He said he will neuter the “job killing” EPA and he can have the USA ignore the Paris accords (which would likely cause other countries to pull out as well, rightfully claiming unfairness and treachery).
Furthermore, he wants to approve the Keystone pipeline and he is a Climate change denier. Full stop. Wants the US to extract and burn more fossil fuels.
What did you expect the impact to be after 16 years of Obama/HRC and what do you expect the impact to be after 4 or 8 years of Trump?
Please don’t just say “it’ll be worse” ;). It’s obviously going to be worse but how much worse?
That is what I’d like you to speculate on. You can use any metric you want, temperatures, water levels, ecological or agricultural impacts, etc.
ps: I’m deliberately not including the health effects of air and water pollutants on our bodies to focus on just temperatures.
I’m open minded. Climate is hard to study. But there will never be enough proof to satisfy some skeptics. We’ve had warmer years and more disasters. Even holdouts like The Economist favour action and don’t think it has a purely negative economic impact.
If the scaremongerers are right, other countries will back out of the Paris Consensus. Temperatures and water levels will go up. How much? Well, probably not all the countries would reach agreed targets even if the Accord stood. A large part of the accord (I have heard) is transferring resources to poorer nations and this is now less likely to happen.
I do not see conservation as a strict Liberal-Conservative issue since these days their are economic benefits to conservation, more so the more accurate the science is. I’m guessing Trump confuses weather with climate and cares little about reading more about the issue.
Maybe not the best time to move to the Marshall Islands or to Florida? Who knows?
I’m open minded. Climate is hard to study. But there will never be enough proof to satisfy some skeptics. We’ve had warmer years and more disasters. Even holdouts like The Economist favour action and don’t think it has a purely negative economic impact.
If the scaremongerers are right, other countries will back out of the Paris Consensus. Temperatures and water levels will go up. How much? Well, probably not all the countries would reach agreed targets even if the Accord stood. A large part of the accord (I have heard) is transferring resources to poorer nations and this is now less likely to happen.
I do not see conservation as a strict Liberal-Conservative issue since these days their are economic benefits to conservation, more so the more accurate the science is. I’m guessing Trump confuses weather with climate and cares little about reading more about the issue.
Maybe not the best time to move to the Marshall Islands or to Florida? Who knows?
Things might depend on a rather interesting court case that just cleared a major hurdle.
IANAL and there are too many interesting points in the article to quote here without violating guidelines but here is a start - read the article for more details.
This is probably the single area, other than starting a nuclear war, where I think Trump has the potential to cause the most damage, but I also think it’s containable IF people who have power and care deeply about the issue play their cards right. Literally. See, as far as I can tell, Trump is not ideologically wedded to the idea that climate change is a Chinese hoax. (He’s not ideologically wedded to anything at all – mostly, he says whatever pops into his head and what he thinks his audience wants to hear, and by some accounts, he’s easily manipulable because he tends to be swayed by whoever speaks with him last.) So: weekly poker night with Al Gore, who will let him win, flatter the heck out of him, and at the same time pound the “this is a real thing and it’s dangerous, but taking action on it will make you a hero” message into his head on a regular basis.
I think this is the only strategy that will work, and it might actually shift the Overton window on this issue in ways that a Democratic president would not be able to accomplish.
Well, one should then consult the experts and people that study the issue. As science writer Peter Hadfield reported years ago the published science gets a very constant and therefore very likely number for the rise of the oceans if nothing is changed regarding the human CO2 emissions.
Conservatively speaking, the reported number was between .8 to 2 meters of ocean rise by the end of the century.
[QUOTE]
With a hundred 50 cubic miles of this size melting every year, basic physics tells us that this will cause sea levels to rise and basic physics also tells us that as water warms up it expands so on top of the rise due to ice melt.
Researchers say sea levels will also rise because of thermal expansion. There are two ways to calculate this one is to estimate how much ice will melt and how much the oceans will expand for a given rise in temperature and that gives us a figure of between 0.8 and 2 meters by the end of the century depending on how much co2 is pumped into the atmosphere.
Another way of estimating it is to see how much sea levels rose in the past for a given rise in temperature and that gives a similar range between one and two meters by the end of this century
Now point eight meters as the low end of the estimates may not sound like much, it’s about three feet but it’s enough to submerge large areas of coastline including parts of coastal cities like Miami gwangju New York and Calcutta and Tokyo Hong Kong Bangkok New Orleans amsterdam and rotterdam two meters.
The high end of the scale is over six feet.
[/QUOTE]
Now keep in mind that low end estimate, as the IPCC said in an early report (and based on the same published science) that low value could be expected provided that we did not observe an acceleration of the loss of cap ice.
The now many times reported and observed acceleration means that we will more likely see the mid range of the ocean rise and sooner than expected. By not making a concerted effort to reduce emissions. If that inaction happens, by the end of the century we can then see about six feet of rise and then much more as time will continue marching.
“The sky looks clean to me, I don’t see the problem” – The Donald (about a year ago I think)
I’m optimistic …
Global warming mediation has had a pretty good run these past eight years … the Obama administration was able to start some programs that should be able to proceed … if the USA pulls out of the Paris agreement, we’re not going to tear down our wind mills, breach our hydrodams or remove the solar panels from our roofs … Some of us will continue working to greatly curtail pollution whether The Donald likes it or not … and I guess we’ll be finding out if these markets are financially feasible without Federal tax credits … someday we’ll elect another Democrat and we can work to make more progress then …
Keep in mind, sea level rise damage will occur first during the spring tide, coastal neighbors will be inundated for a few hours every six months … I do believe the insurance industry will quickly tire of re-building homes and basically we’ll be slowly let the coast “return to it’s natural state” …
I’ve my homeowner’s premium here in my hand … $417 per year* … any Florida homeowner’s care to share theirs?
Sarah Palin is on the short list to be secretary of interior ! So this show how much Trump will affect Global warming , The bitch will allow all the trees to be logged and have pipe lines running across all of our national parks !
I have to wonder if bringing back all these darlings of the past is just to fire the imaginations and excitement of the right wing, as a distraction from how Trump is going to start breaking campaign promises the minute he takes the oath.
Well, you are certainly enthusiastic about ellipses, anyway. But you are not well informed on the impact of climate change. While rising mean ocean levels are the most obvious result, they are neither the most dramatic or threatening. We can at least make reasonable predictions for that and, presuming governmental bodies act in a preventative manner, relocate populations that are in areas threatened by rising sea level. The bigger impact is on the climate itself, and particularly on the ocean currents that drive the climate and the hydrologic cycle which delivers fresh water inland. While more storms might seem to the casual observer to offer more rainfall, the opposite is actually true; we can expect to see damaging storms that deliver a deluge of water to coastal regions while inland regions suffer progressively worse droughts due to volatility unprecedented since long before the beginning of human agriculture.
Windmills and solar panels to supplement energy demand are all well and good for what they are, but they really aren’t going to do anything to mitigate the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide. What is needed is an aggressive program to develop technology to supplement future energy demand while reducing carbon emissions, at the same time making preparations for the impact of the unavoidable change that global climate circulation models predict. And regardless of how you feel ideologically about overarching government regulation and international treaties that significantly limit national sovereignty (I’m personally not a fan), this is in fact the only way to effectively counter the worst effects of climate change. Throwing up ones hands and saying “India and China won’t go along so why bother?” is absurdist ignorance at its worst. Both China and and especially India will be substantially impacted by elevated temperature and volatile weather, and given a reasonable cost-effective way of avoiding it could be engaged.
What happens to your insurance premiums on your fucking beach house isn’t even significant noise in terms the cost impact of climate change.
The renewable industry keeps saying that renewable energy is now cheaper than fossil fuel energy. If that were actually true then Trump’s election would have no impact, since business would automatically go for the cheap option. But lots of us don’t believe this.
First of all, there is no way to substantiate such a broad claim in any practical way. Some forms of renewable energy, such as PV solar, are becoming cost competitive with coal and gas based power production when amortized over the lifetime cost. Of course, this fails to account for the hidden subsidy in terms of the future cost impact of climate change, which may potentially be incalculable. Certainly no synthesized biofuel is going to be as cheap as pumping petroleum out of the ground, but then, that petroleum was formed over tens of millions of years after being formed by biomass that sequestered carbon from the atmosphere, whereas a closed cycle biofuel is innately carbon neutral (or at least reasonably close).
The atmosphere as a reservoir for carbon dioxide is basically a common “resource”, and as with such resources, producers feel they should be able to use it as much as they want without limit until some regulatory body comes and establishes a cost basis for it. If we wait for a reactive market to establish the cost of dumping greenhouse producing gases into the atmosphere, we’re likely going to find the cost not only more than we can afford, but literally incalculable in terms of damage.
And of course as Stranger On A Train points out, in reality if we add the real cost to continue to emit CO2 from fossil fuels, the new technologies were already cheaper yesterday.