"Reality is moving faster than we thought or hoped it would."

The rate of "climate change"/global warming is occurring faster than previously predicted.

The northern ice cap has been shrinking since the 1970s, with global warming driving the loss of about three-quarters of its volume so far. But the recent heat in the Arctic has shocked scientists, with temperatures 33C above average in parts of the Russian Arctic and 20C higher in some other places.

In November, ice levels hit a record low, and we are now in “uncharted territory”, said Prof Jennifer Francis, an Arctic climate expert at Rutgers University in the US, who first became interested in the region when she sailed through it on a round-the-world trip in the 1980s.

“These rapid changes in the Arctic are affecting weather patterns where you live right now,” she said. “In the past you have had natural variations like El Niño, but they have never happened before in combination with this very warm Arctic, so it is a whole new ball game.

Of course as winter storms hit the US the deniers will point out the windows and say look see.

“The worrying aspect is that such dynamical changes can occur more abruptly than simple background warming of the climate,” said Coumou. “Dynamical changes can change more rapidly and can therefore lead to surprises and I think there are many such possibilities in the system.”

The MSM's treatment that climate change has two sides has enabled:

“A large fraction of the US public still doesn’t believe that it is humans that are affecting the climate system,” said Francis. “But one of the silver linings of this pretty dark cloud is that the Arctic is such an obvious and conspicuous change, that anybody can see them happening. There is no ambiguity whatsoever.”

But this changing of minds needs to happen quickly, said Hansen: “If we wait for the natural world to reveal itself clearly, it may be too late.”

Hell, most Americans don't know what is going on in the next State let alone in the far north the misinformation campaign has been that "good".

In and earlier article this year

Arctic scientists have warned that the increasingly rapid melting of the ice cap risks triggering 19 “tipping points” in the region that could have catastrophic consequences around the globe.

The Arctic Resilience Report found that the effects of Arctic warming could be felt as far away as the Indian Ocean, in a stark warning that changes in the region could cause uncontrollable climate change at a global level.

So combine tipping point and changes occurring faster than expected, time is running out faster than previously stated under current international agreements eg Paris Agreement of December 2015, only one year later we are entering a whole "new" dynamic.

A climate tipping point is a somewhat ill-defined concept of a point when global climate changes from one stable state to another stable state, in a similar manner to a wine glass tipping over. After the tipping point has been passed, a transition to a new state occurs. The tipping event may be irreversible, comparable to wine spilling from the glass: standing up the glass will not put the wine back.

See: The Arctic Resilience Report 2016 That has identified 19 tipping points in the Arctic.

The changes happening in the Arctic today are driven primarily by external factors. Climate change
is the most pervasive and powerful driver of change, but many other environmental changes are
taking place as well, alongside rapid social and economic developments. In some contexts, factors
such as resource demand, transportation needs, migration, geopolitical changes and globalization are
making the greatest impact on the Arctic. Indeed, many Arctic social-ecological systems face multiple
stressors at once.

The most dangerous thing human beings can do is to play with their own biosphere. Nobody knows what the end result will be, but getting to the next stability point [whatever that will be] will cause havoc and possibly global conflicts/mass migrations.

The scientific consensus is there, ignoring it wont make it go away, but adding to it could be catastrophic for all of us.

The sad thing is that the political will to do something about a problem tends to only reach consensus when it is damn near too late, the problem with climate change is that it has a considerable time lag [decades] between cause and effect. When we actually try to do something because the current effects are severe "enough", it is already too late, it will get worse. You cant just switch climate change/global warming off, no matter how many votes you get or what you believe.

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The New Climate Regime

Bruno Latour and his French effort in the AIME Project (An Inquiry Into Modes Of Existence = AIME) has important insights into what is needed to deal on a whole new level with climate change.

Here are some tweets this morning ( twitter AIMEproject)

AIME ‏@AIMEproject 6h6 hours ago
Trump’s innovation in politics is to define a whole movement on denial of ecological mutations, the indifference to facts is a consequence.

AIME ‏@AIMEproject 6h6 hours ago
It’s not Trump’ indifference to facts that makes his troops ignore climate, it’s because his job is to make US ignore climate 4 more years.

AIME ‏@AIMEproject 6h6 hours ago
Since the Exxon scandal in the 90s it’s clear that political affiliation is largely organised around climate denial, it trumps left/right.

AIME ‏@AIMEproject 6h6 hours ago
It’s not that people vote against their interests, it’s that people are now more interested in believing that you can escape climate 4 years

AIME ‏@AIMEproject 6h6 hours ago
The government of the 1% for the 1% by the 1% insures that they will be protected against the impact of ecological mutations, denial is key.

Latour’s metaphysics considers both human and non human actors. For example, water is an actor in North Dakota protests by water protectors. In fact the major political actor now is The New Climate Regime

His major project is Reset Modernity

Reset Modernity! Edited by Bruno Latour

Overview
Modernity has had so many meanings and tries to combine so many contradictory sets of attitudes and values that it has become impossible to use it to define the future. It has ended up crashing like an overloaded computer. Hence the idea is that modernity might need a sort of reset. Not a clean break, not a “tabula rasa,” not another iconoclastic gesture, but rather a restart of the complicated programs that have been accumulated, over the course of history, in what is often called the “modernist project.” This operation has become all the more urgent now that the ecological mutation is forcing us to reorient ourselves toward an experience of the material world for which we don’t seem to have good recording devices.

Reset Modernity! is organized around six procedures that might induce the readers to reset some of those instruments. Once this reset has been completed, readers might be better prepared for a series of new encounters with other cultures. After having been thrown into the modernist maelstrom, those cultures have difficulties that are just as grave as ours in orienting themselves within the notion of modernity. It is not impossible that the course of those encounters might be altered after modernizers have reset their own way of recording their experience of the world.

At the intersection of art, philosophy, and anthropology, Reset Modernity! has assembled close to sixty authors, most of whom have participated, in one way or another, in the Inquiry into Modes of Existence initiated by Bruno Latour. Together they try to see whether such a reset and such encounters have any practicality. Much like the two exhibitions Iconoclash and Making Things Public, this book documents and completes what could be called a “thought exhibition:” Reset Modernity! held at ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe from April to August 2016. Like the two others, this book, generously illustrated, includes contributions, excerpts, and works from many authors and artists.

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Some even believe that we will find a magic switch to make it all go away.

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Lily O Lady's picture

a good game. Had Gore gained the White House in 2000 we might have had a chance which is the real reason he lost IMO. TPTB couldn't have someone who really cared about climate change in the White House.

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"The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?" ~Orwell, "1984"

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Beware the bullshit factories.

Lily O Lady's picture

Now they're popular with Republicans and Democrats. The press stopped Gore the way they worked against Sanders. Liberal columnists dumped all over him. I couldn't understand it at the time, but now it looks like TPTB wanted him out. They wanted an oil man rather than a warrior against climate change.

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"The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?" ~Orwell, "1984"

asterisk's picture

All the mean 'wooden' jokes did not even make sense.
Obviously the MSM wants to install a Twit in Chief.

Maybe if Al Gore had a Twitter account back then . . .

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Cassiodorus's picture

Al Gore has far too little of an idea of what to do about climate change. Can any of you reading this message find an actual Al Gore plan for climate change? If so I will retract this comment.

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"The war on Gaza, backed by the West, is a demonstration that the West is willing to cross all lines. That it will discard any nuance of humanity. That it is willing to commit genocide" -- Moon of Alabama

Lily O Lady's picture

deal with climate change. I have not read it. The Wikipedia entry only deals with two of the topics. Nuclear power is not a good option, apparently (I agree) nor is carbon capture and sequestration. Solar and wind are mentioned in the article, but Gore's thoughts are not explained. This could mean that his ideas aren't good, or they are so good that TPTB want them suppressed.

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"The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?" ~Orwell, "1984"

asterisk's picture

I listened to it as a book on tape and do not remember exactly which solutions he pushed. The book was reasonable and his proposals would have made a good start.

If we had started in 2000 we would have bought time to find better solutions. We would have better technology and a political will to use it. If the Supreme Court had not given Bush the Presidency the Arctic ice would not be melting yet.

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or imaginary President Kerry or any imaginary President would have done if he or she had ever actually made it to the White House. Gore, like Clinton and Lieberman was a founding member of the odious Democratic Leadership Council, when the Koch brothers were donors and sitting on its Executive Council. And he did choose Lieberman as his running mate. He probably would have been better than Dimson on the environment, but we will never actually know.

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Roy Blakeley's picture

pretty much guaranteed a loss for Gore. Gore was wooden, but so what. He could easily have won, but the campaign was seriously incompetent.

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Lily O Lady's picture

the campaign. The MSM put the stink on him. They always showed Bush with his sleeves rolled up. Sadly, they never considered what he would do with those rolled up sleeves. TPTB apparently preferred Bush to Gore. I think Gore's views on climate change were not approved of by TPTB.

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"The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?" ~Orwell, "1984"

Roy Blakeley's picture

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is either going to put a cap on our hopes to get out of this catastrophe or it's going to serve as the giant wake-up call we need.

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Beware the bullshit factories.

In the UK stopping the burning of coal in the major cities [Clean Air Act in 1956] became a local form of climate change, the toxic sulphur laden fogs that caused so many deaths.

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China orders roads and factories to be closed as it chokes under toxic smog and warns there is WORSE ahead

  • 23 cities in the world's most populous nation have issued red alerts for pollution
  • The smog is covering a ninth of the country and risks serious health problems
  • Many large hospitals have seen a surge in the number of patients

Most of China's smog is blamed on the burning of coal for electricity and heating, which spikes when demand peaks in winter.

The issue is a source of enduring public anger in China, where fast economic growth in recent decades has come at the cost of widespread environmental degradation.

Chinese censors, who tightly control online commentary, were busily removing remarks about the smog from the twitter-like Weibo social media platform, according to the web site Freeweibo.com, which tracks posts deleted from the service.

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native

scale.

Learning is something we seem to have trouble with.

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CB's picture

on a per capita basis (China #7).
China has also outperformed the US in the installation of wind and solar. It took 10 years to drop emissions 12% in the US. If you also consider the fact that the GDP of China has increased at approx three times the rate of the US, China has greatly outperformed the US in controlling emissions.

A look at China's efforts to reduce coal use
...
China's domestic coal production fell 3.5 percent in 2015, while imports dropped by almost 30 percent, according to Chinese government data.
...
The document also noted that the country's carbon emissions dropped by three to four percent in 2015.
...
At the same time, growing public concern over the poor quality of air in Chinese cities has prompted the government to formulate stringent measures to deal with the problem.

In 2014, Premier Li Keqiang even announced a "War on air pollution" - following a year of what has been termed as "airpocalypse" in the capital Beijing. Li's plan to fight against air pollution includes reforming "the way energy is consumed and produced" and eliminating outdated energy producers and industrial plants.
...
"China has clearly flagged a long-term policy to diversify its electricity generation fleet - more nuclear, wind, solar, gas and hydro," Buckley added, pointing to the almost 30.5 gigawatt (GW) of wind power capacity China installed in 2015 alone.

In a report IEEFA published last week, it was also estimated that the total wind power generation capacity across China had reached 145 GW by the end of 2015, almost double that in the United States (about 75GW), and more than triple the estimated 43 GW of capacity in Germany.

But Beijing's efforts are not limited to wind power alone. The government also plans to increase solar power capacity to 150 GW by 2020. This means the country uses less coal to generate electricity, says analyst Buckley.

Besides increased emphasis on renewable energy, Beijing is also providing financial incentives for companies to accelerate the shift away from coal.

Keep in mind that a very large portion of China's emissions are due to exports to countries like the US and EU who are heavy consumers. (China's exports to the US amounted to $502.7 billion or 21.8% of its overall imports.)

The US is the major source of global warming in the world (and has been for a century) due to it's massive consumerism.

Use It and Lose It: The Outsize Effect of U.S. Consumption on the Environment
It is well known that Americans consume far more natural resources and live much less sustainably than people from any other large country of the world. “A child born in the United States will create thirteen times as much ecological damage over the course of his or her lifetime than a child born in Brazil,” reports the Sierra Club’s Dave Tilford, adding that the average American will drain as many resources as 35 natives of India and consume 53 times more goods and services than someone from China.

Tilford cites a litany of sobering statistics showing just how profligate Americans have been in using and abusing natural resources. For example, between 1900 and 1989 U.S. population tripled while its use of raw materials grew by a factor of 17. “With less than 5 percent of world population, the U.S. uses one-third of the world’s paper, a quarter of the world’s oil, 23 percent of the coal, 27 percent of the aluminum, and 19 percent of the copper,” he reports. “Our per capita use of energy, metals, minerals, forest products, fish, grains, meat, and even fresh water dwarfs that of people living in the developing world.”

He adds that the U.S. ranks highest in most consumer categories by a considerable margin, even among industrial nations. To wit, American fossil fuel consumption is double that of the average resident of Great Britain and two and a half times that of the average Japanese. Meanwhile, Americans account for only five percent of the world’s population but create half of the globe’s solid waste.
...
Paradoxically, those with the lightest environmental footprint are also the most likely to feel both guilty and disempowered. “In what may be a major disconnect between perception and behavior, the study also shows that consumers who feel the guiltiest about their impact—those in China, India and Brazil—actually lead the pack in sustainable consumer choices,” says National Geographic’s Terry Garcia, who coordinates the annual Greendex study. “That’s despite Chinese and Indian consumers also being among the least confident that individual action can help the environment.”

To add insult to injury, the US is the world's richest nation and could afford to do the most in ameliorating climate change. But, on a per capita basis, it does the least.

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to us, because it has been defined to seem "normal".

Tilford cites a litany of sobering statistics showing just how profligate Americans have been in using and abusing natural resources.

Whenever I pass by a big box store surrounded by acres of parked cars, I am reminded of this. I would of course, normally be driving my own car.

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native

CB's picture

amount of 'stuff' they purchase at their local big box and Wallymart stores. Of course this soon fills up their 2,000 sq ft homes so they go out and rent space to put more of their 'stuff' in. Many Americans are addicted to buying and hoarding 'stuff' in a futile attempt to give value and meaning to their lives.
Edward Bernays would be proud of his accomplishments.

Bernays invented the public relations profession in the 1920s and was the first person to take Freud's ideas to manipulate the masses. He showed American corporations how they could make people want things they didn't need by systematically linking mass-produced goods to their unconscious desires.

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terriertribe's picture

Exactly for this reason:

Of course as winter storms hit the US the deniers will point out the windows and say look see.

Even though "global warming" is technically correct, it's too easy for the deniers to fool the non-technical public, as you point out. Something like "global weather disruption" would have let the scientists point at those same winter storms and say "see?" And the heat waves. And the ice loss both north and south. And ...

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Now interviewing signature candidates. Apply within.

at their headquarters for global domination and add fixes to their climate change hoax. Maybe they'll have the deniers put in FEMA camps.

/s

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Beware the bullshit factories.

PriceRip's picture

          so obviously scientists don't really know anything · · ·

          Understanding data is at once a trivial process and an enormously difficult task. Everyone of us have run into this many times in our careers. Just a few weeks ago I was trying to make a point (somewhere else on the internet) using a graphical representation of some data. The loyal opposition pointed to some trivial difference between the scales on one of the axes and spiraled off into the "neverland" of "you are fraudulently representing the data" and "you have no credibility" blah blah blah · · · Well this is the internet and anonymity is the norm, so I said screw it, deleted my side of the "conversation", and went on with my life.

          In real life this sort of thing seldom (if ever) happens. The problem is that most (or perhaps that should read "far too many") decision makers don't hangout with us, literally. For most politicians we are benign magicians at best and evil sorcerers at worst. This, BTW, is true at all levels of government, not just at the national level. I cannot count the number of VIP visits to this university campus where, avoiding the faculty (particularly those recalcitrant faculty) while hobnobbing with obsequious administrators, was the de jure activity.

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Shockwave's picture

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The political revolution continues

Shockwave's picture

...it is clear that the red counties are deniers.

An Extremely Detailed Geography of Climate Change Beliefs

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The political revolution continues

boriscleto's picture

Within a generation are the places least concerned about climate change (except California). Can we act now to prevent climate refuges from those states migrating to ours? (A person can wish...)

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" In the beginning, the universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry, and is generally considered to have been a bad move. -- Douglas Adams, The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy "

featheredsprite's picture

We in the US don't have that excuse.

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Life is strong. I'm weak, but Life is strong.

CB's picture

forefront of the social chaos/upheaval created from rapid climate change affecting food security. This is a bellwether of the worldwide strife to come.
The countries that are presently and historically the most responsible for climate change are also the ones that will experience the least affects - at least in the near future. These very same countries are also the richest and should be in the forefront of addressing these problems.

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/food-insecurity-index/
This website allows you to explore how different scenarios of global greenhouse gas emissions and adaptation to climate change could change the geography of food insecurity in developing and least-developed countries. By altering the levels of future global greenhouse gas emissions and/or the levels of adaptation, you can see how vulnerability to food insecurity changes over time, and compare and contrast these different future scenarios with each other and the present day.

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gulfgal98's picture

Our mass media propaganda machines have definitely had an effect upon public opinion about climate change in the US. I am still amazed when I talk to college educated people who still do not believe in it. Denial (especially fueled by political beliefs) is a very strong thing to overcome. Facts have no bearing on the deniers.

Personally, I think we are already screwed. I am glad I do not have children or grandchildren. The future for the generations who follow us is very bleak.

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Do I hear the sound of guillotines being constructed?

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." ~ President John F. Kennedy

I wonder why so little is being done in preparation. Or maybe it's just get it whilst you still can mentality driving the politics.

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We can't kill hope.

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Beware the bullshit factories.

and I see little change on the horizon.

No harm in being prepared, because even if we stopped polluting tomorrow it will still be rough.

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Bisbonian's picture

No point in hoping in something that is false. We do need to keep trying to slow it down, though, in hopes that somebody survives...but we are also going to have to prepare to just deal with it. No significant action is going to be taken by the US until it is obviously too late.

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"I’m a human being, first and foremost, and as such I’m for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.” —Malcolm X

Cassiodorus's picture

The rich are too busy with their narcissistic drives for wealth and power, the rest of us too busy earning a living. All of the plans for "climate change mitigation" involve an accumulation of "greenness" to match capital accumulation, because the promoted corporate "solution" to climate change is one that will allow the corporations to hang on to the model of capital accumulation as long as possible.

In reality capitalism is deadly for the planet and we need to put an end to it as quickly as possible. They really do believe they can kill everything for profit and just eat money.

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"The war on Gaza, backed by the West, is a demonstration that the West is willing to cross all lines. That it will discard any nuance of humanity. That it is willing to commit genocide" -- Moon of Alabama

the floor wearing a little black dress.

Happy festive season.

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Lily O Lady's picture

the coming apocalypse.
So we have that going for us. /s

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"The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?" ~Orwell, "1984"

asterisk's picture

Apparently they had worked out how they would run things after they sent off the nukes.

I knew a couple of military types at the time and asked them what we planned to do when the Mexicans came across our southern border and announced they would be running things. The Mexican government might reasonably demand reparations for the radioactive fallout after all.

Luckily for me in those days our military did not have the right to shoot the messenger.

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Song of the lark's picture

Climate change will cause, migrations, kinetic dust ups even amongst former friends or within countries, for water and resources etc. Hence widespread surveillance , militarized police etc. TPTB are on it.

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hellinahandcart's picture

In a mid-70's thesis, Carl Sagan wrote about "The Greenhouse Gas Effect." In that essay, he stressed the exponential rate of warming, if nothing were to be done. It wasn't so much a 'tipping point,' as the ever-increasing inability to reverse it, because the heat being trapped in the atmosphere would trigger a feed-back loop, exponentially SPEEDING UP the process. He predicted that if we took no action to counteract warming, we would be facing worldwide famine by 2050.
IMHO, we need to be SCRAMBLING to build/modify infrastructure to deal with the climate changes that are now feeding on itself. If we stopped using fossil fuels tomorrow (not saying we shouldn't), we would still be having to deal w/ the feedback loop. So all the time and energy we're expending talking and arguing is just keeping us from building infrastructure that could help protect us from the (very soon) landscape of tomorrow-- which will be a very different landscape.

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divineorder's picture

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A truth of the nuclear age/climate change: we can no longer have endless war and survive on this planet. Oh sh*t.

Yellerdog's picture

Not only are the we the only creatures that contemplate our personal death but now we are the first and maybe the last to contemplate the extermination of our entire species. Way to to Homo Sapiens.

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MarilynW's picture

A heartbreaking photograph in the NYTimes shows a brown polar bear family visiting an Alaskan town. Had their fur turned brown from rolling in the mud left behind after the ice melted? or are they experiencing hormonal changes that effects their colouring? I didn't read the article so as not to get depressed but the image of brown polar bears is hard for me to forget.

Thank you for the climate report.

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To thine own self be true.

with the brown bears (grizzlies) from the lower latitudes. A documentary I watched described how that was the best possible outcome for the fate of the polar bears. Complete extinction was obviously the worst. The fossil fuel corporations will be responsible for the polar bear genocide.

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Beware the bullshit factories.

dystopian's picture

Capitalism should be called what it really is, MONEYism. The religion wherein money is god. Where it is worshiped above and beyond lowly people and place. I think recently there has been movement to use the original and more proper term climate change due to the oft intentional misusage of "global warming" for the purpose of disparaging. Part of climate change will be global warming. Some areas will experience cooling. Both are a result of climate change.

A friend that studied the Mojave Desert ecosystem for 5 decades (was Ph.D. curator at San Bernadino Nat. Hist. Mus.) said to me "you would not believe the changes I have seen". They could not have been predicted with present knowledge at any time. As one that also has spent over 5 decades studying nature, me too. The changes taking place in our ecosystems are mind-boggling. But most don't know, are unaware, and get their info from the MSM. Further, all the best modeling and predictions based on what we knew has come up short on how radical and how fast the changes would be. They said high latitudes (the Arctic) would warm first. They were right. But it is more faster than they thought. Look at world temp maps (NOAA) and see the melt pools off of Antarctica and Greenland. We are in freefall, and the moneyism people are in control of the message, working feverishly to stop any opposing view.

When one pulls on a strand in the web of life one finds everything is connected. John Muir

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We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.
Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.
both - Albert Einstein