Wow, it's the stupid left's fault we're killing the planet? The stupid left has little choice. Yes, the policies they support will not help in a meaningful way. True, involvement in the Paris Accords is tilting at windmills. But what choice does the left have? The right, otherwise known as the party in control of all 3 branches of government, will not admit we have a climate problem at all. Global warming is the butt of jokes. Any move by the left to fund research or institute programs that address the problem are turned by the right into examples of the left's uncontrolled spending and penchant for big government. The left must feel like it's trying to slay a dragon with a pointed stick.

Litwitlou wrote:Wow, it's the stupid left's fault we're killing the planet? The stupid left has little choice. Yes, the policies they support will not help in a meaningful way. True, involvement in the Paris Accords is tilting at windmills. But what choice does the left have? The right, otherwise known as the party in control of all 3 branches of government, will not admit we have a climate problem at all. Global warming is the butt of jokes. Any move by the left to fund research or institute programs that address the problem are turned by the right into examples of the left's uncontrolled spending and penchant for big government. The left must feel like it's trying to slay a dragon with a pointed stick.

Climate politics sure is complicated, and I appreciate your comments here. My view is that climate politics involves strong subconscious psychological drivers that people find very difficult to discuss, notice or analyse. The emotions in the debate mean that major factors get ignored or distorted. I think that failure is happening in climate debate from both sides.

The big issue behind these emotional problems is that our planet is on an apocalyptic path to destruction. The primary risk factor may be ocean currents. Back in the day of the end of the Permian Era 252 million years ago, it seems CO2 increased over thousands of years, and this stopped the ocean currents from overturning. In turn, that disrupted the acidity and oxygen levels in the water, causing the extinction of almost all marine species, and of most terrestrial life too. That is bad.

People don’t like to think about how our current increase of CO2 may be causing a similar risk, but it really is the top security problem for our planetary existence, involving the threat of human extinction or collapse of civilization. The current change in climate is so fast in geological terms that we could easily cross an unknown threshold into catastrophe at any moment. It is alarming.

The last time we had 400 ppm of CO2 in the air, the sea was ten yards higher. Who knows what hair trigger tipping point might be out there, with the climate gun already loaded and cocked?

So what happens in the politics? My reading is that the climate lobby has built such momentum around its perceived solution of emission reduction that it is unable to step back and consider this realistically. But unfortunately emission reduction cannot work.

The logic of emission reduction seems very simple, that if you are adding too much of something (carbon in the air), then reducing the amount you add will fix the problem. Unfortunately, with climate that simple answer is wrong.

By the end of this century, humans will have added 6000 gigatonnes of CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalent) to the air. However, all the pledges under the Paris Accord will only reduce that by 60 gigatonnes, or just one percent of the problem. Now Paris only goes up to 2030, but even so, if Paris keeps going at the same intended rate it will still only address about 5% of the problem. That is not enough. And even addressing that tiny proportion of the problem assumes no corruption or failure, although these are endemic to climate pledges.

This simple mathematics shows the entire paradigm of emission reduction is a failure. It is wrong to focus on the 1% under Paris when the real problem is the remaining 99% outside Paris. The real issue is how we can remove all that dangerous carbon from the air safely and quickly. Emission reduction efforts only generate political conflict and resistance, as the election of Donald Trump shows, and this political conflict gets in the way of cooperative discussion. Doubling down on the war on coal is a recipe for human extinction.

The psychology and politics of climate is fascinating. It seems to me that the climate lobby has assumed that because the science of the greenhouse effect is settled, therefore the politics of how to fix the climate is equally settled. Uh-uh. Not true. Wrong. False. As the 1% Paris ratio shows, emission reduction can deliver a tiny fraction of the required carbon removal. Emission reduction is justified on grounds of reducing pollution and improving economic efficiency, not not on grounds of climate stability. But the Paris Accord puts almost all its eggs in the emission reduction basket. Stupid.

And the denial movement is equally if not more stupid, but its attitude is explained by the need for a popular placeholder that will prevent the economic chaos of a rapid shift away from fossil fuels.

So why is it like that? My interpretation is that the settled science leads people to think in polarised bloc terms. Since scientific knowledge about the environment has traditionally been associated with the political left, with the emphasis on regulating business to limit its drive for profit untrammelled by externalities, the simple assumption by the climate lobby is that measures to fix the climate must be modelled on this same path of regulating business, something that only liberal progressives want to do.

People therefore think the only way to fix the climate is to install left wing governments. They subordinate all technical arguments to that strategic plan. It means anyone with different thinking is shunned.

Negative externalities include the harmful waste products of business. They can be addressed either by preventing their production or by cleaning them up. The Montreal Protocol prevents the production of gasses that destroy the ozone layer, providing a successful model for how the Paris Accord is imagined to prevent the production of gasses that heat the planet. The alternative model, cleaning up waste, is illustrated by sanitation, since reducing production of human waste is not feasible.

My view is simply that the prevention of emissions cannot be a feasible way to stabilise the climate, due to the unfeasible 1% Paris ratio. However, removing carbon from the air is a feasible, safe and rapid way to fix the climate. The best way to mine carbon is to utilise iron as the limiting element in ocean fertility.

Scientists have calculated that in the large zones of the world ocean that are anaemic, adding just one iron atom can cause photosynthesis involving more than a million times its weight in CO2, because iron is the limiting element. The best way to add iron evenly across the sea is in shipping flue gas plumes going up to the troposphere a mile above the surface.

The big problem with this idea is not technical but political. Groups like 350.org who are fixated on the war on coal think that such iron methods will reduce political pressure to reduce emissions. So they have corrupted the UN Convention on Biological Diversity to define adding an atom of iron to the sea as “dumping of waste” except in very controlled methods, in order to bully scientists away from anything other than emission reduction as a method to fix the climate. Emission reduction advocacy is a disgrace and a perilous recipe for climate catastrophe.

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What I'm gathering here is that the real roadblock to effective climate solutions is the lack of an informed citizenry. And that the old cliché applies, "There are none so blind as those who will not see." People don't want hear about climate change because they think fixing it will cost them money or jobs. At this point our democratically elected leaders have a responsibility to educate us on this issue before a catastrophe occurs -- and no one knows how soon that will be. Personally, I thought a sustained reduction in CO2 emissions through decreased dependence on fossil fuels and other methods would be enough.

Having read a few of your rather intense posts on this issue I'm worried. We are doing nothing that addresses the real problem largely because our efforts to correct the issue are counterproductive. They mask the problem and effectively block even a discussion of the true peril because fixes implemented or proposed now, give the illusion the problem is under control, thus negating our understanding of the urgency with which accurate assessments and solutions are needed if we want to hang on to our planet.

Something like that is what you're telling me in far more specific terms, I think.

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And now I'm learning all about how nitrogen dioxide caused 10,000 premature deaths in Germany last Year.

Netflix has a new series called Dirty Money. The first episode is about that little problem VW is having with emissions on its new turbo diesels. I thought it was bad. I mean I'd read they were buying cars back. That's bad. But if you watch the episode you will learn the problem is worse. Much worse.

A shift from dirty to clean fuels is good for the environment, good for human health, good for technological innovation and good for economic efficiency.

However, my argument, which no one wants to engage with, is that despite all these great benefits, clean fuels do nothing to slow climate change. They simply operate on too small and slow a scale to stop the freight train approaching. The only way to stop the climate freight train is to physically remove the excess carbon that humans have added to the air.

Emission reduction is not a substitute for carbon removal. Unfortunately, the politics of climate are so toxic and divided that even esteemed scientific bodies like the American Geophysical Union are unwilling to debate this simple question of evidence.

Robert Tulip wrote:A shift from dirty to clean fuels is good for the environment, good for human health, good for technological innovation and good for economic efficiency.

However, my argument, which no one wants to engage with, is that despite all these great benefits, clean fuels do nothing to slow climate change. They simply operate on too small and slow a scale to stop the freight train approaching. The only way to stop the climate freight train is to physically remove the excess carbon that humans have added to the air.

Emission reduction is not a substitute for carbon removal.

Maybe 2 weeks ago I mentioned I had to read some posts a few times to understand them fully. I read your original post on the need for carbon mining several times. We have a time bomb on our hands no is talking about, never mind trying to defuse. It's not that I don't want to engage with your argument; you seem to have covered the situation comprehensively and I just have nothing intelligent to add.

Carbon mining could be a great source of carbon emission reducing in the world.
Carbon is becoming a serious problem to the world economy and human civilization. If we do not find any possible solution to this problem human civilization may face extreme temperatures, problematic environment and climate. So all of should be aware of this serious problem and work accordingly.

Litwitlou wrote:I read your original post on the need for carbon mining several times.

Thanks very much Litwitlou for your conversation here. My impression is that most people do not want to know about what is actually happening to our planet, and are happy to go quietly into extinction or collapse. I regard that attitude as a shameful tragedy. It is hard to see what could wake people from their deathly torpor. Perhaps this conversation here will help.

Litwitlou wrote: We have a time bomb on our hands no is talking about, never mind trying to defuse.

Quite extraordinary really. We have all this nonsense talk about how military expenditure will deliver national security, and meanwhile we have clear scientific evidence of massive global security risk factors, such as disruption to ocean currents, melting of the poles, dangerous warming, mass extinction, etc, and as you say, almost no one is really talking about it except in ways that don’t address the problem.

I think the most culpable organisations in terms of talking about the time bomb are those who advocate emission reduction, which is a false answer. It is a great tragedy that smart scientists like James Hansen have been sucked into the non-answer of reducing emissions as the solution to climate change. It just shows you can be brilliant at astrophysics but a moron at politics. I was quite disgusted to see Hansen together with the communist activist Naomi Klein, spouting her drivel about how class war is the solution to everything, spearheaded by the useless and counterproductive divestment campaign against fossil energy. https://theintercept.com/2018/01/11/new ... te-change/

The Klein mentality somehow reminds me of someone saying that you can defuse a timebomb by carefully extracting the nitroglycerine, or using a hammer, rather than stopping the clock. Sadly emission reduction has a very high risk of blowing up in our faces.

Litwitlou wrote: It's not that I don't want to engage with your argument; you seem to have covered the situation comprehensively and I just have nothing intelligent to add.

I was not talking about you, but about the cowering timid scientists who have been bullied by the communist activists who run the climate movement. The communists say, in their more candid moments, that climate policy is just a ruse to redistribute wealth from rich to poor. And the scientists are too scared to stand up to them, fearing that the neo-comms control the grant money. Climate politics is utterly corrupt and degraded.

Back in 2010, an IPCC leader Ottmar Edenhofer said “the next world climate summit in Cancun is actually an economy summit during which the distribution of the world’s resources will be negotiated. Climate policy has almost nothing to do anymore with environmental protection.”

I have not found any evidence of the climate movement resiling from this absurd view. Meanwhile the freight train approaches and we are tied down like Penelope Pitstop. Carbon mining means working with the fossil fuel industry, and the insurance industry, the tourism industry, fishing, chemicals, shipping, etc, to take more carbon out of the air than we add. Carbon mining could strand emission reduction like a beached whale in its pretensions to be a viable climate protection strategy. Carbon mining could destroy the whole strategic argument of the climate movement that fossil energy reserves are stranded assets. So the communists in the emission reduction movement are bitterly opposed to carbon mining, and have managed to infect the rest of the climate lobby with their mentality of doubt, like how big tobacco said the jury is still out.

To understand this point, it is essential to go back to earlier comments from climate activists, such as the one above from the IPCC official, where people were more honest about their opinions, before they had worked out the tactic of avoiding political reaction by maintaining secrecy and deception. Many people worry that such class war mentality, advocating wealth transfer for climate stability, is ineffective. That is exactly why Donald Trump withdrew from the morally bankrupt Paris Accord.

Now of course Trump wrapped that decision up in a lot of his own political nonsense, but that does not change the fact that his departure should have put a rocket up the climate movement, producing some soul-searching about whether their strategies are workable. But no, the anti-Trump forces are now engaged in fervent denial of reality, through their failure to see that Paris is a crock. They just say we will wait out these four years of hell, blocking our ears and eyes.

A good example of this reverse climate denial is a recent publication, Federal research, development, and demonstration priorities for carbon dioxide removal in the United States. It is very weak, in my opinion, primarily due to how it prioritises politics over science. Others might see it differently, but I hope it is possible to have a civil fact-based conversation about what these ideological arguments imply about achieving climate stability.

This article signals from its first sentence, “Carbon Dioxide Removal technologies may be critical to achieving deep decarbonization,” that its authors see partisan politics as more important than any immediate effort to achieve climate results in the context of the Trump Presidency.

All their readers well know that the Trump Administration is opposed to the concept of decarbonisation, which is the leading idea in the war on coal that is central to the Paris Accord. The climate movement is in total denial about the bankruptcy of decarbonisation. To get a view of how decarbonisation is contested as a “miserable fantasy”, see this article by former British Chancellor Nigel Lawson. But these CDR Priority authors just blithely ignore that entire line of thought, putting disdain in place of engagement.

They therefore signal they are not interested in dialogue with the current administration on climate change, but consider that campaigning for the 2020 election, with a ‘decarbonisation President’, is the only viable strategy. They then confirm this partisan mentality by saying “Recently, the White House Mid-Century Strategy for Deep Decarbonization affirmed the role that CDR can play in US mitigation efforts through 2050 (The White House, 2016)”. No mention that this policy has been rejected by the current President, and is not available on the White House website, but only from the Government of California.

While they say “executive branch implementation can begin at any time”, that is little more than a political dig at Trump who has expressed his complete opposition to their ideas. Readers here may share this partisan outlook of horror at Trump, thinking if they can stick their fingers in their ears it will all go away, and they can formulate strategies assuming that conservatives will allow them to be implemented.

If for a moment people consider the massive political barriers to achieving decarbonisation, then perhaps other approaches can be considered. There actually is also a fact-based conversation about climate change that questions the assumption that the Paris Accord is central. That conversation is mainly led by Bjorn Lomborg, with his empirical observation that Paris only achieves 1% of the carbon removal needed for climate stability, and the focus needs to shift from renewable subsidies to R&D into new technology. Unfortunately, Lomborg is despised as a pariah by the political left, so his analysis gets ignored by ad hominem reasoning.

My own focus is on ocean-based carbon removal. If ocean-based technology, such as Iron Salt Aerosol, can remove carbon on a larger scale than total emissions, it could make the concept of decarbonisation unnecessary for climate stability. The need for decarbonisation is only a flawed assumption, and the basis of this assumption is entirely political, not scientific. But this “US Strategy” document accepts that flawed political assumption.

They extend that government-focussed attitude through a veiled hostility toward private enterprise. Despite mentioning commercial deployment, the article says “We expect this synthesis to be relevant for civil society” while pointedly ignoring relevance to business. It seems they don’t see public-private partnership as part of the strategy. What about cooperation with the fossil fuel industry on carbon removal? Obviously that is politically incorrect.

Its list of five main functions that federal agencies can do to progress carbon removal makes no mention of mobilising commercial finance. Again, that would be politically incorrect.

Then in the barriers to coordination, there is no mention of political ideology as a barrier, even though untested assumptions can often be a primary barrier to government cooperation with the private sector. Ideology is also a barrier to CDR full stop, with the pervasive assumption that carbon removal undermines incentive to achieve emission reduction.

Such documents engage in an elaborate dance to be able to plausibly deny their aggressive partisan intent. It looks like they can’t be more honest and direct, given the general agreement to speak in code in order to mobilise political opposition to Trump.

Robert Tulip wrote: Back in 2010, an IPCC leader Ottmar Edenhofer said “the next world climate summit in Cancun is actually an economy summit during which the distribution of the world’s resources will be negotiated. Climate policy has almost nothing to do anymore with environmental protection.”

I looked in vain for this quotation in the interview posted by the blogger on the far-right fundamentalist website in your link. The quotation is the blogger's characterization of Edenhofer's remarks, not his exact words, and when you read his words you see she has misrepresented him. He does not let down his guard, as you stated, and admit that emissions reduction is but a stalking horse for the true agenda of redistributing the world's wealth. He does say that we must channel money to places like Africa to help it adapt to the harmful effects of climate change. The money would go primarily towards agriculture, since climate change is stressing the continent's ability to produce food. You can justifiably say he's redistributionist in that regard. I think 'communist' is way out there, though.

One can imagine the blogger's motive in impugning Edenhofer. God would never make a world that would go haywire owing to the actions of the creature he put in charge of it.

Edenhofer is serious and thoughtful in this interview. I think he would agree with Bjorn Lomborg in at least one area, the emphasis on adaptation to warming--in preventing more world hunger, for example. Edenhofer also doesn't believe that clean energy technology will deliver us from global warming's threats: " We try unsafe experiments such as geo-engineering, focus on the development of clean and safe energy, or one trusts in regional and local solutions. However, there is no indication that any of these ideas solves the problem." Lomborg does think we should seriously consider geoengineering, but on the other two points Edenhofer is with Lomborg.

While I haven't kept up with everything Lomborg has said, I've respected him ever since reading The Skeptical Environmentalist some years ago. Lomborg doesn't resort to negative stereotypes of those with whom he disagrees, doesn't use ideological branding to attack opponents. He relies on the facts as he sees them, even while forcefully stating his opinions based on them. I especially appreciate his attention to environmental problems that deserve as much action as climate change does.

A significant area on which you and he would seem to disagree is that Lomborg does believe that we must eventually turn to non-carbon energy technology to counteract our warming of the planet. It is just that we won't be able to make the transition with anything near the speed needed to avoid the bad effects of climate change. Other differences are his non-alarmism regarding climate and his advocacy (a cautious one) of geoengineering only for the short-term, while clean energy alternatives are created.

My mistake, I accidentally provided the wrong link - as per the article, it is from http://www.thegwpf.com/ipcc-official-cl ... ds-wealth/ and was only reposted five years later on that religious site which came up when I searched for it. Thanks for noticing. And I am not necessarily endorsing anything else on that site either.

The summary looks a fair explanation of the interview. The IPCC official says "One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore...The climate summit in Cancun ... is not a climate conference, but one of the largest economic conferences since the Second World War... one must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy."

This communist politicisation of climate policy, prioritising the transfer of wealth over fixing the climate, is a grave security peril. I understand that these days many communists don't like being called communists, since they turned into watermelons, but when something walks and quacks like a duck you should call it a duck.