Video: History of atmospheric carbon dioxide levels

Thanks to SteveoR for showing this to me!

The video shows a graph of the rise of atmospheric CO2 levels over the second half of the 20th century, into the 21st. Then it starts to “zoom out”, showing falling levels, back into the last ice age, rising before it, falling again for another ice age, and so on back to eight hundred thousand years BCE. As longer periods of time become visible on the graph, the timeline compresses, showing the last 50 years or so for the very short time that they represent. Well before the end of the video, it is clear that CO2 levels are far, far higher now than they have been at any point in the last 800,000 years, and beyond.

Steps on the path, showing the way

In my last non-music post I talked about the world of possibilities opened up by renewable energy, and the fact that we could fairly easily generate more power than we currently need, and use that for other projects to make the world a better place. This is a theme I’ll be returning to fairly often in the foreseeable future, and in this post, I want to set aside possibilities, and look at what’s actually happening in some places around the world today, because some places are already taking the serious steps toward that better world.

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Food for thought: beyond meeting demand

Usually when people talk about converting to renewable energy, the conversation covers what it would actually take to replace fossil fuels. It’s a good conversation to have, and a lot of good work has gone into working out how much surface area would need to be devoted to wind and solar, what other sources of power could be used, how much it would cost in the short term, and how much it would save in the long term. The end result of all this is that converting the United States – one of the highest per-capita energy consumers in the world – to renewable energy is entirely doable. The only thing lacking is political will.

That said, why stop at what’s needed?

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Supreme Court nominee

Samantha Page over at Thinkprogress has a piece on Merric Garland’s record on the environment and on listening to scientists. There’s nothing dramatically good or bad about him there, but one thing that is a nice change of pace:

In a 2012 case Garland again sided with an agency, that time the DEA. Although medical marijuana advocates decried the final decision, during the argument, Garland said something that might cheer environmentalists.
“Don’t we have to defer to their judgment?” Garland asked about the agency. “We’re not scientists. They are.”
After years of ridiculing the conservative talking point that it’s reasonable to reject the scientific consensus around climate change because “I am not a scientist,” it’s refreshing to hear someone say, I am not a scientist, and therefore we have to listen to scientists.

Yep. When I have time, I’ll see if I can dig up more on him, and if anybody has something relevant, feel free to share it in the comments. Some folks think this guy was nominated because the Republicans’ inevitable obstruction will look worse when they block a center-right nominee, but there has also been plenty of talk indicating that the Republicans might cave on that, in which case this is who we’re likely to get. Time will tell.

Battles ahead – it will never be “too late”

Unsurprisingly, the sundry would-be Republican candidates for president have been less than inspiring this election season. One might think that with two candidates from Florida – a state that’s already starting to struggle with sea level rise – we might see at least hint of sanity from the national figures of Grand Old Party. One would be very wrong to think that, and if one really did, I would hazard a guess that one has not been paying attention.

Um, yeah. Climate denial is no surprise here. Peter Sinclair has more on the situation in Florida from rawstory and from his own video over at climatecrocks.com, but I wanted to talk about something slightly different.

Take a look at this video of Marco Rubio fielding a question sent in by the mayor of Miami (a Republican). Listen to the talking points:

Right-click and inspect element for transcript, or click here for full debate transcript

Some time ago, someone pulled together five stages of climate denial, which are unpacked well in this Guardian article by Dana Nuccitelli:

Stage 1: Deny the Problem Exists […]
Stage 2: Deny We’re the Cause […]
Stage 3: Deny It’s a Problem […]
Stage 4: Deny We can Solve It […]
Stage 5: It’s too Late […]

It’s pretty normal to get some combination of stages one through four in any given remark by a climate denier, and as Nuccitelli’s article shows, we’ve gotten pretty good at rebutting those arguments. Rubio mostly focused on Stages 2 and 4 in the video, with a nod to Stage 1. What I want to focus on in this post is “Stage 5”, because it’s an argument that makes a direct attempt to create despair. Let’s look at her discussion of Stage 5:

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Oceanoxia 2.0: Introductions

From the webcomic XKCD: W stick figure is shown sitting at a desk typing hard on a computer. From out of the frame, someone says

I have to fix this!

This blog was born of frustration in 2010.

At the time, I had been following climate science and climate change politics for a few years, and it was astonishing to me that so many people in the public debate seemed to think that a little sea level rise was the worst-case scenario. Sure, Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” had discussed what would happen if all of Greenland melted, but that has never been a genuine expectation for the 21st century, and the conversation six years ago was all about stopping or even reversing global warming by 2050. In other words, no danger of Greenland melting that much. Hell, at that point people were being called alarmist for talking about two feet of sea level rise. In some circles they still are.

So I wanted to provide some perspective. I wanted to show how alarming the future could be, if things really got bad.

The most obvious worst-case scenario is represented by the planet Venus, but I wasn’t sure if it was even possible to boost the greenhouse effect enough to broil Earth like that. The scenario I started with was one that has been proposed as a possible cause of the Permian-Triassic extinction, also known as The Great Dying. You can go look at my first blog post to learn more, but here’s a brief summary: [Read more…]