10 thoughts on “Monday Message Board”

1. Doubleplus ungood

   No good news from me today. The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/jan/10/world-temperature-in-2024-exceeded-15c-for-first-time:

   “Climate breakdown drove the annual global temperature above the internationally agreed 1.5C target for the first time last year, supercharging extreme weather and causing “misery to millions of people”. The average temperature in 2024 was 1.6C above preindustrial levels, data from the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) shows.”

   Nine years ago I joined many others in celebrating the surprising inclusion of a 1.5 degrees C stretch limit in the Paris Agreement. Serious action at last, we fondly hoped. No such luck. The leaders of the world – well, the ones who were not actively sabotaging the pact – continued to try to buy off Mother Nature with fine words. So here we are. The first numerical climate target has been broken, and earlier than even pessimists feared. It is a colossal defeat. Weep.

   What to do now after a decent pause for mourning? The dominant response will be: we still have a chance, just, to stay within the main 2 degree limit, so let us redouble efforts to fight for it. Fair enough, count me in. But I suggest adding another goal. The news of yet another weather disaster, the $160bn wildfires in Los Angeles, confirms that we have entered the zone of the unacceptable. From now on every gramme of CO2 emitted into the atmosphere will have to be taken out again, until we hit the 1.5 degree target from the upside. Fossil fuel companies should be incessantly reminded of this – and made to pay for it. It’s premature to set this as a limit. When we have the technology and policies to reach 1.5 degrees, they will allow going further down, at a cost of which we we currently have no idea.

   Will this work? I have no idea either. In the Book of Jonah, his warning to Nineveh is surprisingly heard (Jonah 3.6):

   “When Jonah’s warning reached the king of Nineveh, he rose from his throne, took off his royal robes, covered himself with sackcloth and sat down in the dust. “

   This is a satire on the godly – the Assyrians were notoriously brutal imperialists even by the standards of the time. A conversion is much less likely than carrying on as before towards disaster.

   I fear that Kipling’s dyspeptic lines are a better fit:

   “As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man —

   There are only four things certain since Social Progress began:—

   That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,

   And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire.”

   There is a fourth and it’s no better.

2. I would estimate that less than 1% of people globally, who are above the necessary negative footprint, are even now voluntarily taking effective action to rapidly drop to their necessary negative footprint.

   When it comes to the oligarchs, corporations and governments, 0% of the people involved are taking the necessary actions.

   The above does not preclude the fact that the extreme global poor are below their necessary footprint. But they are not in any position to do anything about those who are above the footprint and getting worse or at least not getting better.

   Accuweather preliminary estimates are that the damages in the LA fires are US$250 billion to US$275 billion to date. Given the weather coming and the likelihood of these estimate being conservative, incomplete and outdated hour by hour, I would guess that the damage will easily rise to US$500 million or even a trillion.

   When, not if, disasters of this size (in combined totals) became an annual event somewhere in the US (just considering the US) is this something the US can sustain? Let us assume the US Federal budget can run at US$8 trillion a year at need, is a trillion a year in damages something they can sustainably replace? Do they even possess the production and construction capacity to do that?

   This is the territory we are getting into now with runaway climate change. Not just the US but the entire world.

   I am open to corrections of my figures and assumptions as I draw this worst case scenario which now looks a locked-in certainty to me. I hope I am wrong but this seems to me to be already established as a runaway process.

3. I don’t know what to say. On the one hand, I instinctively don’t like it when people try to blame it all on oil companies, because all of us who use fossil fuels went along with it. Unless it’s politically impossible to get a carbon tax? In which case, maybe dinging the oil cos is just the closest we can get. A less optimal tool, I think. But perhaps, better than nothing. (Are there other tools to move ourselves off the dime? Maybe there are.)

   And on the other hand, I don’t want to see us despair and give up.

   But yes, with the mourning. (Except, I still want a full rollback.)

4.  N: <i>On the one hand, I instinctively don’t like it when people try to blame it all on oil companies, because all of us who use fossil fuels went along with it.</i>

   Giant oil companies et al have spent big on promoting that viewpoint widely. Food Miles, footprints, yada yada, blame shifting to the powerless individual consumer, distracting them, misdirecting them, greenwashing and dodging the issue entirely on the way to their very big bank. Industrial societies have been designed by them to maximise the use of their products. Designed by them so individuals cannot avoid using their products. Designed by them so that individuals do not get a say as they own the government. Probably the only individuals who do not conform to their designs in any way are a few last contact tribes in Amazonia – but, guess what, big oil has plans to change their lifestyles and consumption patterns, and to soon remove Amazonia root-and-branch from the face of the Earth.

5. Tonight around midnight depending on Australian time zone,

   the Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal in a worldwide live-streamed Zoom press conference will conclude its three-year investigation of United States weapons makers Lockheed Martin, Boeing, RTX (Raytheon), and drone maker General Atomics, charged by the Tribunal with conspiring to commit War Crimes, Crimes Against Humanity, and Genocide, all in violation of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.

   Zoom Press Conference: Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal Final Verdicts

   Home – Merchants of Death

   From the 8-page synopsis of the final 155-page Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal Report, page 3:

   <i>…The growing wave of public outrage led Senator Gerald Nye to initiate
   congressional hearings investigating whether U.S. corporations, including
   weapons manufacturers, had led the United States into World War I. In two years, the Nye committee held 93 hearings and called more than 200 witnesses to testify, including JP Morgan, Pierre S. DuPont and his brothers, and former Senate Majority Leader James E. Watson.

   The committee conducted an extensive investigation into the records of
   weapons manufacturers. They uncovered criminal and unethical actions
   including bribery of foreign officials, lobbying the United States government
   to obtain foreign sales, selling weapons to both sides of international
   disputes, and the covert undermining of disarmament conferences.

   “The committee listened daily to men striving to defend acts which found
   them nothing more than international racketeers, bent upon gaining profit
   through a game of arming the world to fight itself,” Senator Nye declared in
   an October 1934 radio address.

   To protect the United States and the world from businesses having a free
   hand in promoting war, the Senate Committee recommended price controls,
   the transfer of Navy shipyards out of private hands, and increased industrial
   taxes. Senator Nye suggested that upon a declaration of war by Congress,
   taxes on annual incomes under $10,000 should automatically be doubled, and
   higher incomes should be taxed at 98%. “Do that and then observe the
   number of jingoists diminish,” The Nation magazine said. “If such policies
   were enacted, businessmen would become our leading pacifists.”
   The American public was outraged at the committee’s findings that big
   business had led America to such useless carnage. Citizens joined to create
   some of the largest peace organizations the country had ever known.</i> –

   Full report:

   The Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal Announces Its Verdict – Merchants of Death

   Will the Greens or Rex Patrick and the JLN, if elected, bring on similar in Australia? It’s about time.

6. The latest estimate I can find of the bill for damages to structures and infrastructure for the still-not-concluded LA fires is US$250 billion to US$275 billion from AccuWeather. This estimate is already out of date in a rapidly spreading situation and the costs may yet go higher. However, let us take the “low-end” estimate of US$250 billion for the whole event when it is over. We must also note that other estimates around in the media currently are as low as US$50 billion.

   Larry Fink of Blackrock has used a US$50 billion damage estimate as the basis for his statement that a rebuild will take 10 years. If Accuweather’s “low-end” estimate is the more accurate figure, does this then imply a 50 year rebuild?

   Can cities, states and nations grow or even sustain if facing annual damage that takes even 10 years, let alone 50 years, to rebuild on the same site or elsewhere. An annual damage bill of “just” US$50 billion from all natural disasters in the US is looking a certainty at this point and certain to worsen. After 10 years that would be a tail of 10+9+8+7+6+5+4+3+2+1+0 = 55 years of rebuild arrears, dotted over the nation. The tail would in fact be worse as damage from climate change will escalate. Don’t forget this is also agricultural damage, production damage, death and morbidity damage and so on. Note, the last 5 years of natural disasters costs for the USA have an average annual bill of US$150 billion per year in round numbers. This will rise further for a certainty.

   The USA will not be able to survive this rate of damage. By extension, no nation on earth will be able to sustain equivalent rates of damage relative to their economic size. This is true if the Larry Fink estimate of rebuild time is about right. Only if Fink’s estimate is out by a factor of 10 (meaning LA, as representative of such a damaged city, could rebuild in 1 year) would a rebuild arrears not build up to some extent. And then with climate change and all other earth boundary violation effects increasing natural disaster damage rates year on year, the unrepaired tail would increase indefinitely.

   https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/billions/state-summary/US

   Does anyone think this will not lead to collapse? Can this outcome be escaped? Data and reasoning please.

7. From that NCEI page for the USA: 44 years of weather/climate disaster events up to 2024 have resulted in the deaths there of just 16,918 people. Whereas over just the last 20 years the USA merchants of death have killed some 4,555,200 at 13 deaths every thirty minutes.

   Is Blackrock going to buy up all the burnt out LA residential and commercial land and then build to rent. Buy up, as the burnt out properties mostly uninsured, and the construction costs already high are sure to increase steeply. Cheap build-to-rent, as the economy being now shot, and people being now without businesses, jobs, income, and most without savings they won’t be rebuilding themselves nor buying. A great opportunity for slumlord Buffet to expand his lend then re-possess mobile home and trailer park empire too. What are their business plans for accommodation and rebuilding in Gaza?

8. From that NCEI page for the USA: 44 years of weather/climate disaster events up to 2024 have resulted in the deaths there of just 16,918 people. Whereas over just the last 20 years the USA merchants of death have killed some 4,555,200 at 13 deaths every thirty minutes.

   Is Blackrock going to buy up all the burnt out LA residential and commercial land and then build to rent. Buy up, as the burnt out properties mostly uninsured, and the construction costs already high are sure to increase steeply. Cheap build-to-rent, as the economy being now shot, and people being now without businesses, jobs, income, and most without savings they won’t be rebuilding themselves nor buying. A great opportunity for slumlord Buffet to expand his lend then re-possess mobile home and trailer park empire too. What are their business plans for accommodation and rebuilding in Gaza?

9. Update to above post. From another angle we can say this. Total US GDP is about $US30 trillion. Compared to this, annual losses from climate change of even say US$1 trillion per year would seem relatively small at 3.33% of GDP. Painful for sure but not nation breaking.

   However, I think the issue is that total GDP cannot be counted as instantly or easily convertible into building activity. It is not convertible at such scale. The size of construction’s GDP contribution must be considered.

   Contribution of the US construction industry to US GDP is about 4.50%. This is US$1.35 trillion. In that case, an annual damage bill of US$500 billion looks catastrophic. More than 12,000 homes, businesses, schools and other LA structures have been destroyed so far. At a conservative average of $5 million apiece, that is 60,000,000,000 or 60 billion dollars: a bit higher than Larry Fink’s estimate but nowhere near the Accuweather estimate. But then this contains many mansions, plus commercial buildings and public buildings. Maybe $5 million per unit low-balls it. Then there is infrastructure to add in. The number could get within reach of Accuweather’s estimate. I know nothing of their estimate methods.

   Overall, I think the current level and rising of climate change disasters will degrade and destroy all nations by destroying infrastructure (and food production) at an unsustainable rate. I cannot see how it cannot do this.

   My assumptions, reasoning and arithmetic may all be faulty. Feel free to demonstrate how. If there are some provable glaring and obvious errors in my thinking I will stand corrected.

10. Retired professor of mathematics and computer science, casino consultant, author of 4 books, Eliot Jacobson, posted at BlueSky several hours ago:

    The 365-day running mean for the global surface temperature anomaly is back over 1.60°C, and the daily is back over 1.80°C.

    The Paris Agreement is yesterday’s news. The climate of the future is happening now.

    The GMST anomalies relative to 1850-1900 baseline using Copernicus ERA5 dataset, as at 18 Jan 2025:

    • Most recent day: _ _ _ _ _ _ _ +1.83x °C
    • 30-day running mean: _ _ _ _+1.73x °C
    • 90-day running mean: _ _ _ _+1.68x °C
    • 180-day running mean: _ _ _ +1.61x °C
    • 365-day running mean: _ _ _ +1.60x °C
    • 2-year running mean: _ _ _ _ +1.55x °C
    • Year-to-date running mean: +1.73x °C