The Real Problem
A bI.G. macher recently said to me that there is no question that CO2 is causing global warming! It is a statement of fact! Here’s a better climate statement of fact. There are more people on the earth now than before the industrial revolution.
There are now eight billion of us. We put up a lot of steel reinforced concrete buildings which makes for hot cities (heat islands). We fertilize and plasticize and asphalticize (1). Humans and their domesticated animals now account for 96% of the biomass of mammals on this planet which means a lot of land usage…land that we have cut the forests off of….land that used to be a big carbon sink but is now hemorrhaging carbon into the atmosphere. It bleeds carbon because we till it yearly, we dump fertilizer on it (most of which runs off), and we grow BIG AG subsidized corn and soy bean on a big percentage of it (2). It’s crazy but only a small percentage of farmers actually grow food that they themselves eat. And eight billion humans need a lot of food that is “cheap” and “processed” (3).
500000 years ago Homo Erectus found out how to use fire as a pre-stomach. 5000 years ago Homo Sapiens found agriculture which changed the carbon cycle even more than our fire (4). 500 years ago (I am fudging this number a bit to make it rhyme with the previous two..lol) humanity learned how to burn fossil fuels and make just about everything that is around you right now.
Biology (which is four billion years old) has been screwing up this planet (which is five billion years old) for at least two billion years when a little bug found a way to grab photons directly from the sun and pass them down an unbelievably efficient quantum mechanical electron transport chain for its energy needs. This released a toxic gas into the atmosphere that turned the black seas blue, the black rocks red, and killed 99.99% of everything “alive” on earth at the time. That toxic gas was called oxygen.
ps-The earth has been screwing the earth up for 5 billion years. Look up at the top of a mountain that has fossils in it like the Burgess Shale. It used to be on the bottom of the ocean a few hundred million years ago. Amazing what a little mass, gravity, and planetary dynamics over time can accomplish.
The Narrow Interpretation
A New York Times headline or a Tic Tok/Facebook video is the climate diet of most people’s attentions. And really, most people don’t discuss climate at the dinner table…..the economy and their jobs are first with maybe some worry about air pollution if the ash is really falling from the forest fires near them (half of which are started by yahoos with catalytic converters or cigarettes).
Both sides in the CO2 headlines have their nice polarized beliefs but both sides have assumptions that they don’t question. The +1 folks say how could you be such a fool to deny climate change….just look at the temp today or the hurricane somewhere! The -1 folks say how could you be such a fool to believe in big brother lefty socialist science cherry picking data. I’ve always been amazed that the bigger the framework becomes, the more the negatives and positives flip or at least move to the more “scientific” middle where we really don’t “know” for sure. The discourse now is just a shit show (5).
It is a shit show because the language of this war is statistics. So, for example, a common line is that 95% of doctors agree with something that some drug company marketing commercial is trying to sell. What they don’t tell you is that 1% of doctors don’t believe it (-1) and 19% of doctors believe it (+1) and 80% don’t have an opinion/don’t know…so 19/20 is 95%! Good headline but it should be 19%!
It is a shit show because there are, like in a lot of other areas of public debate, a +1 side and a -1 side. This means the “sides” hate each other. This means they are mired in the confirmation bias of their non-communicating information bubbles. Now what do you think the chances of anything constructive coming out of this are?
But is it a shit show that is good for the Republicans and the Democrats (sorry for the USA centred focus) as it keeps the giant financial Rube Goldberg political system ala Larry Lessig’s Lester election rules going full fighting tilt.
Here is just a little snippet of words (6) to show you the morass you can find yourself in when the classic believer and skeptic dichotomy plays out with really smart people citing all sorts of scientific literature. There are words on the -1 side like adjusted with present bias, tree ring proxy data biased to CO2 vs cold of the past, unreliable data due to urban heat and upward homogenization of data. There are words on the +1 side like insignificant hockey stick errors, reconstructed paleoclimate hockey stick data orbital decay of satellites doing the measuring of diurnal drift and extreme event incidence. And this is before you get into the responses and responses to the responses.
Let’s do the famous hockey stick, shall we? It shows centuries of CO2 staying the same and then….bam!…it takes off since the steam engine. This is the human burning of unoxidized carbon in the ground (the so-called carbon one time pulse). This was possible only because we humans were lucky to have had life on this planet for eons that got buried. It is still being buried but we are sucking it out and burning it now millions of times faster than it is being put back in. Now instead of walking to Timbuktu under our own power eating some energy bars on the way, we can just jump on a jet fueled tin can and fly there using the equivalent of 200,000 humans walking labour.
Now blow up the hockey stick graph on the last 200 years and you will see CO2 and temperature step in step. This is the +1 folks’ rock solid flagship. The -1 folks then say that if you look longer than this 200 years there are times when the temperature/CO2 has been higher and when the planet’s tree line was thousands of miles further north with trees that were a hundred feet taller.
The Wider Interpretation
There are a ton of indicators of climate other than CO2….sea level, hurricanes, flooding, agriculture productivity…the list goes on and on. They are all interconnected with the planet, but GRETA picks out one (carbon) as THEE answer. Like…if you think about it for more than a nanosecond…. CO2 alone is really too small a frame of reference for climate AND climate is too small a frame of reference for thinking about crises, especially the human ones. When I say expansion of the framework it really means….think ecologically….you alive, planet alive, all connected….almost Buddhist. Might make you give up Christianity. Yeah. Really.
Religious sidebar….my reason for monotheism rejection lol……Homo sapiens has (at least, since religion came along) been pretty ignorant about the earth that “lives”. Genesis 1:28 says “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” Dominion? Like, domination? Man, how effin’ stupid. The three monotheistic faiths that came out of the Levant (judaism,christianity,islam..in chronological order ? lol) are all the bloody same. They forgot the “replenish” part. They externalized the real costs as the economists say. End of the religious lecture! And I didn’t ask for donations! But watch for me on the cable 66 channel. ROFL.
Think of this alive earth in different terms other than just CO2 and temperature. For example, think of it in terms of water. Used to be in the good ol’ days (whenever that was?) that a big forest would shoot aerosols into the atmosphere (7)….. that water vapor would then condense on…..that formed low clouds….that acted like a cooling blanket by sending some heat to space….that drew in water from the oceans hundreds of miles away (8)….that fell as rain. The water was slowed down on its way to the aquifers and oceans by wetlands, and grassland, and forests and beaver dams and so on. But now without forests the particles to condense on are smaller….the condensation results in thinner clouds that are higher and now act like a heating blanket on top of the earth which makes the rain water run real fast eroding more soil so flooding and drought are much worse. This means that we now have dirt (dead) not soil (alive).
Humanity has been the greatest freshwater planetary plumber ever. The biggest infrastructure projects in history have been done with freshwater…freshwater that we can waste like there is no tomorrow….just look up agricultural aquifer depletion…look out if you have a Palm Desert place. We have huge sanitation infrastructure to prevent sickness but the slightest problem results in us insanely trusting only water in plastic bottles with all the downside that creates. Maybe it is H2O, not CO2 we should focus on? Think Arrakis. Btw, dams (9) aren’t the best thing either when you broaden the framework. There is that word again.
Think of this alive earth in terms 8 billions of us just trying to get by somehow….in other words think economics. The western activists (the rich ones anyway) don’t seem to spend too much time on the global south and the power law distributions of wealth. They don’t spend too much time on how someone who is really poor just trying to stay alive hates climate activism. Hell, the real poor just want a refrigerator so their kids don’t die. The people with power (whether CCP or Dem/Rep) are concerned about economic growth so that is what decarbonization is more and more to be coupled with. This is good for Elon.
On a grand scale the battle between The Chicken Little-The Sky Is Falling Malthusians and the Techno-Optimist ElonMuskians is never over. The Paul Ehrlich population bomb gurus got defrocked and the WMD Bush and Blair intelligence agencies humiliated so I wonder what climate truth is going to be laughed at in a hundred years which surely will be the case (9). My personal favorite is my Dad’s (Carson Monteith Elliott of the Northcutt & Elliott Funeral Home) head shaking at how stupid it was to take dead bodies, fill them with formaldehyde and then bury them in a mahogany box in a town where that now contaminated cemetery land can never (or almost never) be used for living humans to live on. How about those giant plants now being built by the oil companies to sequester carbon for their carbon neutrality? I guess this is just a progression of historical thought that we cleaned up garbage in the streets to stop the bubonic plague, then we cleaned up the water to prevent cholera, and now we are “cleaning” the air to prevent “whatever”.
ps-As well meaning, concerned, sincere, and smart as some of these carbon pulse folks are, if you ask the question, “What resource have we run out of? Ever?” No specific substance (resource) has ever been given to me as an answer to my obnoxious question. The “answer” is always in the future tense….like….”We will run out of oil!” Call me a non-Malthusian!
Some Comments From The Cheap Seats On Climate Models
The IPCC reports are based on something labeled integrated assessment modeling which in turn is based on assumptions about the future burning of coal and economics and demographics and politics….all of which have changed and will change more which apparently is not “in the models”. Then there is a thing called RPC 8.5 which drops out of all this. RPC is short for representative concentration pathway and 8.5 is the energy balance at the top of the atmosphere calibrated in watts of forcing per square meter. The Biden administration seems to have given up on RPC 8.5 which is good….apparently.
Models are like metaphors. They are incomplete. They suffer from the Hawkmoth (as opposed to the Butterfly) Effect. For instance, if you have a picture of me in front of you, that does not help you to know what I like to eat (10). And if some modeller really likes the idea of geo-engineering then a new variable gets shoved in the model and then someone thinks it is a good idea to dump iron in the ocean and sulphur aerosols into the stratosphere to decrease global warming because the model say it decreases CO2. How do you think that is going to work out (11)?
The mathy modeler (or is it modeller?) folks generally admit that with a complex system if an equation is shoved into an algorithm that is then shoved into a computer, that this is useless for modelling water vapor and clouds. Their explanation is that the model is not “fine grained” enough. And many will admit that greenhouse gases are good for explaining the climate on the planet of Venus and perhaps in the tropics on earth and but for little else. Google coriolis effect.
Off Based Distinctly Non-Malthusian Speculation
So……. it is real easy to be pessimistic. Pessimism (vs optimism) registers more with us, evolutionarily speaking, as fear is what allowed Homo Sapiens to NOT go extinct.
We have had the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act (again sorry for the USA orientation) for 50 years but air and water quality is worse now? I guess the obvious answer is “Yes” if you live near a forest fire or have tried sailing through the plastics of the Northwest Pacific Gyre. Yeah, I know, some say the gyre does not exist. We have had the Endangered Species Act for 40 years but biodiversity does not seem to be going up. I mean it is hard not to be pessimistic about humanity’s dopamine fueled operating system when the canoe you are paddling north is moving south due to the strong south flowing direction of the river.
Best to mention Jevons Paradox here. More energy means more tech means more energy means more tech and so on. Just a little negative feedback mechanism to the energy/climate optimism that follows. It will be interesting to see if the price of oil does ten or hundred X’s its per barrel price in the future if this Jevons thing flips like some “one time carbon pulse” smart folks predict.
So…..here are some climate questions with some optimistic climate speculation.
What would happen if we could do Haber Bosch like biology does?
Consider the Haber Bosch thingy that makes fertilizer (fixes nitrogen) by using natural gas. It accounts for maybe 1% of the energy use in the world. If we don’t have fertilizer in 2023 GRETA! then we don’t feed 8 billion people. Period. This process, like a lot of vital chemical things we depend on, is run by a catalyst (a speeder upper), in this case at 200 atmospheres of pressure and 400 degrees celsius. Biology does this nitrogen fixation with normal temperatures and pressures via quantum chemistry. But we have no idea how this can scale for us. A big reason for this is that we don’t have a quantum computer that can model the quantum chemistry of this process. We know the rules but the numerics are beyond any classic computer today. But someday?
If you generalize this synthetic biology to bacteria and yeast making everything around you that now mostly comes from petrochemicals this truly would be remarkable. Imagine everything from fertilizers to fragrances made at scale in big petri dishes. Another example would be letting CRISPR bacteria make the aniline dye for the, at least at a minimum, billion pairs of blue jeans made each year which probably kills a lot of kids with the blue rivers it creates in third world countries. Google Huue.
What would happen if people shared cars?
Well that is pretty obvious re emissions. Better living, no? We have Uber (which just went cash flow positive)ly and Lyft, but hold on tight when the big auto companies realize (they already have) that their business model is toast and they start getting into the drone business big time. Hello Jetsons.
What would happen if people didn’t eat meat?
I don’t want to get into a big evolutionary bun fight over whether meat made us human (excess calories for brain development and all that stuff) but lots of folks seems to be following the Michael Pollan rules of “Eat food, not too much, mostly plants”. Better living, yes?
What would happen it jet planes did not leave condensation trails?
Jet engines burning fuel at altitude are really effective at 30,000 feet as polluters. Just look at the immediate drop in world temperature when Bush ordered the planes grounded on 9/11. If you replace a combustion jet engine with a retrofitted hydrogen engine there is no CO2 because there is no combustion (at altitude anyway). Of course you would have to convert airport fuel storage areas to hydrogen factories and you would have to deal with the weight of compressed hydrogen gas, but many think this is doable. Google ZeroAvia. ps-only 15% of the world’s population has taken a flight.
What would happen if humans could be paid for cutting down their waste?
Right now our system (capitalism) has an invisible hand that is probably better than any other system. But there is a downside to the +1 invisible hand which is from dumping (economic externalization of) our waste for free into the ocean or the atmosphere. Some say the carbon tax solves this problem but if it is not applied to the whole world it won’t work. Just like the “drug addict” issue or the "offshore" tax issue. But there is human ingenuity. Google OhmConnect or Mill. Fcking brilliant ideas based on the +1 invisible hand by entrepreneurs trying to make the world a better place (in addition to a fortune for themselves). The Mill CEO did Nest, which was bought by Apple. I agree with Taleb that these type of innovators (especially the ones who fail) should have monuments just like the fallen soldiers do.
What would happen if there was no building waste?
That is what biology does. A ribosome makes another ribosome. Ribosomes make proteins (proteins are everything) with 20 lego building blocks. They are not thrown out but reused. For years, Neil Gershenfeld at MIT has talked for years about what happens when a computation can compute its own construction…..like….information is in each brick that the builder builds the house with. Very sci-fi? Maybe. But never say never. Arthur C. Clarke's expression that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” comes to mind with this kind of chatter. But it is possible. Someday. And sooner that we think. Why? Because the science of computation is known now. A hundred years ago the science of electromagnetism ala James Maxwell was known. But if you had shown a person from a hundred years ago that using these principles you could communicate with anyone in the world by talking into some glass (a cell phone) that would have been magic to them.
What would happen if we could flow the water through Vancouver more?
I have never been in charge of building anything and I will never run for office so cut me some slack on the medical analogy that follows.
It is a good thing to have blood flow to an injury for healing of some part of the body, especially after, say, a surgical insult. Ditto for water through a city? My guess would be that the E. Coli levels that give the dragon boat breast cancer folks rashes on their arms while paddling would not be as bad in False Creek if this was the case. ps-Why the city doesn’t get rid of the derelict boats there dumping their toilets directly in the water is beyond me.
Let’s say…. for instance… that someone(s) wants to put condo skyscrapers on a spare 140 acres on the west side of Vancouver near the water. And let’s further assume that “these someones” don’t have to prostrate themselves in front of a city bureaucracy that has basically become a self serving multipolar trap of Moloch. So the “This New Model for Humanity” of 13000 homes is built with salmon spawning in the last quarter mile of a stream before the ocean, with the concrete buildings covered in green, with no big hole dug for underground parking because everyone walks or takes an overhead wired battery-less trolley, with drought and bug resistant trees that grow without every screwing up the infrastructure or toppling in a tornado and killing people AND with GOD (you pick the god) smiling down on it. All this would be, of course at huge expense to the developer compared to just following the “green” rules now in place. Would it be financed? Would it sell? Not sure about the order of those last two questions these days.
There is that famous real estate developer line that “all real estate is local”. The question here is will that 140 acres, done up so extravagantly, make any difference to the city’s overall water flow? Or the globe’s temperature? I doubt it but you gotta start somewhere (yes, that’s a famous quote from somewhere!).
Notes and References:
1) Converted the noun asphalt to a verb as is the stupid trend these days….asphalticizing is the same thing as plasticizing in that it’s from an oil distillation column.
2)That is very Vaclav Smil…addiction to the four golden pillars of the table…concrete, steel, plastics, and fertilizer……all of which come from fossils. Also the million dollar Big Ag machines are made of steels and plastic and are fuel by diesel.
3)And ultra-processed food is not going anywhere…it will only go up as the shelf life is longer making more business sense. When one considers the enormous waste of food overall estimated by some as 50%, that means that more perishable real food has unbelievable waste….Most of this is from grocery stores who throw away spoil food not sold and individual home refrigerators who individual owners let food rot in. Google Strella BioTech.
4) Agriculture also used a lot of fire. The slash and burn still goes on today.
5)The +1 people would be people like, Greta, the most famous teenager in the world who knows everything (like we all did at one time…right?) and the head of every government department with the slightest tangential connection to climate. Hmmm. Incentives anyone? The well meaning, smart, and sincere -1 people who you can google are Judith Curry, John Christy, Roy Spencer, Jim Steele, Stephen McIntyre. The scientists who can give you both sides of the story that I recommend are Steve Koonin and Richard Lindzen. The journalists with this attribute would be Revkin and Lombard. Interactions online between Rex Weyler and Patrick Moore, old Greenpeace friends who are now on opposite sides of the debate can give you the nuance of science that sometimes seems more linguistic than numerical. Roger Pielke who has a background PHD in politics is a gem of a climate scientist to check out. Not many people here from the Global South are there?
6)For each phrase I am NOT going to go down each statistical freekin’ rabbit hole. I will leave it to the reader to Google or GPT4 (both G words are verbs now).
7)I always thought that forests grow where it rains. Apparently it rains somewhere because the forest grows there. Who knew? The biological aerosols that rise up from forests cause condensation of water vapour into more low lying clouds that act like a cooling blanket in that some of the heat is transferred into outer space.
8)This sucking up water from hundreds of miles away is called the “atmospheric river”. It is all part of the “healthy” slow flow of water on the planet. Similar arguments apply to blood circulating in your body.
9)https://www.noemamag.com/concrete-built-the-modern-world-now-its-destroying-it/
10)http://www.ericathompson.co.uk/books/
11)After the dumping iron in the ocean or sulphur in the air, the third thing that is always mentioned by geo-engineering people is carbon capture. This means that in the future you will have these enormous factories sucking air to make CO2. This will be then buried in the ground by an oil company like Occidental Petroleum who will “guarantee” that it will stay there for a hundred years. This process is backed by sincere folks like Bill Gates or even our local Vancouverite ex Macdonald Dettwiler CEO Daniel Friedmann. Google Carbon Engineering. But the real incentive for this carbon sequestering business is the IRS tax refunds of so many dollars for so many tons of carbon. Everyone has to be carbon neutral. Right?