Climate Links: September 2018 #2

Ho Hum. 6th IPCC Report Says World Is Headed For Existential Crisis. What Else Is New? Steve Hanley, Clean Technica. Sep. 27, 2018.

Drew Shindell, a Duke University climate scientist and a co-author of the report, tells The Guardian that meeting the under 1.5º C goal will require a massive change in how humans behave and how they derive the energy they need to maintain their accustomed lifestyle. 

Emissions from transportation, electricity generation, and agriculture will need to be slashed dramatically or eliminated entirely in order for there to be any hope of meeting the goal, Shindell says. “It’s extraordinarily challenging to get to the 1.5º C target and we are nowhere near on track to doing that. While it’s technically possible, it’s extremely improbable, absent a real sea change in the way we evaluate risk. We are nowhere near that.” 

Even assuming carbon emissions can be greatly reduced, the world will have to remove massive amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to meet the 1.5º C goal. That will be a problem. “The penetration rate of new technology historically takes a long time,” Shindell says. “It’s not simple to change these things. There aren’t good examples in history of such rapid, far reaching transitions.”

World 'nowhere near on track' to avoid warming beyond 1.5C target. Oliver Milman, Guardian. Sep. 27, 2018.

Exclusive: Author of key UN climate report says limiting temperature rise would require enormous, immediate transformation in human activity

A massive, immediate transformation in the way the world’s population generates energy, uses transportation and grows food will be required to limit the global temperature rise to 1.5C and the forthcoming analysis is set to lay bare how remote this possibility is.

“It’s extraordinarily challenging to get to the 1.5C target and we are nowhere near on track to doing that,” said Drew Shindell, a Duke University climate scientist and a co-author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, which will be unveiled in South Korea next month. 

“While it’s technically possible, it’s extremely improbable, absent a real sea change in the way we evaluate risk. We are nowhere near that.”

New Evidence That Climate Change Poses a Much Greater Threat to Humanity Than Recently Understood Because the IPCC has been Systematically Underestimating Climate Change Risks: An Ethical Analysis. Donald Brown, Ethics and Climate. Sep. 21, 2018.

Three papers have been recently published that lead to the conclusion that human-induced climate change poses a much more urgent and serious threat to life on Earth than many have thought who have been relying primarily on the conclusions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This paper first reviews these papers and then examines the ethical questions by the issues discussed in these papers.

Climate study ‘pulls punches’ to keep polluters on board. Robin McKie, Guardian. Sep. 23, 2018.

‘True risks’ of warming played down to placate fossil-fuel nations

Warnings about the dangers of global warming are being watered down in the final version of a key climate report for a major international meeting next month, according to reviewers who have studied earlier versions of the report and its summary. 

They say scientists working on the final draft of the summary are censoring their own warnings and “pulling their punches” to make policy recommendations seem more palatable to countries – such as the US, Saudi Arabia and Australia – that are reluctant to cut fossil-fuel emissions, a key cause of global warming. “Downplaying the worst impacts of climate change has led the scientific authors to omit crucial information from the summary for policymakers,”

New Climate Debate: How to Adapt to the End of the World. Christopher Flavelle, Bloomberg. Sep. 26, 2018.

While economic growth continues we’ll never kick our fossil fuels habit. George Monbiot, Guardian. Sep. 26, 2018.

There may be more bicycles but there will also be more planes. We’re still in denial about the scale of the threat to the planet.

We’re getting there, aren’t we? We’re making the transition towards an all-electric future. We can now leave fossil fuels in the ground and thwart climate breakdown. Or so you might imagine, if you follow the technology news. 

So how come oil production, for the first time in history, is about to hit 100m barrels a day? How come the oil industry expects demand to climb until the 2030s? How is it that in Germany, whose energy transition (Energiewende) was supposed to be a model for the world, protesters are being beaten up by police as they try to defend the 12,000-year-old Hambacher forest from an opencast mine extracting lignite – the dirtiest form of coal? Why have investments in Canadian tar sands – the dirtiest source of oil – doubled in a year? 

The answer is, growth. There may be more electric vehicles on the world’s roads, but there are also more internal combustion engines. There be more bicycles, but there are also more planes. It doesn’t matter how many good things we do: preventing climate breakdown means ceasing to do bad things. Given that economic growth, in nations that are already rich enough to meet the needs of all, requires an increase in pointless consumption, it is hard to see how it can ever be decoupled from the assault on the living planet.

When a low-carbon industry expands within a growing economy, the money it generates stimulates high-carbon industry. Anyone who works in this field knows environmental entrepreneurs, eco-consultants and green business managers who use their earnings to pay for holidays in distant parts of the world and the flights required to get there. Electric vehicles have driven a new resource rush, particularly for lithium, that is already polluting rivers and trashing precious wild places. Clean growth is as much of an oxymoron as clean coal. But making this obvious statement in public life is treated as political suicide.

Satellite images show 'runaway' expansion of coal power in China. Adam Vaughan, Guardian. Sep. 26, 2018.

Extra 259GW capacity from coal in pipeline despite Beijing’s restrictions on plants

The Energy 202: Something strange is happening with Arctic lakes. Chris Mooney. Wa Po. Sep. 25 2018.

What does that mean? Well, so far, Walter Anthony is working from the hypothesis that at least in this location -- but perhaps others, too -- long-buried fossil fuels are being exposed to the atmosphere, thanks to the thawing of permafrost which had previously sealed them below the ground. 

If this turns out to be widespread -- it could only occur in areas where thawing permafrost sits atop older fossil fuel reserves -- then the fear is there could be another source of greenhouse gas emissions that is tied to permafrost thaw, but is actually in addition to it.

Space Station Earth. Andy Miles, Clean Technica. Sep. 22, 2018.

Living in the Future's Past. trailer via youtube.

contributors include:
Jeff Bridges — Actor, Artist, Producer
Dr. Piers Sellers — Director of the Earth Science Division at NASA Meteorologist and Astronaut (IN MEMORIAM)
Wesley Clark — General, US Army (Ret.) former NATO Supreme Allied Commander
Oren Lyons — Environmental Activist Professor of American Studies
Dr. Timothy Morton — Philosopher; Professor, Rice University; Texas Author, Humankind and Dark Ecology
Bob Inglis — Former (R) Congressman, South Carolina; Founder, Enterprise and Energy Initiative
Dr. Rich Pancost — Head of School of Earth Sciences; Professor of Biogeochemistry (Earth Systems); Director of the University of Bristol Cabot Institute, Bristol, UK
Dr. Ruth Gates — Marine Biologist; Director, Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology, The University of Hawaii at Manoa
Dr. Renee Lertzman — Author, Environmental Melancholia
Dr. Leonard Mlodinow — Physicist and Author, The Upright Thinkers
Dr. Bruce Hood — Professor of Developmental Psychology, University of Bristol; UK Author, The Self Illusion
Dr. Mark Plotkin — Ethnobotanist President, Amazon Conservation Team
Dr. Amy Jacobson — Evolutionary Anthropologist, Human Behavioral Ecologist
Daniel Goleman — Psychologist; Science Journalist; Author, Emotional Intelligence
Dr. Stephan Lewandowsky — Professor of Cognitive Psychology, University of Bristol, UK DR.
Nathan Hagens — Director, Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future; Co-Founder, Bottleneck Foundation; Ph.D., Natural Resources; Reality 101, University of Minnesota Honors Program
Dr. Joseph Tainter — Professor of Anthropology; Author, Collapse of Complex Societies
Dr. Ugo Bardi — Professor of Physical Chemistry, University of Florence, Italy
Paul Roberts — Journalist; Author, End of Oil and The Impulse Society
Dr. Ian Robertson — Cognitive Neuroscientist; Co-Director, Global Brain Health Institute Professor Emeritus, Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience