The Crisis Report - 88
The things I noticed this week.
I have been thinking a lot about something I read this week.
Doomers Are Self-Righteous Twits
I dislike them almost as much as I dislike liberals
The writer Michael Campi writes about choosing to NOT bring up the subject of the Climate Crisis with his daughter.
“My daughter is turning 34 this year and she is enjoying her life. Every time I think about broaching the subject of what’s happening (Climate Crisis) I think…”
“I am certain that she understands what’s going on and she chooses to enjoy herself and I don’t have a problem with that.”
who am I?
What right do I have to make her unhappy?
What right do I have to hurt her?
What right do I have to satisfy my ego and sacrifice her enjoyment of life?
It’s not my place to be the “Great Destroyer of Illusions” as some doomers claim to be.
It’s not my place to be “The Only True Realist” as some doomers claim to be.
I hope that I have grown beyond that.
Although Michael mentions me favorably and, goes out of his way to indicate that I am not “one of those Doomers”. His piece still hit home.
What right do I have to make you unhappy?
I am a “one note” writer. I write about the developing Climate Crisis and my analysis of the situation. Because my views on it are “fringe” I am also trying to “evangelize” you and convince you that the “reality” you think exists, is an “illusion”.
I am trying to CONVINCE you and CONVERT you.
As a writer, I know that can make my work become repetitive and stale. How many ways can I tell you “Collapse is Happening” before it gets boring. I am proselytizing for a New Climate Paradigm, so I am going to keep hammering on the same issues that convince people and “win converts”.
I “justify” my work, by telling myself that “the truth shall set you free” from the illusion of a Star Trek Utopia FUTURE being peddled by the Techno Optimists and Climate Moderates.
I want to create an informed and aware group of “influencers” who are primed and ready for when the “Other 90%” of the population “wakes up”. I think we are getting close to “The Great Climate Awakening” as the world begins to understand the horrific magnitude and scope of the Climate Crisis.
People’s minds will be open for a “new paradigm”. There will be a window of opportunity to shape the “Consensus Understanding” of the Climate Crisis. There will be a LOT of competing ideas, misinformation, and disinformation.
You, my dear readers, are my “missionaries”. My “seeds”, that I hope will spread my understanding of the Climate System and the Climate Crisis around the world.
Because, we will have to work together if we want to save anything. We cannot work together unless we all SEE and AGREE on the same reality.
As you can tell, I have a HUGE EGO and am kind of a “monster”. I have “convinced” myself that I am right. Now I feel that I am “helping” you by “opening your eyes” to the reality of the world.
If you keep reading my work. I assume it’s because you WANT TO KNOW.
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THE HOUSING CRISIS
Are You Sure Your House Is Worth That Much?
Climate risk is still not being priced into American home ownership.
“For generations, buying a home has been considered a wise investment in one’s future. But as wildfire and flooding turn assets into liabilities, homeownership is becoming a greater gamble. Many economists now think that, because home prices don’t yet reflect climate reality, a new housing bubble is growing. How much bigger it gets will determine how much havoc it will wreak when it inevitably pops.”
“Across the United States, homeowner’s insurance is getting more expensive.”
“In storm-battered Florida and coastal Louisiana, they’ve gone up a lot; the same is true for scorched Colorado and California. But even Ohio and Wisconsin have seen rate hikes greater than 15 percent in a single year.”
How much they’ve risen actually means something: Insurers, being in the business of risk assessment, are a good bellwether of the state of reality, and because of climate change, Americans’ homes are not as safe from harm, statistically speaking, as they once were.
“Even residents of states seen as climate havens, such as Minnesota, are watching their rates go up because of an uptick in hailstorms and thunderstorms.”
A 2023 paper, for instance, found that U.S. residential properties are overvalued by $121 billion to $237 billion for current flood risks alone.
Soaring Insurance Costs Could 'End' Affordable Housing, Developers Warn
Developers and landlords of subsidized housing, who cannot raise rents or charge more for starter homes, say property…
Costs are rising for homeowners of all types, and in states like Florida, Texas and California, it has become harder to get insurance at all. The industry says bigger, more frequent storms, along with increased home prices and material and labor costs, are forcing them to raise premiums or stop writing policies.
Wealthier homeowners can go without insurance, if they can buy a home without a mortgage. Landlords of market-rate apartments can raise the rent to adjust to the higher costs. But for the 4,000 or so nonprofits and developers that aren’t allowed to raise rents, or are selling homes only to buyers with the most constrained budgets, the soaring cost of insurance is an existential threat.
Real-Estate Shopping for the Apocalypse
As the world falls to pieces (wars! climate change! pandemics!), the market for bunkers and underground shelters is…
What if they’re right?
What if a nuke drops, or climate change turns the world into a foaming puddle, or the next pandemic is spread through selfies?
Billionaires have recently been spending millions building themselves customized bunkers, in the hope that they can ride out the apocalypse in splendor. In January, a video surfaced of the rapper Rick Ross bragging that his bunker will be better than Elon Musk’s bunker. (Musk is not known to have a bunker, but that’s a detail.)
Ross’s bunker will have multiple “wings” and a “water maker.” Also, plenty of canned goods. Ross’s bunker might even have its own bunker. But what about me — and, if I’m being generous, you? Are there affordable underground shelters available for us to hole up in?
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CLIMATE CRISIS
Hot days or heat waves? Researchers debate how to count deaths from heat
www.science.org Aug 23 (2024)
Focusing on temperature extremes can galvanize policy changes but risks undercounting.
More than 47,000 Europeans died from heat-related causes last year, the warmest on record globally, a study published this month found.
The number was surpassed only by the 60,000 Europeans who died of heat-related causes in 2022.
Another study this month found that the toll in Europe could triple by the end of the century if Earth continues to warm to 3°C or 4°C above preindustrial levels.
The numbers, though shocking, almost certainly understate the toll of hot weather, worsened by global warming. But scientists aren’t sure how to do better.
Heat Kills Thousands in the U.S. Every Year. Why Are the Deaths So Hard to Track?
As heat waves become more frequent and intense, researchers and activists say the lack of precise data is leading to…
Researchers estimate that heat kills more people than any other extreme weather event, and the number of heat-related deaths reported by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has steadily risen in recent years.
In 2023, the agency reported that heat played a role in approximately 2,300 deaths, though this number may be revised as more records are processed. But some researchers say the actual number is far higher. One study that examined data from the late 1990s to the early 2000s concluded that the average number of fatalities annually was roughly 10,000.
The C.D.C. relies on death certificates reported by local authorities for its tally, but the way these certificates are completed varies from place to place.
Many local officials do not have the time, funding or staffing needed to investigate heat-related questions. And officials do not apply a consistent set of criteria to determine whether heat contributed to a death — or even consider heat as a potential factor when filling out death certificates.
It’s actually a big issue on how to figure this out. The article does a good job discussing the various issues. Getting an accurate count is going to require federal standards and federal funding.
Is climate change accelerating after a record year of heat?
With each consecutive month of record-breaking temperatures, concerns are growing that the world has tipped into a new phase of warming.
Is climate change really accelerating?
Like everything to do with climate change, it is complicated. What is clear is that the extraordinary heat of 2023 has climate scientists rattled — and even, in a rare example of disagreement across the field, butting heads.
“2023 was unusually warm, and we still don’t have a good explanation for why,” says Zeke Hausfather at US non‑profit Berkeley Earth. “That is worrying in its own right.”
“I’ve been using the word ‘disquieted’,” says Gavin Schmidt at NASA. “We like to have answers, we like to be able to explain things, especially important things like the climate. And up until last year, we were pretty good at explaining things.”
The basic facts aren’t in contention: Earth’s climate is warming, mostly due to the greenhouse gases we have emitted, and it will continue to do so until we reach net zero. But because the climate operates on the scale of decades, not years, interpreting 2023 has caused a schism in climate science circles.
This article lays out the Moderate position on the change in the Rate of Warming.
“To be clear, this means that (Mainstream) climate scientists are in agreement that we should expect an acceleration. The latest assessment from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggests the rate of warming up to 2050 will be about 26 per faster than that from 1970 to the present day.”
What that means in “real life” is that the Moderates think the RoW has increased to around +0.24°C per decade and the Alarmists think it has increased to around +0.36°C per decade.
The Moderates have admitted that the Rate of Warming has accelerated. Things are actually getting worse, FASTER now. They just think it’s not as bad as the Alarmists are claiming.
“The sharp uptick in global temperatures last year cannot yet be used as proof of an even steeper acceleration in the rate of climate change,” says Colin Jones at the Met Office, the UK’s national weather service. “One year does not make a climate.”
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CHINA
China's fresh urbanization push may thwart 'birth-friendly society' goal
The impact of the fast-paced, expensive city life on birth rates should be treated with more urgency, demographers say.
At a twice-a-decade top political gathering last month, China announced plans to build a “birth-friendly society” — pledging to implement measures long-called for by population experts, such as lowering childcare and education costs.
But, to the despair of the same experts, Beijing also vowed to encourage more people into urban areas.
This policy aims to increase housing demand to prop up the crisis-hit property sector, and revive flagging economic growth through productivity gains and stronger consumption. Urban residents typically produce and buy higher value-added goods and services than their rural counterparts.w
But the fresh urbanization push overlooks basic demographic theory. In the cities, people have fewer children due to high housing costs, limited space, expensive education, and because they spend most of their day at work.
The pattern is very clear now. Populations globally wouldn't just “keep climbing”. As countries industrialize and populations shift from being primarily rural to primarily urban, family size declines.
Even without the Climate Crisis, global populations were already “peaking” due to the rapid global trend towards urbanization. Over 52% of the worlds population now lives in urban areas.
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SEA LEVEL RISE
Our Very Strange Search for "Sea Level"
Brooke Jarvis considers the history behind the search for sea level, as described in a new book by Wilko Graf von…
Mountains, oddly, are the reason most of us have learned to think of the level of the sea as a stable point, a baseline, an unmoving benchmark against which one might reasonably measure the height of great peaks.
We confidently assert that Mt. Rainier rises 14,411 feet above sea level, without stopping to ask ourselves what exactly we mean: what sea, and where and when, and in what state of weather?
The oceans, we know, are never at rest; they’re pulled to and fro by the moon (in the Bay of Fundy, a single tidal change can lower the water by more than fifty-three feet), the wind, the atmospheric pressure, and the considerable gravity exerted by glaciers and landmasses. Even changes in a sea’s temperature can affect its water level, by causing molecules of water to draw closer to, or farther away from, one another.
More profoundly, oceans have risen and fallen by hundreds of feet alongside ancient changes in the Earth’s glaciation (in the process allowing people to cross land bridges to the Americas and Australia and what are now the islands of the United Kingdom), and they are currently pushing, at a fairly rapid clip, over seawalls and into cities.
It would seem ludicrous to take mean sea level — something “as ephemeral as a fleeting ray of sunshine on a wintery afternoon,” as the Australian geologist Rhodes W. Fairbridge wrote in 1961 — to be a standard of stability.
How on earth, we might wonder, did we come to treat the sea as a synonym for solidity?
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SOCIETY
Politicians step up attacks on the teaching of scientific theories in US schools
A growing number of states are passing laws that call scientific theories into question.
Almost 100 years ago, science teacher John Scopes was convicted of violating a Tennessee law that prohibited teaching the theory of evolution. Although his conviction was overturned on a technicality in 1927, laws banning classes on Darwin’s theory stuck around for another 40 years. They were ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1968.
Over the past few decades, conservative or religious groups that object to including the theory of evolution in science classes have tried a different approach. Now, they argue, if the “scientific” theory of evolution is taught, other views, such as “intelligent design” — a stand-in for creationism — should also be taught.
The approach is not limited to evolution. Legislatures across the country are proposing or passing laws that purport to encourage scientific discussion, but instead encourage students to treat established, scientific theories as equivalent to ideas that lack scientific study.
For example, more than 20 years ago, in Kitzmiller v. Dover, a federal court ruled that intelligent design was not science; it lacked empirical evidence and testable hypotheses. Teaching it would violate the First Amendment’s prohibition against state support of religion.”
Theories AREN’T FACT is the battle cry of these educational reformers. Therefore religious beliefs should be allowed to be presented as “competing theories”.
LORD HAVE MERCY.
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The END TIMES are “boring” right now.
Optimism is the new trend.
The Incredible Disappearing Doomsday, by Kyle Paoletta
How the climate catastrophists learned to stop worrying and love the calm
A sea change culminated last October, in the form of the New York Times Magazine’s annual climate issue, which featured comic-book-style depictions of “The New World” that climate change would create, illustrated by Anuj Shrestha and annotated by David Wallace-Wells.
“Not very long ago,” Wallace-Wells wrote, some scientists believed that emissions “could cause four or five degrees Celsius of warming, giving rise to existential fears about apocalyptic futures.”
Now a two-to-three-degree range was more likely, “thanks to a global political awakening, an astonishing decline in the price of clean energy, a rise in global policy ambition and revisions to some basic modeling assumptions.”
The outlook is now ambiguous.
An idea Wallace-Wells expanded upon in a stand-alone essay titled “Beyond Catastrophe.”
“We have cut expected warming almost in half in just five years,” he asserted. Now the culture was entering a new phase, one that traded alarmism and denialism for sober consideration of the adjustments required by a world whose transformation, however profound, would fall “mercifully short of true climate apocalypse.”
According to a 2023 YouGov poll of a thousand respondents.
In 2022, the Pew Research Center found that thirty-nine per cent of adults in the United States believe we are living in end times.
66% are worried that the human race will be wiped out by nuclear weapons
65% worry that we will be killed off by a world war.
53% think the next pandemic could do us in.
52% bet on climate change. (but only 23% think Climate Change will affect them negatively “in their lifetime)
46% on A.I.
42% on an act of God.
37% on an asteroid.
31% on global inability to have children.
25% on an alien invasion.
8% believe the end will come in the next ten years.
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However jarring it is to compare this with the rosy picture in “Beyond Catastrophe,” Wallace-Wells is hardly the only journalist whose framing of the climate crisis has transformed in recent years.
Where once the climate corps provided weary summations of daunting research, now they offer assurances that progress has been made and the future may be just fine.
Given how quickly the tone has shifted, the average news consumer might assume that something fundamental has changed. Perhaps, thanks to all those new solar fields and international summits, a carbon-neutral future is already on the horizon.
Unfortunately, that is not the case.
Global emissions have plateaued at a level that has produced +1.5°C degrees of warming, meaning that billions of people will suffer.
That isn’t good news in any sense of the phrase.
However, it is precisely the earlier work of the climate catastrophists that makes the present reality seem novel and agreeable. The facts have remained the same; only the story has changed.
The “good news” is that they think things won't get as bad as we thought they would.
MAYBE.
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I think in five years we will KNOW who's right.
But, that’s just me.
— rc 090124
You say, "I want to create an informed and aware group of “influencers” who are primed and ready for when the “Other 90%” of the population “wakes up”."
I agree with your direction and roughly the numbers but not so much about what that 90% will do or become. Human history indicates that the vast, vast majority will go into some sort of denial, much as we see today. Pareto suggests that no more than 20% will get it and act on it.
Unfortunately, that segment, whether 20% or 90% or somewhere in between, will have to attend to a world with a horrendous mountain of dead bodies, likely for decades. Primarily human but I think all life forms will suffer monumental mortalities in a +2 degree world. Even worse in a 3-5 degree world which is assured in the 22nd Century. Or sooner?
It's going to be very difficult to maintain a go forward, development attitude in this scenario. I think the work you are doing is extremely important to those who will be active in this short, brutal and nasty world they have been left with.
WW III is already in motion. Looking back from the future you can see it forming up right now.