Climate Links: July 9, 2017

no shit...
Hopes of mild climate change dashed by new research. Damian Carrington, The Guardian. July 5, 2017.

Hopes that the world’s huge carbon emissions might not drive temperatures up to dangerous levels have been dashed by new research. 

The work shows that temperature rises measured over recent decades do not fully reflect the global warming already in the pipeline and that the ultimate heating of the planet could be even worse than feared.

The uninhabitable Earth: when will climate change make the Earth too hot for humans? David Wallace-Wells, NY Mag. July 9, 2017.

It is, I promise, worse than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a teenager today. And yet the swelling seas — and the cities they will drown — have so dominated the picture of global warming, and so overwhelmed our capacity for climate panic, that they have occluded our perception of other threats, many much closer at hand.

not sure about this line (given how F'g alarmed I am):

"no matter how well-informed you are, you are surely not alarmed enough."

but I certainly agree with the remainder of that particular paragraph:

when it comes to contemplating real-world warming dangers, we suffer from an incredible failure of imagination. The reasons for that are many: the timid language of scientific probabilities, which the climatologist James Hansen once called “scientific reticence” in a paper chastising scientists for editing their own observations so conscientiously that they failed to communicate how dire the threat really was; the fact that the country is dominated by a group of technocrats who believe any problem can be solved and an opposing culture that doesn’t even see warming as a problem worth addressing; the way that climate denialism has made scientists even more cautious in offering speculative warnings; the simple speed of change and, also, its slowness, such that we are only seeing effects now of warming from decades past; our uncertainty about uncertainty, which the climate writer Naomi Oreskes in particular has suggested stops us from preparing as though anything worse than a median outcome were even possible; the way we assume climate change will hit hardest elsewhere, not everywhere; the smallness (two degrees) and largeness (1.8 trillion tons) and abstractness (400 parts per million) of the numbers; the discomfort of considering a problem that is very difficult, if not impossible, to solve; the altogether incomprehensible scale of that problem, which amounts to the prospect of our own annihilation; simple fear. But aversion arising from fear is a form of denial, too.

‘The Models Are Too Conservative’: Paleontologist Peter Ward on What Past Mass Extinctions Can Teach Us About Climate Change Today. David Wallace-Wells, NY Mag. July 10, 2017.




Canada Undermines Targets for Protecting Oceans by Increasing Oil Exploration. Jerri-Lynn Scofield, naked capitalism. July 3, 2017.