Forum / Too Much Too Late

strannikov
Apr 01, 04:20pm

(Nota bene: the following essay was composed by yours truly with assistance from the Gemini LLM serving as fact-supplier for the argument I was assembling. The argument I have assembled is only tentative, suggestive, and indicative, reflecting the real circumstance that "climate realities" are themselves some distance out in front of climate measurements and analyses thereof, which themselves are some distance far out in front of policy responses over the past three decades and more to climate concerns. The essay is thus a provocation and does not attempt to pose any solution, even though it suggests a shocking magnitude of response that conceivably is already necessary and overdue. I must also ask readers to bear with formatting errors.)

Too Much Too Late

Indivisible, the outfit sponsoring the nationwide “No Kings” protests, claims that over eight million citizens participated in the 28 March 2026 rallies it helped organize across the U. S. This figure of participation is not seriously under dispute from any credible source.

For all the thought and planning that went into organizing the protests, however, little to no thought seems to have been given to resulting climate impacts.

Failure to assess climate impacts among individual citizens of any of the world’s nations and countries, even in an era of “climate sensitivity”, is ridiculously common, even or especially at such a comparatively late date as Spring 2026.

Commercial cults of celebrity, for instance, remain oddly deaf and blind to legitimate climate concerns in our perilous days and times. To note but two recent and conspicuous instances: Madonna’s Copacabana Rio concert in May 2024 attracted an estimated 1.6 million attendees, while Lady Gaga’s Copacabana Rio concert in May 2025 attracted an estimated 2.5 million attendees. (While these two events had fewer attendees than the most recent “No Kings” rallies, their per-capita emissions were likely higher due to the concentration of international tourism calculated in terms of numbers of flights and passenger miles.)

The March 2026 “No Kings” protests (hereafter: NK3) more than doubled the participation rates for the two Copacabana Rio concerts just mentioned. NK3 participants chiefly were not flying to protest venues nor were they walking or cycling: many if not most were driving or relying on some other form of automotive transport to and from their protest venues.

Because this essay is being composed less than a week after NK3, rude and crude back-of-the-envelope calculations will have to suffice for now, but even initial “rough estimates” do not look appetizing.

Travel to and from protest venues would have accounted for anywhere from 70% to 85% of CO2 emissions. Further assuming a roughly forty-mile round trip (whether in an individual ICE vehicle or by way of public transport), about fifteen kilograms of CO2 per attendee would have been emitted. The NK3 protests and rallies thus would have generated over 120,000 metric tonnes of CO2 emissions.

One metric tonne equals 2,204.62 pounds. Thus: well over 260 million pounds of CO2 emissions were generated in a single day of NK3 protests. (This figure can legitimately be augmented by adding in CO2 emissions resulting from energy consumption [mainly, electricity] at venue sites, which could easily inflate the 120,000 metric tonne figure by 15,000 metric tonnes to a total of 135,000 metric tonnes—another thirty-three million pounds of CO2 emissions, which means we’re closing in on a range of 295 to 300 million pounds of CO2 emissions for a single day’s protests.)

A metric tonne of CO2 released for a protest has the same radiative forcing as a metric tonne of CO2 released for a luxury cruise.

Perhaps possibly maybe Indivisible’s leaders would argue that preserving democratic institutions is a prerequisite for climate action. With other political activists they may share the idea that the American administrative state can or should be dismantled and that therefore any amount of “personal carbon foot-printing” expended in organized and visible protests can be tolerated: mass protests may be seen by protest organizers as a legitimate if not necessary expenditure to protect the legal framework required for future decarbonization. For NK3 participants the carbon emissions costs of being one of over eight million people marching in local venues is “the cost of doing business” (assuming that the protests can actually shift policy enough so that resulting emissions reductions would dwarf the carbon emissions footprints of the rallies themselves). Carbon emissions in the staging of public political protests comprise just one of the “sunk costs” of political protest.

Political debate could therefore ensue as to whether political protest advocates and participants (just as devotees of commercial cults of celebrity) have any good ideas of just how perilously close our planet’s residents are to activating self-amplifying feedback loops as of April 2026.

On Tuesday, 31 March 2026, new satellite data confirmed that the Gulf Stream’s path has shifted north by approximately 50 kilometers. Modeling suggests this is a late-stage indicator of a weakening Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC).

The three-year period ending in 2025 formally and officially breached the 1.5°C threshold set in the Paris Agreement: while three-years’ worth of data is only a slice of a 20-year average, the empirical reality is that we have already entered an “overshoot” era.

Methane releases from Siberian and Canadian sub-arctic permafrost zones and regions are now estimated to be accelerating at nearly double the rate projected as recently as 2020.

As of 1 March 2026, Arctic sea ice extent was the second-lowest in the satellite record. We are closer than ever to approaching the threshold where the “Blue Ocean Event” (an ice-free Arctic summer) becomes a mathematical certainty, permanently removing the planet’s primary heat reflector.

Although many political activists and protesters may well understand the peril, they behave as if they believe that without functioning, responsive governments to manage coming asymmetries, self-amplifying feedback loops will be activated that result in total societal unraveling. They may not be ignoring the CO2 emissions of their rallies at all but are instead accepting that some expenditure of kinetic energy is required to move a stalled political engine before the climate system renders all policy moot.

This could well be exactly the wrong approach to take in our present circumstances.

If the past three decades of sclerotic political response tells us anything at all in Spring 2026, obviously, we cannot rely on nation-states and their top-down bureaucracies to enforce limits to CO2 emissions: the economies they help to manage were built to promote consumption, and simply buying into regular consumption habits in order to hope to effect “systemic change” does nothing to avert the climate crisis already facing us.

Again: A metric tonne of CO2 released for a protest has the same radiative forcing as a metric tonne of CO2 released for a luxury cruise. Self-amplifying feedback loops do not care about “intent” behind CO2 emissions: one metric tonne of CO2 is equal to one metric tonne of CO2.

Arguments that we must “buy into” existing consumption habits (traveling to rallies, using digital infrastructure, maintaining global logistics) to effect political change assumes that global climate has a linear response to policy. —but our climate sciences and scientists cannot construct working climate models with the “linear” assumptions that afflict not only policymakers but, sadly and apparently, contrarian political activists themselves.

The massive volume of CO2 emissions from c. 1850 to today represents a physical reality that top-down bureaucracies are ill-equipped to manage, especially when any “systemic change” being sought relies on the very consumption patterns that only add to this weight.

If political activists in 2026 are not in fact shy about engaging in political debate, they may have to or want to contend with the view that the only responsible approach going forward is to encourage as little automotive transportation as possible, across all circumstances (work and leisure, travel and transport, et cetera). Each nation’s population of individual citizens is now chiefly responsible for CO2 emissions--not governments or financial bureaucracies which have already long demonstrated incapacity, inability, and unwillingness.

It is already too late to wait for governments and civil bureaucracies to “legislate the survival” that governments and bureaucracies exist to preclude (since their duties are to promote and/or preserve GDP and economic growth).

Governments do not drive cars—people do.

Political, financial, economic, and social systems promote consumption because the populations they serve remain willing to participate in those systems. Only if or when the residents of the planet’s wealthiest nations begin to adopt a radical stasis—minimizing all non-essential automotive and aerial transport—will the “top-down” structures face any likelihood of collapse. Such collapse would be a byproduct of the only thing the climate actually responds to: the cessation of CO2 emissions into the atmosphere.

If contrarian political activists have a care for climate realities going forward, they can begin to promote a twenty-percent rule for citizens: reduce your automative and travel transits by at least eighty percent each year going forward. Instead of driving your ICE vehicle 12,000 miles annually, plan to cut back to no more than 2,400 miles annually.

Otherwise, by the time any government is “forced” to act by a protesting population, the very act of protesting will only have added millions of more pounds of carbon to the atmospheric load, potentially triggering the feedback loops (like an AMOC collapse or further and accelerating permafrost melt) that would make any subsequent legislation irrelevant.

New habits, arguably, are already required of us all.

-END-

strannikov
Apr 08, 01:18pm

Background Data and Analysis
(Collaboration with ChatGPT, 3–7 April 2026)

(Since I wrote the essay above with help from the Gemini LLM for fact-checking, I decided to rely on ChatGPT to assemble the following summary of current climate science consensus and the state of the climate as viewed by climatologists, et al. ChatGPT imposed a welcome rigor to the expressions in the summary, since as a non-scientist and not working as a science journalist, I remain apt to overstate some points without appreciating the limits and the finesse that the subject truly deserves. Any other errors in the following presumably are my own, though I still don't know how to exercise control over formatting errors.)

Assessment of Climate System State

1. Greenhouse Gas Forcing
Mauna Loa Observatory and global GHG monitoring show continuing rise in atmospheric concentrations of CO₂, CH₄, N₂O, and other long-lived greenhouse gases. Declining ocean carbon uptake (~10% below model expectations) implies more CO₂ remains in the atmosphere, increasing radiative forcing.
Confidence: Very high
Emissions trajectories are consistent with intermediate-to-high forcing scenarios, though not uniquely aligned with the highest-end pathways. There is emerging but uncertain evidence of weakening natural carbon sinks.
Implication: The primary driver of energy accumulation continues unabated: technogenic radiative forcing is increasing, committing the system to continued warming and, absent substantial mitigation, potential acceleration.

2. Aerosol Forcing (Declining Masking Effect)
Maritime sulfur emissions (IMO 2020 sulfur cap) and land-based air quality controls have reduced reflective aerosols and decreased their net cooling influence.
Confidence: High (direction), Medium (magnitude)
Implication: Reduced aerosol masking likely contributes to near-term warming rate increases, though precise attribution remains uncertain.

3. Global Mean Surface Temperature (GMST)
Post-2015 data show no evidence of stabilization, with year-on-year anomalies continuing upward. Global temperatures continue to rise, with recent records at or near historical highs.
Confidence: Very high
Detection of long-term acceleration in GMST remains low-to-medium confidence due to variability.
Implication: The system shows continued warming without stabilization, but acceleration is not yet robustly established. Nevertheless, short-term accelerations in GMST align with continued GHG emissions growth, aerosol declines, and ocean-atmosphere feedbacks. Warming trends are consistent with a system in sustained radiative disequilibrium, even if statistical acceleration over decades is not yet fully confirmed.

4. Cryosphere (Ice Sheets and Glaciers)
Ice sheets and glaciers are losing mass globally. Greenland and Antarctica ice sheets continue unabated mass loss, now measurable every month of the year for Greenland. Mountain glaciers worldwide are retreating, contributing to accelerating sea-level rise.
Confidence: Very high
Evidence for nonlinear or accelerating dynamics is medium confidence and regionally variable.
Implication: Ongoing ice loss contributes to sea-level rise and may introduce long-term feedbacks, with uncertain timing and magnitude. Ice-sheet response is non-linear, providing both evidence of warming persistence and reinforcing feedbacks via albedo reduction and freshwater input into oceans.

5. Sea Level, Coastal Processes, and Hydrologic Intrusion

5a. Global Mean Sea Level (GMSL)
Global mean sea level is rising and the rate of GMSL is accelerating, unequivocally. Recent studies (Nerem et al. 2018, Hamlington et al. 2024, Adams/JPL 2024) indicate accelerating sea-level rise driven by ice-mass loss and ocean thermal expansion. Acceleration of GMSL reflects energy accumulation in the climate system.
Confidence: Very high
Implication: Provides a robust, integrated signal of long-term energy accumulation. Sea-level rise acts as a lagging but integrated indicator of ongoing system disequilibrium.

5b. Relative Sea-Level Rise (RSLR) and Coastal Subsidence
Local sea-level change is strongly influenced by vertical land motion.
Confidence: High
In many regions (e.g., deltas, sedimentary coasts), subsidence significantly amplifies effective sea-level rise.
Implication: Some coastal areas experience relative sea-level rise rates substantially exceeding the global mean, often by a factor of two or more.

5c. Saltwater Intrusion into Aquifers
Rising sea levels and groundwater extraction contribute to inland migration of saline water.
Confidence: High (observed), Medium (future extent)
Implication: Degradation of freshwater resources. Potentially irreversible aquifer salinization on human timescales.

5d. Marshes, Wetlands, and Coastal Buffer Systems
Coastal ecosystems respond dynamically to sea-level rise but are increasingly stressed.
Confidence: High
Rapid relative sea-level rise and reduced sediment supply can exceed adaptive capacity.
Implication: Loss of wetlands and marshes
Reduction of natural storm buffers, increased inland exposure to flooding.

5e. Nonlinear and Threshold Behavior
Sea-level-related impacts are often threshold-driven rather than gradual.
Confidence: High (conceptual and observational basis)
Implication: Small increments in sea level can trigger abrupt local consequences, including:
sudden loss of potable groundwater, rapid wetland collapse, and sharp increases in flood frequency.
Integrated Sea-Level Implication
Sea-level rise is best understood as a global, steadily accelerating driver that produces highly variable, locally amplified, and often nonlinear impacts through interaction with subsidence, hydrology, and coastal geomorphology.

6. Ocean Heat Content (OHC) and Carbon Uptake
Ocean heat content continues to increase. Oceans continue to absorb ~90% of cxcess heat, with rising heat content. Simultaneously, emerging but uncertain evidence of regional and episodic weakening suggests carbon uptake efficiency may be declining.
Confidence: Very high
(Evidence for declining carbon uptake efficiency: low-to-medium confidence.)
Implication: Continued heat accumulation confirms persistent system imbalance. Persistent energy accumulation combined with reduced carbon buffering amplifies the potential for further warming.

7. Earth’s Radiation Budget and Energy Imbalance (EEI)
Observations indicate a sustained positive energy imbalance. CERES data (~2000–2026) show an energy imbalance has likely increased over the last ~25 years. Short-term variability (ENSO, volcanic, aerosol effects) complicates detection of sustained acceleration, but the trend in forcing and heat accumulation is clear.
Confidence: High to very high
Implication: The Earth system remains out of radiative equilibrium, ensuring continued warming, continued loss of ice mass, continued sea level rise. As long as EEI remains positive, continued system change is inevitable.

8. Ocean Circulation Signals (AMOC and Related Systems)
There is evidence suggesting potential weakening of large-scale ocean circulation.
Confidence: Medium (trend), Low (recent short-term shifts)
Implication: Indications of circulation sensitivity exist, but there is no high-confidence evidence of imminent tipping. Early indications of circulation system stress hint at nonlinearity and the emergence of tipping-element behavior, which could amplify regional and global climate responses.

Synthesis

Very high confidence that the Earth system is accumulating energy and warming
High confidence that sea-level rise is accelerating and increasingly shaped by local amplifiers
High confidence that coastal impacts are already being intensified by subsidence, saltwater intrusion,
and wetland loss.
Medium confidence that feedbacks (cryosphere, aerosols, carbon cycle) are influencing the rate and regional expression of change.
Low-to-medium confidence in claims of system-wide acceleration or imminent large-scale tipping

Bottom-Line Characterization

—The Earth’s climate system is unequivocally in a state of persistent warming and sustained positive energy imbalance. Multiple independent observations—including rising ocean heat content, accelerating global mean sea level, ongoing cryosphere mass loss, and increasing greenhouse gas concentrations—demonstrate that the system remains far from radiative equilibrium.
—While long-term acceleration in global mean surface temperature is not yet robustly established due to internal variability, several components of the system—notably ice-sheet mass loss—exhibit acceleration in some regions. Declining aerosol cooling and possible weakening of natural carbon sinks may be contributing to recent warming trends, though their magnitudes remain uncertain.
—Sea-level rise stands out as a particularly robust and integrative signal, already producing amplified and nonlinear impacts at regional scales through interactions with subsidence, hydrology, and coastal ecosystem dynamics.
—Emerging signals of stress in large-scale ocean circulation and other potential tipping elements warrant close monitoring, but there is currently low confidence in imminent abrupt global transitions.
—A substantial fraction of future warming and sea-level rise is already committed due to past and present forcing, even in the absence of further emissions increases. Taken together, the evidence indicates a climate system under sustained and increasing stress, with continued warming and long-term change effectively locked in under present forcing conditions.

strannikov
May 12, 05:23pm

Hendecasyllabic summary:

“Taking things for granted” is our default mode,
which makes good sense while loitering within a
year or decade: “orientation towards
stability”, we may prefer to term it.
Apparently, however, it begins to
lose sound applicability once climate
dynamics exhibit velocities and
traits of self-amplifying feedback loops, once
our oldest accurate maps no longer show
how much our coastlines have been changed by rising
sea levels and coastal subsidence. Look quick!

User Deleted
May 12, 11:12pm

Yes, it's the individual citizens fault that our habitat is going to undergo and radical, catastrophic rupture. No, it's not the fault of global trans-national corporations or the militaries of the five biggest nations on Earth. Nope, not their fault. It's mine. You couldn't be a more of a neo-liberal cheerleader if you were wearing a Friedrich von Hayek skin costume a la Leatherface.

strannikov
May 13, 12:51am

Chris: I cannot stop you from reading or from misreading work I post here in the Forum.

At the risk of provoking further misreading, though, I'll post this Fictionaut essay from June 2019 for what might offer clarifying background, but do feel free to misconstrue and mischaracterize it, too:

http://fictionaut.com/stories/strannikov/naming-the-scourge-we-made

strannikov
May 13, 02:09am

(I had thought to hold off on posting the following essay until after Thursday, 14 May, the day after tomorrow: that is the scheduled date for the NOAA Climate Prediction Center to update its ENSO Diagnostic Discussion with an updated reading on the anticipated commencement of the next El Nino cycle, which the last Diagnostic Discussion concluded would likely begin sometime in mid-to-late September [2026] or early-to-mid October.

Meanwhile: just as the top two entries on this page were written with LLMs as data sources, I here relied on Claude and ChatGPT to help frame my input as accurately as they deemed advisable, so here is what I intended all along as the summation of the first two entries [the hendecasyllabic entry above is all mine and was a spontaneous creation just this morning]):

Elective Consumption Constraints vs. Climate-Imposed Collapse: Policy Argument for a General Audience
(Collaboration with Claude Sonnet 4.6 and with ChatGPT [April 2026])

The Earth is in a state of measured radiative imbalance: more energy is entering the climate system than leaving it. Satellite measurements and ocean heat content data confirm both the existence of this imbalance and its acceleration. This is not a projection. It is a physical measurement.

The driver is equally well established: the accumulation of greenhouse gases from fossil fuel combustion, tightly coupled to the consumption patterns of industrialized economies. The causal chain — consumption → energy demand → emissions → atmospheric accumulation → radiative forcing — is settled physics.

The question is not whether this process is occurring but whether current responses are sufficient to arrest it in time.

I. The empirical gap

The continued rise of atmospheric CO₂, as recorded by the Keeling Curve — a continuous data record maintained since March 1958 — demonstrates that global decarbonization efforts have not yet outpaced growth in emissions. This is not a claim about intent but about outcome.

Even under optimistic assumptions, the observable rate of decarbonization remains below what is required to stabilize the climate within widely accepted thresholds, given current carbon budget estimates. Carbon capture technologies exist but remain orders of magnitude below the scale needed to offset ongoing emissions, and their expansion is constrained by energy, infrastructure, and time.

Electrification and low-carbon generation are advancing, but they are being deployed into a physical environment that is already degrading. Drought and heat stress have already reduced output from some nuclear facilities, illustrating a broader point: no energy system scales in isolation from the climatic conditions that support it.

The result is a widening gap between the rate of emissions reduction required and the rate of emissions empirically observed. Closing it requires acting on both sides of the equation: how energy is produced, and how it is consumed.

This gap is the central policy problem.

II. Structural drivers of the gap

High-income economies are structurally organized around consumption. Consumer spending constitutes the majority of economic activity, supported by systems of credit expansion, marketing, and product turnover designed to sustain demand beyond what is required for basic human need.

Efficiency gains alone do not resolve this dynamic. Through the Jevons Paradox, improvements in efficiency tend to reduce costs and stimulate additional consumption, offsetting a portion of their environmental benefit.

Emissions are also highly unequal. Data from Oxfam and the Stockholm Environment Institute consistently show that the wealthiest ten percent of the global population account for approximately half of all consumption-based emissions, while the poorest fifty percent contribute roughly ten percent. The issue is not consumption per se, but its scale, concentration, and carbon intensity at the top end. A targeted reduction agenda focused on the highest-impact consumption among the highest-consuming populations could achieve substantial emissions reductions while leaving the consumption of lower-income populations untouched or improved. This is not a sacrifice imposed equally on everyone. It is a reallocation of the atmospheric commons away from those who have been consuming it disproportionately.

III. The constraint reality

Standard transition models often assume stable infrastructure and linear deployment conditions. Increasingly, those assumptions are under strain.

Climate impacts — on water systems, agriculture, transport networks, and coastal infrastructure — are already introducing friction into the very processes required for large-scale energy transition. At the same time, Earth-system feedbacks introduce the risk of additional, self-reinforcing warming. Among the most consequential is permafrost thaw, which releases both carbon dioxide through aerobic decomposition and methane through anaerobic processes in waterlogged terrain. The distinction matters: methane carries a warming potential approximately eighty times that of carbon dioxide over a twenty-year horizon, meaning the permafrost feedback pathway could accelerate radiative imbalance substantially faster than carbon release alone would imply. Ice-sheet instability and the early signs of Atlantic circulation weakening — including a recently observed northward shift of the Gulf Stream consistent with AMOC slowdown — further suggest that nonlinear responses may already be emerging from the system.

The implication is not that decarbonization will fail, but that supply-side transition alone cannot be assumed to close the gap within the available time window.

Under this constraint, reducing demand for high-carbon activity becomes a necessary complement to technological transition, not an alternative to it.

IV. Targeted consumption reduction

The objective is not generalized austerity. It is the selective reduction of high-carbon, low-
necessity consumption, concentrated where emissions are highest and welfare returns are lowest.
Priority categories include frequent long-haul aviation; oversized personal vehicle manufacture and use beyond functional need; fast-turnover consumer goods including fast fashion and planned obsolescence; high-emission food systems at current scale; excessive residential energy use; and continued private expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure. (In addition to primary high-emission sectors, targeted reductions in discretionary, high-carbon activities within the entertainment and cultural economy offer near-term, low-friction opportunities for emissions abatement during a period of elevated climate risk.)

These categories share two characteristics: high climate impact and weak or indirect linkage to durable human wellbeing.

Evidence from wellbeing research indicates that beyond a threshold of material sufficiency, additional consumption yields diminishing returns. In this range, reducing excess consumption need not reduce welfare and may improve it.

V. Mechanisms for demand-side adjustment

Effective policy tools include carbon-weighted consumption taxes, durability and repairability standards, restrictions on planned obsolescence, limits on high-emission advertising, and public provisioning that reduces dependence on private consumption.

A critical but often overlooked lever is the regulation of demand-stimulation systems themselves. Modern digital and media infrastructures continuously generate and amplify consumption demand at scale, supported by substantial and growing energy use. Viable regulatory approaches include targeted advertising restrictions for high-carbon goods, transparency requirements and limits on algorithmic amplification of consumption, carbon-linked pricing for data-center energy use, and constraints on business models designed to maximize user attention and purchasing behavior.

These measures address not only individual choice but the systems that shape it.

VI. Democratic feasibility

Historical precedent demonstrates that democratic societies can rapidly restructure consumption when confronted with clearly articulated and legible threats. The United States and United Kingdom during 1941 and 1942 imposed rationing, redirected industrial capacity, and restructured civilian consumption at scale — with substantial popular legitimacy, and without waiting for certainty about the outcome. The observable threat was sufficient. The energy crises of the 1970s demonstrated that price signals combined with cultural messaging could shift consumption patterns in relatively short timeframes. The COVID-19 disruption of 2020 demonstrated something more fundamental: that consumption patterns previously treated as structurally fixed — daily commuting, frequent air travel, disposable service culture — could change with remarkable speed when conditions demanded it. What these precedents share is not the specific nature of the threat but the mechanism: when the stakes were made sufficiently clear and the collective response sufficiently framed as necessary, democratic societies acted.

Climate change differs from these precedents in its temporal distribution and the slower visibility of its consequences. Under these conditions, framing becomes decisive. The relevant distinction is not between lifestyle choice and environmental preference, but between managed adjustment and unmanaged disruption.

Unmanaged reduction — through supply shocks, infrastructure failure, and environmental stress — already begins to emerge. Managed reduction offers a more equitable and stable alternative.

Conclusion

The continued rise in emissions, despite decades of policy and technological effort, indicates that current approaches are insufficient at the required scale and speed. This is an empirical
observation, not a theoretical claim.

Under conditions of constrained time, infrastructural vulnerability, and potential climatic feedbacks, reliance on supply-side transition alone is a high-risk strategy.

A complementary approach — targeted reduction of high-impact consumption in high-income populations — follows directly from the physical constraints of the system. It is not a moral injunction but a structural response to a measurable imbalance.

The choice is not whether consumption will adjust. It is whether that adjustment occurs deliberately, through policy, or involuntarily, through physical disruption. The former remains available. The latter is already underway. The window for choosing between them is narrowing.

- END -

David Ackley
May 13, 02:18am

We are merely at the cusp of a historical process of carbon fueled environmental degradation, which by one recent account has been going on for at least the last 500 years. More recently, one could point to Henry Ford's mass production of the gasoline burning car as a turning point in providing the assured outlet for oil based fuel, making it the perfect commodity, instantly consumed, endlessly needing replacement. Blaming individuals in the present for consequences already beyond control is not only unreasonable but simple-minded.

strannikov
May 13, 01:01pm

"Blaming individuals in the present for consequences already beyond control is not only unreasonable but simple-minded."

I wholeheartedly agree, David: I'm glad I've not indulged in anything so unreasonable or simple-minded.

David Ackley
May 13, 01:24pm

Actually, Edward, you did, in your argument that political protests, dependent on fuel consumption in order to gather, were some significant part of the problem.

strannikov
May 13, 02:15pm

Actually, David, I did not: the consequences of a political protest that entail emissions of c. 300 million pounds of CO2 for a single day's events is not (was not) "already beyond control". Protest organizers seem simply to've defaulted to the "mass protest model" without due climate consideration because mass protests still garner mass media attention. Sounds to me as if protest organizers believed that the mass protest model continues to be viable in a critical era of climate realities already exhibiting clear signs of significant stress, as I documented in the second post above (dated 8 April).

I did not fault the Indivisible protestors for their protests per se but, more pointedly, for living in the past (and somewhat irresponsibly so). We no longer live in a world where the gratuitous expenditure of c. 300 million pounds of CO2 emissions in a single day is prudent or advisable, no matter what worth or value anyone imputes to the protest itself.

David Ackley
May 13, 08:09pm

I don't know what to say to you, Edward, when you blame, both by innuendo and direct statement, individual protestors for participating in a collective action that you don't like and then deny that you said what you actually said. I could point out places where you did just that but if you're not going to take responsibility for your own words it's really pointless to go any further. You offered this up for discussion, so discuss, don't throw up a fog of words to obscure the real problem with what you're saying: Essentially blaming the victims of climate change, who are out there trying (as Walter Benjamin put it) to ..."pull the emergency brake of history."

strannikov
May 13, 10:14pm

David: You do seem to be conflating my indifference toward the political content or substance of the 28 March 2026 Indivisible/NK3 protests with my specific criticism that the protest organizers relied on what I consider an outmoded and non-viable form of mass protest.

If NK3 protest organizers and participants think they have an agenda worth pursuing, fine: but I still think they need to get over the idea that they can resort to 20th century mass mobilization tactics today as if the past thirty-plus years of climate science data accumulation have yielded no evidence of continuous radiative disequilibrium or as if the entire sixty-eight-year span of Keeling Curve data do not show a continuous upward trend in atmospheric CO2 concentrations, to say nothing of the other data I summarized in the 8 April post above.

Do not ask me to concede that the legitimacy of NK3 protests justifies pumping well over a hundred thousand metric tonnes (= hundreds of millions of pounds) of CO2 emissions into the atmosphere in a single day (you can find an obvious clue to my perspective in the title of the first essay: "Too Much Too Late").

Also do not ask me to share your valorization of NK3 organizers and participants as hapless "victims of climate change". By far most of us living in the developed world--me, you, Chris, NK3 organizers and participants as well as those they were protesting against--share responsibility for what has transpired across our lifetimes. Compounding injuries to the global climate and its interconnected systems does not come with a "Get Out of Jail Free" card, not even if such a generous hope emerges from a sincere desire to impute legitimacy to the substance of the protests themselves. NK3 organizers and participants are not victims of "consequences already beyond control" when their mode of protest is in no way imposed upon them from the outside. NK3 organizers and participants are not victims of "consequences already beyond control" when they themselves fail to assess how their choice of outmoded mass mobilization protest contributes that much more to an already perilous climate situation, especially this late in the day.

--so how do you assess the essay I posted this morning, "Elective Consumption Constraints vs. Climate-Imposed Collapse: Policy Argument for a General Audience"?

David Ackley
May 14, 12:16am

I'm sure your carping about 20th century mass mobilization techniques is not going to change the minds of the millions of participants who think otherwise. All of them individuals who chose to do that all in spite of your impugning both their motives and their awareness.

I do think its rich that you should do this while marshalling AI to underpin your arguments, one of the biggest consumers of (fossil fueled) energy
on the planet.

David Ackley
May 14, 12:39am

As to your latest posting, and those before, although your (and AI's ) massaging of the data is probably accurate, most of it has been available for years, the alarm raised in books, Climate reports from the UN, and multiple international conferences. It is clear by now that the fundamental problem is -- as is almost always the case-- political, how to persuade enough people, especially those in positions of corporate and governmental authority to over-ride their short-term self interest and that of their investors in favor of the long-term welfare of the planet and the human race. I don't think they will do this willingly, but one way or another in the past political solutions to concentrations of power and the crises they inevitably create have occurred before and I suspect one might present itself before too long. Just my opinion, Edward, I hasten to add, without any decoration.

strannikov
May 14, 01:34am

You are much more sure than I'm able to be, David, that the blissful millions you're keen to valorize actually think or gave any thought about whether their choice of protest mode--their "informed choice", right?--contributed further to the aggravation of climate conditions in both the short term and the long term.

As far as I could tell from the contemporary accounts, it was less a "mass protest" than "a mass indulgence of emotivist pique", political theatre playing directly for the cameras and the microphones. As simplistic confirmation that Trump is virulently disliked by millions of Americans (I could be one myself, since I've not voted for him a single time), I could not tell that the demonstration provoked any political change or yielded any outcome other than the emission of another two or three hundred million pounds of CO2 in a single day.

With some variation among them, each of the three LLM models I've consulted is better informed on the specifics of climatology than most practicing US science journalists I've come across online. (Apparently, the LLMs are also much better informed on the climate sciences than most credentialed science teachers who've been laboring in America's dysfunctional public schools for the past decade or more.) To keep body and soul together, I doubt I rely on the LLMs more substantively in terms of energy consumption than I am compelled to continue to rely on my car (a four-cylinder internal combustion engine vehicle which I've put less than 1000 miles on in the past nine months)--but I am not much of an idealist, after all. (I do wonder now, though, whether OpenAI's, Google's, and Anthropic's LLMs combined are responsible for emissions of two or three hundred million pounds of CO2 each day.)

Meanwhile, I'll alert you and anyone else again to the updates scheduled for release tomorrow from NOAA's Climate Prediction Center: their ENSO Diagnostic Discussion should offer further clues about the transition to El Nino conditions later this year.

David Ackley
May 14, 03:15am

The "blissful millions," that I am "keen to valorize." Really, Edward, your Edwardian sarcasm sounds like it comes from an English Clubroom about a century ago or more from some cognac-sipping aristo berating the mob. You should really update your diction. That aside, I was just pointing out that the only recourse is the political, which seems to me patently obvious, and that that has been historically so since human beings began to constitute themselves as political entities. Neither science, nor religion, nor philosophy can create change without the political will and collective muscle to bring it about.

strannikov
May 14, 01:53pm

Here is the link to the 14 May 2026 NOAA/CPC ENSO Diagnostic Discussion:

https://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/enso_advisory/ensodisc.pdf

The most startling item is the anticipation that the transition to El Nino conditions will commence as early as late May or early June--over the next four weeks, that is: this is roughly four months earlier than what models were indicating as recently as last month, and the new data show a high probability that El Nino conditions will persist into early 2027, at least into February (the data again permitting a bit more candor than data sets from only a month ago).

What this portends remains to be seen. As the summary concedes, a "strong El Nino" only makes possible outcomes more likely. I assume that the folks at RealClimate.org will be picking up on this report shortly, since the consequences of a strong El Nino event will be felt most directly from Australia and East Asia across the Pacific and the Americas to West Africa. A sufficiently strong El Nino also could temporarily weaken (even further) the already-compromised Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation.

Stay tuned.

strannikov
May 15, 12:40pm

In the initial essay “Too Much Too Late” (posted 1 April), I offered back-of-the-envelope estimates on the CO2 emissions generated by the 28 March Indivisible/NK3 protests convened at hundreds of venues across the U. S.

Still using the original crowd estimates offered by Indivisible of eight million participants, but unable to find any interim figures for transportation to and from venues, I am here cutting the estimated CO2 emissions for the day’s festivities in half, from over 120,000 metric tonnes to 60,000 metric tonnes. Use of this more conservative number helps account more reliably for the blend of the number of local events not requiring automotive transportation, reliance on public transit by whatever number of participants, and the likelihood that many participants relied to some degree on carpooling. (In this lower estimate I incorporate a lower figure of 10,000 metric tonnes of CO2 emissions for power consumption at venue sites instead of the earlier figure of 15,000 metric tonnes.)

Sixty-thousand metric tonnes of CO2 emissions for a single-day event amounts to something between 130 and 132 million pounds of CO2 emissions.

One-hundred-thirty million pounds of CO2 emissions for a single-day event is a non-trivial number, inasmuch as this roughly equals a day’s worth of CO2 emissions for the nation of Estonia (2026 population of c. 1,363,000), though of course it is miniscule compared to the estimated 1150 to 1200 gigatonnes of CO2 (GtCO2) emissions circulating in the atmosphere. Still: as a graph header put it in the IPCC's AR6 report in August 2021: "Every tonne of CO2 emissions adds to global warming."

For relevant context here is the mid-May 2026 summary of Ocean Heat Content data supplied by Google’s AI Overview (not one the LLMs I relied on for earlier data summaries):

“In 2025, global ocean heat content (OHC) in the upper 2000 meters reached a new record high, increasing by approximately 23 (plus or minus 8) ZettaJoules (ZJ) compared to 2024, continuing a rapid warming trend.
Over 90% of excess heat from climate change is absorbed by the oceans, with the 2024–2025 rise being particularly pronounced in the Southern and Pacific Oceans. 2025 set a new record for upper-ocean heat content (0–2000 m).
The oceans stored roughly 23 to 24 ZJ more heat in 2025 than in 2024. The full-depth ocean heat content has increased by 481 (plus or minus 48) ZJ since 1960.
The most significant warming from 2024 to 2025 occurred in the Tropical Western Pacific, Southeast Indian Oceans, and the Indian sector of the Southern Ocean.
The majority of heat gain is concentrated in the top 700 meters, though significant warming is now observed down to 2000 meters.
The rate of ocean warming has roughly doubled from 0.14 W/m² (1960–2025) to 0.32 W/m² (2005–2025) in the top 2000 meters.
Despite record overall heat content in 2025, sea surface temperatures (SST) were slightly lower than 2024 due to the development of La Niña conditions, highlighting that heat is being transferred to deeper layers. (Data from Copernicus Marine Service, NOAA NCEI, and NASA ECCO are used to monitor these trends, confirming that the oceans remain the primary reservoir for planetary energy imbalance.)”

(From the "Too Much Too Late" essay I would also delete the brief note concerning 31 March 2026 satellite data indicating a 50 km northward shift in the Gulf Stream. In April those data were assessed not to have accounted properly for sea surface temperatures and now merit re-analysis.)

The foregoing alterations and enhancements constitute the only changes I am prepared to make to the original essay. I continue to argue, therefore, that Indivisible’s resort to mass mobilization for their 28 March NK3 protest was ill-advised, given the CPC’s 14 May assessment for an El Niño event extending through the remainder of 2026 and into at least the first two months of 2027.

El Niño events, driven in part by subsurface heat anomalies in the equatorial Pacific region, transfer heat from ocean to atmosphere. Whereas Earth’s oceans typically function as the planet’s largest “carbon sink” for atmospheric CO2 and as Earth’s primary reservoir for excess heat, El Niño events often raise global average air temperatures temporarily and can also reduce CO2 uptake in some regions.

It likely remains too early to draw a definitive connection with the new ENSO forecast, but data collected in 2023, 2024, and 2025 suggest that Earth’s oceans have experienced an “efficiency drop”, absorbing about 10% less CO2 than earlier models had predicted. With an atmosphere already crammed with almost 1200 GtCO2, oceans’ modestly reduced absorption of atmospheric CO2—coupled with what may well become a severe El Niño event—may provide an early signal of long-term atmospheric temperature elevations. (Some contested data begin to suggest that “cooling” La Niña events are already becoming less intense and occurring with shorter durations.)

The next NOAA/CPC ENSO Diagnostic Discussion release is scheduled for Thursday, 11 June, by which time (assuming that the transition to El Niño conditions will have commenced) further data may begin to reveal the probable severity or intensity of this ENSO event.

This is not 1976, when Keeling Curve atmospheric CO2 readings nudged from 331.66 ppm in January to 332.72 ppm in December—this is 2026 (433.95 ppm recorded 1 May), and the days when 130 million pounds of CO2 emissions can be heaved into the atmosphere for a single day’s political protest, I continue to argue, are well behind us. Indivisible is welcome to stage strictly local protests and encourage participants not to take automotive transport to protest venues and can resort to other protest measures: but events relying on mass mobilization no longer seem tenable for the short term and, depending on the intensity and severity of the upcoming El Niño event, such events may remain untenable across the long term, however long that might turn out to be. Of course, the foregoing critique applies equally to the staging of mass mobilization rallies and protests across the entire political spectrum, just as the foregoing can equally begin to apply to how we have accustomed ourselves to think about attending sports, concert, and other cultural events and making long-distance travel, even how we think about more frequent local commutes and shopping.

Continuing to treat discretionary emissions as “normal and acceptable” during an unstable climate era reflects a dangerous collective mindset. The 2026–2027 El Niño Event may turn out to be one of the last wake-up calls we get.

David Ackley
May 17, 03:01pm

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/may/17/america-china-energy-oil-renewables

strannikov
May 18, 11:30am

cars and trucks idling
tailpipes shitting fecal fumes
into warming days.

David Ackley
May 18, 12:55pm

Nice "Haiku," Edward. You should post it on the story page.
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