An intelligent friend found this argument about the climate crisis plausible

[JudyM]

Wondering what environmental/climate science folks here think about it, especially the ecosystem/biodiversity parts.

There is No Climate Emergency
Climate change is an optimization problem that must be solved calmly and rationally. Alarmism is the wrong response.
…
It’s worth reiterating that, if we can keep ourselves to the SSP2–4.5 emissions trajectory (or even slightly below), we are currently navigating the most challenging decades due to the rapid rate of change. After 2050, the rate of temperature rise will slow down and approach stagnation by 2100. At that point, ecosystem pressures will be considerably lower than they are today because climate zones will no longer be shifting, allowing nature to catch up and settle down into a new equilibrium.

The rate of global temperature rise in realistic emission trajectories (SSP2–4.5 or below) slows considerably after mid-century | IPCC
Our job is to limit the rate of change and manage the transition period as best we can. If we do this reasonably well, nature will thrive in the 22nd century and beyond.
…
It’s time to take a collective deep breath and approach the climate optimization problem with a new sense of pragmatic calm. Denial is dangerous, alarmism is even more dangerous, and the gross inefficiency caused by these extreme groups screaming at each other only makes things worse. Instead, we should consciously target the wide and achievable optimal zone in the middle, probably between two and three degrees.

If we manage to stabilize the global climate in that optimal zone this century without hurting economic upliftment through climate panic, our 22nd-century descendants can have no complaints. In fact, they may even thank us for leaving them a moderately warmer planet with a more active carbon cycle and an economy granting high climate resilience to all.

https://medium.com/a-balanced-transition/there-is-no-climate-emergency-2375e90cbb23

[Tetrachloride]

1. Sorry to say: sophistry. I live in a higher risk area which

Last edited Fri Mar 31, 2023, 08:09 PM - Edit history (2)

is near to mighty high risk areas.

The passages imply there is solid math but the passages have zero math.

Psychologically, forthright decisions as implied are The Way.

However, psychology isn’t math nor action.

I’d be looking forward to a lot more action than theory.

[relayerbob]

2. Using rational logic

Last edited Fri Mar 31, 2023, 10:03 PM - Edit history (1)

And approaching the problem systematically, is, in fact, the way to solve the problem. However, that requires that people agree to work together, which won’t happen with our worldwide political climate. Which is, mostly the long way of saying, we’re fucked.

[JudyM]

5. Global society needs to work together on this better than we ever have before. The motivation

will have to be intense.

[Jim__]

3. The author of that article certainly seems to take climate change very calmly.

I'm not sure people in India are as calm and relaxed. This article, Rising temperatures are pushing India towards the deadly "wet bulb" threshold, was referenced in another post on DU today. A brief excerpt from the article:

India is moving towards fatal climatic conditions. This year saw the country’s hottest February in 122 years, and it is only likely to get worse.

The central and western regions of the hot tropical country are expected to experience heat waves in March-May, according to the India Meteorological Department (IMD). Summer temperatures in northern India regularly soar beyond 40°C in May and June, the hottest months of the year. Topping 50°C is unusual, but that is happening, too.

...

When I read that article, I don't feel as confident that there is no real problem as Cloete seems to think I should.

[JudyM]

6. Thanks for posting this. That heat wave in India last year was horrific.

[orthoclad]

10. Thanks for the wet bulb reference

That's a good article.

For a fictional depiction of such an event in India, check Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry Of The Future. It begins with a wet-bulb disaster. Ah, I see the DU ref cites the book. It's a well-researched description of a holocaust which we may see in the news - soon.

I keep thinking of the band from Pakistan to Vietnam experiencing glacial melt floods, heat waves, extreme monsoons, and tropical cyclones, and with dense coastal populations experiencing storm surge and sea level rise. They're gonna get mad. Pakistan asked for compensation after 1/3 of the country flooded last year. Pakistan contributed about 0.08% of GHG. The people who contribute the least towards GHG will suffer the most. Some of them have nukes.

For contrast, there's the Persian Gulf rich oil country that used OUTDOOR stadium air conditioning for a soccer match. A soccer match. Of course Kushner and Musk were there.

Cloete thinks 3C will be acceptable. It'll be disastrous.

[orthoclad]

4. The key phrase in the quote is

Last edited Sat Apr 1, 2023, 01:43 AM - Edit history (1)

"without hurting economic upliftment"

That's the tell, the little facial tic that exposes the true motive behind that article. It's a fairly meaningless phrase. What is meant by "hurting economic uplift"? Whose economic uplift?

I see it as yet another attempt by the fossil wealthy to extract the maximum wealth they can before things crash down. Ask the 3000 dead in Puerto Rico, the 2000 dead in New Orleans, the people of Paradise, California and all the other burnt areas of the now-arid West what they think of economic uplift. The poor people of India skating perilously close to unsurvivable heat and humidity, or the poor of Bangladesh waiting for the ocean to close over their world.

Is this the economic uplift that the article speaks of?
Congressional Budget Office: Trends in the Distribution of Family Wealth, 1989 to 2019
?itok=fh64bNke
https://www.cbo.gov/publication/58533

I can just as easily say that economic uplift consists of making the rich pay taxes and compensation for the consequences of their greed.

Holding global heating to between 2C and 3C will spell unspeakable pain and disaster for millions of people, maybe billions. Thousands of scientists worked for decades to reach this conclusion, including Exxon's own scientists. And now they are telling us that we are out of time to waste. Any delay in acting will require enormously more effort.

It's time to take a collective deep breath and begin a Manhattan Project, a Moon Shot, of global heating prevention - because Nature doesn't negotiate. We can achieve full employment and eliminate poverty in the US in the process. Is that "economic uplift"?

edit: I'd like to superimpose the rise in GHG generation over the same time span of the upper ten percent curve above, or better yet, the upper 1%. I'm gathering the data to create that, then I have to find someone on Mastodon to post it so I can link to it. After all, the closest I come to punching nazis is to boycott the bird cage. I expect a good fit just from looking at the curves. Might be a strong correlation coefficient. Is there a way to just draw a line on an image on DU?

[JudyM]

8. When I read it it felt like a tic/tell to me, too, but there's a fairly continuous focus in the

article on economic inequality/social injustice, too.

… immorally unequal food distribution

…

The result of such unwarranted climate panic is high energy costs that only worsen the climate vulnerability of the billions of world citizens who were not as lucky at the lottery of birth as you and me.

…

In fact, it can be far worse due to the socio-economic inefficiencies caused by climate panic. For example, if drastic climate action harms economic upliftment, total climate damages may actually increase with more action because poor communities (where almost all future population growth will be concentrated) are subject to far greater climate vulnerability than rich communities.

[orthoclad]

9. Sophistry, as noted above

Making it up out of thin air. This section makes no sense at all:
"the socio-economic inefficiencies caused by climate panic. For example, if drastic climate action harms economic upliftment, total climate damages may actually increase with more action because poor communities (where almost all future population growth will be concentrated) are subject to far greater climate vulnerability than rich communities."
Translation: if you don't do as the oil wealthy say, they'll lay off a ton of people and raise gas prices like we did last year to cause inflation.

He uses a lot of undefined and loaded phrases that sound Intellectual(TM), like "socio-economic inefficiencies". What does that phrase even mean? So he uses polysyllabic word salad, in contrast to words like "panic". Boebert with a high-school diploma (maybe freshman in college trying to slip a shabby composition through).


Meaningless, vague phrases that sound "Intellectual(tm)" because they have more than 2 syllables:
unwarranted climate panic
unequal food distribution
socio-economic inefficiencies
drastic climate action
economic upliftment
total climate damages
climate vulnerability

Some of this may be machine translation artifact; I don't think English is his first language.

You have to beware of PR personnel who write like engineers or scientists, or write like right-wingers quoting MLK, or write like "researchers" defending tobacco. Cloete seems to do all of that. Try a quick search on his activities.

To address your question about biodiversity: many actual journal-published scientists ( not self-described dilettante "researchers" ) are of the opinion that we are in the early or mid stages of the Sixth Mass Extinction. Like the dinosaur-killer asteroid, but stretched out over a century or two, not one big event, a large percentage of species will go extinct.

From wiki: "most conservation biologists now believe that human activity has either produced a period of mass extinction, or is on the cusp of doing so."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction

The boat is rocking.

[Delphinus]

14. That

picture just makes me ill and then angry.

[orthoclad]

16. Plot the rise in CO2 concentration

alongside the rise in upper-class wealth. You'll get a good fiit.

[NickB79]

7. This assumption here is flat-out bullshit, rendering the entire argument moot

After 2050, the rate of temperature rise will slow down and approach stagnation by 2100.

The study of climate tipping points and positive feedback loops has shown pretty solidly that stagnation will NOT occur. So many positive feedback loops are now kicking in that Nature itself will not only lose much of it's ability to to keep sequestering carbon, but will in many instances start to release it by the billions of tons annually, independent of human action. For example:

The Amazon rainforest is now likely crossed a tipping point of transitioning to savannah, burning in the process and releasing carbon.
The Arctic permafrost is currently thawing, venting CO2 and methane.
The boreal forests are dying of beetle infestation and drought, burning in the process and releasing carbon.
The Antarctic ice melt is short-circuiting the southern polar ocean currents, reducing the ability of the ocean to pull carbon deep down.

SSP2-4.5 is ONLY taking into account human emissions, with the (asinine) assumption that the planet will continue to sequester the same amount of carbon in the future 100 years that it did in the past 100 years. This is an extremely dangerous assumption.

[orthoclad]

11. Methane blowholes in Siberia

dramatic positive feedback, from Siberian Times a few years ago:

More pictures here: https://siberiantimes.com/other/others/news/giant-new-50-metre-deep-crater-opens-up-in-arctic-tundra/
Siberia above the Arctic Circle was experiencing 100F days. Arctic Circle!

Expect this in Alaska and Canada, too. I expect that Putin is clamping down on this type of news now. I think he WANTS maximum warming. Ice-free ports, thawed Siberia, etc., for an even more glorious Russian Empire.

Over ten years ago, a NOAA scientist said in a seminar that the ocean was saturated and could no longer absorb net CO2. That's a HUGE difference with the previous hundred years.

I'm afraid that we are well into positive feedback country. We can still slow the rate of change, with massive effort. Not with new fossil projects.

[IbogaProject]

12. This increase in CO2 is rising faster than ever

The increase is by the year rather than by the century during the past increases or declines. The last time CO2 was anywhere near 420 The oceans were 60 feet or meters higher. That is above most cities and alone will be an issue. The soot is lowering tge remaining ice's effectiveness which means more hear trap. The paper's premise was what Carter was doing for us over 40 years ago. If we'd followed his goals plus made a big push to reduce heating and cooling energy consumption we might have been able to address species migration. Now each year will be ever worse and some time very soon much of that methane will release and average temps will go up tens of degrees. I've seen 10 centigrade as the estimate, which happened in about a dozen years during the Permian extinction

The situation in the late Permian – increasing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that create warmer temperatures on Earth – is similar to today.

Here is an article about a 20 centigrade temperature increase event 600 million years ago. The action is over a dozen years.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/05/080528140255.htm

Arctic-news blogspot covers this with thorough details. This is a crisis not an inconvience.

[orthoclad]

13. From your ScienceDaily link:

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"We see that strong forcing on the climate, not unlike the current carbon dioxide forcing, results in the activation of latent controls in the climate system that, once initiated, change the climate to a wholly different state.""

Wholly. Different. State. Phrase has a certain ring to it.

No time to waste.

[NNadir]

15. Intelligent people who nonetheless engage in tortured bourgeois soothsaying in order to...

...defend the indefensible, show the limits of "intelligence," whatever "intelligence" is supposed to be.

It's appalling.