The Demon Nonlinearity

A tipping point may now be in our rear view mirror.

There’s no good climate news, the only thing from the natural world that doesn’t utterly suck are the incremental gains being made here and there in protecting endangered species. This latest from Just Have a Think is delivered in the usual calm, deliberate fashion, but what it really needs is a battery of WWII air raid sirens making sure we notice this.

The Arctic has been a net carbon sink. Past tense. The warming, drying, and wetting have turned a third of those lands into net carbon emission sources. It’s reasonable to expect the rest to follow.

We’ve been kicking the can down the road for a while now, fooling with a 350ppm CO2 limit, which is well in the review view mirror, and a “maybe 2.0 C won’t be so bad” theory. Last year cracked the 1.5C mark and it was thought this was an anomaly, and that things would back off a bit. Instead January averaged 1.75C.

If we have indeed reached an inflection point, a place where the CO2 already in the atmosphere will drive rapid addition of even more CO2, it’ll turn 2024 into a year we look back at fondly, because things weren’t THAT bad yet.

The prior twelve months we first saw hurricane Helene scour the roads and towns from the western North Carolina mountains like a pressure washer turned on spider webs, then a Santa Ana blast furnace did an estimated $30 billion in damage to the Los Angeles area. That is only 1/15th of California’s annual budget, we’ll adjust, but that means $30 billion in other activities get cancelled.

What happens in the long term if urban firestorms are the new normal here? What’s the value of a house if it’s an annual roll of the dice on if it’ll still be there come New Years? We’ve got insurance companies fleeing California and Florida, people are going bare, rolling that die and hoping to make it another year. When their time comes, they’re wiped out with no recourse. We’ll socialize the losses, eventually, but only fractionally, since the victims are just humans, rather than precious virtual person corporations with professional influence peddlers tending them.

The latest distraction is carbon capture. We’ll build a few facilities, demonstrate that it works, albeit at a terrible cost that makes reversing our long term emissions impossible, and we’ll waste another decade on this fantasy. Pragmatic systems thinkers who’ve got their heads around this stuff are alternately despondent, or terrified.

Now we’ve come to the point where the danger is undeniable, and the U.S> response has been to discard reality and replace it with religion … the sort that facilitates nihilistic grifting, and we’ll get a bloodbath in the form of persecuting the “other” to turn aside climate change god’s wrath. That plays straight into the hands of fossil fuel producers who care not a lick for their own grandchildren, let alone anyone else’s.

I’m sticking to my earlier assessment - the ONLY thing that will improve this is a workable fusion system, perhaps from Helion. Once we’re using deuterium for power it really is bottomless, and some of those highly theoretical carbon capture schemes might become operationally possible.