With the number of ecosystems that are predicted to collapse, and species that will go extinct, the future is going to be a rapid-fire drumbeat of “this died” and “that died” and “the other thing died” interspersed with human populations going into panic when the thing that died is something people depended on.
The reactions are … interesting. Here’s one:
[alaska]
“We lost billions of snow crab in a matter of months,” said Bob Foy, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Alaska Fisheries Science Center, at a public forum held Dec. 12 at the Anchorage Museum of History and Art. “We don’t have a smoking gun, if you will. We don’t have one particular event that impacted the snow crab — except the heat wave.”
That heat wave is now over, but its effects linger. A NOAA survey showed an 80% decline in Bering Sea snow crab, from 11.7 billion in 2018 to 1.9 billion this year. It could take six to 10 years to recover, experts told members of the North Pacific Fishery Management Council, which wrapped up a 10-day meeting in Anchorage on Wednesday.
[emphasis mine]
What do you mean it could take 6 to 10 years to recover? It “could”? No, it “won’t.” If the problem was caused by a heat wave (spoiler: not quite) then we’re dealing with heat level rises that will last thousands of years – how is the population going to “recover” when the heat waves are going to get worse and worse?
Over in the Climate Denial Department, there are active arguments about whether or not humanity has blown through the +1.5C “limit” – last year it was over +1.5C in many places, but, no, we can’t count it as having gone over the imaginary limit unless the whole planet is +1.5C for, let’s say, a decade. No doubt there will be others who say that we shouldn’t declare the line crossed until everything that science predicts will die at that level, is dead. Meanwhile, of course, Americans will continue dumping CO2 like frantically masturbating monkeys, in a desperate attempt to “act now, before some liberal gets your oil and burns it first.” Or something. My feelings on this topic are a bit bitter and political/class -tinged because, yesterday, I was passed on the back road by 3 big pickup trucks that were “rolling coal.” Aaah, Pennsylvania. Can I say “dumb rednecks?” They were flying Trump flags, so it’s hard to tell decisively which axis of stupid I was looking at.
This is the kind of shit that they are fed, to keep them dumb and desperate:
From my phone
“Radical policies that hurt our energy future”? Oh. My. Fucking. God. As Mister Dylan wrote, “it doesn’t take a weatherman to tell which way the wind is blowing” – but what about basically every weatherman on earth? [Naturally, I did not bother to take the survey, but maybe I should – because I bet it ends with a plea for donations. Mostly, I expect it ends with a torrent of similar spam ad nauseam.]
[bbc]
The 1.5C figure has become a symbol of global climate change negotiations. Countries agreed to “pursue efforts” to limit global temperature rises to 1.5C under the 2015 Paris agreement.
Going over 1.5C every year for a decade or two would see far greater impacts of warming, such as longer heatwaves, more intense storms and wildfires.
But passing the level in one of the next few years would not mean that the Paris limit had been broken. Scientists say there is still time to restrict global warming by cutting emissions sharply.
[emphasis mine]
Now you have to picture me sitting here next to my carbon-belching computer [I know: metaphor] furrowing my mighty brow with all the “WTF?” I can muster. Going over +1.5C every year for, uh, a year, would indicate that the Paris limit had been broken. By the time all the places are +1.5C, that means the hotter spots will be close to +2C. There’s no need to argue about anything in that ballpark.
I am utterly puzzled at why BBC’s journalists decided to throw that little bit of “it’ll be OK, hush hush baby” in on top of a rather dire observation. In point of fact, nowadays I take it as journalistic malpractice not to point out, at this time, that the US’ strategy for climate change is to keep increasing emissions until they suddenly drop off toward zero in 2050. Personally, I don’t see how the US is going to pull anything like that shit off, but hey, vote Biden because the other choices are all more disgusting! It’s not as though the US hasn’t been telling a gigantic bucket of lies about climate. You don’t even need to rise to the level of the “Radical policies that hurt our energy future” text when the white house has made it pretty obvious that they realize the cost of fossil fuels affects their electoral success and therefore, fuck the environment, getting re-elected is important.
Back to our friends the now-deceased crab fisheries: [cnn]
Snow crabs are cold-water species and found overwhelmingly in areas where water temperatures are below 2 degrees Celsius, though they can function in waters up to 12 degrees Celsius, according to the study. Warmer ocean water likely wreaked havoc on the crabs’ metabolism and increased their caloric needs.
The amount of energy crabs needed from food in 2018 — the first year of a two-year marine heat wave in the region — may have been as much as quadrupled compared to the previous year, researchers found. But with the heat disrupting much of the Bering Sea’s food web, snow crabs had a hard time foraging for food and weren’t able to keep up with the caloric demand.
This is the kind of subtle not-so-subtle cascading effect that scientists have been warning about since the 1980s: we cannot accurately predict all of the possible failure modes of the system but we can be sure that randomly twiddling the knobs that control the system will result in changes and possibly failures of the system. Here in Pennsylvania there is a plague of spotted lanternflies [md] an “invasive species” that has found the warmer weather here to its liking, and has decided to prove Malthus’ point by overpopulating toward a collapse. Meanwhile, the air is full of these dumb creatures and the other creatures that have shown up to eat them, etc. You know, kind of like the crabs and humanity: “oh wow look crabs lets eat the hell out of them!” and later “where did the crabs go?”
Normally, there is a temperature barrier in the ocean that prevents species like Pacific cod from reaching the crabs’ extremely cold habitat. But during the heat wave, the Pacific cod were able to go to these warmer-than-usual waters and ate a portion of what was left of the crab population.
Cod: “yum! crabs!”
What’s happening with Alaska’s crabs is proof the climate crisis is rapidly accelerating and impacting livelihoods, Szuwalski said. He knew this was going to happen at some point, but he “didn’t expect it to happen so soon.”
“This was kind of an unexpected, punctuated change in their populations,” he said. “But I think long term, the expectation is that the snow crab population will move north as the ice recedes and in the eastern Bering Sea, we probably won’t see as much of them anymore.”
God damn, people are stupid. When humans started fishing the Alaskan Crab population it was stable at around 8 billion crabs. Now, it’s down to well under 1 billion. The way that guy frames it, it sounds like 8 billion crabs are just going to … move somewhere else. But, in fact, they’re dead and gone. Turned into a brief population explosion of cod, which – no doubt – will be fished to near extinction by humans in short order.
What I think is going on, behind the scenes and unvoiced in all this reporting, is the human conceit that somehow we’re going to manage this. You know, the crab population is still out there, or will bounce back, pretty quickly once Biden gets re-elected and the US gets serious about cutting its oil consumption. We’re a species that has shown a lot of ingenuity at getting ourselves out of tight situations, and this is another tight situation, therefore we’ll get out of it. That, of course, denies the huge history of humans’ getting out of tight situations by: running away. I’m sure the denizens of Doggerland [stderr] patted themselves on the back for being smart enough to move in time, as the waters rose and ruined their ability to survive in their former homes. I am reminded that, at one point, human population was down around 1,500 individuals – presumably due to some volcanic eruption that caused the equivalent of several nuclear winters. Meanwhile, the nuclear war planners are telling themselves, “our winter will be, um, different!” Climate scientists keep pointing out that the heat will not magically stop even if the US magically stops its emissions in 2050 – the CO2 causing the heat will be here for at least a few thousand years, unless there is a miraculous technologic control-alt-del that absorbs carbon and has nearly zero energy requirements while doing so. “Oh, is that all?” During those thousands of years, the Alaskan Crab population will continue to drop – to zero. Because if it’s dropped like this in 10 years, what is 2000 years of drop going to look like?
Fucking duh:
He knew this was going to happen at some point, but he “didn’t expect it to happen so soon.”
The path of smart is to see that it’s going to happen if ${contingency} and ${change} and then prevent it from happening, not watch for it to happen and then wring your hands and go “I saw it coming, but I didn’t expect it to get here so soon.” That’s a good policy with climate change or trolley car problems. The solution to the trolley car problem is to tell the experimenter, “I am not in your trolley car problem because I saw you were setting up a trolley car problem and went ahead of time and told everyone on both tracks ‘there is an evil philosopher a way up the track who is sending a trolley car down to kill some of you. Get the fuck off the track.“
Because the tories have decided that there’s lots of votes in being anti-green again, so to point out otherwise would be *biased*.
And the BBC, as a fiercely independent organisation, is naturally utterly paranoid about getting a spanking from those that control its budget.
Frankly, I still believe that we could manage it. If we wanted to.
The problem is that it would, so to speak, require eating less crab, so… I guess not.
And don’t forget the ultimate form of running away, namely: “Dying before the bill comes due, so it’s someone else’s problem.”
It’s real popular.
Probably wrong. The next time Republicans have power, they will make it illegal to report that “this died.”
@3:
Since “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” are unalienable God-given rights, anything that dies is clearly Un-American and deserved it.
I can’t discount that possbility. We’re past the tipping point, and the only way now to reverse what’s happening is through extensive geoengineering: possibly by increasing Earth’s albedo at the poles with large surface mirrors or by nudging a near-Earth object into orbit around the Earth and mining it to construct a huge ring of mirrors orbiting near the ecliptic plane which can directly modulate incoming sunlight. Will this be more difficult than it would have been to switch entirely to nuclear power and avoid our present scenario? Absolutely. Can we do it? I guess, I won’t say it’s impossible.
The ruling class conceit is that they can manage the discontent their rule has wrought and that their class system will survive unaltered. They’re keeping a close eye on Gaza right now because Israel’s open-air prison is an invaluable laboratory for Western democracies (for a sufficiently loose definition of “democracy”) to study how to keep a lid on a large population who wants to kill you, and possibly how to genocide them in, from their perspective, an acceptable manner. More barriers to immigration, more military fortifications, and a pervasive secret police state are how they plan to manage this.
beholder@#5:
I can’t discount that possbility
I sometimes wonder if science fiction has doomed us. Specifically stuff like Star Trek, which is basically a giant mcguffin telling humans “it’s OK, we’ll get through it.” You know, someone will invent a warp drive just in time and humanity will go pester the stars. I have sometimes had conversations about climate change with people who genuinely seem to believe that technology will save us, in spite of the obvious fact that nobody is working on technology like that, and the physical reality of removing CO2 from the air is about as energy-consuming as the processes that put it there in the first place. [unless we adopt the “let the trees take care of it” strategy that takes 100,000+ years] And there was the former friend who insisted that Alcubierre drives were possible, but, yeah, sure the energy budget was about the equivalent of a years’ solar output but humans would figure it out in time. Well, if we could do that we wouldn’t need to worry about fossil fuels in the first place, etc.
The ruling class conceit is that they can manage the discontent their rule has wrought and that their class system will survive unaltered.
… which is weird. Because it looks to me like, every couple hundred years or so, human civilization goes through a period of great crisis and comes out the other side profoundly altered. The French Revolution/Napoleon Bonaparte was considered a tremendous shock and destruction to the ancien regime and the other crowned heads of Europe, but really the thing that blew them up was the end of imperialism (as a result of, ironically, imperialist wars) etc. Of course, they totally didn’t see communism and socialism coming, and had no get well plan for that other than “kill it before it spreads.” The establishment seems to be holding out for a way forward that will preserve the establishment, in spite of the obvious fact that any change significant enough for us to result in a positive balance for a future will mean dismantling capitalism’s premise of endless growth. Just that one necessary change – homeostasis instead of asymptotic growth – means the end of nations, corporations, and capitalism as we understand them.
This is something we’re just not going to get around. CO2 is the most oxidized form of carbon. Turning it into anything else is going to require energy and that energy has to come from somewhere.
We can be smart about how we do things, but technology isn’t magic .
And, not to forget, huge areas of land.
Even with some generous assumptions (tropical levels of productivity), my own country would require almost 60% of the land area to be covered with forest, to make up for our CO2 emissions. We’re currently at about 15%.
And that’s just for steady-state. Actually reducing the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere would require even more.
This may be part of the issue: Actually fixing the problem requires such a massive re-think of how we do things, it’s hard to even imagine what the world would look like afterwards. The people in power (who got there by fitting into the current paradigm) may simply not be mentally equipped to deal with the challenge.
I haven’t had much luck finding the source, mostly because I’m overworked, overstressed, and just too damned tired, but I once ran across some random quote to the effect of “We’ll go down in history as the first society that failed to save itself because it wasn’t cost-effective” (or something along those corporatespeak lingo lines)…
and goddamned, if that isn’t a fuckin kick in the metaphorical teeth.
lochaber@#8:
I once ran across some random quote to the effect of “We’ll go down in history as the first society that failed to save itself because it wasn’t cost-effective” (or something along those corporatespeak lingo lines)…
What’s absolutely crazy is that there are low-cost ways of dealing with the climate crisis. One would have been to stop making more humans and let the population die waaaaay back to, say, 100 million, and build a nice “green” civilization in Siberia and let the rest of the planet lie fallow. Cost is almost always a matter of scale, and scaling back is the ultimate cost effectiveness.
What has always struck me as weird is when you say “we need to dramatically reduce the size of humanity” someone jumps in to assume I mean by methods of genocide or mass carnage, instead of a gentle die-off. We’ve set ourselves up for maybe 100,000 years of fucked, but now we’re talking deep time. Letting a population die back naturally is going to happen anyhow when the food supply collapses. We may as well be ahead of the game by planning for it, instead of doing an unplanned violent die-back. Which is almost certainly what we will do, because humans just can’t seem to think that way. I guess it’s “inconvenient” and territorial wars and food riots is “convenient.”
But we can’t do anything sensible. We’d just rather have things go the nasty way. We could focus on making life very much better for a much smaller number of humans, or trying to make it not unbearably short and nasty for a much larger number. 11 billion dying overheated miserable humans is much more human misery than a 100 million sustainable population that is unconstrained by space. We could even experiment with not having a scarcity economy and capitalism. You know, a democratic workers’ paradise? Can’t have that.
(Sherri Tepper’s The Gate to Women’s Country and C J Cherryh’s Cyteen are profound influences on my thinking in this matter)
But cost is also a matter of perspective. Specifically, a dictator in need of cannon fodder might think that a declining population is much too high a cost to bear. After all, that means he can’t invade his neighbors.
If you care more about conquering the world than whether it survives after you’re dead, the math changes.