I want to sue the republican party for willful denial of scientific evidence about climate change.

[China]

The Flooding Will Come “No Matter What”

 

Another great American migration is now underway, this time forced by the warming that is altering how and where people can live. For now, it’s just a trickle. But in the corners of the country’s most vulnerable landscapes — on the shores of its sinking bayous and on the eroding bluffs of its coastal defenses — populations are already in disarray.

 

A couple of miles west of downtown Slidell, Louisiana, and just upstream from the broad expanse of Lake Pontchartrain — the 40-by-24-mile-wide brackish estuary separating what is now the mainland from New Orleans — a five-room shotgun house sits on a plot of marshy lawn near the edge of Liberty Bayou. Colette Pichon Battle’s mother had been born in that house. Colette, bright-eyed and ambitious, devoutly Catholic, a force on the volleyball court, was raised in the house until the day she left for college. The family’s very identity had grown from the waters of the marsh around it. From a humble rectangle of wood, framed onto brick stanchions that kept it hovering several feet above the ground, shaded by the long beards of Spanish moss hanging from the limbs of towering oaks and a hardy pine, a family was born. Its Creole heritage near the acre of low-lying land goes deeper than the trees, deeper than the United States as a nation, to around 1770. Those roots withstood the tests of centuries: slavery, war and more than their share of storms.

 

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As the U.S. gets hotter, its coastal waters rise higher, its wildfires burn larger and its droughts last longer, the notion that humankind can triumph over nature is fading, and with it, slowly, goes the belief that self-determination and personal preference can be the driving factors in choosing where to live. Scientific modeling of these pressures suggest a sweeping change is coming in the shape and location of communities across America, a change that promises to transform the country’s politics, culture and economy.

 

It has already begun. More Americans are displaced by catastrophic climate-change-driven storms and floods and fires every year. The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, the global nongovernmental organization researchers rely on to measure the number of people forcibly cast out of their homes by natural disasters, counted very few displaced Americans in 2009, 2010 and 2011, years in which few natural disasters struck the United States. But by 2016 the numbers had begun to surge, with between 1 million and 1.7 million newly displaced people annually. The disasters and heat waves each year have become legion. But the statistics show the human side of what has appeared to be a turning point in both the severity and frequency of wildfires and hurricanes. As the number of displaced people continues to grow, an ever-larger portion of those affected will make their moves permanent, migrating to safer ground or supportive communities. They will do so either because a singular disaster like the 2018 wildfire in Paradise, California — or Hurricane Harvey, which struck the Texas and Louisiana coasts — is so destructive it forces them to, or because the subtler “slow onset” change in their surroundings gradually grows so intolerable, uncomfortable or inconvenient that they make the decision to leave, proactively, by choice. In a 2021 study published in the journal Climatic Change, researchers found that 57% of the Americans they surveyed believed that changes in their climate would push them to consider a move sometime in the next decade.

 

Click on the link for the full article

[philibusters]

On 3/24/2024 at 3:41 PM, China said:

A nuclear plant’s closure was hailed as a green win. Then emissions went up

 

When New York’s deteriorating and unloved Indian Point nuclear plant finally shuttered in 2021, its demise was met with delight from environmentalists who had long demanded it be scrapped.

 

But there has been a sting in the tail – since the closure, New York’s greenhouse gas emissions have gone up.

 

Castigated for its impact upon the surrounding environment and feared for its potential to unleash disaster close to the heart of New York City, Indian Point nevertheless supplied a large chunk of the state’s carbon-free electricity.

 

Since the plant’s closure, it has been gas, rather then clean energy such as solar and wind, that has filled the void, leaving New York City in the embarrassing situation of seeing its planet-heating emissions jump in recent years to the point its power grid is now dirtier than Texas’s, as well as the US average.

 

“From a climate change point of view it’s been a real step backwards and made it harder for New York City to decarbonize its electricity supply than it could’ve been,” said Ben Furnas, a climate and energy policy expert at Cornell University. “This has been a cautionary tale that has left New York in a really challenging spot.”

 

Click on the link for the full article

 

I definitely don't understand why some environmentalists still continue to dis-like nuclear so much other than they learned it from their parents.   I think the position was more justifiable in 1950's, 1960's, and 1970's when there was no understanding of global warming and hence people didn't factor in carbon emissions and when the design of nuclear powerplants was  less sophisicated and there was more potential for a disaster. On the other hand back then, coal was the most common fuel source and it burned less cleanly than say natural gas which is a lot more common today.  But yeah, environmentalist in France got their country to back up off nuclear like 10 years ago and of course their carbon emissions went up afterwardsd.

[PokerPacker]

10 minutes ago, philibusters said:

 

I definitely don't understand why some environmentalists still continue to dis-like nuclear so much other than they learned it from their parents.   I think the position was more justifiable in 1950's, 1960's, and 1970's when there was no understanding of global warming and hence people didn't factor in carbon emissions and when the design of nuclear powerplants was  less sophisicated and there was more potential for a disaster. On the other hand back then, coal was the most common fuel source and it burned less cleanly than say natural gas which is a lot more common today.  But yeah, environmentalist in France got their country to back up off nuclear like 10 years ago and of course their carbon emissions went up afterwardsd.

We still don't have an acceptable answer to the question of what to do with nuclear waste, really bad things happen when disaster strikes, and it takes decades to get a new plant opened while we can renewables going much, much faster without the prior drawbacks.

[Captain Wiggles]

Lol our solution to dealing with nuclear waste is to bury it under a mountain and it all gets there by rail. Railroads are sooper safe right? There's only like three derailments per day on average. 

 

Make Nuclear Waste Great Again tho. 🤪

[philibusters]

5 hours ago, PokerPacker said:

We still don't have an acceptable answer to the question of what to do with nuclear waste, really bad things happen when disaster strikes, and it takes decades to get a new plant opened while we can renewables going much, much faster without the prior drawbacks.

 

I agree that renewables are very important to the future.  But that they have a ton of drawbacks.  First they are just not as reliable as fossil fuels.  When France got rid of its nuclear power they thought it would mostly be made up through renewables.  It hasn't.  It wasn't made up for with fossil fuels.   Why?  Because France was less windy and more cloudy than anticipated in the years following the transition.  30 years ago there was a hope that batteries could be developed that could store the excess energy renewables produced when it was sunny or windy, but the battery hasn't developed as quickly as hoped and may still be 50 years away (kind of like self-driving cars it seemed close, but then it wasn't).  Second, renewables have their own bad environmental consequences.  It is not 100% clear to me over the long term they are more environmentally friendly than nuclear.  For example in order to generate a large amount of power they need to take up a lot of space.   Now if  you are near a desert where it sunny and sometimes windy and the land is not that useable, that is an easy requirement to hit.  But in crowded urban areas, there really is not enough room to put solar and wind farms.  Likewise solar panels use a lot of fairly rare metals that require a lot of mining.  Some of these metals can be toxic, so like nuclear waste you have to figure out what to do with them after the solar panels die (panel may have a 30 year life).  

Without doubt as the renewable technology gets better and as battery technology gets better renewables will be the wave of the future.  There is no doubt about that.   But as I said I think environmentalist messed  up big time back in the 1950's and 1960's advocating for fossil fuels over nuclear and I think some continue to make the same mistake today.  

[Cooked Crack]

 

 

[China]

38 trillion dollars in damages each year: World economy already committed to income reduction of 19 % due to climate change

 

Even if CO2 emissions were to be drastically cut down starting today, the world economy is already committed to an income reduction of 19 % until 2050 due to climate change, a new study published in “Nature” finds. These damages are six times larger than the mitigation costs needed to limit global warming to two degrees. Based on empirical data from more than 1,600 regions worldwide over the past 40 years, scientists at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) assessed future impacts of changing climatic conditions on economic growth and their persistence.

 

“Strong income reductions are projected for the majority of regions, including North America and Europe, with South Asia and Africa being most strongly affected. These are caused by the impact of climate change on various aspects that are relevant for economic growth such as agricultural yields, labour productivity or infrastructure,” says PIK scientist and first author of the study Maximilian Kotz. Overall, global annual damages are estimated to be at 38 trillion dollars, with a likely range of 19-59 trillion Dollars in 2050. These damages mainly result from rising temperatures but also from changes in rainfall and temperature variability. Accounting for other weather extremes such as storms or wildfires could further raise them.

 

“Our analysis shows that climate change will cause massive economic damages within the next 25 years in almost all countries around the world, also in highly-developed ones such as Germany, France and the United States,” says PIK scientist Leonie Wenz who led the study. ”These near-term damages are a result of our past emissions. We will need more adaptation efforts if we want to avoid at least some of them. And we have to cut down our emissions drastically and immediately – if not, economic losses will become even bigger in the second half of the century, amounting to up to 60% on global average by 2100. This clearly shows that protecting our climate is much cheaper than not doing so, and that is without even considering non-economic impacts such as loss of life or biodiversity.”

 

Click on the link for more