The campaign is heating up

In school, back in the old country, when learning about deserts around the world, we came across a name that summed up what awaited one on a miserably hot day in the desert: Death Valley.

There is simply no way that I would have imagined then that I would live in the United States, and for a few years not far from Death Valley itself.

However, visiting Death Valley never happened.  It turned out that visiting Death Valley and staying at the historic inn during the couple of pleasant months required long-term planning and committing to the dates month in advance.

Death Valley is in the news today: It "hit a scorching 130 degrees on Sunday, marking what could be the hottest temperature on Earth since at least 1913."

130!

The World Meteorological Organization tweeted that this "would be the hottest global temperature officially recorded since 1931."

We can't merely shrug this off though, in a world in which we have been experiencing a warming trend.  A year ago, on July 2nd, Shahdad, Iran, registered 127.6 degrees on the thermometer.  Every year, we are told that it was hotter than the previous year.

Bill McKibben writes that we might be looking at a century of crises:

Because humans have fundamentally altered the physical workings of planet Earth, this is going to be a century of crises, many of them more dangerous than what we’re living through now. The main question is whether we’ll be able to hold the rise in temperature to a point where we can, at great expense and suffering, deal with those crises coherently, or whether they will overwhelm the coping abilities of our civilization.

We can't even console ourselves with the Casablanca line, "We'll Always Have Paris."  tRump withdrew from the Paris Agreement, remember?

So, what are we looking at?

McKibben quotes from the book by Matthew Lynas that he reviews in the essay:

If we stay on the current business-as-usual trajectory, we could see two degrees as soon as the early 2030s, three degrees around mid-century, and four degrees by 2075 or so. If we’re unlucky with positive feedbacks…from thawing permafrost in the Arctic or collapsing tropical rainforests, then we could be in for five or even six degrees by century’s end.

Keep in mind that the "degrees" are in Celsius.  One degree in Celsius is about 1.8 degrees difference in the Fahrenheit scale.

tRump does not want to "stay on the current business-as-usual trajectory"--he is bent on accelerating the process with his populist talk about coal (and oil and natural gas too.)   The Arctic is for drilling! So, we don't even need to wait for 2030!

The record-setting heatwaves of 2019 “will be considered an unusually cool summer in the three-degree world”; over a billion people would live in zones of the planet “where it becomes impossible to safely work outside artificially cooled environments, even in the shade.” The Amazon dies back, permafrost collapses. Change feeds on itself: at three degrees the albedo, or reflectivity, of the planet is grossly altered, with white ice that bounces sunshine back out to space replaced by blue ocean or brown land that absorbs those rays, amplifying the process.
And then comes four degrees

You don't want to know what happens!

While there is no vaccine to protect us from the warming and the effects, there are other things that are happening.  Like:

The price per kilowatt hour of solar power has fallen 82 percent since 2010—this spring in the sunny deserts of Dubai the winning bid for what will be the world’s largest solar array came in at not much more than a penny. The price of wind power has fallen nearly as dramatically. Now batteries are whooshing down the same curve.

There is hope.  Possibilities.  "The climate plan announced by the Biden campaign last month is a credible start toward the necessary effort."

Vote tRump out of office.  And unseat all the Republicans who continue to deny the science and reality of global warming and climate change.

We have exhausted the "low hanging fruit" of energy. Or not?

Recently, Tyler Cowen wrote about how the US has pretty much gathered all the low hanging fruit of economic growth and development and that we are doomed from now on, unless we adopted something along the lines of a libertarian manifesto.  Reviewing Cowen's e-book, Timothy Noah wrote in Slate:

Cowen's core message is: Get used to economic stagnation, or what he calls "the new normal." It's a weird conservative echo of liberalism's era-of-limits gospel from the 1970s, articulated by the Club of Rome and other groups, the chief difference being that liberals used economic pessimism to sell wise environmental stewardship while Cowen is using it to sell complacency about the fate of the middle class.

The WSJ did not do him a favor, which they thought they were doing, when writing:

His arguments aren’t perfect, and “low-hanging fruit” doesn’t quite have the catchiness of “The World is Flat,” but in terms of framing the dialogue Tyler Cowen may very well turn out to be this decade’s Thomas Friedman. 

Tyler Cowen is infinitely smarter than a Thomas Friedman. What an insult to him!

Anyway, my point is that it was Cowen's "low hanging fruit" thesis that I was reminded of as I was reading in the Scientific American this essay, which in print is titled "The true cost of fossil fuels."  The core argument involves "energy return on investment (EROI)" which is a measure that is a ratio of how much energy is returned compared to the investment.  Given that we dig for fossil fuels, it is an inversion of "low hanging fruit" in the sense that the easier it is to extract the fuel, the higher the return on it.

You need a subscription to get to the detailed charts.  And I have no patience to provide here photos of those charts.  But, the inventor of this metric explains the logic in the interview with the magazine:

What happens when the EROI gets too low? What’s achievable at different EROIs? If you've got an EROI of 1.1:1, you can pump the oil out of the ground and look at it. If you've got 1.2:1, you can refine it and look at it. At 1.3:1, you can move it to where you want it and look at it. We looked at the minimum EROI you need to drive a truck, and you need at least 3:1 at the wellhead. Now, if you want to put anything in the truck, like grain, you need to have an EROI of 5:1. And that includes the depreciation for the truck. But if you want to include the depreciation for the truck driver and the oil worker and the farmer, then you've got to support the families. And then you need an EROI of 7:1. And if you want education, you need 8:1 or 9:1. And if you want health care, you need 10:1 or 11:1.

Tyler Cowen says that we have exhausted the low hanging fruit with respect to education and healthcare.  EROI now tells us that these two will become even more expensive. The only thing good about the EROI is that yet again is a confirmation that the gazillions that go into subsidizing ethanol are wasted.

Sounds tempting to conclude, therefore, this will be the new normal and that we better get used to it.  If one is born into the middle or lower classes, well, you might as well move to Montana, build yourself a log cabin, and live your life hunting bears and fly fishing.

Except, the same issue of the Scientific American has an interesting piece in its regular feature of highlighting an article or theme from past years.  And, what was featured this time?  Well, it is from one hundred years ago, from April 1913:

Yep, a hundred years ago, the worry was about energy sources once we exhausted the coal mines:

Long before we took stock of our fuel supply and found that we must husband what little we have left, scientific dreamers wondered whether natural forces could not in some way be utilized. Already we are making extensive use of water power, or 'white coal' as it is called. The tide has yielded us some power and so have the waves.

Note there what is missing: petroleum, natural gas, and nuclear power.  In 1913, humans hadn't even figured out the proton and the neutron. Neutrinos weren't probably even in the collective human imagination.

I do not mean to suggest that science and technology will lead us out of the stagnation and that we can all rest easy until those nerds in the labs figure things out for us.  But, come on, sky-is-falling?  Check with Thomas Malthus about how his sky-is-falling claim worked out!  I suppose we have been worrying about the future ever since the proto-human stood up on two legs and made the other two as "hands" and sat posing as Rodin's Thinker.  We have evolved to worry, which is good--the worrying has led us to innovate.  Worry away :)

Cartoons on "Drill, Obama, drill" :)

Cartoonists are having a field day on Obama's plans :) (ht)

The graph "they" didn't want you to see

Several authors of the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on the projected effects of global warming now say they regret not pushing harder to include an updated diagram of climate risks in the report. The diagram, known as “burning embers,” is an updated version of one that was a central feature of the panel’s preceding climate report in 2001. The main opposition to including the diagram in 2007, they say, came from officials representing the United States, China, Russia and Saudi Arabia.

That was from the NY Times, which quotes Stephen H. Schneider, a climatologist at Stanford University who has been involved in writing the I.P.C.C. reports since 1988,:

4 fossil fuel dependent countries accepted the text but refused the figure. Remember, at the UN, consensus means everybody, so a few countries constitute in effect a small successful filibuster. No matter how much New Zealand, small islands states, Canada, Germany, Belgium and the UK said this was an essential diagram, China, the U.S., Russia and the Saudis said it was too much of a “judgment”