as having a whole different meaning to the paper’s conclusions’ “control of weather events”?
BPL: I’m just not for YOUR solution and ONLY YOUR solution, like you are.
K 101: I did not create regenerative agriculture in any of its forms.
BPL: Nor am I against regenerative agriculture, you flaming ass.
Adam Leasays
107: “But the commentary drills down into the psychology of WHY we (mostly) dont react with as much alarm to killer heatwaves as for example hurricanes.”
My guess would have been a heatwave is a leisurely disaster, killing people across a large area over a number of days or weeks, and mostly kills the weakest members of the population, whereas with a hurricane coming ashore, the power and destruction is in your face, there is no hiding from the effects, and the aftermath can be catastrophic, after a cat 5 has gone through the area can be uninhabitable for weeks.
prlsays
114: “after a cat 5 has gone through the area can be uninhabitable for weeks.”
Sometimes a lot longer, even for lower category hurricanes.
E.g. tropical cyclone Tracy in Darwin, 1974 (Australian category 4, SSHWS category 3):
“Tracy killed 71 people, caused A$837 million in damage (1974 dollars), or approximately A$6.85 billion (2018 dollars), or $4.79 billion 2018 USD. It destroyed more than 70 percent of Darwin’s buildings, including 80 percent of houses. It left more than 25,000 out of the 47,000 inhabitants of the city homeless prior to landfall and required the evacuation of over 30,000 people, of whom many never returned.”
The mangled grammar in the last sentence is in the original. It should read something like “more than 25,000 were left homeless out of the 47,000 inhabitants of the city prior to landfall.”
“By 1978, much of the city had recovered and was able to house almost the same number of people as it had before the cyclone hit. However, by the 1980s, as many as sixty percent of Darwin’s 1974 population had left, never to return. In the years that followed, Darwin was almost entirely rebuilt and now shows almost no resemblance to the pre-Tracy Darwin of December 1974.”
I’m taking a momentary break from all the horrible climate change impacts we’ve seen around the world lately–New Zealand flooding being just the most recent as of writing–and retreating, briefly no doubt, to theory.
The vexed question of stratospheric cooling and the GHE came up elsewhere recently, so I hit Realclimate’s posts on that topic from way, way back in 2004-6 or thereabouts. It would seem, based on recent reports, that the upper atmosphere is still contracting just as in Lastovicka et al (2006), which RC cited back in the day, and which is available as PDF here:
So, I’m wondering how understanding of this aspect of things has evolved in the 15-odd years since then? In particular, is stratospheric cooling still regarded as something of a GHE fingerprint? And are qualitative descriptions any clearer than back then?
John Pollacksays
July 20 was a bad day on the east side of the Persian/Arabian Gulf. A number of weather stations had hourly readings with the wet bulb temperature (Twet) above 32C. These include:
Station ID Temp/dew point Twet UTC time
Bastak Arpt OIBH 37/31 32.2C 0700
Khark Isl. AP OIBQ 35/32 32.6C 0400,0500
Persian Gulf AP OIBP 37/32 33.0C 0800
Kish Isl. AP OIBK 35/33 33.4C 0500
Qeshm Isl. AP OIKQ 36/33 33.6C 1000,1100
honorable mention goes to Abadan Intl. Airport, which (for US reference) combined the attributes of a hot day in Phoenix with a humid one in Houston
Abadan Intl AP OIAA 46/26 30.5C 1300
In other warming news, the normally cool equatorial current that extends westward from the African coast is also having a heat wave. Weekly average SST in the Gulf of Guinea north of the equator exceeds 26C, with an anomaly of up to +2.5C centered around 15W, and warmer than +1C to 30W.
“I am surprised by how far [the rainfall] is above the previous record,” Dieter Gerten, who grew up in a village in the affected area and is now professor of global change climatology and hydrology at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, told The Guardian. “We seem to be not just above normal but in domains we didn’t expect in terms of spatial extent and the speed it developed.”
21 July 2021 (The Washington Post) – Wang Peng rushed to join flood rescue efforts in Zhengzhou on Wednesday, as the central Chinese city was inundated with record rain. But his group of volunteers found themselves overwhelmed, with streets turned into rivers.
“Once I got to the scene, I couldn’t help anyone,” said Wang, a 34-year-old logistics manager. “The water was too deep.”
Wang and other volunteers recounted scenes of devastation in Zhengzhou on Wednesday, as the death toll rose to 25 and more than 1.2 million people were displaced. Videos circulating online showed residents being rescued with ropes from deep, rushing waters. Large areas of the surrounding countryside remained underwater. […]
The state-run People’s Daily newspaper called the rainstorm the “worst in Zhengzhou history,” with almost a year’s worth of rain falling in a single day.
Patrick at 119: thanks for sharing that, I wonder if Dieter Gerten’s view and level of surprise about rainfall levels is shared by others at Pottsdam or the climate scientist community generally. I have the impression that the rainfall increase was expected. I am used to reading that scientists are surprised that is already happening at levels they expected later in this century, so that is surprise about timing, but Gerten is not talking about timing, but the variance in degree. There’s always this background chatter about how scientists haven’t been clear enough about the risks and that reticence of scientists has enabled the problem to become worse. I think a quote like that one from subtantiates some of that chatter, but the blame game is kinda useless now. As RL notes at 120, we have left the fuck around stage of global warming and have entered the find out stage.
It didn’t have to turn out this badly. We still have an opportunity to reduce the suffering and misery that comes with a warmed planet, but the stuff we have to do might drive deficit spending and that chimera still have a lot of traction to centrist thinking about global warming.
Cheers
Mike
Mikesays
Top US scientist on melting glaciers: ‘I’ve gone from being an ecologist to a coroner’
that has to be a bit of a bummer. It’s never too late to change occupations once the thrill and joy are gone. But it’s hard to change occupations and reinvent yourself. I did it a couple of times, it was hard work and scary. We do what we have to in order to pay the mortgage, etc but it is probably smart to know when to throw in the towel. When I look back at the changes that I made, I think I should have thrown in the towel a bit earlier. Some things you think will really work well turn out to be dead ends. Then you start thinking of yourself as a coroner. That’s grim if you are not working at an office with a sign that says Coroner. If you see the coroner sign, you chose it and I hope it is going well for you there.
Cheers
Mike
Reality Checksays
another Siberian report:
Monitoring suggests toxic smoke in Yakutsk is one of world’s worst ever air pollution events
Yakutsk, the capital of Russia’s north-east Sakha Republic – also known as Yakutia – is the coldest winter city on the planet, but due to global heating, summer temperatures here have been rising at least 2.5 times faster than the world average. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jul/20/airpocalypse-hits-siberian-city-as-heatwave-sparks-forest-fires
@122 – “There’s always this background chatter about how scientists haven’t been clear enough about the risks and that reticence of scientists has enabled the problem to become worse.” – opinions vary, they’re human. At times overly defensive too? Or disagree on the finer points and the emphasis of others.
A recent example Jul 14, 2021
…. 1) the IPCC’s SR1.5 report further hid the huge & immediate scale of mitigation required to meet our 1.5-2°C commitments behind a veil of future negative emission technologies & so-called nature-based-solutions. Policymakers & many others have been misled.
… 2) That many people don’t understand why and how the climate is changing and what would be effective in slowing that down, is not evidence anyone was misled by the IPCC. I’d even argue the opposite: Far more people are so aware because of the 1.5°C report.
… 3) It raised awareness (from almost nothing) while also giving (or at least allowing) the impression that 2050 was a reasonable time to make targets for.
I think there was an article on RC here years ago that challenged/argued the then latest IPCC report about SLR/Ice loss (?) as being ‘too conservative’, ignoring recent knowledge, and therefore potentially ‘misleading’
The choice of a descriptive word can all too often get noses out of joint to a point where the point being made is lost in the subsequent ‘noise.’
@120 and @122 yes, and yes, seems like it.
nigeljsays
Research: “Elevated atmospheric CO2 adversely affects a dung beetle’s development: another potential driver of decline in insect numbers?”
113 Barton Paul Levenson says:
19 Jul 2021 at 7:56 AM
BPL: I’m just not for YOUR solution and ONLY YOUR solution, like you are.
K 101: I did not create regenerative agriculture in any of its forms.
BPL: Nor am I against regenerative agriculture, you flaming ass.
Yes, you are. You are against the changes necessary to make it dominant in industrialized nations. And, no, a few cover crops and no-till do not equal regenerative.
Carbomontanussays
125 nigelj
That seems less responsible, as very many insects live in high concentration CO2 enviroments.
I can mention Drosofila melanogaster, that live on fermenting fruits in laboratory glasses, and seek up & swarm aound active wine jugs and bottles..
..and common mosquitoes of several kinds, that do not go after your sweet blood, but do identify you because your very typical CO2… Aura… due to your combustion of organic material.
I was at the dept of entomology, Agricultural highschool, and they had barn-flies in culture in the darkroom. They thrive and breed on a mixture of fermenting grass and cereales and honey and common piss.
Also in the acker and in the garden if you want to have proper microfauna in your soils,… se that there is anything fermenting and edible for them, and proper mycelium and fungi and odeours.
What is the CO2 level inside of a bee- hive or inside of an anthill?
Or inside of a large whasps- nest?
Carbomontanussays
125 nigelj
That seems less responsible, as very many insects live in high concentration CO2 enviroments.
I can mention Drosofila melanogaster, that live on fermenting fruits in laboratory glasses, and seek up & swarm aound active wine jugs and bottles..
..and common mosquitoes of several kinds, that do not go after your sweet blood, but do identify you because your very typical CO2… Aura… due to your combustion of organic material.
I was at the dept of entomology, Agricultural highschool, and they had barn-flies in culture in the darkroom. They thrive and breed on a mixture of fermenting grass and cereals and honey and common piss.
Also in the acker and in the garden if you want to have proper microfauna in your soils,… se that there is anything fermenting and edible for them, and proper mycelium and fungi and odeours.
What is the CO2 level inside of a bee- hive or inside of an anthill?
BPL: Nor am I against regenerative agriculture, you flaming ass.
K 126: Yes, you are.
Abnormal psyche professor: Killian continuously rewrites events as they happen so he always comes out looking good and his enemies always come out looking horrific. What do we call this, class?
nigeljsays
Carbomontanus @128 “That seems less responsible, as very many insects live in high concentration CO2 enviroments.”
Were those examples of insects in laboratory situations tested to see if the high CO2 concentrations affected their life cycles and mortality? And the mosquitos annoying us humans, and insects eating fermenting material are only exposed to high CO2 concentrations briefly and intermittently. They are adapted to that. This is obviously different from a permanent rise in background levels.
Richard the Weaversays
Nigelj: He probably means the individual ideas are not his. His use of english language is so confusing. But he cannot distance himself like this from ideas he clearly supports.
RtW: He didn’t distance. He was letting folks know he is/was a student in those areas, as opposed to an innovator. Killian’s language is a bit poetic there. He says what he is not to be credited with. And what he also is not responsible for creating. That sets up the Money Shot: what he is, and what he did do.
Or at least that’s how I read it (not going back).
Richard the Weaversays
BPL: Abnormal psyche professor: Killian continuously rewrites events as they happen so he always comes out looking good and his enemies always come out looking horrific. What do we call this, class?
RtW: reality. Humans remember things via description and narrative, as opposed to events themselves.
Each time one thinks of an event one writes another version that competes with all previous tellings and ponderings. The truth gets washed and smeared.
And remember, when you describe things you generally focus on what you did right and what they did wrong. By telling your friends “all” about it your memory of the event gradually (or immediately if you’re GOPpish) migrates to fantasy.
mikesays
“A remarkable new study by a director at one of the largest accounting firms in the world has found that a famous, decades-old warning from MIT about the risk of industrial civilization collapsing appears to be accurate based on new empirical data.
As the world looks forward to a rebound in economic growth following the devastation wrought by the pandemic, the research raises urgent questions about the risks of attempting to simply return to the pre-pandemic ‘normal.’
In 1972, a team of MIT scientists got together to study the risks of civilizational collapse. Their system dynamics model published by the Club of Rome identified impending ‘limits to growth’ (LtG) that meant industrial civilization was on track to collapse sometime within the 21st century, due to overexploitation of planetary resources.”
Here’s a new name to store along with Guy McPherson: Gaya Herrington.
When folks put up signs that say, Stay Back from Cliff, or Watch for Rogue Waves, are they scare-mongering or giving responsible warnings?
Centrists may say, “where would government get the money to address this problem?”
Hey, governments found money to fight WWII even though it was right after the great depression and the dustbowl. Many folks back in that day were quite sure that FDR’s depression deficit spending gave the government no room to expand the economy in the event of a new emergency. You know what? That turned out to be nonsense. The government turned on the printing press and cranked out the bucks to fight the “good war.”
Buckminster Fuller, no centrist in his thinking, said that we can afford to do anything we have to do. So right, Bucky. He was talking about reluctance in the US to fund secondary sewage treatment across the country to protect water, but I am pretty sure that if he were alive, he would feel that we have to take action to address global warming.
Maybe we need signs that say, Watch Out for Nonsense in Public Discussion.
Cheers
Mike
Killiansays
131 Richard the Weaver says:
24 Jul 2021 at 10:19 PM
Nigelj: He probably means the individual ideas are not his. His use of english language is so confusing. But he cannot distance himself like this from ideas he clearly supports.
RtW: He didn’t distance. He was letting folks know he is/was a student in those areas, as opposed to an innovator. Killian’s language is a bit poetic there. He says what he is not to be credited with. And what he also is not responsible for creating. That sets up the Money Shot: what he is, and what he did do.
Or at least that’s how I read it (not going back).
Indeed, but a fool hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest, at least according to Simon and Garfunkle.
Killiansays
133 mike Here’s a new name to store along with Guy McPherson: Gaya Herrington.
You’ve got a serious misunderstanding of what McPherson has been spouting. Yes, McPherson was right to stress urgency, but he got off into some weird cult of personality crap that derailed everything he was saying.
Gaya: Yeah, sure, we can fix this. No problem. Will take some serious work, but, it’s doable.
McPherson: It’s too late. Humanity should be in hospice mode because we will be extinct by 2026. Period. Also, McPherson misrepresents the science to fit his suicidal, the-end-is-nigh agenda.
What these two are saying is vastly different. You might owe Henderson an apology for that comparison. One is a absurd and the other is a sober analyst.
Killiansays
132 Richard the Weaver says:
25 Jul 2021 at 8:17 AM
BPL: Abnormal psyche professor: Killian continuously rewrites events as they happen so he always comes out looking good and his enemies always come out looking horrific. What do we call this, class?
RtW: reality. Humans remember things via description and narrative, as opposed to events themselves.
…By telling your friends “all” about it your memory of the event gradually (or immediately if you’re GOPpish) migrates to fantasy.
You’re not helping here. There was no rewrite, there was an application of logic. BPL may pay lip service to supporting Regen Ag, but his views of climate policies, economics, etc., as I said, support none of what will make global regenerative ag possible.
This is another case of one seeing what they wish to see and disregarding the rest.
They can’t keep up, so they pull this crap.
Susan Andersonsays
Anyone who has seen me here knows I’m not a scientist, just an interested party with extended acquaintance with science and scientists, an admirer their honesty and knowledge. Since “Unforced Variations” is partly about tactics and communication, I offer an extended extract from Kathryn Schultz (who wrote that amazing article about the Cascadian fault and possible NW American earthquake). It begins with an observation about the reviewed author in the context of religion, but is mostly a range of observations on self-righteousness about nature that ignores our part in nature’s community of humans [better yet, go to the link and read it, especially the second half]: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/07/12/what-do-we-hope-to-find-when-we-look-for-a-snow-leopard
he is very funny on the theme, recasting Matthiessen’s Zen take on the matter—“If the snow leopard should manifest itself, then I am ready to see the snow leopard”—as something a good Christian might say on his knees in Notre Dame: “Lord, if I did not have a vision of the snow leopard, it is because I was not worthy to receive it, and I am grateful to You for sparing me the vanity of such an encounter.”
All this tilts dangerously toward that old familiar strain of fascism in nature writing, the strain that despises cities as breeding grounds for the foreign and impoverished while promising to restore to a purer people glory and lands. For the most part, though, Tesson sounds less like a proto-fascist than like a standard-issue curmudgeon; he despises human beings not in subsets but in general, partly for defiling the environment but mostly for being inferior, in his estimation, to other animals—weaker, plagued by thought, capable of evil. In this respect, he is continuing a tradition of eco-grumpiness made famous by the likes of Henry David Thoreau and Edward Abbey, and his writing is marked by two of their most unpalatable qualities: contempt and hypocrisy.
Tesson is, at least, aware that he is part of the problem. He knows he has spent most of his life rushing around the globe while “bleating (in a self-important tone) that humankind would do well to stop rushing around the globe.” Yet that single sentence represents almost all of his reckoning with his own involvement in a culture that he claims to despise, while the sentences that inveigh and condemn keep piling up. He speaks disparagingly of “a certain lumbering race of humans,” as if he himself belonged to some other race; equates progress with sadness; sneers that we have reached “the acme of civilization: traffic jams and obesity”; quotes Novalis and Proust but mocks “culture” as the opposite of nature and therefore detestable; rejoices that some of the local children he encounters are spared the “ignominy” of education; and declares, while travelling to his destination by car, that “modernization is the pauperization of the past.” Even a house cat, purring away in the warmth of a Tibetan home, comes in for his disdain, as if it were nothing more than a snow leopard manqué. ….
Humankind as destructive, culture as corrosive, progress as decline: these are old saws, dull from use, dull from their stalemate combination of truth and falsity.
Some things that are old become venerable, others become clichéd, others just cease to speak to the times. …. only the least interested or least trustworthy narrator can have failed to notice by now that nature’s existential condition needs at least as much tending as our own. As a result, contemporary nature writing is losing tonal diversity as steadily as its subject is losing biodiversity ….
Solid reasons for righteous anger keep piling up …. Our growing awareness of just how drastically we have altered the planet has provoked similarly large-scale feelings of guilt and recrimination, so that regarding one another with disgust has drifted from a fringe to a mainstream perspective. …. a sense of ourselves, steadily intensifying these past several decades, as an existential threat to the planet. … the Misanthropocene, …
And yet, when you listen closely, there is often something off key about this kind of invective…. perfunctory, while offense at other people … seems fiery and genuine. ….
I have sometimes succumbed to an ugly feeling common to many of us who love nature: the sanctimonious sense that everyone but me is using it wrong.
… The problem begins when that feeling is passed off as fact, in a kind of reverse pathetic fallacy, as if our emotions reflected the state of the planet. … a transgression against one’s own private contentment is not a transgression against nature. Indeed, in my experience environmental concerns have relatively little to do with the dismay that nature lovers feel at the presence of other people in the wilderness. …. it does not seem any more defensible to use concern for the natural world as a pretext for being a grouch.
…. If our chief goal is to begin ameliorating the many environmental crises we presently face, then misanthropy does not strike me as a likely means to that end. …. there is a difference between a jeremiad, which indicts its listeners but can also help them imagine a better future, and a tirade, which deals only in rage and blame. … from Rachel Carson to David Quammen, have worked in the former vein, inspired less by wrath than by sorrow and alarm.
…. we are not solitary creatures but members of a shared community, accountable to and dependent on one another whether we like it or not. …. any suggestion of interdependence, anything that we need from or provide for one another, violates a sacred freedom.
….
Stripped of its soaring prose and its sagebrush and pine martens, this is the default attitude of teenagers and tyrants; were it not so dangerous, it would simply be absurd. …. they valorize the challenges that arise when we confront ourselves and the wilderness but not the challenges that arise when we confront one another.
…. [patience] was a particular relationship between the self and the other, an inward restraint that has nothing to do with behaving like a rock and everything to do with how we treat other people. … [requires] humility, empathy, and forbearance: the ability to set aside our own needs for a while, to listen, to stay calm, to keep working together toward a given end despite all the setbacks we encounter along the way.
Barry E Finchsays
@133 mike For me, the 2 main negative issues with Guy McPherson are:
– He lies outright and hugely about two published WG1 climate science papers (both about atmospheric aerosols), and
– He has zero understanding of basic thermodynamics
I’m unable to tolerate either of those 2 preceding. He might well be fine about the other stuff for all I know, I don’t study it.
nigeljsays
Richard the Weaver @132 “Each time one thinks of the event….”. This is just pure BS. Stop making excuses for people. BPL understand it better than you.
nigeljsays
Killian @136 says “You’re not helping here. There was no rewrite, there was an application of logic. BPL may pay lip service to supporting Regen Ag, but his views of climate policies, economics, etc., as I said, support none of what will make global regenerative ag possible.”
And yet this same Killian guy tells us how regenerative agriculture is taking off like a rocket in… capitalist countries! ROFL. The fact is regenerative agriculture is just a way of farming and it could happen under just about any economic system. Its just more Killian BS.
Carbomontanussays
Ladies and Gentlemen
Yesterday evening 25-7-21 I believe I saw rather thick, wildfrire smoke over Oslo and enviroment. I have a very long horisontal perspective from where I live, and that air or atmosphere was quite abnormal. Normally it is blue in the longest horions, but this was ocker brownish red, like we see it from New Delhi or Peking.
Not even under the worst diesel smog situations in winter can it be that yellowish brown, and the british coal industries have vanished or they are shrubbed in the meantime.
I have looked oven Nullschool if there are plausible winds. It burns even worse in eastern Siberia at the moment, but that goes eastward. California and Oregon is very far from here, but I have red that smoke from there has reached New York.
I am rather sure because we have very clean air and blue sky due to hydroelectric power like in France where they have mostly Nuclear.
But we will know for rather quite sure now in 3 days, because heavy and long rain is forecasted
By the way, the diesel smoke situation and dirty airplanes were very characteristic in the EU south of us as seen from the airplane windows 30-40 years ago. It showed also in the bee- hives on the Propolis, that was almost black in Germany but up to light brick red here. Since then they have changed to “clean diesel” and the modern updated more quiet and clean turbo prop jet. Only Aeroflot and the B52 has ran on original simple and noisy turbojet using cheaqp dirty kerosene, that gives black stripes in the troposphere.
Chucksays
And Weaktor is still stunningly Stupid. Wtf!
Victoria’s Secret says:
“Sure. It’s hotter than usual. We all know that. So yes, as a result we are seeing some instances of extreme heat in certain places. What does that tell us about the influence of CO2 on the world’s climate? Absolutely nothing!”
zebrasays
Susan Anderson #137,
Susan, I read the article, and I can’t agree, if I understand the author’s point correctly.
Here is humanity interacting with each other and the natural world:
Gosh, what a spiritual journey that must have been… almost as good as Disney World, eh.
Wilderness, and being alone there, is very different from bagging summits. You stop being a ‘teenager’, and become better at dealing with other humans, when you start seeing the “little places” on the way up. From that you get to understand that being where you can see the summit is just as good as standing on it… maybe better, because being able to turn around there and start back down is real “freedom”.
Humans are indeed interdependent, but we have the potential to be more than very clever monkeys, and that requires individual growth. If one is never alone, whatever the venue, that is unlikely to happen.
Susan Andersonsays
I should have edited: (1) ¶1: the religious bit will be distracting, (2) the next 2 ¶s are slow to get to the point, (3) the meat is further in (note bolded sentence). Unfortunately, our attention span is all too brief. I hope people with too little time or desire to read the whole will skip the beginning and read the end.
Carbomontanussays
130 Nigelj
Routine culture or breeding of Drosofila in the lab for several generations was a recepy of honey ++ with some yeast, in glasses cowered with “gaz” for possible ventilation. What surprized me most of all is that they would live in an environment of 20-30 promille etanol, thus they must also have very efficient alcoholases.
Common barn- flies grew on meshed green grass + wheat bran + some honey + yeast.
I tried further at home. You crush sweet pears in a glass. They will smell that and arrive in autumn. Then tie over with “Gaz”. Then you have them IN VITRO. The glasses do become extreemly full og Drosofila in just 2 weeks, so you can take them to school and open a glass in the classroom.
The Teacher will wonder and start waving around.
Thus anyone can interrupt the education quite efficiently..
To take them out and to count them, we had a bottle of CO2, and like humans, they go down and sleep in higher CO2- concentrations heavier than air, and can be counted and sorted carefully in a small box, cowered with CO2. And will fly upp again in 10 seconds if CO2 is taken away.,
For longer anestesia, we used dietyl- eter, that took longer time to wake up from. And for killing them, we used Etyl- acetat. Then they go down and never wake up again.
All in all, it is obvious that a lot of insects are selected and aquaintede to very high concentrations of CO2 in their natural living- rooms where they also preferre to breed, just think of typical places where things are rotting or fermenting, and they like that and live there.
When the community goes down in the septic and sewage pits, they better check the air down there first. Or in engine- rooms with automatic CO2 fire extinguisher that may leak, or wherever fruit and potatoes is stored in tight rooms and cellars under CO2- cower.
Everyone healthy enough can live and breathe well with only 10% oxygen in the air, resembling 5.5 Km up in an airplane or balloon. But CO2- concentrations above 10 % I think, is solidly narcotic as for flies.
Susan Andersonsays
@Zebra – not sure what you’re getting at, but can you say “both/and”? Of course Everest is an excellent illustration of one kind of egomania that harms rather than helping.
As noted in my further comment, I regret including the first paragraph, which will get knickers in a twist about religion, and is irrelevant to most of the rest. I found it amusing, but it’s a distraction.
I repeat: blame seeking is a distraction from the vital work. It’s only all our lives and futures.
Barry E Finchsays
@119 December 2019 MA Rodger: The scientists operating this Web Log site have recently implied with considerable subtle nuance that the average relaxation time for an H2O or CO2 molecule that’s not a CO2 molecule emitting a 15μm photon is measured in about 1 hour give or take a few minutes rather than your tenths of seconds for a CO2 molecule emitting a 15μm photon. I suppose I’d need to find your references that do exist are buried within rather complex analyses but I greatly doubt I’ll ever bother, too lazy. Thanks again for the “measured in tenths of seconds” CO2 15μm photon information.
mike @133,
The paper Herrington (2021) ‘Update to limits to growth – Comparing the World3 model with empirical data’ is surely too closely wedded to Meadows et al (1972) ‘Limits to Growth – A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind’ to be taken seriously.
How can it be any more than pointless curve-fitting when a data series exhibiting exponential growth is fitted onto an un-scaled curve of some nebulous ‘pollution’ quantity also undergoing exponential growth? So Herrington (2021), by taking “CO2 concentrations and plastic production … as proxies” for ‘pollution’ is but a silly exercise in curve-fitting while using the widely-known 1972 Club of Rome study to cynically promote it.
Given this, and given the 1972 work both says it has no idea about the limits to the various sorts of ‘pollution’ as well as putting CO2 equally alongside the pollution of waste heat from our energy use, can there be any merit in the projections from Herrington (2021) that “indicate a slowdown and eventual halt in growth within the next decade or so”?
Carbomontanussays
By the way, Hr Nigel
The mentioned Drosofila- experiments were in order to define and to explore reminiscents of insectides such as DDT and Lindan, to which he said “the Drosofilæ are especially sensitive..”.
As a young student with fresh senses, I felt clearly that I could taste it allready, Carrots grown by DDT and Lindan against carrot flie, sprayed on the soil and even given to the seeds. And untreated carrots as zero reference. The treated carrots hardly tasted carrots bat all. Those Umbelliferæ are rather fameous spice plants all of them.
Thinking it over later on, I found it out of question that I could taste those minute levels of DDT or Lindan, so what was it?
But there was an obvious difference of taste, as I sneakingly ate parts of the samples.
I have later come to believe that it may have been the dramatic impact of DDT and Lindan to the very soil microfauna, that is actually insects to a large extent, and what that micro- life means to the spreading of fungi and mycelium and spores in the topsoils.
Mold and mushrums is often quite tasty, even smells very characteristic.
A lot of tiny insects especially larvae do actually have mycelium and bacteriæ on their main diet, and spread it the best they can to live symbiotic with it.
Those untreated carrots were quite more “nostalgic” and better. And I think that principle may rule further for a lot of crops.
Wherefore we like and preferre it both “nostalgic” and “organic”.
Giving CO2 the blame here is to shoot the wrong enemy. I do rather suspect todays “neonicotinoides” for being the main reason for the disappearing insects.
For private Drosofila experiments, one has to take unsprayed pears.
Killiansays
148 MA Rodger says:
26 Jul 2021 at 12:04 PM
mike @133,
The paper Herrington (2021) ‘Update to limits to growth – Comparing the World3 model with empirical data’ is surely too closely wedded to Meadows et al (1972) ‘Limits to Growth – A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind’ to be taken seriously.
How can it be any more than pointless curve-fitting when a data series exhibiting exponential growth is fitted onto an un-scaled curve of some nebulous ‘pollution’ quantity also undergoing exponential growth? So Herrington (2021), by taking “CO2 concentrations and plastic production … as proxies” for ‘pollution’ is but a silly exercise in curve-fitting while using the widely-known 1972 Club of Rome study to cynically promote it.
Given this, and given the 1972 work both says it has no idea about the limits to the various sorts of ‘pollution’ as well as putting CO2 equally alongside the pollution of waste heat from our energy use, can there be any merit in the projections from Herrington (2021) that “indicate a slowdown and eventual halt in growth within the next decade or so”?
MAR has once again pulled back hard on the reigns of forward thinking and also imposed his personal biases WRT rapid climate change and insisted on hyper-conservative views thereof.
This phrase caught my eye: “How can it be any more than pointless curve-fitting…” I hope it is clear to all he doesn’t actually know. He’s assuming it is curve fitting and that it is pointless. This is nothing but biased dressed up as a legitimate opinion and analysis.
The claim is CO2 cannot serve as the proxy claimed. Why not? MAR does not say, he simply claims it is so. Yet, CO2 emissions are exactly estimated from economic output, which has an energy correlation. Of course CO2 can serve as a proxy for pollution.
MAR’s bias is further revealed the pejorative terms he uses: too closely wedded… to be taken seriously, pointless, silly, cynically, etc. Based on his own language, MAR has made zero attempt at honest analysis. I think it would be fair to say MAR has an extremely negative view of LtoG from the jump.
So, no, the techniques are not bogus. No, the intent was not nefarious (the author states she started the review out of her own curiosity, but you call her a liar, VERY thinly veiled.) And, yes, EVERY updated analysis of LtoG has had exactly the same result.
I believe replicability is a key foundation of good science, yes? You have a rather weird need to keep progress in science at a snail’s pace and keep it bounded by only the absolutely proven, but policy is not done that way. It is forward-looking at all times, and in a fast-moving global emergency, an existential threat to society, if not humanity, such constant pulling back on moving thinking forward is suicidal.
80 Barton Paul Levenson says:
13 Jul 2021 at 6:02 AM
K 65: You two are representative of the most dangerous class of people on the planet today: Centrists advising incremental responses as the Titanic sinks.
BPL: Except that I don’t, and never have, advocated “incremental responses.”
What the actual hell do you think non-systemic change is?
I’m just not for YOUR solution and ONLY YOUR solution, like you are.
I did not create regenerative agriculture in any of its forms.
I did not create basic egalitarian decision-making in any of its forms. I am the first to propose a fractal, non-hierarchical, scale-based application of it, to my knowledge.
I am the first to bring these and other concepts together in a single model.
To call the overall approach mine is dishonest and/or ignorant and is nothing more than attempting denigration by association.
Please Bore Hole crap like this where BPL puts their ego before the lives of billions with personal attacks rather than engaging on issues.
Meine Damen und Herren
Now you better discuss what you were supposed to discuss, not just extreme heat ande wildfires, but also sudden and extreme percipitation.
I red of 120 mm rain in Köln on Thursday, and the event is large. Not just Nordrhein Westfalen, but also Rheinland Pfalz and further into Belgia. With well over 100 victims and over 1000 missing becaquse communications have broken down.
I think of the “Delta”. The combined landscape with Rhein, Maas, and Waal is drained out via Rotterdam, and is highly artificial with channels, Dijks, and Bridges. To my conscepts, it looks dubious and dangerous because it is also partly severely flat.
Do think a bit in terms of the “Netherlands”, Pays bas, and even “Niedersachsen” when you think of climate change, and of “Hochwasser” and “Dat Water” they call it.
Luckily we have it steep enough here where I live, but I do often think in terms of climate- refugees when I think of the future. That may become a worst problem, especially where it is steep enough and quite close to those obviously overpopulated and threatened areas.
Well, I hope that enough people will begin to dislike unnecessary wars and waste of money for unnecessary and unhealthy Luxury because of such cathastrophies, and begin to see their true values better.
MA says:
Yes, understanding of course always comes first. But what might be controllable is the preparation in advance of knowing when the next El Nino event occurs. Could this be billions or even trillions of $$$ saved and potential lives lost if farmers knew how much seed and irrigation allowances to make and governments knew where to spend in preventative disaster control?
I am not going on much of a ledge since there is lots of ongoing research to back this up, but it’s likely that El Ninos in the future will readily be predicted years in advance. Most think this is impossible because of the butterfly effect, but as we are seeing determinism caused by forcing is over-riding that, which is the subtext of the Miyoshi & Sun paper
Research paper: “Large and increasing methane emissions from eastern Amazonia derived from satellite data, 2010–2018”
https://acp.copernicus.org/articles/21/10643/2021/
“Our results show that the Amazon alone was responsible for 24 ± 18 % of the total global increase in CH4 flux during the study period, and it may contribute further in future due to its sensitivity to temperature changes.”
82, 83
A Google search will come up with some papers relating climate change to storminess. A few I found:
“On the relationship between cyclones and extreme windstorm events over Europe under climate change”
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0921818104001067
“Increased wind risk from sting-jet windstorms with climate change”
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aaae3a/meta
Tornadoes and climate change:
https://www.carbonbrief.org/tornadoes-and-climate-change-what-does-the-science-say-2
Tornadoes and Global Warming: Is There a Connection?
https://www.nationalgeographic.org/article/tornadoes-and-global-warming-there-connection/
Tropical cyclones and climate change, this Wikipedia article contains references: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropical_cyclones_and_climate_change
I agree we need to find out how to adapt to a future with more frequent climate extremes. Where I live in the UK is, unfortunately, not great when it comes to the more extreme weather that our temperate climate can deliver, because it seems our ways of life are optimised for the current normal, and cope very badly with even modest deviation from normal. Even a modest windstorm or a couple of inches of snow can cause significant disruption in SE England, because of the high population density and because transportation systems are running at almost maximum capacity, with no slack to take up perturbations caused by things like severe weather.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaNpK4Rbb_Q&ab_channel=TheSun
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6elHa1-xX4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95yCviQc7Tg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CyZVFB4Sco
Welcome to the future if some of the predictions over the next century come to pass.
Ladies and Gentlemen:
There will be many upset comments following the rainy situation in Germany and the Netherlands, I hope.
Such things is rather what our political and personal responsibility for the climate is about.
Personally, I am very happy that our community did totally renovate the local water and sewage and draining system here a few years ago, and seeing it dug up again what was done cheaply and hasty from the beginning in our new suburb area, I was really upset. It was high time!
Thus if you love to blame the politicians, then blame them for such betrayal. Which is not private responsibility. It is social, official, and political responsibility. It is about official enterprizes and workers being qualified.
I have a cellar- pump with level switch, my private “waterstaat” of which I am very proud. It goes on and off in intervals, and that system has gone on and off more and more often, precisely proportional to the Keeling Curve for the last 45 years.
And thus one of my basic references in order for me to judge the validity and the honesty of the IPCC.
Then, what I really hate and what makes me quite upset, and the reason why I disturb you all here, is that when I am able to put one and two and tree and a few further simple tings together, things that are in my own experience and under my own responsibility and control because it rather is part of my own trade and own economy and existance,… and come to a general conclusion on the basis of that…
… and some people dare to fight and to deny boldly that general conclusion,…
… then they actually fight my person, my knowledge, my vital interests, my personal trade, and my style, existance, and economy. And political opinion & religion, and my “Waterstaat” in the cellar, and my Community and society..
They are frighting my flowers and my trees, my personal worrying, my horizons, my own skills, and my 2 cellar- pumps.
Greta Thunhberg has a similar wiew of it.
And we hope that it will touch the German election this autumn.
This is interesting: “Climate change is fueling mass-casualty heat waves. Here’s why experts say we don’t view them as crises.”
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/07/12/weather/climate-change-mass-casualty-psychology/index.html
Try not to assume I’m somehow downplaying the issues of heatwaves or being centrist or whatever. I’m very concerned that climate change is making heatwaves worse, and is hurting a lot of people. But the commentary drills down into the psychology of WHY we (mostly) dont react with as much alarm to killer heatwaves as for example hurricanes.
92 Mike
Yup.
There are those who see what is and let the facts lead them, then there are those who see what eases their fears. This is why the first principle is…
Observe: See, don’t guess. Adapt to what is. Then you can design so that you…
Don’t impose design; let it emerge: No igloos in Florida. Also, no condos built on (reclaimed) beaches and limestone. Maybe don’t tell The Elders to fuck off when they tell you to use resources with the 7th generation at the forefront of your thinking so you don’t create a slow-rolling Chicxulub and instead…
Design so every element has *at least* two functions, and the more the merrier; and design so that every element is supported by the functions of at least two other elements: Maintain the web of life. Recreate ecosystems.
Etc.
Storms were not the problem during the last few days in Europe.
The problem was, that the clouds did not move fast enough and there was too much rain on the same land area. I think, very likely windy/stormy weather would have helped to reduce the flooding problems.
Killian @101, I largely agree with Barton Paul Levensons comment @80 about incrementalism and crackpot ideas. I have nothing in principle against systemic change or revolutionary scale change or rapid change if its a workable plan and the right solution. Its your version of systemic change that looks unconvincing at least in part. Im quite happy with a new energy grid built as quickly as possible. This is systemic change of the energy system.
“I am the first to bring these and other concepts together in a single model. To call the overall approach mine is dishonest and/or ignorant and is nothing more than attempting denigration by association.”
This is completely contradictory. You have just said the overall approach is yours then said its dishonest to suggest it is. It’s also not significant whether the ideas were yours or ideas you supported. The point being made is about the ideas.
Killlian @101, addendum to previous comment.
“I am the first to bring these and other concepts together in a single model.To call the overall approach mine is dishonest and/or ignorant and is nothing more than attempting denigration by association.”
On second thoughts maybe he isn’t contradicting himself. He probably means the individual ideas are not his. His use of english language is so confusing. But he cannot distance himself like this from ideas he clearly supports.
Paul Pukite(@whut) @103,
We are in agreement that an improved understanding of ENSO to the point of being able to forecast it with confidence at an inter-annual timescale would be very useful for those who live in its shadow.
And I do see in that context, the Abstract of Miyoshi & Sun (2021) does make sense in saying they consider their work as a step “toward possible future applications to reduce weather disaster risks.”
But am I being overly pedantic to see this ‘prediction of weather events’ as having a whole different meaning to the paper’s conclusions’ “control of weather events”?
BPL: I’m just not for YOUR solution and ONLY YOUR solution, like you are.
K 101: I did not create regenerative agriculture in any of its forms.
BPL: Nor am I against regenerative agriculture, you flaming ass.
107: “But the commentary drills down into the psychology of WHY we (mostly) dont react with as much alarm to killer heatwaves as for example hurricanes.”
My guess would have been a heatwave is a leisurely disaster, killing people across a large area over a number of days or weeks, and mostly kills the weakest members of the population, whereas with a hurricane coming ashore, the power and destruction is in your face, there is no hiding from the effects, and the aftermath can be catastrophic, after a cat 5 has gone through the area can be uninhabitable for weeks.
114: “after a cat 5 has gone through the area can be uninhabitable for weeks.”
Sometimes a lot longer, even for lower category hurricanes.
E.g. tropical cyclone Tracy in Darwin, 1974 (Australian category 4, SSHWS category 3):
“Tracy killed 71 people, caused A$837 million in damage (1974 dollars), or approximately A$6.85 billion (2018 dollars), or $4.79 billion 2018 USD. It destroyed more than 70 percent of Darwin’s buildings, including 80 percent of houses. It left more than 25,000 out of the 47,000 inhabitants of the city homeless prior to landfall and required the evacuation of over 30,000 people, of whom many never returned.”
The mangled grammar in the last sentence is in the original. It should read something like “more than 25,000 were left homeless out of the 47,000 inhabitants of the city prior to landfall.”
“By 1978, much of the city had recovered and was able to house almost the same number of people as it had before the cyclone hit. However, by the 1980s, as many as sixty percent of Darwin’s 1974 population had left, never to return. In the years that followed, Darwin was almost entirely rebuilt and now shows almost no resemblance to the pre-Tracy Darwin of December 1974.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclone_Tracy
I’m taking a momentary break from all the horrible climate change impacts we’ve seen around the world lately–New Zealand flooding being just the most recent as of writing–and retreating, briefly no doubt, to theory.
The vexed question of stratospheric cooling and the GHE came up elsewhere recently, so I hit Realclimate’s posts on that topic from way, way back in 2004-6 or thereabouts. It would seem, based on recent reports, that the upper atmosphere is still contracting just as in Lastovicka et al (2006), which RC cited back in the day, and which is available as PDF here:
http://faculty.jsd.claremont.edu/emorhardt/159/pdfs/2007/Lastovficka%20e5%20ql%202006.pdf
So, I’m wondering how understanding of this aspect of things has evolved in the 15-odd years since then? In particular, is stratospheric cooling still regarded as something of a GHE fingerprint? And are qualitative descriptions any clearer than back then?
July 20 was a bad day on the east side of the Persian/Arabian Gulf. A number of weather stations had hourly readings with the wet bulb temperature (Twet) above 32C. These include:
Station ID Temp/dew point Twet UTC time
Bastak Arpt OIBH 37/31 32.2C 0700
Khark Isl. AP OIBQ 35/32 32.6C 0400,0500
Persian Gulf AP OIBP 37/32 33.0C 0800
Kish Isl. AP OIBK 35/33 33.4C 0500
Qeshm Isl. AP OIKQ 36/33 33.6C 1000,1100
honorable mention goes to Abadan Intl. Airport, which (for US reference) combined the attributes of a hot day in Phoenix with a humid one in Houston
Abadan Intl AP OIAA 46/26 30.5C 1300
In other warming news, the normally cool equatorial current that extends westward from the African coast is also having a heat wave. Weekly average SST in the Gulf of Guinea north of the equator exceeds 26C, with an anomaly of up to +2.5C centered around 15W, and warmer than +1C to 30W.
Floods in China too:
https://news.sky.com/story/china-people-trapped-on-subway-trains-and-in-cars-after-terrifying-floods-12359980
“I am surprised by how far [the rainfall] is above the previous record,” Dieter Gerten, who grew up in a village in the affected area and is now professor of global change climatology and hydrology at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, told The Guardian. “We seem to be not just above normal but in domains we didn’t expect in terms of spatial extent and the speed it developed.”
https://nexusmedianews.com/top_story/torrential-rain-deadly-floods-wreak-devastation-in-western-europe/
For 40 years, humans have proceeded with business as usual as the climate situation has gotten ever more severe.
2021: Ladies and gentlemen, we interrupt the Fuck Around stage of climate change to bring you a glimpse of the Find Out phase.
Another project for WWA:
Rescue efforts launched after record floods in central China displace 1.2 million
can you say tipping point?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/20/everything-is-on-fire-siberia-hit-by-unprecedented-burning?utm_term=0cadd628865443f78de3b6f84c3be57f&utm_campaign=USMorningBriefing&utm_source=esp&utm_medium=Email&CMP=usbriefing_email
Patrick at 119: thanks for sharing that, I wonder if Dieter Gerten’s view and level of surprise about rainfall levels is shared by others at Pottsdam or the climate scientist community generally. I have the impression that the rainfall increase was expected. I am used to reading that scientists are surprised that is already happening at levels they expected later in this century, so that is surprise about timing, but Gerten is not talking about timing, but the variance in degree. There’s always this background chatter about how scientists haven’t been clear enough about the risks and that reticence of scientists has enabled the problem to become worse. I think a quote like that one from subtantiates some of that chatter, but the blame game is kinda useless now. As RL notes at 120, we have left the fuck around stage of global warming and have entered the find out stage.
It didn’t have to turn out this badly. We still have an opportunity to reduce the suffering and misery that comes with a warmed planet, but the stuff we have to do might drive deficit spending and that chimera still have a lot of traction to centrist thinking about global warming.
Cheers
Mike
Top US scientist on melting glaciers: ‘I’ve gone from being an ecologist to a coroner’
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jul/21/climate-crisis-glacier-diana-six-ecologist
that has to be a bit of a bummer. It’s never too late to change occupations once the thrill and joy are gone. But it’s hard to change occupations and reinvent yourself. I did it a couple of times, it was hard work and scary. We do what we have to in order to pay the mortgage, etc but it is probably smart to know when to throw in the towel. When I look back at the changes that I made, I think I should have thrown in the towel a bit earlier. Some things you think will really work well turn out to be dead ends. Then you start thinking of yourself as a coroner. That’s grim if you are not working at an office with a sign that says Coroner. If you see the coroner sign, you chose it and I hope it is going well for you there.
Cheers
Mike
another Siberian report:
Monitoring suggests toxic smoke in Yakutsk is one of world’s worst ever air pollution events
Yakutsk, the capital of Russia’s north-east Sakha Republic – also known as Yakutia – is the coldest winter city on the planet, but due to global heating, summer temperatures here have been rising at least 2.5 times faster than the world average.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jul/20/airpocalypse-hits-siberian-city-as-heatwave-sparks-forest-fires
Climate change made 2020 Siberian heatwave 600 times more likely – study
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jul/15/climate-change-made-siberian-heatwave-600-times-more-likely-study
@122 – “There’s always this background chatter about how scientists haven’t been clear enough about the risks and that reticence of scientists has enabled the problem to become worse.” – opinions vary, they’re human. At times overly defensive too? Or disagree on the finer points and the emphasis of others.
A recent example Jul 14, 2021
…. 1) the IPCC’s SR1.5 report further hid the huge & immediate scale of mitigation required to meet our 1.5-2°C commitments behind a veil of future negative emission technologies & so-called nature-based-solutions. Policymakers & many others have been misled.
… 2) That many people don’t understand why and how the climate is changing and what would be effective in slowing that down, is not evidence anyone was misled by the IPCC. I’d even argue the opposite: Far more people are so aware because of the 1.5°C report.
… 3) It raised awareness (from almost nothing) while also giving (or at least allowing) the impression that 2050 was a reasonable time to make targets for.
… 4) It can be argued that the dominant role of policy makers/politicians in determining the final version of IPCC report lies at the roots of the problem.
https://twitter.com/KevinClimate/status/1415214002414792705
I think there was an article on RC here years ago that challenged/argued the then latest IPCC report about SLR/Ice loss (?) as being ‘too conservative’, ignoring recent knowledge, and therefore potentially ‘misleading’
The choice of a descriptive word can all too often get noses out of joint to a point where the point being made is lost in the subsequent ‘noise.’
@120 and @122 yes, and yes, seems like it.
Research: “Elevated atmospheric CO2 adversely affects a dung beetle’s development: another potential driver of decline in insect numbers?”
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gcb.15804?af=R
113 Barton Paul Levenson says:
19 Jul 2021 at 7:56 AM
BPL: I’m just not for YOUR solution and ONLY YOUR solution, like you are.
K 101: I did not create regenerative agriculture in any of its forms.
BPL: Nor am I against regenerative agriculture, you flaming ass.
Yes, you are. You are against the changes necessary to make it dominant in industrialized nations. And, no, a few cover crops and no-till do not equal regenerative.
125 nigelj
That seems less responsible, as very many insects live in high concentration CO2 enviroments.
I can mention Drosofila melanogaster, that live on fermenting fruits in laboratory glasses, and seek up & swarm aound active wine jugs and bottles..
..and common mosquitoes of several kinds, that do not go after your sweet blood, but do identify you because your very typical CO2… Aura… due to your combustion of organic material.
I was at the dept of entomology, Agricultural highschool, and they had barn-flies in culture in the darkroom. They thrive and breed on a mixture of fermenting grass and cereales and honey and common piss.
Also in the acker and in the garden if you want to have proper microfauna in your soils,… se that there is anything fermenting and edible for them, and proper mycelium and fungi and odeours.
What is the CO2 level inside of a bee- hive or inside of an anthill?
Or inside of a large whasps- nest?
125 nigelj
That seems less responsible, as very many insects live in high concentration CO2 enviroments.
I can mention Drosofila melanogaster, that live on fermenting fruits in laboratory glasses, and seek up & swarm aound active wine jugs and bottles..
..and common mosquitoes of several kinds, that do not go after your sweet blood, but do identify you because your very typical CO2… Aura… due to your combustion of organic material.
I was at the dept of entomology, Agricultural highschool, and they had barn-flies in culture in the darkroom. They thrive and breed on a mixture of fermenting grass and cereals and honey and common piss.
Also in the acker and in the garden if you want to have proper microfauna in your soils,… se that there is anything fermenting and edible for them, and proper mycelium and fungi and odeours.
What is the CO2 level inside of a bee- hive or inside of an anthill?
Or inside of a large whasps- nest?
BPL: Nor am I against regenerative agriculture, you flaming ass.
K 126: Yes, you are.
Abnormal psyche professor: Killian continuously rewrites events as they happen so he always comes out looking good and his enemies always come out looking horrific. What do we call this, class?
Carbomontanus @128 “That seems less responsible, as very many insects live in high concentration CO2 enviroments.”
Were those examples of insects in laboratory situations tested to see if the high CO2 concentrations affected their life cycles and mortality? And the mosquitos annoying us humans, and insects eating fermenting material are only exposed to high CO2 concentrations briefly and intermittently. They are adapted to that. This is obviously different from a permanent rise in background levels.
Nigelj: He probably means the individual ideas are not his. His use of english language is so confusing. But he cannot distance himself like this from ideas he clearly supports.
RtW: He didn’t distance. He was letting folks know he is/was a student in those areas, as opposed to an innovator. Killian’s language is a bit poetic there. He says what he is not to be credited with. And what he also is not responsible for creating. That sets up the Money Shot: what he is, and what he did do.
Or at least that’s how I read it (not going back).
BPL: Abnormal psyche professor: Killian continuously rewrites events as they happen so he always comes out looking good and his enemies always come out looking horrific. What do we call this, class?
RtW: reality. Humans remember things via description and narrative, as opposed to events themselves.
Each time one thinks of an event one writes another version that competes with all previous tellings and ponderings. The truth gets washed and smeared.
And remember, when you describe things you generally focus on what you did right and what they did wrong. By telling your friends “all” about it your memory of the event gradually (or immediately if you’re GOPpish) migrates to fantasy.
“A remarkable new study by a director at one of the largest accounting firms in the world has found that a famous, decades-old warning from MIT about the risk of industrial civilization collapsing appears to be accurate based on new empirical data.
As the world looks forward to a rebound in economic growth following the devastation wrought by the pandemic, the research raises urgent questions about the risks of attempting to simply return to the pre-pandemic ‘normal.’
In 1972, a team of MIT scientists got together to study the risks of civilizational collapse. Their system dynamics model published by the Club of Rome identified impending ‘limits to growth’ (LtG) that meant industrial civilization was on track to collapse sometime within the 21st century, due to overexploitation of planetary resources.”
https://www.vice.com/en/article/z3xw3x/new-research-vindicates-1972-mit-prediction-that-society-will-collapse-soon
https://www.vice.com/en/article/z3xw3x/new-research-vindicates-1972-mit-prediction-that-society-will-collapse-soon
Here’s a new name to store along with Guy McPherson: Gaya Herrington.
When folks put up signs that say, Stay Back from Cliff, or Watch for Rogue Waves, are they scare-mongering or giving responsible warnings?
Centrists may say, “where would government get the money to address this problem?”
Hey, governments found money to fight WWII even though it was right after the great depression and the dustbowl. Many folks back in that day were quite sure that FDR’s depression deficit spending gave the government no room to expand the economy in the event of a new emergency. You know what? That turned out to be nonsense. The government turned on the printing press and cranked out the bucks to fight the “good war.”
Buckminster Fuller, no centrist in his thinking, said that we can afford to do anything we have to do. So right, Bucky. He was talking about reluctance in the US to fund secondary sewage treatment across the country to protect water, but I am pretty sure that if he were alive, he would feel that we have to take action to address global warming.
Maybe we need signs that say, Watch Out for Nonsense in Public Discussion.
Cheers
Mike
131 Richard the Weaver says:
24 Jul 2021 at 10:19 PM
Nigelj: He probably means the individual ideas are not his. His use of english language is so confusing. But he cannot distance himself like this from ideas he clearly supports.
RtW: He didn’t distance. He was letting folks know he is/was a student in those areas, as opposed to an innovator. Killian’s language is a bit poetic there. He says what he is not to be credited with. And what he also is not responsible for creating. That sets up the Money Shot: what he is, and what he did do.
Or at least that’s how I read it (not going back).
Indeed, but a fool hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest, at least according to Simon and Garfunkle.
133 mike
Here’s a new name to store along with Guy McPherson: Gaya Herrington.
You’ve got a serious misunderstanding of what McPherson has been spouting. Yes, McPherson was right to stress urgency, but he got off into some weird cult of personality crap that derailed everything he was saying.
Gaya: Yeah, sure, we can fix this. No problem. Will take some serious work, but, it’s doable.
McPherson: It’s too late. Humanity should be in hospice mode because we will be extinct by 2026. Period. Also, McPherson misrepresents the science to fit his suicidal, the-end-is-nigh agenda.
What these two are saying is vastly different. You might owe Henderson an apology for that comparison. One is a absurd and the other is a sober analyst.
132 Richard the Weaver says:
25 Jul 2021 at 8:17 AM
BPL: Abnormal psyche professor: Killian continuously rewrites events as they happen so he always comes out looking good and his enemies always come out looking horrific. What do we call this, class?
RtW: reality. Humans remember things via description and narrative, as opposed to events themselves.
…By telling your friends “all” about it your memory of the event gradually (or immediately if you’re GOPpish) migrates to fantasy.
You’re not helping here. There was no rewrite, there was an application of logic. BPL may pay lip service to supporting Regen Ag, but his views of climate policies, economics, etc., as I said, support none of what will make global regenerative ag possible.
This is another case of one seeing what they wish to see and disregarding the rest.
They can’t keep up, so they pull this crap.
Anyone who has seen me here knows I’m not a scientist, just an interested party with extended acquaintance with science and scientists, an admirer their honesty and knowledge. Since “Unforced Variations” is partly about tactics and communication, I offer an extended extract from Kathryn Schultz (who wrote that amazing article about the Cascadian fault and possible NW American earthquake). It begins with an observation about the reviewed author in the context of religion, but is mostly a range of observations on self-righteousness about nature that ignores our part in nature’s community of humans [better yet, go to the link and read it, especially the second half]: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/07/12/what-do-we-hope-to-find-when-we-look-for-a-snow-leopard
@133 mike For me, the 2 main negative issues with Guy McPherson are:
– He lies outright and hugely about two published WG1 climate science papers (both about atmospheric aerosols), and
– He has zero understanding of basic thermodynamics
I’m unable to tolerate either of those 2 preceding. He might well be fine about the other stuff for all I know, I don’t study it.
Richard the Weaver @132 “Each time one thinks of the event….”. This is just pure BS. Stop making excuses for people. BPL understand it better than you.
Killian @136 says “You’re not helping here. There was no rewrite, there was an application of logic. BPL may pay lip service to supporting Regen Ag, but his views of climate policies, economics, etc., as I said, support none of what will make global regenerative ag possible.”
And yet this same Killian guy tells us how regenerative agriculture is taking off like a rocket in… capitalist countries! ROFL. The fact is regenerative agriculture is just a way of farming and it could happen under just about any economic system. Its just more Killian BS.
Ladies and Gentlemen
Yesterday evening 25-7-21 I believe I saw rather thick, wildfrire smoke over Oslo and enviroment. I have a very long horisontal perspective from where I live, and that air or atmosphere was quite abnormal. Normally it is blue in the longest horions, but this was ocker brownish red, like we see it from New Delhi or Peking.
Not even under the worst diesel smog situations in winter can it be that yellowish brown, and the british coal industries have vanished or they are shrubbed in the meantime.
I have looked oven Nullschool if there are plausible winds. It burns even worse in eastern Siberia at the moment, but that goes eastward. California and Oregon is very far from here, but I have red that smoke from there has reached New York.
I am rather sure because we have very clean air and blue sky due to hydroelectric power like in France where they have mostly Nuclear.
But we will know for rather quite sure now in 3 days, because heavy and long rain is forecasted
By the way, the diesel smoke situation and dirty airplanes were very characteristic in the EU south of us as seen from the airplane windows 30-40 years ago. It showed also in the bee- hives on the Propolis, that was almost black in Germany but up to light brick red here. Since then they have changed to “clean diesel” and the modern updated more quiet and clean turbo prop jet. Only Aeroflot and the B52 has ran on original simple and noisy turbojet using cheaqp dirty kerosene, that gives black stripes in the troposphere.
And Weaktor is still stunningly Stupid. Wtf!
Victoria’s Secret says:
“Sure. It’s hotter than usual. We all know that. So yes, as a result we are seeing some instances of extreme heat in certain places. What does that tell us about the influence of CO2 on the world’s climate? Absolutely nothing!”
Susan Anderson #137,
Susan, I read the article, and I can’t agree, if I understand the author’s point correctly.
Here is humanity interacting with each other and the natural world:
https://static01.nyt.com/images/2019/05/28/multimedia/28xp-everest2/930a364d10a949edb64ec62a686b4cd6-superJumbo.jpg
Gosh, what a spiritual journey that must have been… almost as good as Disney World, eh.
Wilderness, and being alone there, is very different from bagging summits. You stop being a ‘teenager’, and become better at dealing with other humans, when you start seeing the “little places” on the way up. From that you get to understand that being where you can see the summit is just as good as standing on it… maybe better, because being able to turn around there and start back down is real “freedom”.
Humans are indeed interdependent, but we have the potential to be more than very clever monkeys, and that requires individual growth. If one is never alone, whatever the venue, that is unlikely to happen.
I should have edited: (1) ¶1: the religious bit will be distracting, (2) the next 2 ¶s are slow to get to the point, (3) the meat is further in (note bolded sentence). Unfortunately, our attention span is all too brief. I hope people with too little time or desire to read the whole will skip the beginning and read the end.
130 Nigelj
Routine culture or breeding of Drosofila in the lab for several generations was a recepy of honey ++ with some yeast, in glasses cowered with “gaz” for possible ventilation. What surprized me most of all is that they would live in an environment of 20-30 promille etanol, thus they must also have very efficient alcoholases.
Common barn- flies grew on meshed green grass + wheat bran + some honey + yeast.
I tried further at home. You crush sweet pears in a glass. They will smell that and arrive in autumn. Then tie over with “Gaz”. Then you have them IN VITRO. The glasses do become extreemly full og Drosofila in just 2 weeks, so you can take them to school and open a glass in the classroom.
The Teacher will wonder and start waving around.
Thus anyone can interrupt the education quite efficiently..
To take them out and to count them, we had a bottle of CO2, and like humans, they go down and sleep in higher CO2- concentrations heavier than air, and can be counted and sorted carefully in a small box, cowered with CO2. And will fly upp again in 10 seconds if CO2 is taken away.,
For longer anestesia, we used dietyl- eter, that took longer time to wake up from. And for killing them, we used Etyl- acetat. Then they go down and never wake up again.
All in all, it is obvious that a lot of insects are selected and aquaintede to very high concentrations of CO2 in their natural living- rooms where they also preferre to breed, just think of typical places where things are rotting or fermenting, and they like that and live there.
When the community goes down in the septic and sewage pits, they better check the air down there first. Or in engine- rooms with automatic CO2 fire extinguisher that may leak, or wherever fruit and potatoes is stored in tight rooms and cellars under CO2- cower.
Everyone healthy enough can live and breathe well with only 10% oxygen in the air, resembling 5.5 Km up in an airplane or balloon. But CO2- concentrations above 10 % I think, is solidly narcotic as for flies.
@Zebra – not sure what you’re getting at, but can you say “both/and”? Of course Everest is an excellent illustration of one kind of egomania that harms rather than helping.
I thought she made the point about the difference between acknowledging problems and finding people to blame rather well. It’s a book review (Matthiessen and Tesson on the hunt for snow leopards). I get the impression from what you wrote that you read the original, thanks: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/07/12/what-do-we-hope-to-find-when-we-look-for-a-snow-leopard
As noted in my further comment, I regret including the first paragraph, which will get knickers in a twist about religion, and is irrelevant to most of the rest. I found it amusing, but it’s a distraction.
I repeat: blame seeking is a distraction from the vital work. It’s only all our lives and futures.
@119 December 2019 MA Rodger: The scientists operating this Web Log site have recently implied with considerable subtle nuance that the average relaxation time for an H2O or CO2 molecule that’s not a CO2 molecule emitting a 15μm photon is measured in about 1 hour give or take a few minutes rather than your tenths of seconds for a CO2 molecule emitting a 15μm photon. I suppose I’d need to find your references that do exist are buried within rather complex analyses but I greatly doubt I’ll ever bother, too lazy. Thanks again for the “measured in tenths of seconds” CO2 15μm photon information.
mike @133,
The paper Herrington (2021) ‘Update to limits to growth – Comparing the World3 model with empirical data’ is surely too closely wedded to Meadows et al (1972) ‘Limits to Growth – A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind’ to be taken seriously.
How can it be any more than pointless curve-fitting when a data series exhibiting exponential growth is fitted onto an un-scaled curve of some nebulous ‘pollution’ quantity also undergoing exponential growth? So Herrington (2021), by taking “CO2 concentrations and plastic production … as proxies” for ‘pollution’ is but a silly exercise in curve-fitting while using the widely-known 1972 Club of Rome study to cynically promote it.
Given this, and given the 1972 work both says it has no idea about the limits to the various sorts of ‘pollution’ as well as putting CO2 equally alongside the pollution of waste heat from our energy use, can there be any merit in the projections from Herrington (2021) that “indicate a slowdown and eventual halt in growth within the next decade or so”?
By the way, Hr Nigel
The mentioned Drosofila- experiments were in order to define and to explore reminiscents of insectides such as DDT and Lindan, to which he said “the Drosofilæ are especially sensitive..”.
As a young student with fresh senses, I felt clearly that I could taste it allready, Carrots grown by DDT and Lindan against carrot flie, sprayed on the soil and even given to the seeds. And untreated carrots as zero reference. The treated carrots hardly tasted carrots bat all. Those Umbelliferæ are rather fameous spice plants all of them.
Thinking it over later on, I found it out of question that I could taste those minute levels of DDT or Lindan, so what was it?
But there was an obvious difference of taste, as I sneakingly ate parts of the samples.
I have later come to believe that it may have been the dramatic impact of DDT and Lindan to the very soil microfauna, that is actually insects to a large extent, and what that micro- life means to the spreading of fungi and mycelium and spores in the topsoils.
Mold and mushrums is often quite tasty, even smells very characteristic.
A lot of tiny insects especially larvae do actually have mycelium and bacteriæ on their main diet, and spread it the best they can to live symbiotic with it.
Those untreated carrots were quite more “nostalgic” and better. And I think that principle may rule further for a lot of crops.
Wherefore we like and preferre it both “nostalgic” and “organic”.
Giving CO2 the blame here is to shoot the wrong enemy. I do rather suspect todays “neonicotinoides” for being the main reason for the disappearing insects.
For private Drosofila experiments, one has to take unsprayed pears.
148 MA Rodger says:
26 Jul 2021 at 12:04 PM
mike @133,
The paper Herrington (2021) ‘Update to limits to growth – Comparing the World3 model with empirical data’ is surely too closely wedded to Meadows et al (1972) ‘Limits to Growth – A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind’ to be taken seriously.
How can it be any more than pointless curve-fitting when a data series exhibiting exponential growth is fitted onto an un-scaled curve of some nebulous ‘pollution’ quantity also undergoing exponential growth? So Herrington (2021), by taking “CO2 concentrations and plastic production … as proxies” for ‘pollution’ is but a silly exercise in curve-fitting while using the widely-known 1972 Club of Rome study to cynically promote it.
Given this, and given the 1972 work both says it has no idea about the limits to the various sorts of ‘pollution’ as well as putting CO2 equally alongside the pollution of waste heat from our energy use, can there be any merit in the projections from Herrington (2021) that “indicate a slowdown and eventual halt in growth within the next decade or so”?
MAR has once again pulled back hard on the reigns of forward thinking and also imposed his personal biases WRT rapid climate change and insisted on hyper-conservative views thereof.
This phrase caught my eye: “How can it be any more than pointless curve-fitting…” I hope it is clear to all he doesn’t actually know. He’s assuming it is curve fitting and that it is pointless. This is nothing but biased dressed up as a legitimate opinion and analysis.
The claim is CO2 cannot serve as the proxy claimed. Why not? MAR does not say, he simply claims it is so. Yet, CO2 emissions are exactly estimated from economic output, which has an energy correlation. Of course CO2 can serve as a proxy for pollution.
MAR’s bias is further revealed the pejorative terms he uses: too closely wedded… to be taken seriously, pointless, silly, cynically, etc. Based on his own language, MAR has made zero attempt at honest analysis. I think it would be fair to say MAR has an extremely negative view of LtoG from the jump.
So, no, the techniques are not bogus. No, the intent was not nefarious (the author states she started the review out of her own curiosity, but you call her a liar, VERY thinly veiled.) And, yes, EVERY updated analysis of LtoG has had exactly the same result.
I believe replicability is a key foundation of good science, yes? You have a rather weird need to keep progress in science at a snail’s pace and keep it bounded by only the absolutely proven, but policy is not done that way. It is forward-looking at all times, and in a fast-moving global emergency, an existential threat to society, if not humanity, such constant pulling back on moving thinking forward is suicidal.