TADEAS: jednou jsem byl ve španělsku a bylo tam hezky

A report from Spanish farmers’ association COAG stated that some cereals need to be “written off” across four entire regions this year; one meteorologist told El País to “say goodbye to almost the entire olive harvest.”

The Sau reservoir north of Barcelona has dropped so low that authorities decided to remove fish to avoid them dying off and contaminating the region’s water supply. Across Catalonia, reservoirs stand at only 27 percent — in April. Next week, Spain faces an early heat wave.

According to Ecological Transition Minister Teresa Ribera, water availability in Spain, much like in France, could drop up to 40 percent by 2050

...

France, where no rain fell for more than 30 consecutive days in January and February, experienced its driest winter in 60 years.

Italy’s CIMA research foundation found a 64 percent reduction in snowfall by mid-April. The River Po runs as low as it did last summer; Lake Garda is already at less than half its average level.

goodbye white pride

Fotky z Francie: Alpská vesnice se loučí s vlekem, lyžovat se tu už nedá - Seznam Zprávy
https://www.seznamzpravy.cz/clanek/zahranicni-fotky-z-francie-alpska-vesnice-se-louci-s-vlekem-lyzovat-se-tu-uz-neda-218661

thxbai

Say goodbye to 1.5°C | Nov 5th 2022 | The Economist
https://www.economist.com/weeklyedition/2022-11-05

TADEAS:

Doomsday Glacier in Antarctica Could Collapse Soon: New Research - Rolling Stone
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/doomsday-glacier-thwaites-antarctica-climate-crisis-1273841/

the West Antarctic ice sheet is one of the most important tipping points in the Earth’s climate system. If Thwaites Glacier collapses, it opens the door for the rest of the West Antarctic ice sheet to slide into the sea. Globally, 250 million people live within three feet of high tide lines. Ten feet of sea level rise would be a world-bending catastrophe. It’s not only goodbye Miami, but goodbye to virtually every low-lying coastal city in the world.

...

Depending on various emissions scenarios in the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, we could have as little as one foot of sea level rise by the end of the century, or nearly six feet of sea level rise (of course, rising seas won’t stop in 2100, but that date has become a common benchmark). “The difference between those [models] is a lot of lives and money,” says Richard Alley, a glaciologist at Penn State University and one of the great ice scientists of our time. Alley adds: “The most likely place to generate [the worst scenario] is Thwaites.”

Or to put it more urgently: “If there is going to be a climate catastrophe,” Ohio State glaciologist Ian Howat once told me, “it’s probably going to start at Thwaites.”

...

“We just don’t know what the upper boundary is for how fast this can happen,” Alley says. “We are dealing with an event that no human has ever witnessed before. We have no analog for this.”

...

“The current divergence among model predictions is actually a good sign because it means that scientists are probing different parameterizations, representations of processes, and hypotheses,” writes Jeremy Bassis, a geophysicist at the University of Michigan. Bassis suggests not focusing so much on the long-term uncertainty and highlighting instead what scientists know about the next few decades. “The skill of models in predicting sea level change on decadal time scales is high, and we already have actionable projections on these time scales. We should be emphasizing that fact in discussions with community members, stakeholders, and decision-makers, so they can move ahead with important adaptation and mitigation planning.”

But in the long run, it is not clear that the dynamics of ice sheet collapse that are underway at Thwaites can be stopped. As glaciologist Eric Rignot put it in 2015, in Antarctica, “the fuse has been blown.” Even if we cut carbon emissions to zero tomorrow, warm water will continue to flow beneath the ice sheet for decades, destabilizing the ice and further pushing the glacier toward eventual collapse. This doesn’t means that cutting carbon pollution to zero isn’t an important goal — nothing, in fact, is more important or more urgent. “We may have a small safety margin in Antarctica, but not a large one,” says Alley. Even if the fuse is blown, cutting emissions fast could slow it all down to a millennium-long crack-up that will give us more time to adapt. One way or another, our future is written in ice.

TADEAS:

We have built the new generation of model that can calculate how many materials we will need to make all products. The smartphone I’m holding now, the computer you’re behind, the door handles in your house, the cutlery in your kitchen. The current models calculate how many materials we’ll need to make all of this. And how much comes back and is recycled. We then see two things. There is an incredible amount of materials in circulation, and we have an increasing number of people achieving a high standard of living. A billion Chinese want the same door handles we have, ten per house. That involves billions of handles and huge quantities of material. We are now in a phase to meet that demand

But not many of those door handles come back for reuse. We usually throw them away. This linear use is fast and wasteful. We burn through our things very quickly. This leads to an enormous accumulation, and means that we will peak for nearly all raw materials between 2030 and 2070.”

...

“For some technical applications, the materials used are so specific that they cannot be replaced. It means that if you run out of platinum, you can no longer make a complete product such as a catalyst to convert electricity into hydrogen or hydrogen to electricity in a car afterwards. Or it means that when you can’t make a product with exotic materials anymore, it weighs 14 kilos instead of 140 grams, making production impossible. When your aircraft is broken and your flight is cancelled, that craft is not immediately replaceable by another: it has already been booked. The potential of substitution that economists would like to see as the rescue, is very limited. It can be applied to niche products, but not to bulk products and very large quantities.”

...

The generations after 2100 will face serious material shortages. And if they can be extracted anywhere, we will find them in a less pure form than today’s stocks. This means that the extraction will cost more energy, in a world that may have less energy to use. Those energy costs are already increasing every year. The number of available sources in our geological stocks is also decreasing year by year. Iron extraction alone will take up 30 percent of the total energy demand on Earth by 2070. That is a lot! What are we going to do then? Are we saying goodbye to the Iron Age? Are we going back to ... what? We simply cannot let it come to that. We must change our ways.”

...

But in Europe we don’t have a resources strategy? “The Germans are working on it. This is a total strategy. Where do we get our resources from? Who has these materials? How do we create efficient use within our own national system? How much service do we get from every kilo of raw material and how do we maintain this level?”

...

Harry Lehmann at the German Environmental Protection Agency ... realised that an Energiewende also included a Resourcewende. To realise the turnaround, Germany needs all those critical materials to be able to build the right technology at the right time. But a Socialwende is also needed, in which our behaviour changes, our business, our society. It will not make our life unpleasant, but it will be a little bit different.”

Is this sustainable? | Consciousness of Sheep
https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2020/04/15/is-this-sustainable/

For the moment and temporarily, governments can prop up the economy in this way because the overwhelming majority of the population still buy into the belief that we will return to some form of “normality” and that the economy of the future will be bigger and wealthier than the economy as it was before the pandemic struck; allowing the debt to be repaid. One vision of that bigger and wealthier economy involves the massive deployment of non-renewable renewable energy-harvesting technologies, switching from internal combustion engines to electric motors and swapping physical products (books, DVDs, face to face meetings, etc.) with digital equivalents (e-books, mp4, Zoom, etc.). But these fantasies depend upon a planetary resource base that simply isn’t there anymore.

Several key minerals are only available today because we haven’t attempted a WWII-scale Green New Deal. As Tad Patzek explains:

“To compare the WWII industrial effort with the global dislocation necessary to ameliorate some of the effects of climate change is surprisingly naïve… This comparison also neglects to account for the human population that has almost quadrupled between the 1940s and now, and the resource consumption that has increased almost 10-fold. The world today cannot grow its industrial production the way we did during WWII. There is simply not enough of the planet Earth left to be devoured.”

Less obviously, the energy that we depend upon to do anything is itself increasingly constrained as most of the large oil fields around the planet pass peak production. It is not that there isn’t plenty of oil – or, indeed, fossil fuels in general – under the ground. Nor that enhanced recovery techniques, deep water drilling, hydraulic fracturing and strip-mining bitumen sands cannot continue to deliver vast quantities. Rather, the problem is that each additional barrel of oil from this point on is taking more energy to produce, so that the net energy available to the wider economy is shrinking,

The net energy or energy return on energy invested can fall from 50:1 to as low as 15:1 without having a major impact on the wider economy. Between 15:1 and 5:1 things become extremely difficult. And beyond 5:1 any semblance of a modern economy is impossible. Which raises the question, where are we now? To which, sadly, there is no definitive answer. Conventional oil is probably still above 20:1. Hydraulically fractured shale oil is somewhere around 5:1. Bitumen sands are around 2.5:1 and corn-based biodiesel is energy-negative (it takes more to produce than it provides in return). Solar farms are around 5:1 and windfarms between 15:1 and 20:1 – but remember these technologies are not renewable; without a steady supply of energy-cheap fossil fuels (and in the absence of an energy-dense alternative) these technologies are likely to go the same way as the wider economy.

...

The term which best describes what happens from here on is ‘de-growth’. This is a concept that some have advocated as a positive choice, but it is, in fact, being forced upon us by a relentless deterioration in the energy-driven equation which determines prosperity.”

The current lockdown measures are only “sustainable” for as long as national currencies maintain their value. National currencies, in turn, are only sustainable for as long as the myth of a bigger and wealthier future can be sustained. That myth depends upon growth in the net energy available to the economy that ceased sometime around 2005. There is already a growing list of things that we used to be able to do that – for net energy reasons – are no longer possible; from the collapse of commercial supersonic flight at one end to the growth of such things as bicycle delivery services and hand car washes at the other. In the aftermath of the pandemic, we will likely say goodbye to many more things that we used to take for granted until such time as investors notice and either markets and asset prices collapse for good or stagflation arrives to remove the paper wealth that western economies currently run on.

There is nothing sustainable about the current lockdown. But, then again, there was nothing sustainable about the “normal” economy we were operating anyway. The future is not green growth but de-growth; not more and better, but make do and mend.