"Este é um problema de sobrevivência, não um problema da agricultura"

Comment of the Day: Graydon: : 

"Care to specify one of those problems?... ...They were hard in 1980. So far as I know, they're all solved, and usually solved multiple ways. (Eg., ammonia synthesis and flow batteries for storing renewable energy.)

Also, we cannot keep burning coal and natural gas. We're already somewhere around 50/50 on breaking agriculture. Break agriculture and that's it. Earth reverts to conditions where the maximum human population is around 500 million and probably not that. (Pre-industrial peak was about a billion. We've damaged a lot of soil.)

This is a survival problem, not an agricultural problem.

J. Bradford DeLong on March 07, 2016 at 04:33 AM in Streams: Comment of the Day | Permalink

Este é o melhor argumento que vi desenvolvido em favor da Uber: vejam o vídeo.

Só tive uma vez a oportunidade de usar a Uber e gostei da experiência. Tive ao longo da vida experiências muito desagradáveis com taxistas, nomeadamente, nas Chegadas do Aeroporto de Lisboa (tenho casa em Moscavide), e isso é algo a contar para a minha apreciação dos méritos relativos da questão. Este vídeo, no entanto, poderá mesmo ser o melhor e o final argumento para a minha aceitação da bondade da solução. 

No entretanto, chamo a atenção para o exemplo dado de como a regulamentação (a má regulamentação) dum pré-Uber, por volta de 1915, deu cabo de algo de algo prometedor, e como isso foi o resultado, tomem nota (é mais um exemplo de algo muito importante, mas negligenciado pela esquerda), de uma coligação de interesses, como a indústria de trolleys, os construtores de carros (e, potencialmente, dos produtores de gasolina).

A finalizar: apesar de tudo gostaria de alguma imposição fiscal e de alguma regulamentação adequada e não castradora.

Uber's plan to get more people into fewer cars

Apesar das boas notícias de Al Gore - eu gostei de as ouvir - o meu verdadeiro receio é que, o que está expresso a bold abaixo, se venha mesmo a confirmar

"Comment of the Day: Graydon: Current Links: "The thing about the Nick Stern climate article...

...is that it's uselessly pollyana-ish by talking about economic percentages and not food. Climate-driven disruption gets you, not in the sea level or the air conditioning bill or the change in energy source, but in the farming; either you get hungry or a large hungry group shows up unwilling to starve for your convenience. This is an immediate concern, not a future concern. (That is, there are place in the world where this is already happening.) We do not have 'this century' to get to zero net carbon; we have a lot less time than that. We might have negative time. We are way, way into existential threat territory on this already."

Este é um texto de esquerda, da esquerda pura e dura, da efectiva "análise concreta da situação concreta"

Estava a pensar em fazer um comentário mais desenvolvido sobre este artigo da Naomi Klein, mas falta-me a pachorra. Em todo o caso, permitem-me sublinhar que este artigo é o melhor que li durante muito tempo em termos de esquerda e de esquerda radical (na acepção que dou ao conceito de radical, que não será decerto o de muita gente).

Na ausência do comentário, o bold e o sublinhado permitirão perceber o que considero relevante  e o que, em princípio, concordo (mas, talvez, com algumas qualificações) - o bold com o sublinhado indicam aquilo em que estou absolutamente de acordo. O simples sublinhado é uma chamada de atenção para algo que, a meu ver, naturalmente, deve ser tido em linha de conta, mas que, nalguns casos - atenção, só nalguns casos - pode também não ser (factual ou programaticamente) correcto, ou que deve merecer qualificações. Isto não é mesmo uma forma eficiente de fazer um comentário?

Transcrevi o artigo na totalidade.

Capitalism vs. the Climate | The Nation

There is a question from a gentleman in the fourth row.He introduces himself as Richard Rothschild. He tells the crowd that he ran for county commissioner in Maryland’s Carroll County because he had come to the conclusion that policies to combat global warming were actually “an attack on middle-class American capitalism.” His question for the panelists, gathered in a Washington, DC, Marriott Hotel in late June, is this: “To what extent is this entire movement simply a green Trojan horse, whose belly is full with red Marxist socioeconomic doctrine?”

História dos nossos tempos e dos nossos erros, e muito possivelmente - o que será uma infelicidade - do nosso futuro

Leitura altamente recomendada - nomeadamente, por Krugman e pelo blogue Irish Economy. Deve ser lido na totalidade

Doom! Our Economic Nightmare Is Just Beginning | The New Republic

[....] TODAY’S RECESSION does not merely resemble the Great Depression; it is, to a real extent, a recurrence of it. It has the same unique causes and the same initial trajectory. Both downturns were triggered by a financial crisis coming on top of, and then deepening, a slowdown in industrial production and employment that had begun earlier and that was caused in part by rapid technological innovation. The 1920s saw the spread of electrification in industry; the 1990s saw the triumph of computerization in manufacturing and services. The recessions in 1926 and 2001 were both followed by “jobless recoveries.”

In each case, the financial crisis generated an overhang of consumer and business debt that—along with growing unemployment and underemployment, and the failure of real wages to rise—reduced effective demand to the point where the economy, without extensive government intervention, spun into a downward spiral of joblessness. The accumulation of debt also undermined the use of monetary policy to revive the economy. Even zero-percent interest rates could not induce private investment.

Finally, in contrast to the usual post-World War II​ recession, our current downturn, like the Great Depression, is global in character. Financial disturbances—aggravated by an unstable international monetary system—have spread globally. During the typical recession, a country suffering a downturn might hope to revive itself by cutting its spending. That might temporarily increase unemployment, but it would also depress wages and prices, simultaneously cutting the demand for imports and making a country’s exports more competitive against those of its rivals. But, when the recession is global, you get what John Maynard Keynes​ called the “paradox of thrift” writ large: As all nations cut their spending and attempt to devalue their currencies (which makes their exports cheaper), global demand shrinks still more, and the recession deepens. [....]

O efeito Seneca, ou os efeitos adiados, ou o banquete das consequências - de aplicação generalizada a diversos domínios

The Oil Drum | The Seneca Effect: why decline is faster than growth

"It would be some consolation for the feebleness of our selves and our works if all things should perish as slowly as they come into being; but as it is, increases are of sluggish growth, but the way to ruin is rapid." Lucius Anneaus Seneca, Letters to Lucilius, n. 91

Very often, we fail to understand the delayed effects of our actions. John Sterman reminds us of this point in a talk on global warming quoting Robert Louis Stevenson as saying, "Everybody, sooner or later, sits down to a banquet of consequences." The models shown here tell us that the Seneca cliff is the result of delayed consequences.

As always, the future is something that we build with our actions and the models can only tell us what kind of actions will lead us, eventually, to a certain outcome. Used in this way, models can be extremely useful and can even be applied to systems which are much more modest than an entire civilization, for instance to a single company or to our personal relationships with other people. In all cases, the Seneca effect will be the result of trying hard to keep things running as usual. In that way, we may run out faster of the resource that keeps the system running: be it a physical resource or a reserve of goodwill. The way to avoid this outcome may be to let the system run the way it wants, without attempting to force it to go the way we want it to go. In other words we need to take things in life with some stoicism, as Seneca himself would probably have said. 

Thinking of the worldwide situation and of the problems involved, global warming and resource depletion, what the models tell us is that the Seneca cliff may be the inevitable result of putting too much strain on already badly depleted natural resources. We should try, instead, to develop alternative stocks of resources such as renewable (or nuclear) energy. At the same time, we should avoid to exploit highly polluting and expensive resources such as tar sands, oil shales, deepwater oil, and, in general, applying the "drill, baby, drill" philosophy. All those strategies are recipes for doom. Unfortunately, these are also examples of exactly what we are doing.

I don't know what Seneca would say if he could see this planet-wide effort we are making in order to put into practice the idea that he expressed in his letter to his friend, Lucilius. I can only imagine that he would take it with some stoicism. Or, maybe, he would comment with what he said in his "De Providentia" "Let Nature deal with matter, which is her own, as she pleases; let us be cheerful and brave in the face of everything, reflecting that it is nothing of our own that perishes."

Os grandes bancos são demasiados grandes para falir, e eles sambem !

Merece ser visto, mesmo que nalgumas partes seja um bocado técnico. Mas pelo que é dito, pelo tom com que é dito, e por quem é dito, merece ser, realmente, visto - e, a dado passo, recomenda também que se veja o documentário "Inside Job".

Financial markets: Too big to fail | The Economist:

"Simon Johnson former IMF chief economist and now professor at MIT's Sloan School of Management, has been one of the more vocal critics of the coziness of the ties between the financial sector and the government, particularly in the United States. He spoke on Saturday evening at INET's conference in Bretton Woods on a panel on 'Too Big to Fail' (or, more formally, the regulatory challenge posed by large, complex financial institutions)."

Chamada de atenção

O Expresso da próxima semana distribuirá em DVD (€ 9,90) o documentário "Inside  Job" sobre as causas da actual crise. É uma compra obrigatória. Um crítico disse que quem saísse do cinema sem estar muito zangado é porque não o viu realmente. 

Não trata bem os economistas: aos maus, "pouco virtuosos", designa-os como tal; aos bons, aqueles cujo testemunho serve para identificar as causas do desastre, não. Fora isso é excelente.

Explicações

Krugman é um dos economistas que leva a sério as alterações climáticas e as suas consequências. Abaixo três exemplos (devem lê-los na totalidade):

Gradual Trends and Extreme Events - NYTimes.com:

What happens is that the right tail gets fatter: the probability, and hence the frequency, of extreme events goes up.

Two immediate implications. First, there will still be cold stretches: global warming shifts the distribution, it doesn’t eliminate the left side of the distribution. So there will still be cold spells; that proves nothing. Second, no individual weather event can properly be said to have been “caused” by global warming. Heat waves happened 30 years ago; there’s no way to prove that any individual heat wave now might not have happened even if we hadn’t emitted all that CO2.

But the pattern should have changed: we should be getting lots of record highs, and not as many record lows — which is exactly what we do see. And we should be seeing 100-year heat waves and similar events much more often than history would have suggested likely; again, that’s what we actually do see.

"- Sent using Google Toolbar"

Pânico

Smackdown: climate science vs. climate economics | Grist:

Climate scientists are becoming increasingly panicked as new evidence rolls in and just about every bit is worse than the last. The impacts of climate change are coming faster and harder than most models predicted, and there's a real -- if maddeningly difficult to quantify -- risk of civilization-threatening scenarios that sound like bad sci-fi movies.

"- Sent using Google Toolbar"

A razão suficiente para escolher colocar a citação deve ser óbvia. Este estilo e conteúdo estão a tornar-se comuns, mesmo da parte dos mais analíticos.

No entretanto, o artigo referenciado trata de como a questão das alterações climáticas é tratada de modo diferente, em termos da avaliação das suas consequências, e das propostas de como actuar,  pelos climatologistas e pelos economistas. É interessante, e para quem estiver para aí virado, pode ver, aqui ao lado nos partilhados do Google Reader , uma reacção de um economista a este artigo, no blogue do The Economist, onde pretende explicar as razões da cautela da profissão na matéria: "Are economists erring on climate change?". Esta  é significativa dos tempos, quer por ser feita onde é, e pelo que admite, mas, adoptando um conceito do léxico trostkista, é, a meu ver, demasiado centrista - Krugman, Brad DeLong, e outros, já ultrapassaram essa fase.

E continua... desabafos, leituras a fazer, exemplos a seguir, e mais evidências

Há sempre muito para dizer sobre isto, mas confesso que para mim é mais fácil despejar o que vou lendo, e quem quiser, que faça o seu trabalho de casa, lendo aquilo que achar que deve ler. 

O tom ressaibado do comentário tem a ver com o facto, de muita gente, alinhar as suas convicções nesta matéria do aquecimento global, não em termos do que os factos e o processo científico (digo, deliberadamente, processo científico) nos vão confirmando, mas em função das suas simpatias ideológicas. 

Margaret Tachter (ver abaixo) prova que a aceitação da responsabilidade humana nas alterações climáticas não deveria decorrer de ser de direita ou de esquerda - é tão irónico ver intelectuais de direita, do centro-direita, e mesmo da esquerda democrática, portugueses, caírem na mesma tipo de cegueira ideológica de que acusavam, com razão, os intelectuais comunistas e afins, em tempos idos. Existe, contudo, uma diferença: estes tinham mais desculpas das que têm aqueles agora (a qualidade dos memes criados pela história e pela experiência dos países comunistas era superior à dos memes criados, nos dias que passam, pela extrema -direita norte-americana, e pelos serviços de marketing da Exxon e quejandas).

Artigo de Marty Weitzman:

• Very Scary Things - Paul Krugman Blog - NYTimes.com: "Very Scary Things So I’m working on a climate-related project, and reading Marty Weitzman on extreme uncertainty (pdf). Weitzman directs us to the example of the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum, when temperatures rose about 6 degrees C over 20,000 years, and there were mass extinctions. Meanwhile, I know from Joe Romm that serious climate modelers have marked up their estimates lately, and are predicting a rise of more than 5 degrees under business as usual."

Evidências:

• Freakout-nomics - Paul Krugman Blog - NYTimes.com: "If you think conservatives are freaking out over the growing prospects that health care reform will, in fact, happen, wait until you see the freakout over climate change. You see, a snowy winter in the northeast United States was supposed to have proved the climate skeptics right, after all. But a funny thing happened while they were celebrating: globally, this is shaping up as the warmest winter on record"

• Australia has hottest-ever summer|Climate Ark: "Western Australia has sweated through its hottest ever summer, recording average temperatures just shy of 30 degrees Celsius, officials said on Monday. Weather officials said the giant, dusty state roasted at an average of about 29,6 Celsius during the southern hemisphere summer, 0,2 degrees over the previous high in 1997-1998. The state capital Perth also endured its driest summer since records began in 1897, with just 0,2 millimetres of rain falling in December, January and February. State-wide information is only available since 1950."

• New research sheds light on Antarctic ice melting|Climate Ark: "Jane Ferrigno is the lead author of that new report. She says scientists have known for a while that some of the peninsula's ice shelves are breaking up. Ms. JANE FERRIGNO (Geologist, U.S. Geological Survey): That started at least a decade ago in the northern part of the peninsula, but we looked at all the ice fronts on the peninsula from north to south. In the southern area, we're finding that all the ice fronts are retreating. In the northern part of the peninsula, the majority of ice fronts are retreating, and that's something we neither expected but we're highly interested in finding that out. RAZ: At a peninsula, the area where this research was focused on, is sort of like a canary in the coal mine, right? I mean, what does it tell us about larger trends? Ms. FERRIGNO: The fact that the ice shelves are changing on the peninsula is a significant signal that global change, climate warming, is affecting the ice cover of Antarctica. It's affecting first the area that's towards the north, that's slightly warmer, but the effect of the warming has traveled from the northern part of the peninsula to the southern part of the peninsula, where it's colder. Our next concern is to see exactly what's happening in the continent itself. We've seen some changes there, but we need to look closely and see what else might be happening. RAZ: Give us a sense of how much ice has been lost over the past, say, 10 years. Ms. FERRIGNO: I think I'll go back 20 years, and in the last 20 years, I would say at least 20,000 square kilometers of ice has been lost, and that's comparable to an area somewhere between the state of Texas and the state of Alaska. RAZ: So about the size of the state of Texas in terms of ice has been lost in the past 20 years."

• Tempestade na Madeira é "mais um sinal de um mundo que está em mudança" - Local - PUBLICO.PT: "Portugal “vai viver muito as alterações climáticas” e a violenta tempestade na Madeira é apenas mais um sinal de uma tendência global, defende António Baptista, director do centro norte-americano de Ciência e Tecnologia para a Observação de Margens Costeiras." “Não é possível voltar ao passado nas zonas costeiras. É preciso antecipar agora, tomar as medidas necessárias para ter zonas saudáveis, que permitam aos animais ser saudáveis e aos homens também. Não há ambiguidade ou dúvida. É profunda e irreversível a mudança”, afirma. “Pode discutir-se qual é a grandeza das mudanças climáticas a nível global, mas não há dúvida de que os gases com ‘efeito de estufa’ estão a aumentar de forma espetacular. (...) A questão agora não é julgar a sociedade pelo que fez para que chegássemos a isto, mas olhar para o futuro e perceber o que fazer para gerir melhor os recursos”.

Citação:

• Galileo, Semmelweis, and YOU! : denialism blog: "To wear the mantle of Galileo, it is not enough to be persecuted: you must also be right. --Robert Park"

As diferenças:

• A 21st century catastrophe - Climate Change, Environment - The Independent: "In April 1989 Margaret Thatcher, then Prime Minister, gave her Cabinet a seminar on global warming at No 10 and one of the speakers was the scientist and green guru James Lovelock. A reporter asked him afterwards what would be the first signs of global warming. He replied: 'Surprises.'"

• Senator Inhofe's attempt to distract us from the scientific realities of global warming: "There has been a shift in the climate debate over recent months. It seems people are talking less about the science and more about the alleged actions of a small group of climate scientists. Senator Inhofe is an extreme example with his recent attempt to criminalize 17 leading scientists. These accusations are largely based on stolen private emails that are being quoted out of context and/or without understanding of the science involved. Unfortunately, this is shifting the focus away from the most important element of the climate debate: the scientific reality of global warming. The empirical evidence that global warming is happening and that humans are the primary cause has been and continues to be observed, measured and documented in the peer-reviewed scientific literature."

• James Inhofe, Senate’s top skeptic, explains his climate-hoax theory | Grist: "Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), one of the world’s most vociferous climate skeptics, is practically giddy these days. He’s argued since 2003 that global warming is a massive “hoax” being played on the American people, and now he believes he’s got more backing than ever before for his claim, from “Climategate” emails to errors in the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to the recent blizzards in Washington, D.C. (He gleefully hyped an igloo built by his grandkids as “Al Gore’s new home.”)"

Ciência:

• ambio: Debate sobre clima no Contraditório

• Misinterpreting a retraction of rising sea level predictions: "A new skeptic argument has emerged that upon close inspection, is a polar opposite to the scientific reality. This week, scientists who published a 2009 paper on sea level rise retracted their prediction due to errors in their methodology. This has led some to claim sea levels are no longer predicted to rise. This interpretation was helped no doubt by the unfortunate Guardian headline 'Climate scientists withdraw journal claims of rising sea levels'. However, when you read the article and peruse the peer-reviewed science on future sea level, you learn that the opposite is the case."

• Climate Scientists Defend IPCC Peer Review as Most Rigorous in History | SolveClimate.com

Evidência doutro tipo de coisa:

• Shame « Open Mind  ecoado por  ambio: Estará o clima a arrefecer?

Já existe tradução para português, dos argumentos da Skeptical Science  contra as alegações denegacionistas do aquecimento global:

• Translations of Global Warming Skeptic Arguments