Elite Despair at Davos
This is probably what you’d call ‘elite despair’:
Al Gore on World Economic Forum 2023 about fossil fuel industry and arresting Greta Thunberg in Germany from tremoniamedia Filmproduktion on Vimeo.
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Latest paper from James Hansen, just being submitted for peer review, shows a +10*C warming by 2070 IF CURRENT EMISSIONS STAY THE SAME. The aerosol masking effect will reduce that to a mere +7*C warming over the 1880 baseline. This is due to long term and as well as short term feedback loops, and taken data from paleo records. By looking at energy inbalance, the current +4watts/metre squared equates to a warming potential of 840ppm CO2 equivalent. With CO2+CH4+N2O we are at ~580ppm Co2 equivalent. In other words the world hasn’t caught up to the energy inbalance that is being measured across the planet.
https://mailchi.mp/caa/global-warming-in-the-pipeline
actual paper here:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.04474
IPCC papers do not include any long-term feedbacks, and ignore most short-term ones, plus obviously ignores aircraft emissions and military emissions. And as we know, all their scenarios rely on CCS technology, which is being shown to unoworkable on scale.
Less recent analysis from multiple sources show we are committed to +2.7*C warming regardless of what we do about emissions.
Carbon emissions from non-anthropogenic sources, ie CH4 from wetlands, are on the increase.
Newer studies infer that CH4 emissions from the gas industry have been under-estimated.
The UK government has already committed the country to +2% increase in CO2 emissions for the rest of the decade.
The oil & gas industry is planning the financing of new oil and gas infrastructure up to 2045. They are now promoting the fantasy that we can surge on emissions now to build the ‘renewable’ infrastructure for later and then reduce emissions afterwards (!)
The idea that we are reducing emissions is laughable. People select individual nations and say oh look emissions are down, but that’s because we’ve off-sourced our emissions to China and other Asian countries by manufacturing our stuff over there.
To give a referee point, it is generally recognised that at +3*C global heating, current civilisation collapses. At +6*C most life will go extinct. {Although ecological collapse and economic collapse will happen way before then}.
And anyway, the average global temperature is a bit of a, not misnomer, but not the whole picture. To get the whole planet to increase even 0.1*C takes a lot of effort. But two-thirds of the planet is ocean where nobody lives. It’s the land temperatures we should also keep an eye on.
Europe in 2021 was +2.2*C above 1850 baseline.
Europe in 2022 was +2.7*C above 1850 baseline
China in 2022 was +1.7*C above 1850 baseline
2023 will see a switch from La Nina to El Nino, probably from June. The former has a cooling trend, the latter a heating trend.
In other words if you thought 2022 was bad……
In other data, collapse related, the UK is now EROEI of 6:2 or less
https://damnthematrix.wordpress.com/2022/08/30/well-that-explains-everything/
while some reports show the rest of the world at 10:1
Modern western “civilisation” requires 12:1 roughly to maintain itself.
Pre-1750 agrarian society was 5:1
The collapse of the NHS and the energy infrastructure creaking at the seams we are witnessig now would be happening anyway, just this government’s ideology is making it much worse, accelerating that collapse.
PS 2021 was probably peak food.
PPS a good article on how your new E10 fuel is reducing your mpg:
https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2023/01/22/shrinkflation-at-the-pumps-is-just-depressing/
I’ll let you work out the rest.
More data
15:10: So EROEI is down to 10:1 or less in 2022, from 20:1 in 1999…..
https://youtu.be/CDBJdQnjE2o
On a similar vein to Tim Watkins’ article, only 60% of US oil is actually oil, the rest is substitutes.
Thanks Mark
Hello Mark, I’m really pleased you pointed out the discrepancy between overall global temperature rise and the rise in temperature of the major land masses of the planet, which is at a rate of twice that of the global one. I have also been pointing this out for some time, GISS temperature graphs illustrate this dramatically. https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v4/# Click on the line that says “Annual mean temperature change over land and over ocean” The fact is that the vast majority of the planet’s humanity live on the land, not in the ocean. I have been surprised and disappointed that climate scientist reporting on the severity of global warming haven’t pointed this out much more forcefully. I wrote to “Real Climate” about this but didn’t get a response. This difference suggests that a globally warmed world of 2deg C will see a land mass warming of 4 deg C, totally intolerable. I live in NZ, so the graph showing the hemispheric difference might seem a bit more reassuring for us, but the awful record rainfall in Auckland of this last Friday and the subsequent record flooding of that burgeoning city suggests nowhere is going to escape the dire consequences of global warming.
You tell ’em, Al. But can the World Economic Forum even hear you? The WEF is an exclusive club of totalitarian oligarchs determined to ‘make the world a better place’ for themselves – at any cost. They regard the rest of us merely as ‘human resources’ to be exploited.
Science Fiction author William Gibson imagines a near-future ‘jackpot’:
“The fictional “jackpot” described in the novels is an “androgenic, systemic, multiplex” cluster of environmental, medical and economic crises that begins to emerge in the present day and eventually reduces world population by 80 percent over the second half of the 21st century.”
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jackpot_trilogy
The first novel in the projected trilogy has recently been made into a television drama series. I wonder if, by the time the final novel is considered for adaptation, relevant events from the first will have already caught up with us.
BTW, I couldn’t help notice that ‘Petro’ was sitting at Al Gore’s left elbow, possibly in some surrealist cacodaemonic coincidence.
Thank you for posting this video. I haven’t seen Al Gore in action for a wee while. He was robbed of his presidency, and the consequences for the US and the planet have been incalculable. He did well in this forum – but you know I could have done just as well, and many others – whether ordinary citizens, politicians, environmentalists – around the world. But he’s got no more real power than Greta. Was the enthusiastic applause the sound of a beginning of a tide of change, or the sound of waves breaking against yet another corporatist breakwater? The success of the global corporatist elite in sidelining the left, the environmentalists, the impoverished and the moral and persuading the mass of the citizenry “that nothing ever happens” to paraphrase Pinter who concluded “It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis”. There’s a serious battle looming, not in Ukraine, but in a country near you, between reason and unreason, and it won’t be pleasant, there will be considerable casualties . But without that battle, we are, as a worthwhile Scotsman, John Laurie, in his role as Private Fraser, was fond of saying a while back, “we’re doomed……” I hope these aren’t the last words on the matter but I’m beginning to have serious doubts.