Climate Links: August 2018

Quote of the Month:

"Canada can't transition to a lower-carbon economy, Notley said, until it creates the jobs and raises the tax money needed to do so by selling its natural resources at fair market value." 

CBC. Aug. 30, 2018.

that's Rachel Notley, who is apparently Alberta's new Minister for Orwellian Doublespeak.
to paraphrase: "we will shift to a low-carbon economy once we have sold off and burned up every ounce of carbon we can first extract profitably!"

Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene. Will Steffen, Johan Rockström, Timoth Lenton, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, et al., PNAS. Aug. 6, 2018.

Our analysis suggests that the Earth System may be approaching a planetary threshold that could lock in a continuing rapid pathway toward much hotter conditions—Hothouse Earth. This pathway would be propelled by strong, intrinsic, biogeophysical feedbacks difficult to influence by human actions, a pathway that could not be reversed, steered, or substantially slowed. 

Where such a threshold might be is uncertain, but it could be only decades ahead at a temperature rise of ∼2.0 °C above preindustrial, and thus, it could be within the range of the Paris Accord temperature targets. 

The impacts of a Hothouse Earth pathway on human societies would likely be massive, sometimes abrupt, and undoubtedly disruptive. 

Avoiding this threshold by creating a Stabilized Earth pathway can only be achieved and maintained by a coordinated, deliberate effort by human societies to manage our relationship with the rest of the Earth System, recognizing that humanity is an integral, interacting component of the system. Humanity is now facing the need for critical decisions and actions that could influence our future for centuries, if not millennia.

Scientists Have Uncovered a Disturbing Climate Change Precedent. Peter Brannen, The Atlantic. Aug 6, 2018.

During the rise of mammals, Earth's temperatures spiked in a scary way that the planet may experience again soon

They were strange days at the beginning of the age of mammals. The planet was still hungover from the astonishing disappearance of its marquee superstars, the dinosaurs. Earth’s newest crater was still a smoldering system of hydrothermal vents, roiling under the Gulf of Mexico. In the wake of Armageddon our shell-shocked ancestors meekly negotiated new roles on a planet they inherited quite by accident. Before long, life settled into new rhythms: Earth hosted 50-foot-long boas sliding through steam-bath jungles, birds grew gigantic in imitation of their dearly departed cousins, and mildly modern mammals we might squint to recognize appeared. Within a few million years, loosed from under the iron heel of the vanished giants, they began to experiment. Early whales pranced across a Pakistani archipelago on all fours, testing out life in the water. The first lemur-like primates leapt from the treetops, and hoofed things of all varieties dashed through the forest

But the most striking feature of this early age of mammals is that it was almost unbelievably hot, so hot that around 50 million years ago there were crocodiles, palm trees, and sand tiger sharks in the Arctic Circle. On the other side of the blue-green orb, in waters that today would surround Antarctica, sea-surface temperatures might have topped an unthinkable 86 degrees Fahrenheit, with near-tropical forests on Antarctica itself. There were perhaps even sprawling, febrile dead zones spanning the tropics, too hot even for animal or plant life of any sort.

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“You put more CO2 in the atmosphere and you get more warming, that’s just super-simple physics that we figured out in the 19th century,” says David Naafs, an organic geochemist at the University of Bristol. “But exactly how much it will warm by the end of the century, we don’t know. Based on our research of these ancient climates, though, it’s probably more than we thought.”

No Wiser Than Before: An Introduction. Erik Wallenberg & Ansar Fayyazuddin, Science for the People. Special Issue, Summer 2018.

The world is predominantly conceptualized as split between the subjects of history (humans) and the objects of history (everything else). The undifferentiated mass of everything else–identified as nature, or the environment–is treated as if it is simply for human use. Only in periods of crisis do we recognize that there are limits to what can be done to nature before the balance is tilted to a degree that things begin to go horribly wrong for humans as well. Against this reductive split, the world is in fact an ecological whole. Whatever conceptual divisions one makes, one cannot wish away our interdependence and the ultimate unity of the human and non-human worlds. 

We are living through an ecological disaster. Fueled by the drive for profit, the exploitation of both nature and human labor are defining features of our time. Ecosystems are collapsing under the assault of fossil fuel extraction, geological manipulation, and the systematic release of toxins into our water, air and earth. Islands are sinking as sea levels rise. Children are poisoned by lead in their water. Bee colonies are dying off as weather patterns change. And rapacious capitalist greed remains unabated. 

The crisis of climate change is undeniable and requires urgent attention for anyone concerned with the fate of humanity and the world. However, when thought of in the narrowest terms, climate change is shorthand for the rise in global temperatures driven by the precipitous increase in heat trapping greenhouse gases. When the problem is formulated entirely in terms of physical data and timeless mechanism, it is shorn of its historical and social specificity and its provenance in the capitalist drive for profit and its reliance on fossil fuels. Without historical and social context, climate change appears simply as a problem of science, to be solved with technology. 

From Barack Obama’s science advisor to the current Republican House Science Committee, the large-scale manipulation of the climate to mitigate global warming–geoengineering, for short–has gained a hearing in the halls of government.1For their part, billionaire tycoons such as Bill Gates and Richard Branson champion their own role to drive geoengineering innovation. As several contributors to this collection point out, even the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has legitimated geoengineering as a possible solution. 

With this special issue of Science for the People, we aim to engage with this current of thought and interrogate the research and technology, the assumptions and costs, as well as the general focus on the technological and how that relates to the social, political, and economic questions that drive this crisis. 

...

The Global Rightward Shift on Climate Change. Robinson Meyer, The Atlantic. Aug. 28, 2018.

It points to an emerging pattern: Moderate national leaders—on both the center-left and center-right—in some of the world’s richest and most advanced countries are finding it far easier to talk about climate change than to actually fight it. 

At a basic level, this pattern holds up, well, everywhere. Every country except the United States supports the Paris Agreement on climate change. But no major developed country is on track to meet its Paris climate goals, according to the Climate Action Tracker, an independent analysis produced by three European research organizations. Even Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom—where right-wing governments have made combatting climate change a national priority—seem likely to miss their goals. 

Simply put: This kind of failure, writ large, would devastate Earth in the century to come.

Why so many people on Earth? Brief manifest of ethical-political anti-natalism. Guest post by Natan Feltrin & Eleonora Vecchi, Cassandra's Legacy. Aug. 19, 2018.

We live in a finite system: The Earth is a not a closed, nor an isolated, but a finite system. Thereby it is meant that from a biogeochemical perspective there are limited chances of expansion and proliferation on the planet. In other words, the growth of both consumption and consumers, engine par excellence of GWP (Gross World Product), has physical constraints that are flexible but not breakable. There's no possibility to throw our hearts over thermodynamic rules! To state it even more clearly, the ideology of growth inherent in the contemporary capitalistic economy is heading towards a crash against the hard cliff of reality. 

Violation of ecological boundaries: In the last two hundred years, Homo sapiens not only turned fossil fuel into human biomass but also our species increased its unequal prosperity to the detriment of natural systems. This phenomenon, known as The Great Acceleration, has resulted in an abnormal anthropic effect on a geologic scale: the Anthropocene is not only the Epoch of Man because sapiens has become a hyperobject - an all-pervasive entity in the lives of present and future beings- sed etiam because of the "human quantity". In the Epoch of Man - "Man" and not "Human" due to the anthropocentric perspective of geo-history - loss of biodiversity, global warming, ocean acidification, desertification, plastic pollution, land consumption, water pollution, alteration of many biogeochemical cycles and much more, are consequences of the product between consumption and consumers. An unprecedented impact in history…

How Did the End of the World Become Old News? David Wallace-Wells, NYMag, July 26, 2018.


Which cities are liveable without air conditioning – and for how much longer? Nolan Gray and Antonio Voce, The Guardian. Aug. 14, 2018. 

Mapping the world’s cities where you can live comfortably without heating or air conditioning reveals how few boast such ideal climates – and how global warming may further narrow the field

Worst "red tide" toxic algae bloom in years killing turtles, manatees in Florida. CBS News. Aug. 2, 2018.

Red Tide Is Devastating Florida's Sea Life. Are Humans to Blame? Maya Wei-Haas, National Geographic. Aug. 8, 2018.

The rising tide: perhaps, 2018 flood is only a gentle warning. Arundhati Roy, The Week. Aug. 21, 2018.

Australia’s drought is like a cancer eating away at farms and families. David B Gray, Reuters. July 31, 2018.


Warmer soil releasing more carbon, worsening climate change. Seth Borenstein, AP. Aug. 1, 2018.

Apart from the human toll, the violence in the Amazon is also driving an ominous trend in the earth’s climate system. Last October, Science published one of the most important—and least noticed—climate studies in years. Tropical forests in the Amazon and around the world have been so degraded by logging, burning, and agriculture that they have started to release more carbon than they store, according to scientists from the Woods Hole Research Center and Boston University. In the parlance of climate change, these forests are flipping from carbon sinks to carbon sources. 

This is very bad news, for two reasons. First, until now, the capacity of forests to absorb carbon dioxide via photosynthesis has been a crucial buffer against greenhouse-gas emissions: The forests’ absorption of CO2 has limited the global temperature rise to considerably less than it would otherwise be. Second, forests must absorb even more carbon going forward if humankind is to contain that temperature rise to a survivable amount. Current trends put the earth on a trajectory to an increase of 3.5 degrees Celsius, an amount that scientists have warned is “incompatible with organized society.” Minimizing future emissions is imperative, but it’s not enough. To meet the Paris Agreement’s commitment to hold the temperature rise “well below” 2°C, humankind must also “go negative.” That is, we must extract the CO2 that’s already in the atmosphere and store it where it can no longer trap heat, notably in the earth’s trees and soil. And that means growing more trees, not cutting them down.

Tropical Forests Are Flipping From Storing Carbon to Releasing It. Sam Eaton, The Nation. Aug. 30, 2018.

Scientists Warn Millions Of Sea Creatures Are "In Real Peril" As Pacific Ocean Temps Rise To New Records. Michael Snyder via zerohedge. Aug. 17, 2018.

Ocean temperatures continue to rise, and scientists are extremely alarmed as a mass die-off of sea creatures appears to be imminent.

This week, environmental experts were stunned when ocean water off of the San Diego coast hit an all-time record high of 81.3 degrees Fahrenheit. Daily measurements began all the way back in 1916, and since that time a higher ocean temperature has never been recorded off of the California coast. Unfortunately, this is not an isolated incident. Studies have shown that ocean temperatures have been rising rapidly all over the planet, and this has already had a devastating impact on many ecosystems. The oceans are the foundation of the food chain, and if sea life starts dying off on a massive scale it could mean unprecedented famine all over the planet.

Scientists draw new connections between climate change and warming oceans. Sean Bettam, UoT. Aug. 1, 2018.

Great Barrier Reef headed for ‘massive death’. The ‘Godfather of Coral’ predicts a ‘planetary catastrophe’. Rebecca Wright and Ivan Watson, CNN. Aug. 2018.

John "Charlie" Veron – widely known as "The Godfather of Coral" – is a renowned reef expert who has personally discovered nearly a quarter of the world's coral species and has spent the past 45 years diving Australia's Great Barrier Reef. 

But after a lifetime trying to make sense of the vast ecosystems that lie beneath the ocean's surface, the 73-year-old is now becoming a prophet of their extinction. 

"It's the beginning of a planetary catastrophe," he tells CNN. "I was too slow to become vocal about it."

... 

"So, you take out coral reefs and a third to a quarter of all marine species gets wiped out. Now that is ecological chaos, it is ecological collapse."

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“Mass extinction event”

This doomsday scenario seems extreme, but after decades of studying scientific evidence around this topic, Veron believes that this eventuality is a certainty. 

"We have got now also the phenomenon of a mass extinction event looming," he says, which he describes as a "man-made asteroid" that would compare to the dinosaurs being wiped out.

The world’s oceans and all marine life are on the brink of total collapse. James Bradley, The Monthly. Aug. 2018.


NASA Discovers Bubbling Lakes In The Remote Arctic - A Sign Of Global Warming. Trevor Nace, Forbes. Aug. 30, 2018.

Summer weather is getting "stuck" due to Arctic warming: What happens in the Arctic doesn't stay in the Arctic. Desdemona Despair. Aug. 20, 2018.

“What happens in the Arctic doesn’t stay in the Arctic. By upsetting the energy balance of the planet we are changing the temperature gradient between the equator and the pole. This in turn sets in motion major reorganisations of the flow patterns of the atmosphere and ocean,” said Chris Rapley, professor of climate science at University College London. “The consequences are emerging and they are disruptive, and likely to become even more profoundly so. We are on a journey and the destination doesn’t look good.” 

 Some Arctic Ground No Longer Freezing—Even in Winter. Craig Welch, NatlGeo. Aug. 20, 2018.

"This really is astounding," says Max Holmes, an Arctic scientist with Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts.

The discovery has not been peer-reviewed or published and represents limited data from one spot in one year. But with measurements from another scientist nearby and one an ocean away appearing to support the Zimovs' findings, some Arctic experts are weighing a troubling question: Could a thaw of permafrost begin decades sooner than many people expect in some of the Arctic's coldest, most carbon-rich regions, releasing trapped greenhouse gases that could accelerate human-caused climate change?

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Nearly a quarter of the Northern Hemisphere's landmass sits above permafrost. Trapped in this frozen soil and vegetation is more than twice the carbon found in the atmosphere.

As fossil-fuel burning warms the Earth, this ground is thawing, allowing microbes to consume buried organic matter and release carbon dioxide and shorter-lived methane, which is 25 times as potent a greenhouse gas as CO2.

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more than a dozen Arctic climate scientists contacted by National Geographic agree that this year's active-layer data highlights the limitations of global climate models. The sophisticated computer programs that forecast future climate scenarios often used by government decision-makers simply can't capture major changes in permafrost.

"When we simulate these things there are a number of processes the models don't include—processes that multiply the transfer of heat," says Daniel Fortier, an associate professor of geography with the University of Montreal. "I think it's safe to say that things are happening faster than we were expecting."

The weather all over is not just extreme … It’s downright freakish. William Blum, AER. Aug. 17, 2018.

The argument I like to use when speaking to those who don’t accept the idea that extreme weather phenomena are largely man-made is this: 

Well, we can proceed in one of two ways: 

1. We can do our best to limit the greenhouse effect by curtailing greenhouse gas emissions (carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide) into the atmosphere, and if it turns out that these emissions were not in fact a significant cause of the widespread extreme weather phenomena, then we’ve wasted a lot of time, effort and money (although other benefits to the ecosystem would still accrue).
2. We can do nothing at all to curtail the emission of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and if it turns out that these emissions were in fact the leading cause of all the extreme weather phenomena, then we’ve lost the earth and life as we know it. 

So, are you a gambler? 

Irony of ironies … Misfortune of misfortunes … We have a leader who has zero interest in such things; indeed, the man is unequivocally contemptuous of the very idea of the need to modify individual or social behavior for the sake of the environment. And one after another he’s appointed his soulmates to head government agencies concerned with the environment. 

What is it that motivates such people? I think it’s mainly that they realize that blame for much of environmental damage can be traced, directly or indirectly, to corporate profit-seeking behavior, an ideology to which they are firmly committed.

Much of Western America Will Be Uninhabitable In 40 Years. Ian Welsh. Aug. 21, 2018.

Capitalism Killed Our Climate Momentum, Not "Human Nature". Naomi Klein, The Intercept. Aug. 3, 2018.

rebuttal to

Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change. Nathaniel Rich, NYT Mag. Aug. 1, 2018.

Readying the Mind. Albert Bates. Aug. 5, 2018.

We may have to recognize, as Lynn Margulis tells Charles Mann in Wizard, each species, our own included, comes with an expiration date. We just don’t quite know when that expiration date falls