Climate Links: November 2017
A new, dire "warning to humanity" about the dangers to all of us has been written by 15,000 scientists from around the world.
The message updates an original warning sent from the Union of Concerned Scientists that was backed by 1,700 signatures 25 years ago. But the experts say the picture is far, far worse than it was in 1992, and that almost all of the problems identified then have simply been exacerbated.
Mankind is still facing the existential threat of runaway consumption of limited resources by a rapidly growing population, they warn. And "scientists, media influencers and lay citizens" aren't doing enough to fight against it, according to the letter.
If the world doesn't act soon, there will be catastrophic biodiversity loss and untold amounts of human misery, they warn.
Only the hole in the ozone layer has improved since the first letter was written, and the letter urges humanity to use that as an example of what can happen when it acts decisively. But every single other threat has just got worse, they write, and there is not long left before those changes can never be reversed.
There are some causes for hope, the letter suggests. But humanity isn't doing nearly enough to make the most of them and soon won't be able to reverse its fate.
"Soon it will be too late to shift course away from our failing trajectory, and time is running out," the letter warns. "We must recognize, in our day-to-day lives and in our governing institutions, that Earth with all its life is our only home."
A host of environmental calamities are highlighted in the warning notice, including catastrophic climate change, deforestation, mass species extinction, ocean "dead zones", and lack of access to fresh water.
Writing in the online international journal BioScience, the scientists led by top US ecologist Professor William Ripple, from Oregon State University, said: "Humanity is now being given a second notice ... We are jeopardising our future by not reining in our intense but geographically and demographically uneven material consumption and by not perceiving continued rapid population growth as a primary driver behind many ecological and even societal threats.
"By failing to adequately limit population growth, reassess the role of an economy rooted in growth, reduce greenhouse gases, incentivise renewable energy, protect habitat, restore ecosystems, curb pollution, halt defaunation, and constrain invasive alien species, humanity is not taking the urgent steps needed to safeguard our imperilled biosphere."
In their original warning, scientists including most of the world's Nobel Laureates argued that human impacts on the natural world were likely to lead to "vast human misery".
The new notice, written as an open-letter "viewpoint" article, won the support of 15,364 scientists from 184 countries who agreed to offer their names as signatories.
What’s most disturbing about this litany of pain is that it’s only going to get worse. A recent paper in the journal Nature estimates that our chances of keeping global warming below the danger threshold of 2 degrees is now vanishingly small: only about 5 per cent. It’s more likely that we’re headed for around 3.2 degrees of warming, and possibly as much as 4.9 degrees. If scientists are clear about anything, it’s that this level of climate change will be nothing short of catastrophic. Indeed, there’s a good chance that it would render large-scale civilization impossible.
Why are our prospects so bleak? According to the paper’s authors, it’s because the cuts we’re making to greenhouse gas emissions are being more than cancelled out by economic growth. In the coming decades, we’ll be able to reduce the carbon intensity (CO2 per unit of GDP) of the global economy by about 1.9 per cent per year, they say, if we make heavy investments in clean energy and efficient technology. That’s a lot. But as long as the economy keeps growing by more than that, total emissions are still going to rise. Right now we’re ratcheting up global GDP by 3 per cent per year. At that rate, the maths is not in our favour; on the contrary, it’s slapping us in the face.
In fact, according to new models published last year, with a background rate of 3 per cent GDP growth it’s not possible to achieve any level of emissions reductions at all, even under best-case-scenario conditions. Study after study shows the same thing: keeping global warming below 2 degrees is simply not compatible with continued economic growth.
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remember, the goal is not just to reduce carbon emissions – the goal is to reduce them dramatically, and fast. How fast, exactly? Climate scientists Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows say that if we want to have even a mere 50 per cent chance of staying under 2 degrees, rich nations are going to have to cut emissions by 8-10 per cent per year, beginning in 2015. Keep in mind we’re already two years in, and so far our emissions reductions have been zero.
There’s no magic bill waiting in the wings—and no quick path to arriving at one.
There’s a wrinkle in how the United States talks about climate change in 2017, a tension fundamental to the issue’s politics but widely ignored.
On the one hand, Democrats are the party of climate change. Since the 1990s, as public belief in global warming has become strongly polarized, the Democratic Party has emerged as the advocate of more aggressive climate action. The most recent Democratic president made climate policy a centerpiece of his second term, and the party’s national politicians now lament and oppose the undoing of his work. Concern for the climate isn’t just an elite issue, either: Rank-and-file Democrats are more likely to worry about global warming than the median voter.
On the other hand, the Democratic Party does not have a plan to address climate change. This is true at almost every level of the policy-making process: It does not have a consensus bill on the issue waiting in the wings; it does not have a shared vision for what that bill could look like; and it does not have a guiding slogan—like “Medicare for all”—to express how it wants to stop global warming.
Picture the following: a UK investor buys a coal mine in Africa. The coal is shipped to China where it powers factories that produce goods which are shipped to the UK for consumption. Citizens in the UK benefit financially from the coal extraction, and materially from the goods produced.
So who’s responsible for tackling the huge amounts of carbon dioxide dumped into the atmosphere along that supply chain? According to UN rules, it’s not the UK. Under the Paris Agreement and the Kyoto Protocol before it, countries are only responsible for the greenhouse gases physically emitted within their borders.
Unfortunately, this exclusive focus on ‘territorial’ emissions makes little sense in a globalised economy in which capital and goods flow across borders, and results in a completely misleading picture of where responsibility actually lies.
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So what about all of the money going into renewables? Just last week, the private sector arm of the World Bank, the International Finance Corporation (IFC), released a report championing the huge sums flowing into low carbon industries. But while this is a good thing, it doesn’t matter how many wind and solar farms are installed as long as we continue to burn fossil fuels. It’s like ordering a side salad with a full English breakfast and expecting to lose weight.
There are a number of reasons why huge outward foreign direct investment in oil, coal and gas is a bad thing. On a very basic level, it is totally inconsistent with the stated position of almost every developed country Party to the UNFCCC to support low carbon development internationally. Beyond the hypocrisy, there is also a financial risk in allowing investors to pile into fossil fuel reserves that could become ‘stranded assets’ – reserves that will be placed off-limits by regulators in an effort to curb climate change.
But perhaps the bigger risk is that, far from becoming stranded, coal, oil and gas reserves will be extracted precisely because of the value they represent to investors and the wider economies of their home countries – leading to catastrophic climate change. Think again of the English breakfast, and ask how likely a café is to switch to a healthier menu where the owner has just invested in a deep fryer and a decade’s supply of bacon.
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In the atrophied UN climate change Conference of the Parties (COP) negotiations, which bear an ever more tenuous relationship to the physical universe, it is easy to conclude that climate change is simply too complicated for governments to do anything about (on the agenda this time round is the operationalisation of a financial mechanism with no money, and the adoption of rules for transparent accounting of ‘emissions reductions’ that aren’t happening).
In fact, there are lots of simple, effective measures governments could adopt now. But for that to happen, our governments need take an honest look at the economic interests driving fossil fuel extraction, and not just fall back on the arbitrary accounting principles of the UNFCCC, which are more an exercise in blame absolution than an effort to stop climate change.
There has been a record 30 percent decrease in the total amount of sea ice, and this summer it's disappearing from the Ross Sea at a rate not seen in more than 30 years.
The rapidly changing conditions are having a major impact on this year's scientific research at Scott Base, with scientists describing the changes as "unusual", "unprecedented" and "daunting".
One of the affected scientists is Antarctic oceanographer Dr Natalie Robinson, who studies sea ice and what lies beneath it.
"We had about 200km of sea ice to play with last year, but this year we're down to about 25-30km, so it's certainly a very different ball game," she told Newshub.
The world is evolving into disaster at an ever increasing pace. One global conference after the other is failing both humankind and all other creatures on this planet. We know that, at one point, the glaciers on Antarctica will destabilise and ultimately melt as a consequence of human created climate change, but this eventuality is considered very far off into the future. The melt will take many hundreds of years – possibly even more than half a millennium. At least, this is what we thought. Recent literature proves that we were wrong.
The culprit is marine ice-cliff instability (MICI). An understanding of what happens to glaciers under conditions of rising temperatures had been rather rudimentary, until Bassis developed a new theoretical model in his PhD (2002). In the old understanding, in a stable glacier-ice shelf system, the glacier’s downhill movement is offset by the buoyant force of the water on the front of the shelf. When warmer temperatures destabilize the system by lubricating the glacier’s base and creating melt ponds that eventually carve through the shelf, the ice shelf retreats to the grounding line, the buoyant force that used to offset glacier flow becomes negligible and the glacier picks up speed on its way to the sea. But MICI adds another instability process to this. Bassis proved that MICI can lead to the rapidcollapse of glaciers. Research established that this is exactly what is happening in Greenland and in Antarctica. How rapid exactly the process evolves is unclear.
Global carbon dioxide emissions are projected to rise again in 2017, climate scientists reported Monday, a troubling development for the environment and a major disappointment for those who had hoped emissions of the climate change-causing gas had at last peaked.
The emissions from fossil fuel burning and industrial uses are projected to rise by up to 2 percent in 2017, as well as to rise again in 2018, the scientists told a group of international officials gathered for a United Nations climate conference in Bonn, Germany.
Despite global economic growth, total emissions held level from 2014 to 2016 at about 36 billion tons per year, stoking hope among many climate change advocates that emissions had reached an all-time high point and would subsequently begin to decline. But that was not to be, the new analysis suggests.
“The temporary hiatus appears to have ended in 2017,” wrote Stanford University’s Rob Jackson, who along with colleagues at the Global Carbon Project tracked 2017 emissions to date and projected them forward. “Economic projections suggest further emissions growth in 2018 is likely.”
The renewed rise is a troubling development for the global effort to keep atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases below the levels needed to mitigate the worst effects of climate change.
Forty years ago I was studying for a Physics degree at Edinburgh University. I chose Edinburgh because it offered a course which included Meteorology and Atmospheric Physics, interests which have stayed with me since.
When I came across articles about the Greenhouse Effect, this intrigued me as a scientist, but also worried me as a human being, and although it was only a theory at the time, I felt the implications if true were so severe that at the very least, we should adopt the precautionary principle and take immediate action to prevent it.
It was this that led me to join the Ecology Party in 1979 and since then, politics for me has always been about climate change and the need to address it before it became unstoppable. In the seventies and eighties, the threat of an impending nuclear war was on everyone's minds, but here was another existential threat to humanity that although distant, required no less attention to defuse or at least to quantify.
Then it was a theory and if proven, we still had time to do something about it. Forty years on and the Greenhouse Effect is now known as Global Warming or Climate Change. The effects predicted are not only happening, but they are happening much faster than predicted and events over the last three years have led me to believe that this is not only irreversible, but we are now entering a period of what is known as 'abrupt climate change', which will lead to the breakdown of society within 30 years and near human extinction by the end of the century.
To understand how this will happen so quickly, we need to appreciate that climate change is not linear. We are on an exponential curve. The three warmest years on record globally have been 2014, 2015 and 2016 (with 2017 set to join them). Floods, droughts, wildfires and storms are this year setting records and records are not only being broken, but they are starting to be broken by some margin. We're on an curve where not only will events happen more often and be more severe, but the rate at which they increase will itself be increasing. That's what exponential means.
We also need to appreciate some of the deficiencies in climate modelling. Specifically, climate scientists (in common with nearly all scientists) are experts in their own fields only. Looking at a specific aspect of science in isolation is fine if nothing else is changing, but if everything else is changing, you need to take that into account if you're predicting what will happen in the future.
There are around 70 feedback effects now kicking in, and few if any models are taking these into account. For example, scientists studying the Arctic sea ice may take into account higher sea surface temperatures, but not the incursion of water vapour (a greenhouse gas) into the Arctic resulting from a distorted jet stream, or the impact of soot on ice albedo from increased wildfires thousands of miles away.
A recent example is the speed with which this year's Atlantic hurricanes strengthened from tropical storms to Category 5 hurricanes due to higher sea surface temperatures. This surprised meteorologists as the computer models were only forecasting Cat 2 or 3 at most. Only now are they recognising that the models are underestimating the effect of warmer sea surfaces and the additional energy and water vapour they provide.
As Peter Wadhams writes in his recent book 'A farewell to ice', to reverse the effects of man made carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would demand a switch in global focus on the scale of the post war Marshall plan. We would need not only to stop producing CO2 but also turn over many of our factories to producing carbon capture and storage machines, and we would need to start right now. The cost to the world economies would be huge, possibly running to over $100 Trillion.
If, and it's still an if, we are capable of reversing the trajectory we're on, there are no signs of a willingness to do so - neither from politicians nor people in general. CO2 takes over a decade to become fully effective as a greenhouse gas, and lingers in the atmosphere for decades. Methane (CH4) is 130 times as effective as a greenhouse gas in the first 3 years after release and due largely to melting permafrost is starting to rise rapidly in global concentration (another feedback).
So what are we actually doing about it? 'Emissions' as measured by countries themselves levelled out over the past three years - but are now rising once again. Leaving aside allegations that the figures have been doctored anyway, the extra CO2 from increasing wildfires is not included (as an example, the CO2 from those in British Columbia, just one Canadian province, this year equated to the annual emissions from 40 million cars on the road). The litmus test is the actual measure of CO2 in the atmosphere - now reaching a peak of around 410 ppm and rising at a record annual rate of around 2.5 ppm per year.
In 1989, the UN issued a warning that we had only ten years to address global warming before irreversible tipping points start kicking in. That was 30 years ago. Similar warnings have appeared since, none of them heeded. Instead of issuing warnings, more and more scientists are now coming round to the view that it really is too late. What I have witnessed over the last three years has led me to believe the same. We really are too late and are now entering the sixth mass extinction.
Too many articles on climate change contain the phrase "By 2100..." or "By the end of the century...". That really is too far away for most people to treat as urgent. While it's difficult to make predictions, it should be made clear that the catastrophic impacts of climate change will affect us well before then.
Within five to ten years I expect to see food prices rising well above inflation - perhaps by as much as 50% to 100% with some empty shelves appearing in supermarkets as specific crops are devastated (we already had a 'taste' of this earlier this year with courgettes and lettuce crops hit by unusual weather in Spain; world wine production is now at a 50 year low due to extreme weather events).
Wildfires are already becoming uncontrollable. Portugal has seen six times its average this year. There have been fires in Greenland and in Australia during its winter, not to mention the devastation in California, Canada and Siberia. Hurricanes are becoming stronger and appearing in unusual places (Ophelia was the strongest on record in the east Atlantic and Greece is currently being hit by what is called a 'Medicane'). Sea surface temperatures need to be over 28.5 C for a hurricane to strengthen. The Mediterranean off Italy's coast reached 30 degrees this year. With the right conditions, it would only take one stray east Atlantic hurricane to head into the Med to cause widespread devastation. I can easily see this happening within ten years. Elsewhere we will see hurricanes and typhoons strong enough to flatten cities within the next decade.
The economic implications will be immense. The impact of hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria in the US is expected to be around $400 Billion this year, not counting the wildfires in California and drought in Montana. Over the next decade, super hurricanes, flooding and drought will cause insurance companies to collapse. Banks will follow and pension funds will start to come under pressure. With food prices increasing way ahead of wages, disposable incomes will be hit hard, leading to worldwide economic depression.
And that's not taking into account the hundreds of millions of climate refugees (already begun in the Caribbean). With the jet stream already getting seriously messed up, or if the Hadley cells become severely disrupted, it's not out of the question that the Indian monsoon could fail permanently and within a year we have a billion people starving.
There's a saying that if something is unsustainable it will not be sustained. Obvious, perhaps, but we have been living well beyond the sustainability of the planet for decades and continue to believe that somehow we can do so increasingly and indefinitely. That will not be sustained.
So for forty years I tried to warn people. Now I tell them it's too late and we're f***ed, they say I'm being too negative need to give people a positive message. OK then, will "We're positively f***ed" do?, because when we could save ourselves nobody listened, and even now when they think we still can, there is absolutely no will to do so.
For a long time, we have needed to change our lifestyles and that, for most people, is a red line area. There are no quick fixes. We cannot continue with mass air transport - the only non polluting alternative to fossil fuels requires huge areas of land to be removed from food production, which is already coming under pressure due to climate change and increasing population. We need to stop owning cars (not just leaving them in the driveways) - the resource requirements and human rights implications of even switching to electric cars present largely insurmountable problems. And even if these problems can be fixed, the solution needs to come first, rather than assuming as always that the next generation will somehow pick up the bill and sort out the mess we are creating by our profligate lifestyles.
And so we continue to build more runways and roads, drill for more oil, burn more forests for palm oil plantations and clear the rainforests for agriculture and logging, despite the fact that these massive environmental problems are no longer a theory but are staring us in the face. But we keep on driving and keep on flying and keep on buying things we don't need from halfway across the globe without the slightest thought that all this will kill our children.
I was perhaps naive to believe that politics would solve the problem. If the bottom line is that people will not change their lifestyles, then they will not vote for politicians who say we need to. So politicians will not tell people the truth and tell them instead that we can get by with replacing petrol cars with electric ones by some decade well in the future and convince people we're all 'doing our bit' for the planet by planting a few wind turbines. They talk vaguely about carbon capture and how air transport is important for economic growth and without that we cannot tackle climate change. ...
And people believe them because they want to. I've long maintained that people get the politicians they deserve (good and bad) and they certainly don't want politicians to tell them they can't have their cheap holidays in Spain. ...
Since the 1970s, more than 93% of excess heat captured by greenhouse gases has been absorbed by the oceans. To understand how much heat that is, think of it this way: If the oceans weren’t absorbing it, average global temperatures on land would be far higher—around 122°F, according to researchers on the documentary Chasing Coral. The global average surface temperature right now is 59°F.
A 122°F world, needless to say, would be unlivable. More than 93% of climate change is out of sight and out of mind for most of us land-dwelling humans, but as the oceans continue to onboard all that heat, they’re becoming unlivable themselves.
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