“Failed Solutions” To Pollution-Climate Crisis Are No Accident, But Invisible Plot…

All too many “Democrats” apparently believe that democracy consists in talking about Trump non-stop… Leaving no space for any other subject… Such as traditional “solutions” to various problems which have repeatedly failed to find, or implement.

This is not an accident. Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) is a plot in favor of the statu quo, which is unsustainable.

By talking obsessively about irrelevant subjects, relevance can’t be deployed.

The global heating crisis is a scientific-technical problem. Some technical partial solutions already exist, for example heat pumps. Weirdly, the Biden administration spends many billions on electric cars, a tech of overall little positive impact on climate, short term, but very little on heat pumps, a tech which has a considerable advantage in the GreenHouse Gas Crisis (GHGC).

To solve the GHGC we need deployment of better available tech (heat pumps, hydrogen), and deployment or research in new fission, thorium, fusion… As China is doing.

The term “global warming” to describe GHGC is partial and rather meek. From space temperatures above 62C were observed in India in 2022. That’s global heating, not just warming. Also most of the CO2 goes into the ocean, where it chemically reacts to turn into carbonic acid. So acidification, not just heating, is a problem.

The best long term climate Federal policy would be to augment considerably the research budget in new energy research. As it is, 84% of world primary energy production is fossil fuels. Getting help from “green” hydrogen (produced by “renewables” and, or from cooling nuclear plants) could be done readily by using the present gas networks, and mixing some hydrogen in (a century old technique). Biden had promised ten billions in new energy research, but that morphed into EVs…

 

The true level is above 600ppm, including ALL man-made GreenHouse Gasses. Thermonuclear fusion will save us, but we don’t have it yet. And the less we research, the furthest in the future it lays.

Meuphys from Atlanta intervened with the partisan perspective:

There was no universe in which Republicans in a 50-50 Senate would have allowed that much to be spent on climate change solutions. Their doms in the fossil industries would have stopped paying their allowance! What is needed here is a strong federal mandate, one with teeth… the kind we will never have when the GOP has the votes to sustain a filibuster.

@ Meuphys Thanks for the comment. However, one has to see below the surface. A (nasty) Republican, Nixon, created the EPA, the Environment Protection Agency. Dems and Reps are playing a good cop, bad cop routine about the climate. So is the rest of the world’s leadership.

A point that I am trying to make is that present “solutions” to the pollution crisis (including GreenHouse Gasses, GHG) are not working: they are too expensive and too slow in worldwide deployment. What we need is fundamental research by the Federal government of new solutions, of which there are plenty of potential ones. Private industry can’t develop these solutions: too risky, especially in an uncertain regulatory environment. By the way, the Chinese government is doing just that: it is operating brand new experimental nuclear reactors of several types: pebble, thorium, etc.

Massive investment in electric cars, at the detriment of the rest, is the poster child of these failed approaches… Still “Democrats” have been doubling up on them… probably for financial reasons… Including pleasing the fossil fuels industry which welcomes solutions to its existence that do not work! In other words, while the support of fossil fuels to Republicans is obvious, the one to “Democrats” is even more important, because it is hidden behind windmills which do not work most of the time, and batteries that can’t be made on the necessary industrial scale to make a dent on the climate crisis.. 

On the first day of the Obama administration, research on hydrogen and fuel cells was terminated. That was weird: the US got to the Moon thanks to fuel cells. The Trump administration found that the Alameda-Contra Costa fleet of hydrogen fossil fuel buses worked beyond the most optimistic expectations in all ways.There are less than 100 such buses in the US, and the problem has been cost of procurement, due to small numbers. Differently from electric, such buses can be refueled in minutes. 

“Liberals”, “Neo-Liberals”, “capitalists”, “free marketers”, economists, etc all laud the “Invisible Hand” of the market. What about the “INVISIBLE PLOT”?

Yes, we, the powers that be, want to change nothing much regarding fossil fuels, where power is from! 84% of primary energy is from fossil fuels. Hydrogen and nuclear have been carefully not developed. Dams are under attack. Without hydrogen & dams, “renewables” need fossil fuels

Going all nuclear and hydro (they are interrelated, as hydron can store nuclear) could have produced 100% carbon free electricity for the entire planet. Not a full solution, but a partial one. Instead, we are on target for Armaggedon, and Putin is our prophet.

Patrice Ayme

STANDARD CO2 WARNING, v 2022

There is immense inertia in the planetary climate system. Thermal inertia. Sea current inertia. CO2 sinks inertia. And so on. So the “climate changes” we have seen so far, are mostly changes of systems with small inertia. They are little warnings, rather than the full extent of what we are going to get.
In other words, all the effects we are seeing so far are just the shiny tip of the gigantic melting iceberg, and when it is disturbed enough, it will do what icebergs do, rotate, shatter or splatter suddenly.
In particular, small ice bound systems like part of Arctic regions, individual mountains, or mountain ranges have small thermal inertia, so the CO2 forcing is affecting them more readily. They are forecasting what is going to happen. Small inertia climate systems are on track for a 7 centigrade rise by 2100… And that means, therefore, a similar impact on large systems. Large impacts will simply enfold more slowly, but also more irresistibly.
California may end up like Costa Rica, as the equatorial climate cell extends northward… Meanwhile it should go through the desertic tropical climate zone…
In practice one should take vigorous countermeasures. Thanks to a craftily engineered confusion between total energy use and electric energy generation, most people do not realize that sun and wind renewables contribute little to the total energy generation (which is mostly fossil fuel, with significant nuclear and dams). So the non CO2 total energy generation needs to be augmented considerably… But that will not happen enough with the present strategy.
The CO2 crisis is way worse than realized…

Patrice Ayme

CO2 concentration keeps climbing up… In all locales (Barrow is at the northern tip of Alaska; Mauna Loa is in Hawai’i). Before the industrial, CO2 revolution, it used to be around 280 ppm…. It will become nonlinear self-accelerating at some point, from massive permafrost melting and reversal of oceanic sinks… By incorporating other greenhouse gases, CH4, NOx, CFlx, etc… one is around 600 ppm… This forcing in turn acts on H2O gas, the biggest greenhouse gas: it’s complicated…

The Antarctic Peninsula (the northwest tip near to South America) is among the fastest warming regions of the planet, almost 3°C over the last 50 years. Remote East Antarctica, by contrast, has until now been less impacted.

However, in the third week of March, research stations in East Antarctica recorded unprecedented temperatures. It rained on the coast! (Some of which is north of the polar circle… So it can be predicted East Antarctica may collpase…)

The warmth and moisture was driven primarily by an atmospheric river – a narrow band of moisture collected from warm oceans. Atmospheric rivers are found on the edge of low pressure systems and can move large amounts of water across vast distances. Nearly all the precipitation of California in winter of 2022 came from just two atmospheric rivers, one in October, and one in December, the latter making it the wettest December ever.

An atmospheric river in East Antarctica is rewriting record books and expectations about what is possible. Atmospheric rivers in Antarctica? Is Antarctica the new California? This is the new normal, in any case.

“We need to take action now or 1.5ºC will become out of reach, it will be physically impossible to get there. The report is very clear: we’re not talking about business as usual if we are to address #climatechange“ – #IPCC Working Group III Co-Chair Jim Skea at 4 April’s press conference for the release of the latest, 2022 #IPCC #ClimateReport on the mitigation of #climatechange.

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The 2022 California snowpack results confirmed what those of us monitoring the state’s drought had feared: California’s snowpack is now at 39 percent of its average, or 23 percent lower than at the same point last year. This signals a deepening of the drought — already the worst in the western United States in 1,200 years — and another potentially catastrophic fire season for much of the West.

More from the same NYT article of 4/4/2022, saying what I hgave long been saying, namely that our models are lagging reality, just as the beatific models of tyrants’ characters, in particular Putin, lagged reality:

Many people have a rather simplistic view of drought as a lack of rain and snow. That’s accurate — to an extent. What it doesn’t account for is human activity and climate change that are now dramatically affecting the available water and its management. As more frequent and large wildfires and extended dry periods batter the land, our most important tools for managing water are becoming less and less accurate. At the same time, our reliance on these models to try to make the most of the little water we have is becoming more and more problematic.

Droughts may last for several years or even over a decade, with varying degrees of severity. During these types of extended droughts, soil can become so dry that it soaks up all new water, which reduces runoff to streams and reservoirs. Soil can also become so dry that the surface becomes hard and repels water, which can cause rainwater to pour off the land quickly and cause flooding. This means we no longer can rely on relatively short periods of rain or snow to completely relieve drought conditions the way we did with past droughts.

Many storms with near record-breaking amounts of rain or snow would be required in a single year to make a significant dent in drought conditions. October was the second-snowiest and December the snowiest month on record at the snow lab since 1970, thanks to two atmospheric rivers that hit California. But the exceptionally dry November and January to March periods have left us with another year of below-average snowpack, rain and runoff conditions.

This type of feast-or-famine winter with big storms and long, severe dry periods is expected to increase as climate change continues. As a result, we’ll need multiple above-average rain and snow years to make up the difference rather than consecutive large events in a single year.

Even with normal or above-average precipitation years, changes to the land surface present another complication. Massive wildfires, such as those that we’ve seen in the Sierra Nevada and Rocky Mountains in recent years, cause distinct changes in the way that snow melts and that water, including rain, runs off the landscape. The loss of forest canopy from fires can result in greater wind speeds and temperatures, which increase evaporation and decrease the amount of snow water reaching reservoirs.”

Record Temperatures Jump, Paris 43.6 Celsius, Well-Fed Climate Scientists Too Optimistic

IPCC, INFLUENCED BY ITS SPONSORS, IS TOO OPTIMISTIC: 3 Degree Celsius Rise Already In Paris!

The United Nations’ International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) aspires to please its sponsors, namely the plutocrats who control the nations which constitute the UN. Thus the IPCC knows that, to look serious, it shouldn’t look scary, or depicting a world that cannot happen, in the opinion of plutocrats. Plutocrats have organized the world we have, in which 93% of the energy comes from making CO2. A different energy system, not depending upon making CO2 could have been deployed. But it was not, in great part because the plutocracy in power is infeodated to making CO2. It’s a fossil fuel plutocracy.

So the IPCC makes climate predictions which are ridiculously optimistic. For example that, to limit the rise of global temperature at 1.5 Celsius, one would need to reduce CO2 emissions starting in 2020 (yes, next year).  This will not happen, because, first, the emissions are augmenting, and accelerating… in 2019. Second, there is enormous CO2 in the system, and the global rise is now 1.1 degree Celsius…. Also, in its computations, the IPCC omitted the factor that matters most, Antarctica… Because too little was known about iceshields to incorporate them in computations. That’s dishonest: computations could have been made of the most optimistic case, and the most pessimistic case (the later being what I call catastrophic calculus).

So the IPCC mumbles that we may fear a rise of 2 or 3 degrees Celsius by 2100. But actually, this is the threat, now.

The old temperature record in Paris, established over more than half a millennium, was 40.4 Celsius, in summer 1947 (one of a couple of exceptionally warm years). On July 25, 2019, it reached 43.6 Celsius.

Paris shimmering in the heat, 25 July 2019. Most cars were outlawed by Anne Hidalgo, Mayor; one 3.8 Euro ticket bought public transportation for the entire day

So picture this: a jump of 3.2 Celsius, six Fahrenheit… So much by going up by 3 Celsius in 2100… as the worst possible case! To know the future rise of an average it’s enough to know the rise of the outliers… Another point: temperate vegetation is not made for tropical temperature. An excursion into dry season tropical temps can be enough to kill it.

Conclusion? What lay ahead as worst possible case is rather an eight (8) degree Celsius rise by 2100…. This may sound crazily exaggerated, but I was in Paris the day of the record high. How likely was that? Not very: most of the time, I am not even in France! the capital was eerie in those conditions. The tubes of the Pompidou museum the picture was taken from were probably around 130 F (55 C)… unlivable… So, if we get peaks in 2019 as high as the worst predicted for 2100…

Meanwhile, record fires put one third of gigantic Russia under smoke… As much burning in one month in the Arctic as in eight years prior… CO2 is exponentiating.

The bottom line is this: go to Patagonia. There, the glaciers melt so much, few reach the sea. Antarctica starts 800 kilometers south (500 miles). Generally one seems to lose one degree Celsius per 200 kilometers polewards. That means that Antarctica is four degrees Celsius away from Patagonia (at sea interface). So a rise of four degrees would turn Antarctica into Patagonia…. However, most of Antarctica’s rock mass is BELOW sea level. One can look at the picture in:

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2015/03/21/west-antarctica-melting-amazon-not-helping/

Now, of course, the IPCC sets the worst possible case in 2100 at a three degree C rise… just below obvious massive melting of Antarctica, and this convenient “science’ no doubt pleases the sponsors of the IPCC…

Patrice Ayme