Perhaps I’m beating a dead horse in the eyes of some here, but when I see a headline like this – Fort McMurray: Fire could double in size, Canadian official says – from CNN, I find it more than a little disturbing.
Dry, windy conditions are fueling the blaze, which has already raged over 1,010 square kilometers (389 square miles). By Saturday, it might be twice as big.
“It’s extremely dry out there. Wind continues to push from the southwest, to push the fire to the northeast into the forested areas,” Alberta Wildfire official Chad Morrison said Friday afternoon. “There is a high potential that this fire could double in size by the end of the day tomorrow.”
This is just one of forty (40) wildfires ravaging Alberta. And it’s only May. As for those who see this as just another strange weather event that we should not tie to anthropogenic climate change, well, again, that’s not what the experts at Climate Central, a popular and respected climate science website, are saying in their article: “Here’s the Climate Context For the Fort McMurray Wildfire.”
The wildfire is the latest in a lengthening lineage of early wildfires in the northern reaches of the globe that are indicative of a changing climate. As the planet continues to warm, these types of fires will likely only become more common and intense as spring snowpack disappears and temperatures warm.
If you followed the links from the excerpt of article above, you would see references to a series of massive, disastrous wildfires across the upper Northern hemisphere, including boreal forests in Siberia, Alaska and the Northwest Territories in Canada since 2013, which predates the current extreme El Nino event. This sharp increase in both the extent and intensity of wildfires this far north, and the lengthening of the wildfire season across the globe, as acknowledged by this report in The New York Times, “Wildfires, Once Confined to a Season, Burn Earlier and Longer,” is seen by many climate scientists as a clear indication that global warming is the clear culprit.
Here’s a list of a few of the sources that support this claim:
A new analysis of 35 years of meteorological data confirms fire seasons have become longer. Fire season, which varies in timing and duration based on location, is defined as the time of year when wildfires are most likely to ignite, spread, and affect resources. […]
The researchers found that fire weather seasons have lengthened across one quarter of Earth’s vegetated surface. In certain areas, extending the fire season by a bit each year added up to a large change over the full study period. For instance, parts of the western United States and Mexico, Brazil, and East Africa now face wildfire seasons that are more than a month longer than they were 35 years ago.
The National Interagency Fire Center’s numbers vividly illustrate how 2015 was a record setter. U.S. wildfires scorched 10.12 million acres. […]
That bests the previous mark of 9.87 million acres set in 2006, and it’s the first time wildfire acreage burned has crossed the 10-million acre threshold. The impacts of climate change mean that the threshold will likely be crossed more often in the coming century as wildfire season lasts longer and sparks more large fires. […]
…. In Alaska, scientists have raised concerns that wildfires could send vast reserves of carbon locked in the soil up in smoke. That could raise temperatures further and lead to even more fires and speed up the march of climate change in a dangerous feedback loop.
PNAS Journal article “Recent burning of boreal forests exceeds fire regime limits of the past 10,000 years.”
Fire frequency and area burned increased ∼6,000–3,000 y ago, probably as a result of elevated landscape flammability associated with increased Picea mariana in the regional vegetation. During the Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA; ∼1,000–500 cal B.P.), the period most similar to recent decades, warm and dry climatic conditions resulted in peak biomass burning, but severe fires favored less-flammable deciduous vegetation, such that fire frequency remained relatively stationary. These results suggest that boreal forests can sustain high-severity fire regimes for centuries under warm and dry conditions, with vegetation feedbacks modulating climate–fire linkages. The apparent limit to [Medieval Climate Anomaly] burning has been surpassed by the regional fire regime of recent decades, which is characterized by exceptionally high fire frequency and biomass burning. This extreme combination suggests a transition to a unique regime of unprecedented fire activity.
Perhaps you don’t think this has anything to do with the current election, and in one sense you are correct. The media certainly hasn’t made climate change a major topic of discussion, nor have the candidates. The Republicans, including the likely nominee, Donald Trump, almost to a man and woman, reject the science of climate change and deny that what we are seeing with our own eyes is real. It’s happening now, not in some distant future when we will all be dead and won’t have to worry about it. But they deny, deny, deny because to do otherwise would be to reject the position of their financial backers and all those conservatives who buy into the Fox Noise propaganda.
What’s more troubling, however, is that, despite a few rhetorical statements and stated policy positions (which you can easily find on her campaign’s website, so I won’t bother linking to it here), Hillary Clinton, the leader in the number of delegates in the current Democratic Party’s nomination selection process, seems oblivious or indifferent to the effects that climate change is re-shaping our world at an alarming and ever increasing rate. Instead of responding to legitimate complaints regarding her record by environmental critics, she has lashed out in anger at them instead. And no wonder. Her record, from promoting fracking around the world to approving the transport of tar sands pipelines while Secretary if State is not a good one. Let’s look at some examples, shall we, beginning with her concerted effortss at State to promote fracking.
When Hillary Clinton took over the State Department, she set up a special arm, the Bureau of Energy Resources, after close consultation with oil and gas executives. This bureau, with 63 employees, was soon helping sponsor conferences around the world. And much more: Diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks show that the secretary of state was essentially acting as a broker for the shale-gas industry, twisting the arms of world leaders to make sure US firms got to frack at will.
Unfortunately, Hillary continues to claim that fracking is a clean source of energy, despite the recent evidence that methane emissions in the US alone increased 30% after the fracking and shale gas boom began, and studies that show natural gas would do little to stop the increase in greenhouse gas emissions, while simultaneously blocking increased utilization of renewable energy, such as wind and solar power.
We’ve reached the point where Denmark can generate 42 percent of its power from the wind, and where Bangladesh is planning to solarize every village in the country within the next five years. We’ve reached the point, that is, where the idea of natural gas as a “bridge fuel” to a renewable future is a marketing slogan, not a realistic claim (even if that’s precisely the phrase that Hillary Clinton used to defend fracking in a debate earlier this month).
Joe Romm, a climate analyst at the Center for American Progress, has been tracking the various economic studies more closely than anyone else. Even if you could cut the methane-leakage rates to zero, Romm says, fracked gas (which, remember, still produces 50 percent of the CO2 level emitted by coal when you burn it) would do little to cut the world’s greenhouse-gas emissions because it would displace so much truly clean power. A Stanford forum in 2014 assembled more than a dozen expert teams, and their models showed what a drag on a sustainable future cheap, abundant gas would be. “Cutting greenhouse-gas emissions by burning natural gas is like dieting by eating reduced-fat cookies,” the principal investigator of the Stanford forum explained. “If you really want to lose weight, you probably need to avoid cookies altogether.” […]
Clinton continues to conflate and confuse the chemistry: Natural gas, she said in a recent position paper, has helped US carbon emissions “reach their lowest level in 20 years.” It appears that many in power would like to carry on the fracking revolution, albeit a tad more carefully.
I guess she isn’t paying attention to the research or the EPA’s own confession that they drastically underestimated methane emissions (though their current estimates of methane emissions are still likely too conservative). But she’s against coal, right? Not so fast. Just recently, after criticism from coal miners and the coal mining industry in West Virginia, Hillary Clinton publicly reversed her previous position that coal as an energy source should be phased out as soon as possible.
Mrs. Clinton said earlier this year that more miners would be put out of work if she is elected president and vowed to continue President Obama’s unprecedented crackdown on carbon emissions through federal regulation.
The former secretary of state then tried to retract her comments by saying she was merely opining on the fact that the U.S. coal industry is declining.
“I don’t know how to explain it other than what I said was totally out of context from what I meant because I have been talking about helping coal country for a very long time, and I did put out a plan last summer,” she said. “I didn’t mean that we were going to do it. What I said was that is going to happen unless we take action to try to help and prevent it,” Mrs. Clinton said at a town hall meeting in West Virginia this week.
A profile in political courage, this is not. Then again, in 2008, she avidly supported coal as the fuel of the future. And now she appears to be back on the clean coal bandwagon, supporting pie-in-the-sky carbon sequestration as the solution to keeping coal miners and their employers in business.
Earlier on Monday, Clinton expanded on what sort of “action” she would take during a conversation about “economic barriers and jobs,” which was held in Ashland, Kentucky.
“We’ve got to do a lot more on carbon capture and sequestration,” she told voters, “and try to see how we can get coal to be a fuel that can continue to be sold and continue to be mined.”
Carbon capture and sequestration (CCS), or “clean coal,” has long been touted as a greener method of burning fossil fuels and is a pillar of Clinton’s energy agenda.
Then, of course, there is her dubious record at the State Department, when she green-lighted (pun intended) the Alberta Clipper pipeline to make the transport of tar sand oil production in western Canada economically viable, despite the consensus among the scientific community that it is a dirtier, more harmful source of fossil fuels that should not be pursued.
As [President Obama spoke about America’s leadership in the fight against Climate Change], another pipeline known as the Alberta Clipper was already transporting some 800,000 barrels per day (BPD) of tar sands crude—the same type and essentially the same volume of oil as the proposed Keystone—to U.S. refineries.
While Keystone has monopolized public outrage, the State Department has quietly allowed a similar project to move ahead. The Clipper is one link in a broader network of pipelines, operated by Canadian oil giant Enbridge, Inc., that extends from the Alberta tar sands all the way to refineries on the Gulf Coast. Environmental groups warn that this could lead to a dramatic increase in the production of tar-sands oil—one of the dirtiest and most environmentally hazardous types of fuel— with little public scrutiny
Perhaps it should come as no surprise to anyone, that three major US oil companies, Chevron, ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips, who held significant investments in Canadian tar sands, lobbied the State Department under Secretary Clinton to approve the Alberta Clipper pipeline. All three companies then contributed millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation after this tar sands pipeline was approved.
In 2009, the Clinton-led State Department approved a permit for the 400-mile Alberta Clipper pipeline, which is designed to pump up to 450,000 barrels of oil per day from the Canadian oil sands to Wisconsin (where recent polls show Democratic primary voters are concerned about its impact). According to federal lobbying records reviewed by the IBT, Chevron and ConocoPhillips both lobbied the State Department specifically on the issue of “oil sands” in the immediate months prior to the department’s approval, as did a trade association funded by ExxonMobil.
Those three oil companies have delivered between between $2.5 million and $3 million to the Clinton Foundation. That is on top of money their executives and lobbyists delivered to Clinton’s campaign and super PAC in her 2008 presidential bid — the year before she approved the pipeline. […]
In the year prior to the approval, Chevron’s Laurence Humphries was a top fundraising “bundler” for Clinton’s 2008 presidential bid, raising more than $100,000 for her run, according to the watchdog group Public Citizen. Following the pipeline approval, Chevron hosted an event at the Clinton Global Initiative in 2010, according to CGI’s website. The company also gave the Clinton Foundation $250,000 in 2013, reported the Wall Street Journal. In all, Chevron has given between $500,000 and $1 million to the foundation. Two Chevron lobbyists are listed as fundraising bundlers for Clinton’s 2016 campaign, according to the Huffington Post.
It is both sad and ironic that the people who have been forced to evacuate their homes as a result of these wildfires, which are literally creating its own “weather,” live in the very region that is heavily dependent on income from the development of tar sands oil. Tar sands oil that would not have been developed absent the approval of the Alberta pipeline by Hillary Clinton, the beneficiary of millions of dollars of dirty oil money. That Greenpeace protestor who confronted Hillary in New York was telling the truth, and Hillary evaded the truth of which her accuser spoke by attacking her and blaming Sanders’ supporters for lying about her fossil fuel industry connections. Like Bill McKibben, I have no faith that she will do anything significant to halt fossil fuel use and/or ameliorate the horrific consequences of climate change that are occurring now.
Meanwhile, Alberta burns.
Steven,
I normally just scroll past your long attacks on Clinton (who I’m not a fan of myself, but don’t have nearly the level of hatred you do — I’m a Warren supporter who doesn’t have a home in this primary election). But you’ve stepped onto turf that I think is too important and you’ve skewed things just to keep making the same anti-Clinton argument you make in every post.
Enough.
I’ve spent years studying climate data and the climate situation. There is no policy that has been proposed by any candidate or politician, including your favored candidate, Sanders, that comes even close to addressing the scale of the challenge. The issue goes way way beyond fossil fuel companies — it has to do with economic growth and an economy that relies upon fossil fuels.
Climate scientist Kevin Anderson lays out the facts of the situation quite well — only a planned economic recession of a scale that is unthinkable to any politician anywhere on the political spectrum is capable of keeping Climate Change within non-dangerous bounds:
Kevin Anderson – Delivering on 2°C: evolution or revolution?
Similarly, physicist Tom Murphy has evaluated every alternative energy option in detail and concluded that the typical green utopian solutions that are passed around as if they are serious policy solutions are really a joke:
The Alternative Energy Matrix
You’re bending over backwards to try to put some daylight between Clinton and Sanders here, but it’s false. Both of their responses to Climate Change are like trying to stop an 18 wheeler going downhill at 90 mph by applying bicycle brakes (which I suppose is better than the GOP strategy of hitting the gas). And if you were to believe some of Sander’s economic projections (such as his absurd 5% growth assumption), given that the rate of improvement in carbon intensity of the economy is slow, things would get worse faster under him.
I want us to deal with the realities of Climate Change, not just stoop to political attacks and ignore the reality. I’d like to see you seriously engage on the details, as Anderson and Murphy do, rather than just continue to attack Clinton for something Sanders is no better on.
First step to address any major problem is to recognize the scale and scope of it. Sanders has this at the top of his list of problems/challenges that the US and the world must deal with, however piecemeal and limited the correctives are at this time, and all the variables that are involved in creating the problem and mitigation strategies.
It’s true that GOP politicians can’t even admit that a problem/issue exists. However, for a so-called policy-wonk, HRC only exhibits superficial knowledge of a small subset of the variables involved and on those, has no workable solutions. Putting a lot more Appalachian coal miners out of work solves nothing. Increasing coal imports from Columbia or more strip mining in western states could pick of that shortfall.
Seems to me you’re just repeating partisan talking points — not engaging in the data about climate change. If Sanders is serious about it, he should demonstrate it by actually proposing responses that make sense and actually respond to the challenges at hand. He hasn’t. This is a very important issue to me, and he hasn’t given any indications that he has a clue. Sanders and Clinton are both clueless on this.
I get it, it’s the primary and people are in their respective trenches and will attack the other side no matter what. But this is too important, and it’s something where they’re both inadequate. Some self reflection is what’s needed.
I’m only stating what I’ve seen and heard from the records, speeches, and debates of Sanders and HRC. Not any freaking “partisan memes” that seems to be a favorite meme hurled by HRC supporters at Sanders’ supporters.
How many questions in the debates concerned climate change? How interested is the vast majority of the electorate in this issue? Bernie can barely get a fair hearing on the issue of income/wealth inequality that a significant majority of the electorate experiences first hand everyday. As he’s put it at the top of his list of issues/problems that’s the best he can do within the context of national campaign. More than that and the general public will tune it and him out and view him as irrelevant.
Everything in Sanders’ message is inter-related and related to climate change as well. He knows that, and he also knows that it’s too big a hunk to cover in campaign speeches, etc. He also has relationships with many of the best on the issue of climate changes. Do you think he would throw them under the bus if he were elected president and had power and the bully pulpit to get us moving on it?
HRC has Wall St. — and unless or until they can figure out how to make big bucks quickly and easily to tackle climate change, she aint going to do diddly squat about the issue.
As I replied to Steven below, my point is that there isn’t a dime’s worth of difference between Sanders’s and Clinton’s views on climate change when you look at the actual numbers, and yet folks supporting Clinton or Sanders like to keep claiming that there is a difference. They’re both bad on the issue, and the first step in getting them to be better on it is to admit that and advocate for real solutions (as Anderson discusses).
At a certain point and at a certain point in time, I’m a realist. The choices are limited to less than nothing, nothing, and something (maybe no more than a little something). Less than nothing is fine if all the science is wrong or the die has been cast and any human changes alterations, etc won’t make a whit of difference in the long-term outcome. Nothing is also fine if there’s plenty of time left before acting is absolutely a non-choice or nothing now will make a difference. Science tell us that we’re past the tipping point when action was a non-choice and continuous delays in acting will make the problem larger and more costly if in the future we and every industrialized nation on earth ever decides to act.
There is no option D on offer that would meet the size and scope of what you conclude is necessary at this time. Therefore, you might as well chill and enjoy the goodies offered by your preferred candidate. But if that candidate is Trump or HRC, don’t come and lecture others that there’s not a “dime’s worth of difference” between Sanders and the other two. You’re only pitching a false narrative to protect the goodies you have or expect to get.
Small stuff, which is where you see Sanders, may not make a huge difference in the long-run. But small stuff at least gets a ball rolling, and in case the world has enough time left to avert total ecological collapses, we will be moving forward in the right direction.
I don’t see Sanders’s proposals as “small stuff” — I see it as no different than Clinton. As I pointed out he might be “better” if argued in one way, say by his marginally more aggressive climate one liners, but on the flip side this would be negated by his 5% growth aims and assumptions. And if you assume that he’s wrong on his growth assumptions, then other policies he’s proposing fall apart.
Btw, I’m not pushing Clinton any more than you are. I don’t see the world in a binary of pro-Sanders and anti-Sanders.
Why do you bother to comment at all? Since none of them meet your requirements for action on climate change, what do you care if some see a difference between HRC and Sanders? And since your defined Tweedledee and Tweedledum are completely inadequate to address the problem, why bother voting at all?
Do you mistake Sanders supporters for single issue voters? If you can convince them that on climate change there’s no difference between the two that they should be happy with HRC?
Sigh. Isn’t it possible that they are both bad or both good on some issue? Is that hard to acknowledge? And why does it always come back to Clinton with you?
I care about this issue and don’t care about who the flavor of the month candidate is because it’s too important.
I’m writing because we need to move the entire progressive movement towards real solutions on climate change, not the symbolic but ultimately empty solutions that are being offered today. I rarely comment, and I see that there may not be a point commenting here to try to advocate for an unpopular but I think important policy viewpoint.
We need to move forward?
Only one candidate shows the slightest interest in moving forward, and you devote yourself to insisting he’s as bad as the rest.
Yeah, the only way to move forward is bring that nonsense to comment threads, I guess.
Are you serious?
Less than 5 minutes with Google will show you this is competently untrue.
For someone who claims to have studied this issue over the years, you appear spectacularly uninformed.
Upon the successful replacement of the late-stage-finance-capitalism mode of production with a socialist-production-for-use production, the problem of anthropogenic climate change will finally be addressed, and under circumstances that guarantee it will be addressed successfully.
Work for the revolution, and everything else falls into place.
I know you’re trolling, but it’s eerie how often I see what you’re saying said uncritically (not quite in that language).
As a number of ecologists have observed, both capitalism and socialism (in their various forms, including our current capitalist system and social democracies) are all based on infinite growth on a finite planet. As a result, despite all the talk about the Overton window, we’re still trapped within it — Sanders and Clinton, Trump and Cruz and the rest of the GOP are all in agreement on one thing: we need to stimulate economic growth. All they disagree about is how to achieve that and who should benefit from it. None of them question that fundamental premise — that growth is required — the one that drives many of problems we face today, Climate Change foremost.
Actually, late-stage-finance-capitalism’s solution to climate change is to reduce the masses to yurts and dog carts. Not even ponies.
And without breaking any china.
Just to add — I highly recommend watching the Anderson lecture and reading Murphy’s analysis. It really helps put the scale of the challenge we have in front of us in context.
I’m a colleague of Tom. His analysis is only a start and is a bit biased. Backyard production has the same emphasis as difficulty of production? His matrix does not address important elements of the energy equation: economic cost is neglected. So are environmental costs ( strip mining, air pollution, for instance), costs associated with medical issues related to energy production ( deaths from air pollution, for instance).
The issues really can’t be captured in a simple matrix, especially leaving out these important elements.
Nevertheless, I agree with your general point that none of the candidates are really addressing the issue.
I find the following site useful with more in depth analysis than tom provides
http://www.withouthotair.com/
As am I… I think he summarizes what he’s trying to quite well, and is clear about what he isn’t trying to do. As he says, he knows any weighting or matrix will be incomplete. I don’t look to his analysis to understand environmental impact (that’s where we need to look to ecologists and climate scientists). I look at his analysis for physical feasibility. I’ve read MacKay’s book several times and reference it as well. It’s a good work, but has its own blind spots (e.g., regarding peak oil), is too UK focused, and is a bit out of date.
You confuse criticism and what I see as clear evidence of corruption for hatred.
I have no illusions about the Democratic Party at this point. If it wasn’t Clinton it would be someone else wearing the mask, pretending they will do what is right for most Americans, all the while feeding at the same money trough and planning to do what the money tells them needs to be done.
As for the people in Ft McMurray, I doubt there would be so many of them there had the Alberta Clipper pipeline not been approved, making the production of tar sand oil commercially viable. Thus, there would be fewer people in the path of this firestorm.
Arguably, Clinton can share some of the blame for that, just as she can be blamed the increase in fracking around the world due to her use of her office to advance the interests of oil and gas firms. I recall when Cheney assembled an energy task force comprised of oil and gas company execs and he was roundly condemned for it. I remember the criticism he and the Bushies received for the special rules put in place that allowed fracking firms to use whatever chemicals/ingredients they wished to fracture the shale formations without disclosing them to the public or the EPA. The complaints and vitriol directed toward those policies by Democrats was thunderous.
Yet, here we see a Democratic Secretary of State essentially doing the same thing as the Bush administration, and – crickets. Yet the greatest increase in drilling occurred over the last 8 years. The Bush administration may have set the stage for the fracking boom, but the Obama administration did little to stop it as it metastasized across our country and nothing to prevent the destruction fracking operations bring to so many communities.
Hillary Clinton was a prominent member of the administration and she actively sold the idea of fracking as being good for the environment to foreign governments to encourage increased drilling by American oil and gas firms overseas.
Sanders plan is a moratorium on fracking. Clinton;s plan is continued fracking with better regulations (not defined) and tax incentives for renewable energy. I think there’s a significant difference there, and obviously, based on her past record, a reason to doubt that she will follow through on her plan, inadequate as it is, after she’s elected.
Thanks. Appreciated very much.
It’s this that I’m talking about. My point is that there isn’t a significant difference, and since we’re talking about climate policy there’s actual data to back that up. This is what Anderson is talking about in his lecture. If this were about something less significant or something where there aren’t numbers to discuss, then it’d be one thing.
All I’m trying to get Sanders supporters to realize is that his plans re: climate change are no good, just like Clinton, and would have a negligibly different result. A reality-based approach would be to admit that both are bad on the issue, and try to push them to both be better, rather than to deny that one is bad to make a partisan point. And setting aside Sanders’s explicit climate policy, the 5% growth number he uses directly conflicts with his climate goals as I mention above.
Significant difference as YOU define significance.
There is no conflict between increased GDP and decreased emission of greenhouse gases. Close the coal fields and employ the former coal miners in building wind power. Employ more people in building wind power. And for good measure, employ people to restore the land damaged by coal mining. Print the money needed to do all that. Now you have increased GDP and decreased CO2.
GDP is a crap measurement anyway.
Since fracking contributes to greenhouse gasses, Clinton is for fracking (with unknown regulations in place), and Sanders wants to ban it for now (and possibly permanently); how can you say there is no difference?
Not to mention her stance on coal…
Do you know how ridiculous you sound?
I can acknowledge that Sanders is not doing as much as I would like or as much as needed, but for you to make the claim there is no real difference between Sanders and Clinton on this issue…how in the tank are you for Clinton?
This is the only explanation that makes any sense.
For the future of complex life, especially mammalian, life on the planet; there is essentially no difference between their stated position as far as long term survival is concerned. Yes the repugs are much worst; however nothing that has been proposed that will meaningfully slow let alone stop the ever rising amount of CO2 in the planets biosphere. If that does not happen we will exceed the 2C limit that many experts say is a threshold where feedbacks start to overcome any attempts for the human race to keep the planets global temps below ranges where humans and other large mammals could survive.
It might be bad form to admit this in any political campaign season, however it is the truth.
The small measures proposed by either candidate would have helped around the time ronnie ray-gun was ripping the solar panels off the white house. Today they are simply much too little far too late circa 2016 to stave off the ever evolving catastrophe that is currently rearing it’s ugly head.
I’ve already stated that even Sanders position does not go far enough.
The more important point is that he is at least open to more, while Clinton appears opposed to doing what needs to be done.
I’ve made no claims that Sanders will fix the problem. But I’d rather have someone that appears open to the attempt than someone who seems only slightly more progressive than the GOP on this issue
If you still see that as not being a difference worth making then I’m not sure what anyone can say.
Except we never tried to solve the problem before it solved us.
Sanders approach doesn’t change that fact.
Before it solved us? What exactly does this mean?
And I notice you continue to sidestep my point.
It should be self evident.
From a workable solution to the very real problem that the future of the human race depends on, you have no actual point, just meaningless political talking points, like the rest of the politicians.
The only feasible solution to the current disaster scenario is a multi-trillion dollar effort aimed at direct carbon removal from the atmosphere.
All other scenarios involve a slow-starting, rapidly intensifying global food, water, and land crisis… starting now and accelerating over the next 100 years.
The global climate effects we are experiencing now are a result of 200 years of carbon release, with the most extreme modern impacts being a function of what was released 1 to 2 decades ago (there’s a lag between CO2 release and realized increased heat impact).
We are now at or above 400 ppm, and are bumping up against the 2° C mark on a monthly basis. We bid fair to have an ice free summer in the arctic this year, and regularly ice free in summer by 2020 or 2025.
Sunshades of any sort exacerbate the CO2 levels, which will enhance ocean acidification.
100% cessation of CO2 release will result in about 75% of the global population dying.
We’re still increasing total CO2 release, and actually accelerating that output on a year-by-year basis.
Only direct removal (essentially conditioning the atmosphere) will allow continued food production, power, and transport for the nearly 8 billion people on the planet to continue at any kind of sustainable level.
And yes, it will be an engineered recession… unless we seize and utilize the 30 trillion missing dollars currently stashed in tax haven offshore accounts.
And yes, neither Clinton nor Sanders are really even close when it comes to their proposals.
I agree with much of what you’re saying, but I’m not sure that a CCS-based solution is really physically feasible at this point.
Large-scale biochar in the tropics combined with a cessation of all CO2 output could achieve what you’re describing, maybe, but money is just tokens — something that helps animate human activity. A change on this scale goes far beyond money. On some basic level this would be a reorganization of all of global society towards a single goal, something that seems…challenging.
Would mean mass starvation given the simple fact the vast majority of the planets 7.3 billion humans rely at least for a large part on our industrial based agriculture for their daily food.
However the continued use of Carbon based fuels will mean an ever escalating global warming problem.
Catch22 for the ages.
Then I guess we need to scale back on the number of humans.
I’m not okay with killing most of the other lifeforms on this planet just because mankind is too greedy, arrogant, and selfish to think of the other creatures on this planet.
I drive most of my friends to distraction about climate change. But there just simply isn’t any other issue we face that is this important. Everything is impacted by it.
The Fort McMurray fires have all the elements of climate change that we need to be addressing, political or not. That’s why it’s important to talk about these fires now, not after everyone is safe again and the distance allows for turning your back.
I re read Klein’s Shock Doctrine again recently and when applied to climate change it is another layer that poses incomprehensible danger. Left in the hands of governments that turn a blind eye, each climate change 9/11 moment, big or small, lends itself to the loss of liberty in favor of protection quandary. Who has the reins in those moments becomes crucial on just how many liberties are retired.
Thanks for the compilation Steven. Keep talking.
Too often a thread, and perspectives, get caught up in the stop fracking, emissions, leave It in the ground conversations and make such an uproar they drown out much needed conversations about the incredible technology that is arriving daily to offset the emissions focus.
Just this week the evil Exxon signed on to start work on CO2 recapture. It hasn’t been a perfect storm, but it’s been a great storm that has begun to chase Exxon from its single minded oil greed; likewise with the closing down of coal.
So, whether it be Clinton or Sanders or both, the climate challenge needs to recognize and promote innovation and technology. It’s not good enough to say we cut emissions and so we can sleep well at night.
This time it’s all about innovation.
I’d recommend watching Anderson’s talk that I linked above:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZF1zNpzf8RM
He discusses that while innovation can help, it’s only a small part of the solution.
Yes, I’ve watched it, but my point is that there is no single silver bullet, and sometimes the noise coming from those of us who listen to the emissions side drowns out what should be an important part of the effort. There’s people out there busting their hump to create solutions, give ’em a listen.
I’m sympathetic to that viewpoint on one hand, but on the other it feeds the standard narrative that we have — that someone else will fix the problem, so we as citizens don’t have to take any responsibility for our actions and our leaders don’t need to worry about it. When even the best case scenario technology solutions will take decades to roll out at scale, and Anderson’s point is that we have about a decade to decrease emissions by three quarters.
Just sayin that there’s no silver bullet so everything needs to be on the table. Personal responsibility is one of the things on that same table with an equal voice. Have you seen ITER and of course Powerwall? Just noticing news that Russia is offering to help Alberta with the fire. One thing about climate change, it does have a way of uniting the globe.
It is last winter’s El Nino that caused the Fort McMurray fire. Low snowfall, early melt, warm temps in the spring dried out the forests. Perhsps you can figure out some way to blame Clinton for El Nino?
The title of your post was misleading. A more accurate title would have been:
Alberta Fires Worsen. Blame Hillary Clinton.
Greed, hate, and delusion, Stephen D.
Don’t forget arrogance.
The number of people who think we can use science alone to get ourselves out of the current situation, without having to radically change our way of life, is shocking.
It’s science, not magic.
Im tempted to eat popcorn while you are mystified at the results of a dry winter on boreal forest. Nor am I unhappy at what I see as a terribly destructive exercise of tar sands mining going sideways…including from low price for expensive product. But I do get tired of the unending blather from people who are sold on the idea that we know what the future holds….and its BAAAD. This morning I decided to have a look at what other people besides my stock of regulars like Watts Up With That and JoNova who scoff at alarmism as false and deceptive reporting without a bit of data to back it up. So I was naughty and posted from a couple of Facebook accounts to add to my interminable collection deriding the UN bureaucracy the IPCC and the plan for world energy use taxation ( or a tax on air ! ) http://oldephartte.blogspot.com/p/blog-page_23.html http://oldephartte.blogspot.com/p/blog-page_67.html