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The notion among climate scientists has long been that climate change’s peaking was inevitable (hard to argue against, as nothing goes on forever) but that a decline in temp thereafter was possible — even likely? This concept of the “overshoot” was inherently comforting, signaling that humanity could, through serious effort, one imagines, earn back a bit of that change.
Now, scientists are feeling less optimistic.
The actual abstract from the study:
Global emission reduction efforts continue to be insufficient to meet the temperature goal of the Paris Agreement. This makes the systematic exploration of so-called overshoot pathways that temporarily exceed a targeted global warming limit before drawing temperatures back down to safer levels a priority for science and policy. Here we show that global and regional climate change and associated risks after an overshoot are different from a world that avoids it.
Meaning, once we go down this path, there’s really no returning to what was … at least not in a timeframe people might imagine and thus be willing to sacrifice for in the meantime.
We find that achieving declining global temperatures can limit long-term climate risks compared with a mere stabilization of global warming, including for sea-level rise and cryosphere changes. However, the possibility that global warming could be reversed many decades into the future might be of limited relevance for adaptation planning today.
So we’re locked into adaptation, and that adaptation will be permanent for those who achieve it — in terms of a feasible lifespan, like all my kids.
The wild card is still out there on feedback loops unleashed (e.g., warming Siberia release boatloads of methane that drive up warming all the faster than presently anticipated).
Temperature reversal could be undercut by strong Earth-system feedbacks resulting in high near-term and continuous long-term warming.
Their answer is one helluva clean-up:
To hedge and protect against high-risk outcomes, we identify the geophysical need for a preventive carbon dioxide removal capacity of several hundred gigatonnes. Yet, technical, economic and sustainability considerations may limit the realization of carbon dioxide removal deployment at such scales.
No kidding.
Therefore, we cannot be confident that temperature decline after overshoot is achievable within the timescales expected today. Only rapid near-term emission reductions are effective in reducing climate risks.
Meaning, we’ve reached the top of the rollercoaster’s first drop and there ain’t much that’s going to alter this ride at this point. A certain amount of pain and tumult are baked into our inevitable future.
As one scientist is quoted by WAPO: “Excess deaths are not reversible.”
After that, it is terra incognita for those who inherit the Earth.
America bears a special responsibility here: our promotion of US-style trade integration and economic development (international free trade order now shorthanded as globalization) triggered the Great Acceleration of human activity and consumption that started right after WWII.
We have remade a planet, and our descendants will be forced to live with that transformation.
We can accept that and get on with it (adaptation), or we can pretend that Superpower A warring with Superpower B over Mediumpower C determines the future of our world.
Dude spends a billion USD — easy — on his own personal Shangri-La.
A couple of years experiencing Ukrainian drone attacks and he’s too scared to even visit it.
And if he can’t visit, then nobody can. So he has the whole structure razed.
It is a perfect metaphor for the massive waste and mistake that is Putin’s invasion of Ukraine: he built up Russia as this seemingly impressive petro-power, only to blow it all on some crazy-ass attempt to reconstitute the Russian empire.
Putin is so pathetically Hitler-like in his monomaniacal self-importance.
How much you want to bet Putin spends his last days in a bunker watching most of it burn?
I can’t wait.
3) Classic Middle Earth state failure in the making
South Sudan is about 5-10 degrees north of the equator. If you have ever been to the equator, you know that the sun there is unlike anything most of us are familiar with. It is, in a word, intense.
And it’s going to get a whole lot more intense for a poor country facing the end of the age of oil — its primary export.
With “forage crops” in fourth place?
So what is South Sudan’s future?
Droughts, floods, agricultural failure, famine, and … of course civil strife.
Roughly 4 out of every 5 South Sudanese live in rural areas and farm on a subsistence level. Water precipitation has been dropping systematically for the past half century, choking what historically was a fertile landscape. This is partially why roughly 4 out of every 5 South Sudanese face hunger today (the civil strife compounds all that).
South Sudan is not a small country, just an underpopulated one (already) at 11m souls.
You can’t govern that space with a tiny, impoverished tax base and your only source of income (oil exports) losing value slowly over time.
South Sudan’s government is so broken that it’s taken to taxing international relief personnel and their trucks to raise funds.
To me, this is a classic example of what it’s going to be like for any number of small Middle Earth states located between 30 degrees north and south of the equator.
State survival is unlikely; state failure is almost inevitable … unless South Sudan is integrated into something larger.
It’s not really a choice, as the alternative is state abandonment.
You can go three hours in extreme heat/cold without protection
You can go three days without water
You can go three weeks without food.
With climate change, the tipping point for most people will be water, so says the World Meteorological Organization (WMO, part of the UN) in its The State of Global Water Resourcesreport:
The year 2023 marked the driest year in over three decades for rivers around the world …
Over the last five years below-normal conditions for river flows have been recorded with less water reaching reservoirs.The reduction in supplies has reduced the amount of water available for communities, agriculture and ecosystems.
Currently, 3.6 billion people worldwide face inadequate access to water at least a month per year and this is expected to increase to more than five billion by 2050 …
Meanwhile, 2023 was recorded as the hottest year on record, leading to elevated temperatures and widespread dry conditions, which contributed to prolonged droughts.
Africa is getting the worst of it, but …
Meanwhile, the southern United States, Central America, Argentina, Uruguay, Peru and Brazil were affected by widespread drought conditions, which led to the lowest water levels ever observed in the Amazon and in Lake Titicaca on the border of Bolivia and Peru.
Relative to the Easter Hemisphere, the Western Hemisphere is well endowed with freshwater relative to its population.
Juraj Mihalik and Tom Zorc data visualization from “America’s New Map”
But that advantage will be lost if improperly managed in coming years/decades.
“Far too little is known about the true state of the world’s freshwater resources. We cannot manage what we do not measure,” Ms. [WMO Secretary-General Celeste] Saulo stated.
“This report seeks to contribute to improved monitoring, data-sharing, cross-border collaboration and assessments. This is urgently needed,” she added.
To combat stickier weather, air conditioners need to go from cooling machines to humidity gulpers.
There are just over 1 billion ACs in the world, and the vast majority of them are found in rich northern countries.
But recall my emergent global majority middle class:
In the regions most in need of cooling — such as India, Southeast Asia and Latin America — the potential for AC growth is huge, with billions of would-be users eager to install their first unit.
Huge opportunity but huge challenge: the global middle class will want all the same “unlimiteds” that we in middle-class America have long assumed were our birth right: like bandwidth, education, cheap calories, mobility, AC, electricity, etc. Once they get a taste, they want it all the time. That’s human nature: I work, I strive, I achieve, I deserve.
ACs around the world are projected to triple by 2050.
It’s a stark challenge. The standard technology, first deployed in a Brooklyn printing plant in 1902, is not designed to tackle the higher temperatures and humidity levels common in the places expected to add the most ACs in coming decades.
The machines not only have to be more powerful to mitigate the Southern Hemisphere’s hotter and wetter climate, but to combat further global warming, they also have to do so while using less electricity, which in many of these regions is still generated by burning fossil fuels.
To me, this is a classic example of what I talk about when I note the impact of the rise of the global middle class with all their natural desires: the tech we employed when (last century) less than a quarter of the world was middle class consumers could be fairly inefficient. But when that percentage moves past 50% and toward 60% of the world’s population, then, buddy, the efficiency part has to go through the roof!
Thus, climate change will “mother” all sorts of invention in coming decades.
The experiments continue as we move rapidly toward the Military Singularity — the post-human battlespace:
The research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense has already achieved a milestone by pitting a human pilot against an AI in control of a modified F-16 fighter jet in a dogfight earlier this year. In April this year, the agency announced that its X-62A Variable In-Flight Simulation Test Aircraft (VISTA) powered by AI algorithms went head to head against a human piloting an F-16 in a dogfight.
The right stuff, it would seem:
This was the first-ever deployment of machine-learning-based autonomy in flight-critical systems, and it seems experts in the defense lines are fairly confident that the X-62A is a viable combat approach for the future of aerial warfare. "We've fundamentally changed the conversation by showing this can be executed safely and responsibly, Col. James Valpiani, commandant of the Test Pilot School, was quoted as saying.
No need to report the outcome of the contests, which was uniform (or should I say, uniform-less?).
We are at a juncture in the evolution of the Military Industrial Complex.
Ukraine has revealed the future: not one of direct but indirect superpower conflict — i.e., a return to the proxy wars of the past. It’s also shown how the many, the cheap, the disposable, and the unmanned are replacing the few, the fantastically expensive, the we-can’t-possibly-lose-this (think, carrier), and the manned.
In short, drones have further “proxified” the battlespace: our drones “killing” your drones does not carry the same bloody-shirt potential and thus incrementally disconnects such conflicts from serious escalation (I’m going to risk WWIII just because their drones just wiped out my drones? Why not just send more drones?).
I believe this is why, as the WSJ points out:
Despite the threat of multipolar competition and a rearmament in Europe, military budgets are far from their 1980s highs.
Nor should they be.
Anduril (drones) is showing us the future, not Lockheed Martin (F-35 prime):
Anduril Industries released new, autonomous drones on Thursday for intelligence gathering and lethal missions, to take advantage of surging demand spurred by the success of similar products in Ukraine that are much cheaper than fighter jets.
Russia's invasion of Ukraine has highlighted the importance of loitering munitions - lightweight aerial weapons that can hover over, survey an area and make quick and precise strikes - instead of much more expensive, and vulnerable, fighter jets. The vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) Autonomous Air Vehicles (AAVs) are designed to provide flexible capabilities for a range of missions, from intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) to search and rescue operations as well as a loitering munitions version for targeting enemy forces.
The systems have a flight time of over 40 minutes and a range of 20 km (12 miles), the company said.
Privately-owned Anduril said it is on contract to deliver lethal Bolts to the U.S. Marine Corps. Typical Bolt configurations cost in the low tens of thousands of dollars, the company said.
You know what an F-35 costs? About $110-135M per unit, depending on the model.
Meanwhile, the US is planning to drop $1.7T on updating its nuclear force.
How much you want to bet that number doesn’t pan out?
Never mind that everyone calls him Groovy, or that the company he oversees — Bright Green — is preparing to grow cannabis and opium poppies inside greenhouses on the high desert of New Mexico. Gurvinder Singh would like it known that his business is a rigorous scientific enterprise.
Mr. Singh spends much of his time straining to dislodge the assumption that his company is part of the wave of retail marijuana shops popping up in many communities in the wake of legalization in many states. His 70-acre farm will be centered on producing raw materials for pharmaceuticals that use cannabis, opioids and additional medicinal plants to treat pain, depression and anxiety.
Bright Green has secured a rare license from the Drug Enforcement Administration to grow otherwise illegal crops for use in research and the manufacture of federally approved medicines. The company, which hopes to start operating by early next year, has positioned itself to bolster American self-sufficiency in an age of growing concern over the vulnerability of critical supply chains.
Hmmm.
Search and ye finds the following: As of 2022, the U.S. imported approximately 6% of its total pharmaceutical products from China, making it supplier #4 after Ireland, Germany, and Switzerland. This figure represents a substantial increase from just under 2.5% in 2020.
From my upcoming second Massive Open Online Course based on ANM’s logic:
This slide measures actual finished/packaged meds versus ingredient components, and it indicates that Europe is the major player in that regard. But, no doubt: China is the world's largest producer of active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) and has become a major player in the pharmaceutical industry, significantly impacting global supply chains from an upstream position.
It is apparently that perceived dependency that is pushing the Biden administration down this semiconductor-like path.
9) Big Oil cashing out?
HEAT MAP: Oil Companies Are Preparing for a Lucrative Decline
H/T Andy Barnett
The inevitability defined:
One of the world’s leading forecasters of energy trends is now emphatic that the amount of oil, gas, and coal used around the world each day will begin to taper off within a few years. According to the International Energy Agency, global oil consumption, currently just over 100 million barrels per day, will peak later this decade at around 102 milllion barrels per day even without any new climate policy measures. We are at “the beginning of the end of the era of fossil fuels,” IEA chief Fatih Birol wrote in September.
None of this is adequate to stay within safe climate limits, but it’s hard to overstate what it means for the oil industry, which has enjoyed almost uninterrupted growth for its 150-odd-year existence.
So, how is Big Oil approaching this reality?
The judgment:
The oil industry is not telling a credible story about its own future. Far from doubling down on the future of oil — as they’d have us believe — and as climate action advocates fear – the most powerful oil producers are planning for obsolescence, but they’re hoping to do it on their own, lucrative, terms.
The logic:
It’s a conventional tenet of investing that if companies see their entire industry shrinking, they should not necessarily pivot into a new sector that is replacing it. The principles of “shareholder value,” for example, holds that companies should return cash to shareholders if there are no credible investment opportunities, so they can divert that money into new sectors.
That’s exactly what those massive share buyback programs are doing.
This sort of self-cannibalizing is not terribly reflective of the all-of-the-above argument for meeting the world’s future energy needs, is it?
Deceive, swindle, take unfair advantage of, as in He was just selling you a bill of goods when he said he worked as a secret agent , or Watch out if anyone says he wants to trade bikes with you; he's apt to be selling you a bill of goods . The bill of goods here means “a dishonest offer.” [c. 1920]
Imagine if Exxon or OPEC+'s secretariat said “yes, oil demand is probably close to peaking; it might plateau for awhile but the era of growth is over.” Money would flow out of the sector. Smaller, more expensive producers would stop investing in finding and producing more oil, which would lead to more volatile price spikes, driving the world to switch to clean energy even faster (JP Morgan says the recent high prices has already provoked “demand destruction” — in part explaining why prices haven’t spiked as much as recent world events might suggest.) Governments and other companies might even step up efforts to cut their dependency on oil. It would become a self-fulfilling prophecy with challenging implications for countries and companies whose existence is based on pumping oil and gas.
So, to maximize profits in a declining industry, Big Oil is selling its continued utility even as it is openly acting as if that future simply does not exist — because it doesn’t.
Something to remember when somebody makes the charge that THEY are restricting oil companies from “drill baby drill” opportunities.
The idea that Russia, with a population of 100m more than Ukraine, needs North Korea military personnel to sustain its operations against its next-door neighbor?
I am not impressed. Indeed, it smacks of desperation.
How do I know?
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov on Thursday dismissed claims of Pyongyang sending military personnel to fight in Ukraine as a “hoax.”
The first time a government worker encouraged Yumi Yang to have a baby, she thought little of it. She and her husband were registering their marriage at a local office in northeastern China, and the worker gave them free prenatal vitamins, which she chalked up to the government trying to be helpful.
When an official later called to ask if she had taken them, and then called again after she did get pregnant to track her progress, Ms. Yang shrugged those questions off as well intentioned, too. But then officials showed up at her door after she had given birth, asking to take a photograph of her with her baby for their files. That was too much.
“When they came to my home, that was really ridiculous,” said Ms. Yang, 28. “I felt a little disgusted.”
Gotta be weird when a local officials inquires about your last menstrual cycle.
A big part of Israel’s diminishment strategy, as I have called it, in Gaza is the sheer volume and pervasiveness of the structural damage. Gaza will be home to far fewer Palestinians over time simply because it will be too hard to live there through a putative rebuild that will stretch into decades.
You want a smaller threat profile? This is one way to ensure it.
More than two-thirds of Gaza’s road networks are damaged, and now the truck flow into and out of the Strip is radically reduced and likely to stay that way for the long haul — which will literally include hauling away almost a billion cubic feet of debris.
This war has generated 14 times more debris than all major conflicts in Gaza combined since 2008, according to the U.N.’s July satellite assessment.
That’s after you’re done removing all the unexploded ordinance, along with all the trapped dead bodies.
It is all very reminiscent of the Twin Towers clean-up, isn’t it — just that much bigger.
Israel didn’t have a plan for the “day after.” It had a plan for the decades after.
Facts on the ground.
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