Thanks Coal Black Hearts: New Ocean Heat Record

The heat in the world’s oceans reached a new record level in 2019, demonstrating “irrefutable and accelerating” heating of the planet. 2019 is also the second hottest year ever, after 2016 (heated up by an El Nino). A lot of facts are irrefutable and accelerating, nowadays, but, just as when World War Two was coming, the more so, the more glumly the ostriches bury their heads in the sand.

The world’s oceans are the clearest measure of the climate emergency because they absorb more than 93% of the heat trapped by the greenhouse gases emitted by fossil fuel burning, forest destruction and other (in)human activities.

Oceans absorb most of the CO2. However they do this much less now, basically because the upper layers are getting saturated, and stagnant, as ocean upwelling is short circuited by hot water on top.  

This slowing of ocean mixing has another effect. It stifles the transport of nutrients such as nitrate and phosphate from deeper waters to the surface, which diminishes the growth of phytoplankton, which store carbon in their tissue as a product of photosynthesis. The sinking biological material takes the carbon (from CO2) with it to the deep ocean when the organisms die. It’s another way that carbon can be removed from the ocean surface… However, this is faltering, all the more as carbonic acid (from CO2) gnaws on plankton. Altogether, oxygen production and CO2 absorption by the oceans are diminishing. All such diminutions could lead into mass extinction: actually vast swathes of oceans are now going oxygen free. Fishes such as Marlins now avoid deep diving (their speciality) in many areas, because they would suffocate if they did.

The probability of an exponential explosion in temperature is heating up: that graph above is starting to look like an exponential, thus growing proportional to itself.

The latest analysis commented here, shows the past five years are the top five warmest years recorded in the ocean and the past 10 years are also the top 10 years on record. The amount of heat being added to the oceans is equivalent to every person on the planet running 100 microwave ovens all day and all night. It’s also equal to exploding 3.6 billion Hiroshima size bombs… in the last 25 years.

Researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing used statistical methods to interpolate heat levels in the few places where there was no data, such as under the Arctic ice cap. An independent analysis of the same data by the US National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration shows that same increasing heat trend.

It’s ironic that the news that the oceans are heating up ever more, ever faster, come from China (is China becoming more democratic?) China’s coal production, nearly 4 billion tons, has never been so high:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-economy-output-coal/china-june-coal-output-hits-record-high-as-miners-ramp-up-ahead-of-summer-idUSKCN1UA07O

Coal is the most CO2 generating fuel (as it has little hydrogen, that is, methane). Basically, 4 billion tons of Chinese coal burns into 12 billion tons of CO2. 

Some will scoff that yours truly is panicking. But I am not. I find the situation extremely interesting in all sorts of way, from the physics, to the ethical and psychological. It’s extraordinary to have a seat at the theater playing the greatness madness, ever. Simply, the catastrophe is becoming ever more likely. 

According to my computations, one degree centigrade of temperature increase corresponds to moving towards the poles by 200 kilometers. When that touches the Polar Circle at 66 degrees latitude, each degree will correspond to a reduction of the polar regions of 20% Hence their albedo, the reflecting power of white snow. Some have computed that the disappearance of sea ice would reduce Earth albedo so much that global temperatures would go up one full degree centigrade, just from that. 

Well before that, the Methane Clathrates should release catastrophically. 

See the pretty Methane Ice pictures in:

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2009/11/18/2-c-is-too-much/ 

The vast, and shallow Siberian ocean is full of them. Methane, CH4, has a greenhouse warming potential more than 25 times CO2. I compute that CH4 and other man-made gases contribute nearly 20% to global warming. 

Estimate of the ocean energy budget.
The energy budgets are relative to the 1958–1962 base period. The integrated net radiative imbalance from Allan et al. (65) estimated from the TOA is included in yellow and is multiplied by 0.93 to be comparable with the ocean energy budget. The TOA radiation is adjusted to the value of OHC within 2013–2014. The dashed gray lines encompass the 95% confidence interval.The shallower, the warmer the ocean is getting. The little volcanoes at the bottom degree the three largest volcanic eruptions during the period, which lowered the global temperatures considerably. Pinatubo decreased temps by half a degree centigrade…

Coal has never been doing better: the fraud known as Dr. Merkel is shutting down the German nuclear electricity production, because when she goes to bed, she sees Fukushimas in her head, and to better show the world how to smother us all with lignite, the worst coal.  

India also needs ever more coal: oil  and uranium, it has none (and, differently from Germany, is not as advanced; so India is excused). Speaking of which… Scared by Fukushima, like a child by a big, bad ogre, an irrational Japan is giving up on nuclear power. 

Japan got into World War Two of completely irrational reasons: besides the fact that it was a horrible thing to do, it could only lose. Same problem with Germany, Italy. But there are countries where deep irrationality is a national tradition… under a cover of cold reason. Japan has no good reason to discontinue nuclear (instead of developing new tech)… Only a reason to move out of Fukushima style (generation II) nuclear reactors… Especially without proper emergency generators. Japan, Germany and the like could have developed thorium reactors… So could France, Britain…  Coal kills already thousands of Japanese a year, whereas peaceful uranium kills basically none… 

Anyway, so Japan is moving out of 1950s nuclear technology, so Japan will need… Coal. Yes, if you don’t like the 1950s, go back to the 1850s. Any logic makes sense, for idiots. Ever more coal. But Japan has none. 

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So where is Japan going to get all this coal to smother people and kill the oceans? Where from, the equipment for this Pearl Harbor against life itself?  Hey, equally short-sighted Australia! Coal, direct from the incontinently Burning Continent! Auschwitz used to be a discreet affair, but now the generalized Holocaust (Holo-Caust = Whole-Burn), is as public as it gets. It just doesn’t matter, all these wars which happen, after all the forests burn, when one has no brains, happiness will be reached by “just adding a few shrimps on the barbie” (as long as there are still shrimps). 

Faust sold his soul to the Devil, to get himself stuff, but Australians don’t have such luxury anymore. Aussies prefer to burn their forest, houses, lands to give money to the plutocrats they adore: hey, not everybody has a soul to sell!  

Patrice Ayme

Nature Collapsing, Plutocracy Thriving

Both phenomena are related. The more nature collapses, the more plutocracy thrives (see the multi-centennial fall of Rome, for reference). Small people and other losers have no interest to see nature collapse. However, plutocracy does. Because Pluto-Kratia, Evil-Power, is best expressed and justified during war-like states, and civilizational collapse sure qualifies.

Plutocracy survived the collapse of the Roman and Carolingian empires with flying colors. In the Roman case, most noble families had a bishop in their midst. The collapse of the Renovated Empire of the Romans (Renovatio Imperii Romanorum) and its renewal by the Ottos and Capets brought the feudal order, another plutocratic success.

Now is no different: we have a terminal CO2 crisis bringing in extreme, sudden temperature, acidification and ocean rises: 1% of US CO2 is from state subsidized private jets. Nobody notices, because media have made sure to create entire generations just preoccupied by celebrities, not by what is going on, which is really most significant.

Nor has the media been keen to notice the likes of Biden annihilated the Banking Act of 1933, in the 1990s, bringing in in the age of the financial plutocracy… itself a heavy financier of fossil fuels. So all what some schools are thinking of is installing “Apps”, and plastic grass, instead of teaching sustainable global citizenship. We are cruising towards an apocalypse, at an increasing pace: the Sixth Mass Extinction. The United Nations just came up (May 6, 2019) with an analysis made by 132 countries and 455 scientists: one million species are disappearing. For example, nearly all amphibians.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/06/world/one-million-species-threatened-extinction-humans-scn-intl/index.html

One problem with burning forests in the tropics is that what is left are often extremely poor soils (differently from northern European soils, which are very forgiving, explaining in great part why north west Europe replaced the Greco-Roman world…) Cattle grazing on a tract of illegally cleared Amazon forest in Pará State, Brazil. In most major land habitats, the average abundance of native plant and animal life has fallen by 20 percent or more, mainly over the past century,,, [Credit
Lalo de Almeida for The New York Times]In Africa, burned forest is often replaced by lateritis, a soil which is red, baked, hard… for the good reason that it is full of Aluminum.

It is the Sixth Mass Extinction, but this time the dinosaurs have thermonuclear weapons.

What to do? Get involved, get aware, protest. Protests can become unbearable to the powers that be.

This is the way the fascist government of Brunei on the island of Borneo was just dealt with. It drew powerful international condemnation when it rolled out its interpretation of sharia laws on April 3. Now, the Sultan of Brunei, Hassanal Bolkiah, reverted his decision: after all, the country won’t enforce Islamic laws that include stoning to death for rape, adultery and gay sex.

Killing all the people who got killed in World War Two was atrocious. However, what is now unfolding has the potential to be way way worse. Einstein said he didn’t know which weapons will be used to fight World War Three, but next it would be sticks and stones. That was naively optimistic. If we acidify further the ocean with acid from CO2, we may kill the Earth’s oxygen making mechanism. Not really news, as this was clear five years ago already:

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2014/05/30/global-hypoxia/  

Many behave as if there will be no tomorrow, because they feel that way! It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, it has to be resisted.

What’s needed, beyond recording what’s going on, is interpreting it, going beyond, building ideas, and moods meant to last. Only deeper thinking can do this, and ensure a planet capable of lasting. Because we are not at the regional level anymore. When climate change, plus nefarious human impact, forced the Harappan civilization to abandon its homeland, the Indus valley, it was dealing with forces it had no idea existed. Maybe there are such forces out there. But there are also plenty of forces we can see, and which are plenty lethal enough, at civilizational scale, and the scale of the entire biosphere. Stop. And think. One million species are marching towards extinction, among the plants and animals we know.

Patrice Ayme

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From NYT:

WASHINGTON — Humans are transforming Earth’s natural landscapes so dramatically that as many as one million plant and animal species are now at risk of extinction, posing a dire threat to ecosystems that people all over the world depend on for their survival, a sweeping new United Nations assessment has concluded.

The 1,500-page report, compiled by hundreds of international experts and based on thousands of scientific studies, is the most exhaustive look yet at the decline in biodiversity across the globe and the dangers that creates for human civilization. A summary of its findings, which was approved by representatives from the United States and 131 other countries, was released Monday [May 6, 2019] in Paris. The full report is set to be published this year.

Its conclusions are stark. In most major land habitats, from the savannas of Africa to the rain forests of South America, the average abundance of native plant and animal life has fallen by 20 percent or more, mainly over the past century. With the human population passing 7 billion, activities like farming, logging, poaching, fishing and mining are altering the natural world at a rate “unprecedented in human history.”

At the same time, a new threat has emerged: Global warming has become a major driver of wildlife decline, the assessment found, by shifting or shrinking the local climates that many mammals, birds, insects, fish and plants evolved to survive in. When combined with the other ways humans are damaging the environment, climate change is now pushing a growing number of species, such as the Bengal tiger, closer to extinction.

As a result, biodiversity loss is projected to accelerate through 2050, particularly in the tropics, unless countries drastically step up their conservation efforts.

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With Such Volcanoes, WHO NEEDS ASTEROIDS?

I have long been of the persuasion that the asteroid did not extinguish the dinosaurs: it was too puny. I did not see how a big explosion could have extinguished giant life forms such as the Mosasaurs, who lived in the sea, on the other side of the planet.

Mosasaurs are central to this story: the name, Moselle Lizard, comes from the Moselle, a famous river which flows through the town of Maastricht, next to which the first Mosasaurs were found. In 1794, French revolutionary forces took control of the fossils (against 600 bottles of wine), and brought them to Paris Museum d’Histoire Naturelle for state of the art analysis. Cuvier, by 1808, had formally concluded that  le Grand Animal fossile de Maëstricht confirmed the evolutionary theory of his great rival Lamarck.

Pinatubo Warming Up, June 12, 1991

[The main Pinatubo eruption was three days later, and was obscured by ash and clouds all over; Pinatubo had strong global effects on world temperature; However, by geological standards, Pinatubo was tiny: 10 cubic kilometer of ejecta, 1% of Tambora in 1815; the Deccan Traps LIP was of the order of millions of cubic kilometers of ejecta.]

The age of the Mosasaurs accordingly became known as the Maastrichtian. Characterized by Mosasaurs, it covers the last six million years of the Cretaceous. And a tremendous discovery, the one I had been expecting all along was just made: the Maastrichtian was a time of colossal transitions. So much for the asteroid impact.

There was an obvious culprit for the extinction at the end of the Cretaceous: the Earth Core Eruption of the Deccan Traps. OK, “Earth Core Eruption” is my own semantics, and the theory behind it is not proven. The official term is Large Igneous Province (LIP).

Climate Apocalypse Well Before The Asteroid:

A decade long project in Northeastern China has drilled sediments as ancient as 100 million years ago. It is bringing results I expected, but even more so.

For millions of years before an asteroid struck the planet 66 million years ago, Earth’s climate was already in turmoil.

It has long been known, from ocean floor sediments, that the climate was unstable at the end of the Cretaceous period. Findings from deep drilling in the Songliao Basin show that the climate swings on land were far more drastic, than anyone expected. Average annual temperatures fluctuated up and down by as much as 20°Celsius over tens of thousands of years—a geological eyeblink. “It certainly wasn’t a good time for the dinosaurs,” says Robert Spicer, a paleoclimatologist at the Open University (Milton Keynes, U.K).

Sediments were piling up in the ancient lakebed in northeastern China at a much faster rate than in the ocean. This provides with a much finer chronology.

Shallow seas had contributed to warm and moisten the Earth so much in the age of dinosaurs (before, during and after the Jurassic). Evolving plate tectonic eliminated those during the last few million years of the Cretaceous. That snuffed out many species and hobbled others.

The Songliao Basin was a gigantic lake for 80 million years. During the Cretaceous, it covered 260,000 square kilometers, as much as the area of New Zealand (a micro-continent in my book). The lakebed’s sediments “provide a unique record of what the land environment was like during this turbulent time,” (Page Chamberlain, a paleoclimatologist at Stanford University, a principal investigator of the Songliao International Continental Scientific Drilling Project).

The drilling team, led by Wang from Beijing University, has gone 2.6 kilometers down. Analyzing oxygen and carbon isotope ratios in the sediments the seesawing temperatures during the last 6 million years of the Cretaceous, the Maastrichtian.

High latitude, and the pace of sediment deposit, ten times what it is in the ocean, gives a very fine record.

The sediments reveal not only astounding temperature swings, but also their likely cause.

Two major Maastrichtian warming events captured in the Songliao cores—68 million years ago and 66.3 million years ago -thus, BEFORE the asteroid impact- coincide with massive eruptions of the Deccan Traps, the Large Igneous Province in India.

Carbon isotope studies show that second warming event was characterized by a rapid doubling in atmospheric carbon dioxide. “This was the time when the bulk of Deccan eruptions occurred, which presumably released a massive amount of carbon dioxide,” says Zhang Laiming (China University of Geosciences).

Differently from an asteroid impacts, large volcanic eruptions are characterized with nasty fluctuating gases and temperatures. We know this from Iceland’s Laki eruption in 1783. Europeans found themselves experiencing various gases, some floating by the ground like colored fog, and tremendous variations of temperatures: hot sometimes during winter, cold in summer.

A volcanic eruption can release sulfates, which can bring considerable cooling, for the years they can stay aloft (around five years). Pinatubo cooled the entire planet by nearly one degree Celsius, thanks to this.

However, a volcanic eruption is greatly propelled by CO2, and that can warm up the cilmate for millennia. The combination is a strong whipping around, between cold and heat.

Now in parallel essay, I will make clear that dinosaurs were ill equipped for such fluctuations.

The intense greenhouse effect caused by CO2 from the Deccan Traps drove average temperatures to about 22.3°C. This compares with only 5°C at Songliao today.

The warming was interrupted just after the K-Pg boundary by a brief cooling episode. The team attributes to dust, soot, and aerosols from the Yucatán asteroid impact. However, I would point out that this is just a theory. In 1809 an unknown volcano exploded in the south hemisphere (as determined recently by ice cores). That was followed in 1815 by the explosion of Indonesia’s Tambora. The result was the coldest decade in more than a millennium (and may well have cost Napoleon’s army tremendous losses in Russia, as the 1812 winter was the coldest on record there).

As temperatures convulsed (and probably acidity in the oceans), ecosystems changed. The Songliao sediments trapped spores, pollen, algae, and ostracods (“seed shrimp“).

To my complete non-surprise, many of the species typical of the Paleocene —the geological epoch following the Cretaceous— appeared several million years before the K-Pg boundary (the first period of the Paleocene is called the Paleogene, Pg). Turnovers in the biota, Wang says, “had already been under way when the asteroid struck.”

Dinosaurs were already on their way out. The number of nonavian dinosaur species seem to have shrunk by half in the last 10 million years of the Cretaceous, with the biggest losses during the Maastrichtian (although according to a French geologist, there may have been more than 1,000 dinosaur species at the end). The Chicxulub impact was, Wang says, “the straw that broke the camel’s back.” Put another way, Spicer says, “if the asteroid came in on a less stressed system, the effects would not have been so severe.”

Well? Now the asteroid is reduced to a straw. We don’t need the asteroid. Straws sometimes change history. If Grouchy had not got lost at Waterloo, the French would have won. But not in the case of dinosaurs and mosasaurs, and pterosaurs, plesiosaurs, and maybe ammonites. Straw, or not straw, they were all condemned.

I have a general reasoning, the one I used to explain the “disappearance”, or, more exactly, dilution, of the Neanderthals, to explain this. It implies that large animals tend to disappear more readily. All the more those who did not control their temperatures well. Competition from mammals and avian dinosaurs condemned the dinosaurs.

Yet, there are lessons for today; the cataclysm we are visiting on the biosphere is orders of magnitudes more violent than anything which happened during the Maastrichtian. Even the dinosaurs were not dumb enough to organize their own doom.

Patrice Ayme’

Carbon Tax, Or Global Crash

GOLD MAN SPEAKS:

In brief: The major plutocrat, Henry “Hank” Paulson, who presided over the 2008 financial crash as Bush’s finance minister, has come strongly in favor of a carbon tax. He compares the on-going climate catastrophe to the worst crash imaginable. After a few arguments of support of my own, I extensively quote this “suppot de Satan” (Satan’s support in Middle Age French). Facing the worst, the devils themselves can come in handy. Nothing below is new on this site, but it’s important to repeat it as a prayer, and hope.

It’s only natural that people clean the mess they make. So carbon polluters ought to pay the poisoning of the atmosphere, and the acidification of the seas. Because they are the ones causing this mess. They have to pay for the destruction they inflict. Not that people in general are innocent. Clearly some countries are living on the hog, not to say like hogs. Here are two views of the CO2 emissions per capita:

I Pollute & Ravage, Therefore I Gloat

Few will argue that life is actually drastically worse in, say, France, in spite of all the carbon pinching there (France has no oil, gas, or coal; and fracking is illegal).

To tax carbon enough for the damage it causes, is the only way to price correctly the activity. Non carbon polluting energies will them be able to compete with the pirates who are attacking the biosphere… For profit.

The world emits 48% more carbon dioxide from the consumption of energy now than it did in 1992 when the first Rio summit took place, and Al Gore went down there with an immense retinue of adulators… To do nothing, but self-glorification.

First notice the astounding economic inefficiency of Anglo-Saxon countries (except for the European United Kingdom which emits less than 9 tons of CO2 per person per year).

FRANCE pollutes with 6 (six) tons of CO2 a year, per person. Germany with 9 tons (nine). The USA with 18 (eighteen) tons per person per year. Canada and Australia are even worse. The European Union, and its half a billion people, is around 7.5 tons of CO2, per year, per person.

As I have explained in the past, it’s no coincidence that the three powers that annihilated the Natives are busy now annihilating the biosphere: it’s the continuation of a mood (that the same, sort of, can be said about Russia is not reassuring, either: the main reason why Putin annexed Crimea is oil and gas in the Black Sea, just off shore).

Can we get out of that spiral from hell? Yes, with a carbon tax. Also please learn that the EU and the USA, together, control most of the world GDP. So they could impose a Carbon Tax. Unilaterally. By force. Yes, force, empire, all that brutish stuff. Evil in the service of goodness. The WTO has agreed already that such a tax-for-the-good is legal in the WTO statutes (the EU, or some of its countries, notably France, already impose carbon taxes, of sorts, in spite of strident USA-China-Russia opposition).

Much of Chinese economic activity is Western industrialized activity, translated to another place. Chinese dumping, say of solar panels could be addressed (in spite of… German(!) opposition; Germans sell luxury cars to the PRC, and in exchange mount cheap solar panels).

The question that the West would be at an economic disadvantage from imposing a carbon tax is a false argument. What is true is that some of the CO2 hogs would have to become more economically active to change radically their socio-economies: more people at work, quality work.

Paulson below says nothing I have not said before, and, often, many times. Yet it’s worth having it in his own words, thus allowing me to eschew the accusation of radical lunatic unreal leftism.

Lessons for Climate Change in the 2008 Recession

By HENRY M. PAULSON Jr. June 21, 2014

THERE is a time for weighing evidence and a time for acting. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned throughout my work in finance, government and conservation, it is to act before problems become too big to manage.

For too many years, we failed to rein in the excesses building up in the nation’s financial markets. When the credit bubble burst in 2008, the damage was devastating. Millions suffered. Many still do.

We’re making the same mistake today with climate change. We’re staring down a climate bubble that poses enormous risks to both our environment and economy. The warning signs are clear and growing more urgent as the risks go unchecked.

This is a crisis we can’t afford to ignore. I feel as if I’m watching as we fly in slow motion on a collision course toward a giant mountain. We can see the crash coming, and yet we’re sitting on our hands rather than altering course…

The solution can be a fundamentally conservative one that will empower the marketplace to find the most efficient response. We can do this by putting a price on emissions of carbon dioxide — a CARBON TAX. Few in the United States now pay to emit this potent greenhouse gas into the atmosphere we all share. Putting a price on emissions will create incentives to develop new, cleaner energy technologies...

I was secretary of the Treasury when the credit bubble burst, so I think it’s fair to say that I know a little bit about risk, assessing outcomes and problem-solving. Looking back at the dark days of the financial crisis in 2008, it is easy to see the similarities between the financial crisis and the climate challenge we now face.

We are building up excesses (debt in 2008, greenhouse gas emissions that are trapping heat now). Our government policies are flawed (incentivizing us to borrow too much to finance homes then, and encouraging the overuse of carbon-based fuels now). Our experts (financial experts then, climate scientists now) try to understand what they see and to model possible futures. And the outsize risks have the potential to be tremendously damaging (to a globalized economy then, and the global climate now).

Back then, we narrowly avoided an economic catastrophe at the last minute by rescuing a collapsing financial system through government action. But climate change is a more intractable problem. The carbon dioxide we’re sending into the atmosphere remains there for centuries, heating up the planet.”

[PA’s warning: It’s worse than that: At least a third goes into the sea, turning it into an acid soda.] Paulson again:

“That means the decisions we’re making today — to continue along a path that’s almost entirely carbon-dependent — are locking us in for long-term consequences that we will not be able change but only adapt to, at enormous cost. To protect New York City from rising seas and storm surges is expected to cost at least $20 billion initially, and eventually far more. And that’s just one coastal city…

When I worry about risks, I worry about the biggest ones, particularly those that are difficult to predict — the ones I call small but deep holes. While odds are you will avoid them, if you do fall in one, it’s a long way down and nearly impossible to claw your way out.

Scientists have identified a number of these holes — potential thresholds that, once crossed, could cause sweeping, irreversible changes. They don’t know exactly when we would reach them. But they know we should do everything we can to avoid them.

Already, observations are catching up with years of scientific models, and the trends are not in our favor.

Fewer than 10 years ago, the best analysis projected that melting Arctic sea ice would mean nearly ice-free summers by the end of the 21st century. Now the ice is melting so rapidly that virtually ice-free Arctic summers could be here in the next decade or two. The lack of reflective ice will mean that more of the sun’s heat will be absorbed by the oceans, accelerating warming of both the oceans and the atmosphere, and ultimately raising sea levels.

Even worse, in May, two separate studies discovered that one of the biggest thresholds has already been reached. The West Antarctic ice sheet has begun to melt… Now that this process has begun, there is nothing we can do to undo the underlying dynamics, which scientists say are “baked in.” … those who claim the science is unsettled or action is too costly are simply trying to ignore the problem. We must see the bigger picture.

…waiting for more information before acting — is actually taking a very radical risk. We’ll never know enough to resolve all of the uncertainties. But we know enough to recognize that we must act now…

We need to craft national policy that uses market forces to provide incentives for the technological advances required to address climate change. As I’ve said, we can do this by placing a tax on carbon dioxide emissions. Many respected economists, of all ideological persuasions, support this approach. We can debate the appropriate pricing and policy design and how to use the money generated. But a price on carbon would change the behavior of both individuals and businesses.

At the same time, all fossil fuel — and renewable energy — subsidies should be phased out. Renewable energy can outcompete dirty fuels once pollution costs are accounted for.

… our failure to act on the underlying problem is deeply misguided, financially and logically.

In a future with more severe storms, deeper droughts, longer fire seasons and rising seas that imperil coastal cities, public funding to pay for adaptations and disaster relief will add significantly to our fiscal deficit and threaten our long-term economic security. So it is perverse that those who want limited government and rail against bailouts would put the economy at risk by ignoring climate change.

This is short-termism. There is a tendency, particularly in government and politics, to avoid focusing on difficult problems until they balloon into crisis. We would be fools to wait for that to happen to our climate…..

When it comes to developing new technologies, no country can innovate like America. And no country can test new technologies and roll them out at scale quicker than China.

The two nations must come together on climate. The Paulson Institute at the University of Chicago, a “think-and-do tank” I founded to help strengthen the economic and environmental relationship between these two countries, is focused on bridging this gap.

We already have a head start on the technologies we need. The costs of the policies necessary to make the transition to an economy powered by clean energy are real, but modest relative to the risks.

A tax on carbon emissions will unleash a wave of innovation to develop technologies, lower the costs of clean energy and create jobs as we and other nations develop new energy products and infrastructure. This would strengthen national security by reducing the world’s dependence on governments like Russia and Iran.

Climate change is the challenge of our time. Each of us must recognize that the risks are personal. We’ve seen and felt the costs of underestimating the financial bubble. Let’s not ignore the climate bubble.

Henry M. Paulson Jr., an ex-football player, is the chairman of the Paulson Institute at the University of Chicago, was CEO of Golman-Sachs,  and secretary of the Treasury from July 2006 to January 2009. When Satan himself is melting, the heat is on.

Patrice Aymé

Earth Out Of Oxygen: GLOBAL HYPOXIA

Move over, “Global Warming” and “Climate Change”! You meek, obsolete euphemisms have been paid by your fossil fuel masters to occupy the front stage, in a masquerade of objectivity. These euphemisms pretend, in the very description they entail, that we are just going to change to a warmer state… No big deal then. Actually the real full consequences of the CO2 emission crisis, are much more catastrophic. We could run out of oxygen.

Indeed, let me introduce, instead of a “warm change”, the radical notion of “GLOBAL HYPOXIA“. Yes, no less. That, running out of oxygen is the real ultimate danger in the enfolding man-made CO2 crisis. There are basically three known threats converging on global hypoxia: killing the oxygen making plankton, killing the oxygen making forests… and, even more pernicious, the oxidation of 1,600 gigatons of permafrost (that’s twice the mass of CO2 in the atmosphere…) That will suck oxygen out of the atmosphere…

I have explained that I do not believe in the Impact theory of previous mass extinctions. Instead I believe in what I call (Earth) Core Volcanism. Core Volcanism would have erupted with huge quantities of CO2, hence would have devastated the seas. Hint: at the time when the dinosaurs died, mammals and birds (a type of dinosaur) survived handsomely. Yet the devastation in the ocean was total.

Kill Seas With Acid, Kill Oxygen Production

Krugman wrote an editorial “Cutting Back On Carbon“, that explained the obvious, namely that switching to a non carbon economy would not cost much, if at all:

“Next week the Environmental Protection Agency is expected to announce new rules designed to limit global warming. Although we don’t know the details yet, anti-environmental groups are already predicting vast costs and economic doom. Don’t believe them. Everything we know suggests that we can achieve large reductions in greenhouse gas emissions at little cost to the economy…

You might ask why the Chamber of Commerce is so fiercely opposed to action against global warming, if the cost of action is so small. The answer, of course, is that the chamber is serving special interests, notably the coal industry — what’s good for America isn’t good for the Koch brothers, and vice versa — and also catering to the ever more powerful anti-science sentiments of the Republican Party.”

I sent an approving comment. However, it was censored. With my approach on this particular subject, it’s systematic. It seems that the censors at the New York Times are either very well paid by very clever supervisors, or so stupid that they believe that those who believe in GLOBAL HYPOXIA are genuinely mad.

Out of charity, I decided to operate under the later hypothesis, and to make even more efforts to educate those ignorant little Wall Street sycophantic tyrants.

Oceans Warming Globally, But Acidity Concentrating Locally

This is a (boosted) version of what the New York Times censored:

Agreed to all, well analyzed. Now to add a few points
Cutting carbon burning to zero is not just a question of cost, but a matter of survival. The present Green House Gases concentrations already guarantee that the planet’s climate will be brought back to the Jurassic. That guarantees flooding where billions of people are presently living: the Jurassic was characterized by shallow seas.

But that’s not all. Because this is the most violent eruption of CO2 in at least 65 million years, at least a third of the CO2 created by man’s folly goes straight in the ocean. It does so at a rate at least one hundred times faster than at any times in the last tens of millions of years (as ice core studies for the last 650,000 years have confirmed).

Once in the ocean, the carbon dioxide chemically reacts with water to create carbonic acid. The acidity has already climbed by 30%, globally. However, it concentrates mostly in some surface layers… Where sea life is also the most concentrated.

Thus the CO2 crisis is not just about Global Heating: It is also causing another crisis, a GLOBAL ACID environment too.

If the acidity rises too much, the phytoplankton will die and half of the oxygen supply will be lost.

Now add to this that the forests will burn, and that the permafrost will met and oxidize… and so will many mineral in the ground exposed to higher temperatures. So the Green House Gases pollution is not just a question of changing climate, like one changes clothes. What we have now is a programmed destruction of the biosphere…. and even of the oxygen it breathes!

The fact the US Congress wants to prevent the Pentagon to be well armed for climate change (in particular having as much carbon free fuel as needed), shows indeed that all what the Congress of the USA cares about is preserving the existing power structure. Well, it may be paid for that, but that’s a fatal disposition.

Patrice Aymé

Notes:

Hypoxia Censored: The preceding comment I made of the Krugman editorial was censored by the New York Times, as all previous comments of mine alluding to running out of oxygen, Global Hypoxia, have also been. This shows the hypocrisy of the Times: it pretends to be worried about the climate, but it does not want its readership to be aware of the ultimate danger we are facing: not just sea level rise, and crocodiles in the Arctic, but a lowering of global oxygen levels. It’s simple, yet radical science.

Scientific Background, From Anthropogenic Decline in High-Latitude Ocean Carbonate by 2100 : “The surface ocean is everywhere saturated with respect to calcium carbonate (CaCO3). Yet increasing atmospheric CO2 reduces ocean pH and carbonate ion concentrations, and thus the level of saturation. Reduced saturation states are expected to affect marine calcifiers even though it has been estimated that all
surface waters will remain saturated for centuries.

Here we show, however, that some surface waters will become undersaturated within decades. When atmospheric CO2 reaches 550 ppmv, in year 2050 under the business-as-
usual scenario, Southern Ocean surface waters begin to become undersaturated
with respect to aragonite, a metastable form of CaCO3.

By 2100… undersaturation extends throughout the entire Southern Ocean and… Pacific. These changes will threaten high-latitude aragonite secreting organisms including cold-water corals, which provide essential fish habitat, and shelled pteropods, an abundant food source for marine predators.”

That was published ten years ago, in 2004. Ever since the CO2 injections from human industry have accelerated considerably.