Climate Links: 04/16/17

Abrupt climate change is happening faster than before. Bruce Melton, Truthout. Apr. 15, 2017.

In about the last 100,000 years, there have been 23 abrupt temperature changes in Greenland ice cores. In those moments, the temperature abruptly jumped or fell 9 to 14 degrees Fahrenheit across the planet and 25 to 35 degrees Fahrenheit in Greenland. The changes typically took decades to generations, but at their most extreme, they only took two to three years. 

Counterintuitively, published consensus statements on climate change do not factor in abrupt change -- an omission that seriously affects how climate policy is made. The reason is that we do not yet have the skill to model abrupt changes, even though ample robust evidence exists of the common occurrence of abrupt change in prehistory. It may seem unimaginable that these most important of all climate changes have been disregarded in climate policy, but this is the way the culture of the climate science consensus works. Policy is based upon impacts that we project to happen in the future through modeling.

Yes, we can do sound climate science, even though it is projecting the future. Kevin Trenberth and Reto Knutti, DeSmogBlog. Apr. 11, 2017.

Notably, there is an element of risk here: When the stakes are high, then even a small probability for massive failure prevents us from doing certain things. Imagine hearing that the airplane you are to fly on has a large crack in the wing. It may fly, but we do not know. Would you board the airplane? We do not need full certainty that the airplane will crash — or in the climate change context, we do not need full certainty that the impacts will be catastrophic — to justify some measures to mitigate the outcome, or find an alternative. 

In fact, what we need is very high probability that the airplane will not crash. Using this argument, we should not emit CO2unless we know for sure that it is not harmful. In complex problems like predicting the climate of the Earth, we will never have complete certainty, nor is it needed.

The clean carbon bad joke. Naked Capitalism. Apr 7, 2017.

How corruption fuels climate change. Project Syndicate. Mar 23, 2017.

While the Paris climate agreement was hailed as a major success when it was concluded in December 2015, many signatories have displayed a remarkable lack of ambition in upholding their carbon-reduction commitments. To understand why is to see the sheer extent to which our systems of government have been captured by the corrupting influence of vested interests.

Are fossil fuel companies telling investors enough about the risks of climate change? DeSmogBlog. Feb. 18, 2017.