Global Warming...New Report...and it ain't happy news

With the "climate dyke concept", introduced since some time by the German coastal states, it is now possible to compensate for a sea-level rise of up to two metres in two to three construction phases = motto: let future generations decide what to do.

It would be a gigantic engineering enterprise, endangered at every storm. The dyke would also need to be able to get container traffic through, and fishing vessels, or at least their catch. Hence you'd need a harbor built in high sea.

Well, the Ijesselmeer and the Markermeer project - better known as Zuiderzee Works - were thought to be impossible by some but that system of dams and dykes, land reclamation and water drainage work improved flood protection a lot.

Trump and most u s politicians have the answer to population movement in lowlands. It aint our problem, let em drown. Like the emigrent problem. Send them back to their country and let the armed gangs take care of them. A good Christian attitude.

Shut up. I said noting so moronic as that. You just make this crap up in your head.

I don't remember, but I've heard it said that the Deltaworks and Flevoland land-reclamation are so successful that the Dutch are trying to export such engineering expertise to other low-lying coastal areas.

The projects are very expensive, and thus a good source of income for the Dutch state and their beneficiaries, but it's basically just building infrastructure for tax money, only because it's a transnational/international/intergovernmental project, it doesn't seem like it's the Dutch taxing you but rather your own government, even though the Dutch are getting the money (at least some of it, anyway, depending on how the local government that commissions the project funds it).

Global commerce is funny. When things are done by governments at the national level, they are regarded as governmental projects and the payments they take for public goods/services are recognized as taxes. If, however, there is global/international interaction involved, it obscures what's really going on; i.e. one government can tax the people of a foreign nation by selling something to their government or receiving foreign aide, etc. but it is the local taxing authority that gets the blame.

Is it not ironic that global industrial-consumerism is causing climate change and sea-level rise, and European banks can simultaneously invest in both maintaining the global economy and mitigating the sea level rise by selling coastline protection plans? Not much economic incentive/interest there in stopping/reversing climate degradation and sea-level rise then, is there?

That sort of explains why, whenever the Republican party (or Tories) seeks to gain more independence from global interdependence, they are subject to political-economic resistance from globalists of Europe and Asia. Of course, the problem is that the EU and other more globalist governments may have better intentions where climate reforms are concerned, but the question is whether they are really capable of supporting economic reforms at a global level that will also reduce their ability to leverage international commerce for money to spend on imports they don't want to substitute with local productivity/efficiency/conservation.

Not caused by climate change, yet another indicator of global sickness and a looming environmental apocalypse:

Artificial illumination is helping to devastate the earth’s insects

The German co-authors at GEOMAR published today the report as well:
"By our present standards, the dimensions of such a project sound completely unimaginable", says Prof. Joakim Kjellsson, junior professor in maritime meteorology and co-author of GEOMAR. "Quite apart from the technical challenges of such a project, it would of course have massive implications for the fishing and shipping industry, not to mention the marine ecosystem of the North Sea and beyond", Kjellsson continues. Nevertheless, such a system, if it were technically feasible at all, could be more economical than individual coastal protection measures in the 15 riparian states, the authors say.

"We don't really think that such a project should be realized," says Prof. Kjellsson. "We would like to stress that the best option is still to tackle climate change and prevent such a solution from becoming necessary at all," says the Swedish scientist. "We also wanted to show the immense challenges we will face if we do not get global warming under control in the coming decades. Then future generations will have to deal with problems of this magnitude, or huge areas of land will become uninhabitable and millions of people will have to move inland," warns Prof. Kjellsson emphatically.
(Originally in German at link above.)

I agree with Prof. Joakim Kjellsson. He put my objections much better than I could.

Wind energy provided 15% of the electricity in Europe in 2019, however the current rate of installation is not enough to deliver the Green Deal, according to WindEurope.

Europe installed 15.4GW of new wind energy in 2019, 11.8GW of onshore wind and the record 3.6GW of new offshore wind, bringing the total number to 205GW.

Although 2019 installations were up 27% compared to 2018, the rate of installations needs to double to reach the goals set out in the Green Deal, WindEurope said.

“Wind was 15% of Europe’s electricity. But Europe is not building enough new wind farms to deliver the EU’s goal that it should be half of Europe’s electricity by 2050,” said WindEurope CEO Giles Dickson.

“Climate neutrality and the Green Deal require Europe to install over twice as much new wind energy each year as it managed in 2019. And the growth needs to come from both offshore and onshore wind.”

According to Dickson, this requires a new approach to planning and permitting and continued investment in power grids.

The National Energy and Climate Plans for 2030 are crucial, the WindEurope CEO said, adding that the EU needs to ensure they are ambitious and rigorously implemented.

Across Europe, there were EUR 19 billion of new investments announced in wind farms, covering 11.8GW of capacity, and 15GW of new capacity was awarded in government auctions and tenders.

Currently, Europe has 22GW of offshore wind, of which the UK and Germany account for three-quarters, and Denmark, Belgium and the Netherlands share nearly all of the rest.

https://www.offshorewind.biz/2020/02/17/windeurope-europe-needs-to-double-wind-installation/

(Members of WindEurope include wind project developers Orsted and Iberdrola and turbine manufacturer Siemens Gamesa)

True, but at how fast a rate? I read recently that Miami is starting to build roads higher so they will not flood. Less people will move to places at risk of flooding as the pattern worsens. Some people may just build on footings that can be underwater, and then they will become like archipelagos of buildings.

Ironically, land development should also be becoming archipelago-like, except instead of islands over water connected by bridges, they should be islands over reforested/orcharded land. One way or another humans are going to eventually need to return the ground/soil to nature and live above it so natural hydrology can return to perform all its classical functions to the maximum potential.

These projections where supply is supposed to change while demand just waits for it to catch up are biased. Supply also has a lot of catching up to do with better insulation and more energy-efficient indoor spaces with smaller volume of heated/cooled area.

Big halls and high ceilings are fine for spaces that are naturally ventilated with breezeways, which there should be more of, but areas that need to be insulated should be better insulated and be smaller in volume/height.

Did anyone see the 60 minutes story last night about the Australian bush fires and the politics of global warming going on there?

We get a local version of 60 Minutes in Oz.

What was the take on your version?

What stood out to me is that no matter how starkly evident are the effects of global warming, the right wing politicians there remain deeply in denial. They try to frame the whole issue into some hoax to cheat the petroleum and coal based industries. The program alternated between showing the devastation of the unprecedented, climate-change fueled, gigantic, endless fires - and conservative politicians sneering and holding up pieces of coal and saying “See? Nothing to be afraid of!”

sorta like the "smoking is good for you" campaign authored by the tobacco industry

Sadly, I think these kinds of attitudes have to represented in the media in order for the public to ultimately question them. On the one hand, there is confirmation bias that comes from seeing such opinions reflected in the media, but there is also a thesis-antithesis-synthesis effect where the thesis gradually provokes its antithesis, which then leads to a synthesis.

Unfortunately, I don't know how bad and/or irreversible the effects of denial can become before sufficient questioning of it emerges to evoke progress.

There's also the problem that strongly conformist cultural behavior can suppress questioning to the point that dialogue/dialectical-reasoning never occurs. Everyone just marches in lockstep to avoid getting called out as a questioner.

The question I have with these big fires is will the global markets for meat consumption be sufficiently convinced of the climate harm caused by meat-raising to resist the temptation of low prices driven down by abundance? People may not like seeing forest burned, but when burgers are on sale, can they resist funding the land-clearing that's done to keep the burgers coming at those prices?

1. Since all of us fly by jet air travel, how would this affect the little people and the elites any different?

2. How many so-call little people fly by jet air on any given day worldwide, compared to the number of so-called elite people fly on any given day?




1. Since all of us fly by jet air travel, how would this affect the little people and the elites any different?

2. How many so-call little people fly by jet air on any given day worldwide, compared to the number of so-called elite people fly on any given day?

Not everyone flies. There are also trains and buses.

There could be a lot better options for long-distance travel by bus.

You could have buses platooning, for example, and charging/refueling on the highway without stopping so that a given bus trip could go much faster than driving the same distance.

If buses are allowed to platoon using adaptive cruise control tech, you could have sleeping cars, dining cars, etc. just like a train.

Yeah, it's a bit insidious and complex.

Much of Australia's wealth has traditionally been from digging **** out of the ground and selling it overseas without any value-add.

That has changed a little over the decades (Tourism and Education are comparable export earners now), but....

Mining created a lot of concentrated wealth (google Twiggy Forest and Gina Reinhardt for example). Wealth buys power, funds right wing think tanks and compromises politicians. Both major parties get donations from mining but the conservative right gets more.

It's not the only motivation for trying to preserve mining.
There are legitimate concerns about the balance of trade and the loss of jobs, not to mention an almost 'cultural' belief that mining is good (at least among old white guys). To the point where an element of our leftish opposition now has a schism group opposing shutdown of coal because a large lump of their electorate rely on the sector for income.

Add to that the inability to see that fossil fuel mining has less and less value in employment terms - (and can be a shitty dangerous job) that demand for coal will drop, that we are ******* over the environment while simultaneously missing a fantastic opportunity to export energy generated extremely cheaply. So many opportunities within a renewable economy here.

One that intrigues me is we transport most of our minerals as ores (aluminium and iron for example) but with near free electricity we could be refining those ores into metals - and China would be delighted to by them because freight falls through the floor the same amount of metal and they can burn less coal in their refineries.

Basically we have a singular lack of vision in government - as Martin Mackenzie-Murray noted late last year:

For a long time now we've suffered from people more gifted at assuming power than acquitting it.