Only half way through November – here is an “October in Review” post.
Most frightening and/or depressing story: When it comes to the #1 climate change impact on ordinary people, it’s the food stupid. (Dear reader, I’m not calling you stupid, and I don’t consider myself stupid, but somehow we individually intelligent humans are all managing to be stupid together.) This is the shit that is probably going to hit the fan first while we are shouting stupid slogans like “drill baby drill” (okay, if you are cheering when you hear a politician shout that you might not be stupid, but you are at least uninformed.)
Most hopeful story: AI, at least in theory, should be able to help us manage physical assets like buildings and infrastructure more efficiently. Humans still need to have some up-front vision of what we would like our infrastructure systems to look like in the long term, but then AI should be able to help us make optimal repair-replace-upgrade-abandon decisions that nudge the system toward the vision over time as individual components wear out.
Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: Some explanations proposed for the very high cost of building infrastructure in the U.S. are (1) lack of competition in the construction industry and (2) political fragmentation leading to many relatively small agencies doing many relatively small projects. Some logical solutions then are to encourage the formation of more firms in the U.S., allow foreign firms and foreign workers to compete (hardly consistent with the current political climate!), and consolidate projects into a smaller number of much larger ones where economies of scale can be realized. There is some tension though between scale and competition, because the larger and more complex a project gets, the fewer bidders it will tend to attract who are willing to take the risk.
I’m writing on the morning of election day, November 5, 2024. I have cast my personal vote, in-person since my cracker-ass state will take days to count mail-in ballots and that will allow people who want to cast doubt on the results as they “change” to do so. No results are available yet, so I might as well do one last wrap up of the numbers.
STATE
2020 RESULT
Silver Bulletin (October 1)
Silver Bulletin (November 5)
538 (November 5)
RCP (November 5)
Arizona
Biden +0.4%
Trump +1.5%
Trump +2.4%
Trump +2.1%
Trump +2.8%
Georgia
Biden +0.3%
Trump +1.0
Trump +1.0%
Trump +0.8%
Trump +1.3%
Wisconsin
Biden +0.6%
Harris +1.9%
Harris +1.0%
Harris +1.0%
Harris +0.4%
North Carolina
Trump +1.3%
Trump +0.5%
Trump +1.1%
Trump +0.9%
Trump +1.2%
Pennsylvania
Biden +1.2%
Harris +1.2%
Trump +0.1%
Harris +0.2%
Trump +0.4%
Michigan
Biden +2.8%
Harris +2.1%
Harris +1.2%
Harris +1.0%
Harris +0.5%
Nevada
Biden +2.4%
Harris +1.8%
Trump +0.6%
Trump +0.3%
Trump +0.6%
If we take the Nate Silver numbers as an accurate prediction of the vote, Trump will win the electoral college 287-251. Of course, just flip Pennsylvania to the Harris column and she wins 270-268. If the polling results end up being systematically biased by 1% in either direction, which would be statistically completely unsurprising, it could be a landslide either way. Still, I think I would rather be Trump this morning, because a 1% bias in his direction delivers a huge landslide, whereas a 1% bias in Harris’ direction puts her right on the edge of maybe winning Georgia and Nevada (which Biden won) and North Carolina (which Biden lost). Arizona, which Biden won, would be an even heavier lift. So in other words, these poll numbers suggest she is underperforming 2020 Biden, and that was a close call. It pains me to say all this. And I don’t think it is necessary to even say this: THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE IS A STUPID UNDEMOCRATIC RELIC DESIGNED TO GET 18TH CENTURY SLAVE OWNERS TO AGREE TO BE PART OF THE UNITED STATES, AND WE ARE STILL STUCK WITH IT.
Finally, looking at the betting sites (at 8:50 am EST), PolyMarket is 62% to 38% in favor of Trump, PredictIt is 55 cents to 51 cents, and Kalshi is 60% to 40% in favor of Trump. So whoever bets on these sites seems to agree with the polls more or less. Of course, they are looking at the same polls and other betting sites as everyone else when they decide how to bet, so these are not really independent data points. There may also be shady people manipulating these odds similar to how they are able to manipulate sports odds, who knows.
So I think Harris has a very good chance but I am certainly not confident she will win. We may start to get a sense 12 hours or so from now, or we may not really know for a week or even more.
Do I even need to make my case against Trump again? Well, I will, one last time. These are the really, really bad potential consequences of four more years of Trump.
Climate change has gone from a serious risk that could have been avoided or mitigated to an actively unfolding disaster that needs to be managed to produce the least bad outcome still possible. It is coming for our homes, our cities, and our food supply, and it is going to fuel massive movements of people that are going to cause major social instability. The world can’t afford four more years of denial, propaganda, inaction, and backsliding.
Trump will put incompetent clowns in charge of all major federal departments and programs. Incompetent clowns will not be able to deal with crises and emergencies effectively. The risk of nuclear proliferation, nuclear war, and nuclear terrorism has gone way up over the past decade. This is a huge, imminent existential threat that could bring our country and entire human civilization to its knees. Another major pandemic with a much higher mortality rate among young people, whether bird flu, a Covid relative, or a biological weapon, is another existential threat clowns will not deal with effectively (as they did not last time). Even a major earthquake affecting major population centers, dealt with incompetently or not at all, could deal a body blow to our country.
My list does not include important issues like inequality, health care, child care, education, abortion, gun control, campaign finance reform, or constitutional reform because we can get away with bickering over these things for four more years without the risk of major systemic collapse of our nation and civilization. And neither of the political parties we are allowed to choose from are going to address these issues effectively, although Democrats will attempt some marginal adjustments from time to time. They just make us a little bit poorer and more miserable gradually over time. Hopefully the robot takeover is at least a decade away. What we can’t afford is not having mature, rational grownups running things at a time of growing existential risk.
This has only been measured for a few decades, but a detectable increase in the rate of increase in atmospheric methane made me think of tipping points. Could the much-to-be-feared feedback loops in permafrost and methane hydrates thawing be underway right now?
This article doesn’t mention either permafrost or hydrates. It does say that the increases are not a result of leaking natural gas wells or any other fossil fuel industry site. They narrow the cause down to “sources such as wetlands, waste, and agriculture”. I supposed some frozen wetlands could be thawing out, but it seems like the article would have mentioned that. I am skeptical that there has been any drastic worldwide change in landfill operations. A big change in agricultural practices – this could be plausible, I don’t know enough to say it is not.
Something called the Global Commission on the Economics of Water says that “half of the world’s food production is at risk of failure within the next 25 years as a rapidly worsening water crisis threatens global agricultural systems”. Even if this group and these numbers turn out to be a bit alarmist, food really is where the climate change shit is likely to meet the fan. There is downward pressure on yields in tropical regions with increasing heat, partially offset on increased yields from longer growing seasons northern regions. Then there is increasing drought in important food-growing and food-consuming regions will be a big issue, and flooding will be an issue in others. This article doesn’t mention sea level rise, but eventually that is going to impact agriculture anywhere near a coastline or dependent on a coastal aquifer.
The poorest people and countries will be directly impacted by any food shortfall first, while the middle classes will feel the pinch at first in the form of higher prices. But longer term I am concerned that food shortages will drive mass migration and anti-immigrant political movements that could get very ugly. We are already seeing some precursors of this in the United States and Europe today. Whether climate change is a key driver today (and it is at least somewhat of a driver for some people aspiring to move from the Middle East to Europe and Central America and North America), it is only going to get worse.
Thank goodness we have had a robust and constructive debate around global food security policy during this year’s U.S. election cycle…oh…right, I just woke up from that dream again.
11 square miles covered with moss since 1986 just doesn’t sound all that dramatic to me, but apparently for Antarctica this is a big deal and not a good sign. Apparently it has been happening for awhile in (originally sarcastically named?) Greenland, and it is not as big of a surprise there, but it is still not a good sign.
Jeff Masters at Yale Climate Connections has an article with a massive list of articles, books and tools on climate risks in various geographic areas of the U.S. You could really spend a lot of time drilling down through all these sources, even to research just one location. He does make the point, however, that moving away from extended family and other social ties can be bad for a person/family’s resilience in general, so you should consider that tradeoff before deciding whether to move.
Most frightening and/or depressing story: Some self-labeled “conservatives” in the United States want to do away with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Census Bureau, the Internal Revenue Service, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Education, and possibly even the Federal Reserve. All these are needed to have a competent, stable government and society and to be prepared to respond and recover from the shocks that are coming, so I would call this nihilist and not “conservative” at all. How is it conservative to want to destroy the institutions that have underpinned the success of our nation thus far? On the other hand, they also want to double down on the unimaginative pro-big-business, pro-war consensus of the two major parties over the last 50 years or so, which has also gotten us to where we are today. And it looks like the amateurs and psychopaths have the upper hand at the moment in terms of our November election. This is certainly not “morning in America”.
Most hopeful story: Computer-controlled cars are slowly but surely attaining widespread commercial rollout. I don’t care what the cynics say – this will save land, money and lives. And combined with renewable and/or nuclear energy, it could play a big role in turning the corner on the climate crisis.
Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: I had a misconception that if the world reduces greenhouse gases today, the benefits will not kick in for decades. Happily, scientists’ understanding of this has been updated and I will update my own understanding along with that. The key is the ocean’s ability to absorb excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere relatively quickly. (I am not sure this is good for the ocean itself, but it is somewhat hopeful for temperatures here on land.) And it is not all or nothing – any emissions reductions will help, so the failure to act in the past is not an excuse to continue to fail to act.
I’ve repeated a couple times that if emissions were stabilized today, the climate would continue warming for decades. I am not a complete idiot, because this was the scientific understanding at one time, but it is time for me to update my understanding. Michael Mann explains:
The conventional wisdom was once that warming would continue on for decades even if we stopped emitting carbon into the atmosphere due to the sluggishness of the oceans, which continue to warm up even after CO2 stops increasing. This is known as committed warming. But committed warming is only half of the story, an artifact of simplistic early climate modeling experiments in which CO2 levels are kept fixed after the hypothetical cessation of emissions.
Later, more comprehensive simulations with interactive ocean carbon cycle dynamics revealed that CO2 levels actually drop after emissions cease as the oceans continue to draw carbon down from the atmosphere. That decrease in the greenhouse effect cancels out the committed warming, and the result is an essentially flat line. In other words, global temperatures stabilize quickly once net carbon emissions drop to zero.
So today’s temperatures are the result of emissions over the past decades, but today’s rate of increase in temperature is about the current rate of emissions or at least very recent emissions. This article doesn’t explain, but I think it makes sense, that global temperatures would start to drop at some point as the oceans continued to soak up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. (I’m ignoring ocean acidification for the moment – perhaps this would never be reversed?) This would be encouraging if there were any serious commitment among the world’s governments and institutions to stop emissions in the near future. Nonetheless, Mann points out that the damage already done is not a logical excuse to stop doing further damage. Any action will reduce the severity of future impacts, even if the floor for those impacts has already been baked in.
The last IPCC release covered conditions as of about 2019. There is an effort now to update estimates of key indicators annually in between IPCC reports, called the Indicators of Global Climate Change 2023: annual update of key indicators of the state of the climate system and human influence. I could easily spend a whole day reading and trying to understand the details of this one paper. I’ll pull out just one indicator, which is the “remaining carbon budget”. This metric looks not at annual emissions but at the cumulative amount of carbon emitted since 1850 and how much can still be emitted to keep average global warming under 1.5 degrees C. The results are almost laughable. The IPCC put the remaining budget at 500 Gt (billion metric tons) of carbon dioxide from the start of 2020. This update puts the remaining budget as of the start of 2024 at 200 Gt. Annual emissions are in the 50-55 Gt range, so using very rough layman’s math we have 4 years remaining. There are many reasons this is complicated and uncertain, including periodic adjustment of the target itself, emissions of gases other than carbon dioxide, and aerosols to name a few. But nonetheless, we are a few years away and it is clear the world would be on track to miss this target even if it were making a coordinated effort to prevent this, which it is clearly not. This is not a reason to throw up our hands of course. Any effort to limit the damage, no matter how small or how late, may help lessen or delay the catastrophe we are currently headed for.
Continuing to tackle this thing with the section called “the general welfare”. I’m just reading the summary since the thing is so long. Various authors want to:
End Medicare and Medicaid. [We are the only developed country without a health care system, and our population is suffering for it. This is a shameless giveaway to the finance/insurance industry.]
Gut the National Institutes of Health and the CDC. The section makes wild, conspiracy theory-driven claims that there was no scientific evidence that masks or vaccines helped end the Covid-19 epidemic. [Pardon me, but this is radical, dangerous, ignorant, lying bullshit! This also means our nation will not be prepared to respond and recover from the next pandemic, be it of natural or bioweapon origin. This puts our nation at huge risk and is therefore wildly irresponsible and unpatriotic.]
Double down on fossil fuels, end promotion of alternative energy, fuel efficient and electric vehicles. [We are going to lose our food supply and our coastal cities. This is a shameless giveaway to the fossil energy industry, and it is EVIL.]
End the Department of Education and let parents decide what their children will believe about the world. This is basically driven by the Christian Nationalist, homophobic agenda, although somewhere in there is a shameless giveaway to the charter school lobby.
Regarding the EPA – well, finally, here is a federal agency I actually know something about, having spent decades helping local governments and water utilities comply with its mandates. This section doesn’t say a lot about water, and what it does say is not all that controversial – it even has some love for the state revolving loan funds. Otherwise, this section focuses mostly on rolling back regulation of fossil fuels and vehicle fuel efficiency (which in the EPA context means allowing more air pollution), ignoring greenhouse gases, and otherwise leaving most regulation to the states. They want to slash much of EPA’s research and science agenda, and shift oversight of enforcement actions from lawyers to political appointees. None of this is particularly radical, only “conservative” and would probably take us more or less back to the Bush or Reagan years. Failing to regulate greenhouse gases is a crucial moral and practical unforced error for our country of course, I am just saying it is fully consistent with the shameless giveaway to wealth and power agenda the Republican Party has been pushing for the last 50 years.
Basically bring the DOJ and FBI fully under the control of political appointees. Actually, the propaganda narrative is that the Biden administration has done this, while in reality this is a good example of doublespeak where you accuse your opponent of doing exactly the thing that you plan to do, so that any protest sounds like a childish “I know you are but what am I”?
