Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please.
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John Quiggin 
Like many I worry that Joe Biden’s candidature for the Democrats in 2024 might well hand the US Presidency to Donald Trump. Biden is experienced but is old. So too, for that matter, is Trump. Yes I prefer Biden over Trump any day but others may not. Its a real worry. Surely Biden can see the problem himself. Harry Clarke.
Climate Overshoot – James Wimberley
Pascal Lamy’s self-appointed Climate Overshoot Commission has released its report. downloads here: https://www.overshootcommission.org/report
At first sight it looks pretty sensible and balanced. CDR will be needed anyway and needs a lot more government support to scale up and verify. They propose separating the targets for CDR and emissions reductions to reduce the high risk of CDR greenwashing. They also propose a moratorium on solar radiation geoengineering until the governance is sorted. We’ll find out at COP-28 if anybody is listening. Don’t rule this out; Lamy is very well connected as well as famously tough.
I agree there is a lot to be concerned about in regard to the US election. However, I don’t think we have anyone else who can beat T—-. Plus, objectively, Biden’s done a decent job – though I don’t blame people for being upset about inflation, as we are still kind of getting hammered. The prices don’t seem to go back down, do they? Yet, what’shisname couldn’t fix this anyway. (Admittedly, I have never seenn the appeal … )
Atlantis again – James Wimberley
it’s not just Miami that is doomed in the medium term by climate change. Mike Barnard makes a strong case that Houston will go too: https://cleantechnica.com/2023/10/02/houston-wants-feds-to-waste-billions-on-dike-to-protect-it-from-climate-change/
The mechanisms are different, beyond the common starting point of an irreversibly rising sea level from the ongoing collapse of the polar ice. Miami is built on nice solid limestone rock – but it’s porous, so osmosis will equalize water levels however deep you build your sea wall. Houston is built on a muddy coastal swamp, like Venice. The current plan is to build a $57 bn dike, two-thirds hopefully paid for by the federal government, to keep the sea out. But this will do nothing to stop a repeat of Hurricane Harvey, which dumped 127 billion US tons of water on the city – coming from an ever warmer Gulf of Mexico – mostly inside the hypothetical dike. Houston has another problem that neither Venice nor Miami have: its economy is based on oil and gas, doomed to extinction by 2050 (and a lot earlier if I get my team of Strong Men).
$57 bn is of course far from the final price, if the dike were ever built. Nice quote from Barnard:
“Only 0.5% of megaprojects achieve the trifecta of being on time, on budget, and delivering expected value, per global megaproject expert Bent Flyvbjerg.”
This is a reasonable objection to my centralised climate crash programme. So far as possible, we should structure this on the model of ant and termite colonies, which reliably build large and efficient nests and mounds through the actions of thousands of dumb individuals using only simple learning and coordination algorithms. The rollout of rooftop solar in Australia is a good example, just as Snowy 2 exhibits Flyvbjerg’s norm of failure.
James Wimberley, any idea what sea level rise (SLR) the proponents of this Houston dike proposal are designing for?
SLR certainly won’t stop even if humanity stops GHG emissions ASAP – albeit slow but still a relentless process. Current atmospheric GHG concentrations and ocean heat content have already committed the Earth System to tens (yes, plural) of metres of SLR already. Let that sink in for a moment…
On 22 August 2022, at the Cryosphere 2022 Symposium at the Harpa Conference Centre Reykjavik, Iceland, glaciologist Professor Jason Box said from time interval 0:15:27:
“And at this level of CO₂, this rough approximation suggests that we’ve committed already to more than 20 metres of sea level rise. So, obviously it would help to remove a hell-of-a-lot of CO₂ from the atmosphere, and I don’t hear that conversation very much, because we’re still adding 35 gigatonnes per year.”
See the YouTube video titled Arctic climate system catastrophe – a wide ranging tour – long version, published 29 Dec 2022, duration 0:19:26.
With at least a metre of SLR likely committed by 2100 regardless of any deep GHG emission cuts, with potentially multi-metre SLR in the same timeframe if we/humanity cannot drastically reduce human-induced GHG emissions within this decade, many vulnerable coastal locations will inevitably go under the waves.
What’s required to avoid worst-case catastrophic conditions for humanity in the coming decades? Reduce, Remove, Repair.
http://www.climatecodered.org/2023/06/three-climate-interventions-reduce.html
The Laws of Physics are not negotiable…
The US is now short a speaker of the house. The crazy people have won the election in Slovakia. Poland decided to join with Hungary and not send a foreign minister to the meeting in Ukraine, because the Ukraine now threatens to make the only people that really matter, agricultural capitalists slightly poorer!
Geoff: the best website on Ike’s Dike appears to be this: https://www.tamug.edu/ikedike/
They seem to be thinking in terms of storm surges of 12-20 feet rather than SLR. The one piece of good news is that the Technical University of Delft, unchallenged world experts, are peripherally involved.
Just love those military people and their strange pseudo scare scenarios. Just watched one, “China stands by Russia and feels confirmed that the Democracies cannot uphold support”. Strange, since China does not deliver any weapons to Russia or send any financial support. That would be ugly indeed. What exactly would be non-support? Joining the oil embargo? Obviously, the west is not making as much of an economic effort as Russia to produce supplies and holding many technologies back on top. I just remain puzzled how Russia, with some help from North Korea and Iran is supposed to be a problem for half an effort. Do people ever look at Russian working age population and GDP numbers? Oh, wait they do, and the result is another scare scenario: “but Russia is growing faster than Germany”. No, really, what about the base or the ex oil price number. They got enough nukes to destroy the world and lots of oil/gas. Bad enough, that does not turn Russia into a relevant economy in those other realpolitik calculations. One just cannot turn the world into a happy place for military people. They got the perfect scenario in their parallel universe where the strength of the conventional Russian military matters as a threat potential. Russia ran into the perfect trap in their world. And they are again unhappy, find more excuses to spend more money on guns not delivered to Ukraine. I hate them. All of them, really, in any country. They sound just like agricultural lobbyists. Except that their lobbying not only results in waste of money but also lots of dead people. Curiously, their scare mongering never leads to the other logical place where they would have to ally with the left and support a fast transition to heat pumps and electric cars for “security reasons”. But no, rather consider refugees a “security threat” or “hybrid weapon”.
Everything old new again? No, often it never went away – Svante
A new book by David Marr, Killing for Country, a Family Story, reviewed.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/oct/01/the-hatred-and-greed-of-the-frontier-wars-still-drive-race-politics-today-how-little-things-change
The hatred and greed of the frontier wars still drive race politics today. How little things change
Rejig the no voice case rhetoric a little and you’ll find echoes of arguments from the 19th century. Behind it all I hear familiar old voices growling … The Native Police began killing in the hinterland of the Darling Downs in 1848. My great-great-grandfather, Reg Uhr, and his brother, D’arcy , were officers in the force a few years later as it fought the bloodiest campaigns on the Queensland frontier … Those who still defend the massacres of those years say people were different then. If only that were so. Pare away the 19th-century rhetoric and the hatred and greed that drove those killings can be seen driving race politics in today’s Australia – more clearly than ever since the sluice gates were opened in the referendum campaign.
Are Australians beginning to face the question of what it does to the soul of a country that its foundations rest first in conquest and then in crime? Hardly.