Saving Us

A Climate Scientist's Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World

Katherine Hayhoe Central 363.73874 H419s 2021

Climate scientist, chief scientist for the Nature Conservancy, public policy professor at public policy professor at Texas Tech University in Lubbock

Attitude change is endogenous, not imposed. Dr. Hayhoe's message is about learning about the person you wish to convince, and learning about where that person can go from where they are now. Learning about them, their beliefs, their values, their desires and their worries, then learning how to make an attitude shift desirable to that particular person.

p006 "Like coronavirus, vaccines, and more, climate denial is often just one part of a toxic stew of identity issues that share a key factor: fear of change." ... "That fear drives tribalism"

p007 Climate concern framed as alternate Earth-worshipping religion.

p008 2020 26% Alarmed 28% Concerned 20% Cautious 7% Disengaged 11% Doubtful 7% Dismissive (obsessive negative)

p009 http://skepticalscience.com"

p030 . warming stripes, I want a scarf or flag with this pattern:

p043 . deniers claim "one volcanic eruption produces 10x more carbon pollution than humanity"

• Saint Helens was a "35Mt" blast, a megatonne is 4.18e22 erg, hence 1.46e24
• Tamboura produced 51-58 Mt SO₂, typical CO₂ to SO₂ ratio around 1 to 1

volcanos emit 51.3±5.7 Tg (50 MT) CO₂/y non-eruptive and 1.8±0.9 Tg (2 MT) eruptive CO₂/y

CO₂ emissions MT

Ethan Siegel, Forbes, June 2017: "It would take 3 Mount Saint Helens and 1 Mount Pinatubo eruption every day to equal the amount that humanity is presently emitting." Source of mi³ numbers

p048 Ezra Klein Why We're Polarized

p050 ...the overall number of hurricanes isn't increasing, but the number of strong hurricanes is. cite?

p051 I'm Right and You're an Idiot Jim Hoggan 2019

p053 People with the most scientific literacy are the most polarized, motivated reasoning

p065 Wrote "Potential Surprises" with Bob Kopp, the last chapter of the 4th US National Climate Assessment

p067 David Wallace-Wells 2019 book The Uninhabitable Earth

p069 Don't even think about it : why our brains are wired to ignore climate change 2020 George Marshall

p070 The future we choose : surviving the climate crisis 2020 Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac

p079 I work in the environmental movement. I don’t care if you recycle. 2019 Mary Annaise Heglar

p089 How Climate Change Could Make Our Food Less Nutritious Kristie Ebi • TED2019

p133 Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions, and Everyday Life 2011 Kari Norgaard

p137 Merchants of doubt : how a handful of scientists obscured the truth on issues from tobacco smoke to global warming Naomi Oreskes

p137 Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming 2009 James Hoggan also I'm right and you're an idiot : the toxic state of public discourse and how to clean it up

p147 Global Footprint Calculator Average US 8, Hayhoe 5, I'm about 2 to 3

p171 Dr. Hayhoe has her own climate-threatening attitudes:

• But while safe, affordable, waste-free, widespread nuclear fusion may be part of our long term future, it is not likely to happen anytime this century --- and despite recent technological advances, nuclear fission isn't the all-encompassing antidote its enthusiasts often make it out to be.

I agree with the fusion dismissal, not because of delay, but because of the intrinsic environmental cost. Fusion leaks neutrons, perhaps 100 times as many neutrons per kilowatt hour compared to fission. Fusion will result in vastly more radioactive waste per watt generated than fission, and unlike a gen4 reactor, that waste cannot be "bred and reprocessed" until it is close to radiologically inert.

OTOH, the fission enthusiasts I know (including myself) do not think of fission (or any single technology) as an "all-encompassing antidote". Fission is merely the second best way to make terrestrial grid energy with minimum ecological destruction (the best way is not wasting energy, doing more with less). And fission, as practiced in the 21st century, is the best way to destroy nuclear weapons - 20% of our grid electricity is powered by that destruction.

p164: "In 2019 over 70% of new electricity installed around the world was clean energy"

• This sentence is not supported by a citation. There is a huge difference between peak and sustained capacity - a peaking hydro plant produces oodles of power, but not 8766 hours per year. Renewable energy production is important when demand overlaps nature's maximums, but it isn't yet the all-encompassing antidote its enthusiasts often make it out to be.

• International Renewable Energy Agency, Renewable Capacity Statistics 2020 page 3 "But even then, renewables represented 72% of total capacity additions in 2019, continuing to outpace fossil fuels by a wide margin."

My own focus is on information manufactured from energy - big computations like product design, climate models, video synthesis. A binary bit can be stored with ln(2)kT energy, 18 milli-electron volts, or 3e-21 Joules, or 8e-28 kilowatt-hours. A Dual Layer Blu-Ray video disk is 800 gigabits, so 100% efficient data transmission of a Blu-Ray is (hypothetically) 6.4e-16 kilowatt hours. The U.S. city average power cost is $0.16 per kilowatt hour, hence 100 trillion Blu-Ray videos received per penny. Practically free, even after including the vastly larger energies required to move bits into an optical fiber and back out again.

In real life, moving the data is far less expensive than creating it; emphasis on "create", a process that now requires thousands of skills, and tens of thousands of computer hours to assemble the final video product. Computation can displace some of that skill; sets and "extras" can be simulated, flubs and defects removed. Video synthesis computation consumes vast amounts of electricity, which is all converted to heat, over the course of many months. A long wait, made longer by the finite supply of electricity available.

For "portable" tasks like computation, vastly more energy is available, mere light-seconds above our heads. Compute chips are practically weightless, direct-bandgap photovoltaics can be close to that. "Thinsats" at the Earth-Moon Lagrange positions might mass one kilogram per photovoltaic kilowatt captured, and radiate waste heat into the interstellar void; round trip signal transit times will be less than three seconds, a miniscule fraction of the time needed to synthesize a movie or calculate a global climate/weather model. Future technologies can export a significant fraction of the energy demand and waste heat caused by our exponentially growing demand for information and computation.

p236 Empathy is an antidote to righteousness

p236 Climate Outreach's helpful manual Talking Climate 2023/2 local download pdf

p242 "...and Hosea says, even more to the point "for they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the worldwind"

Unfortunate selective quoting, many translations, but the NIV Hosea 8-7 reads "They sow the wind and reap the whirlwind. The stalk has no head; it will produce no flour. Were it to yield grain, foreigners would swallow it up." Xenophobic fundies will remember the end, not the beginning, sigh.

p243 book Active hope : how to face the mess we're in without going crazy