IPCC says ‘rapid and far-reaching’ measures required to combat climate change
Even if we succeed in limiting warming this century to 2ºC, we’ll have CO2 at around 500 parts per million. That’s a level not seen on this planet since the Middle Miocene, 16 million years ago, when our ancestors were apes. Temperatures then were about 5 to 8ºC warmer not 2º, and sea levels were some 40 meters (130 feet) or more higher, not the 1.5 feet (half a meter) anticipated at the end of this century by the 2013 IPCC report.
Why is there a yawning gap between end-century projections and what happened in Earth’s past? Are past climates telling us we’re missing something?
One big reason for the gap is simple: time.
Earth takes time to respond to changes in greenhouse gases. Some changes happen within years, while others take generations to reach a new equilibrium. Ice sheets melting, permafrost thawing, deep ocean warming, peat formation, and reorganizations of vegetation take centuries to millennia.
These slow responses are typically not included in climate models. That’s partly because of the computing time they would take to calculate, partly because we’re naturally focused on what we can expect over the next few decades, and partly because those processes are uncertain. And even though climate models have been successful at predicting climate change observed so far, uncertainties remain for even some fast responses, like clouds or the amplification of warming at the poles.
Earth’s past, on the other hand, shows us how its climate actually changed, integrating the full spectrum of our planet’s fast and slow responses. During past climate changes when Earth had ice sheets (like today) it typically warmed by around 5ºC to 6ºC for each doubling of CO2 levels, with the process taking about a millennium. That’s roughly double the “Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity” (ECS) values used in climate model projections for 2100, which are calculated mainly from historical observations.
“We do expect the Earth System Sensitivity (change CO2 and have all the systems react—including ice sheets, vegetation, methane, aerosols etc.) to be larger than ECS. Work we did on the Pliocenesuggested about 50 percent bigger, but it could be larger than that,” Gavin Schmidt, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, told me.
Or, as Dana Royer of Wesleyan University put it, “In short, climate models tend to under-predict the magnitude of climate change relative to geologic evidence.”
Part of that greater magnitude is simply down to Earth’s slow responses, which produce a net warming. Even if greenhouse gas emissions were to cease completely tomorrow, sea levels are committed to keep rising for centuries from thermal expansion and melting glaciers; ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland are also committed to keep melting from the heat already built into the climate over recent decades. And because CO2 lasts a long time in the atmosphere, in the absence of geoengineering to remove it, the world will overshoot any of our end-century temperature targets and stay elevated for centuries.
But those don’t explain the entire gap, which suggests we’re missing some other amplifying feedbacks. As the 2017 US National Climate Assessment put it: “model-data mismatch for past warm climates suggests that climate models are omitting at least one, and probably more, processes crucial to future warming, especially in polar regions.”
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Our present window of opportunity may not be open for long—scientists are scrambling to see if ice sheet collapse is starting in one of the largest glaciers of West Antarctica. “Things are changing now very, very fast relative to a lot of what we see in the geological record,” said Eley. “I would love to think that we’re not going to end up with some of the worst-case scenarios, but we’re already, I think, on a path to hitting those sorts of levels.”
Researchers’ model suggests between $1tn (£750bn) and $4tn could be wiped off value of global fossil fuel assets by 2035
Trillions of dollars of fossil fuel wealth will be wiped out at some point over the next 17 years even if governments fail to impose binding carbon emissions limits on industry to curb global warming, according to a major new study.
Environmentalists and policymakers have long warned of the threat of a “carbon bubble” and “stranded assets” for listed energy companies, based on the possibility they will never be able to realise the value of their vast stores of oil, gas and coal if politicians actually deliver on their decarbonisation promises.
But today a group of scientists and analysts from Cambridge, Nijmegen, Macao and the Open University take that warning a step further by arguing that these assets are destined to be stranded regardless of official policies to discourage the use of fossil fuels because clean energy technologies are now developing so rapidly that those polluting assets will be worthless in any case.
We now stand where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost’s familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road—the one less traveled by—offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of the earth.
Rachael Carson, Silent Spring
What’s important to keep in mind in this quote from Rachael Carson’s 56-year-old warning shot over the bow of corporate civilization is that there are two roads being traveled now. We are no longer at a fork. The fork is half-a-century behind us. The goal is not to get the superhighway to somehow re-route itself and follow the path less traveled. It can’t. The superhighway will, and must, continue accelerating in its inevitable direction, simply because the greed and power of the people driving that highway will not allow them to alter course. But if there is any truth to Rachael Carson’s warning (and there seems to be growing evidence of it) the other path—the Road Less Traveled—will become the surviving branch of our evolutionary diagram. The present goal, therefore, should be to create as many exits from the superhighway as possible—and to encourage and enable as many people as possible to take those exits to explore and follow the other path.
“If you measured impact on climate change by each individual action then you’d never be able to talk about the cumulative impact of a set of actions on the climate. We know aviation is one of the fastest growing sources of emissions; we know emissions at altitude are a lot more damaging to the climate than they are at ground level; we know that if Heathrow expands then it’s almost like an arms race between the different airports across Europe, because they’re all in a fight for passengers.”
But we keep being told we must not concede a competitive advantage to rival European airports. She counters wearily: “If you were talking to campaigners in Charles de Gaulle [airport in Paris], they’d tell you they’re told exactly the same thing: don’t concede defeat to London! We’re all being pitted against one another in this incredibly dangerous race to the bottom. If we were to follow the logic of those people who think every time we build a runway our economy miraculously benefits, then why would you not just cover the whole country in concrete? That’s the logic of that argument. The bottom line is that aviation is a very good example of why you can’t say: ‘We’ll have a demand-led approach’ – because the demand will go on. I think there needs to be a mature conversation about limits to growth. I think we need to ask: growth for what?”
Growth for jobs? Growth for our kids to leave home and afford a mortgage and enjoy the living standards our parents took for granted? “Growth that is not tackling inequality,” she rejoins. “Growth that’s destroying the planet we depend on. Growth that we know, by simply measuring prosperity in terms of GDP growth, is an incredibly blunt instrument. GDP simply measures the circulation of money in the economy, not whether or not the outcome of using that money is positive or negative. A major pile up on the M5 is wonderful for growth, because it means people go out and buy more cars. But by any other measure of what’s useful or helpful, a pile up on the M5 is bad news.”
The oldest baobabs are collapsing, and there's only one likely explanation.
So, yeah. Again, as I have said for a long time, the consensus reports are always wrong and when new data comes in it is almost always worse than predicted. There appear to be self-reinforcing cycles involved.
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Nothing we are doing is more effective than a spit into a hurricane. The Paris Accord is a joke: It wouldn’t be enough even if implemented, it’s not mandatory, and most countries won’t make their voluntary targets.
There are a lot of moving parts, the most important of which will be the arctic methane release (once that starts, it will self-reinforce and the game will be over), but for people on the ground it’s going to be about heat, rainfall, and water. Also, about water. And water.
This can no longer be stopped, in any meaningful sense, but we could prepare and try to mitigate. We aren’t even doing that.
"Capitalism and mainstream economics simply cannot deal with these problems. Mainstream economics largely ignore [them]," Grantham says.
"We deforest the land, we degrade our soils, we pollute and overuse our water and we treat air like an open sewer, and we do it all off the balance sheet," he adds.
Officials about to attend the G7 meeting in Toronto later this week expect to get an earful from environmentalists. What they don’t expect is to get blasted by 288 major institutional investors — including Allianz Global Investors, Aviva Investors, DWS, HSBC Global Asset Management, Nomura Asset Management, Australian Super, HESTA, and some several U.S. pension funds including CalPERS — which are calling on leaders of the US, Canada, France, the UK, Japan, Germany, and Italy to eliminate coal-fired generating stations within their borders and ramp up actions designed to cut carbon emissions more aggressively.
BP statistics show we are far from meeting the emission reduction targets adopted in the Paris Agreement. In 2017, we took a step backwards.
The principal conclusion that can be reached from a review of the data presented for last year is that we are far from fulfilling the goals of reducing the threat of climate change according to the objectives of the Paris Agreement. In 2017, we have taken a step backwards with respect to the timid advances that appeared in the two preceding years: the use of fossil fuels continues to grow, the increase of the share of renewable resources is much lower than what is needed and the emissions are increasing rather than decreasing.
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Often one loses sight of the fact that, while the source of energy may be renewable, such as sun or wind, the technology necessary for its capture is not. The minerals, metals and other raw materials necessary for making photovoltaic cells, windmills and batteries are finite, not renewable and in some cases are rare. Their exploitation brings growing economic and energy costs – in addition to environmental damage
Renewable energy grew by the largest amount ever last year, while coal-fired electricity also reached a record high, according to new global data from oil giant BP.
However, set against continued rapid rises in energy demand fuelled by oil and gas, renewables were not enough to prevent global CO2 emissions rising significantly for the first time in four years, the figures show.
Tar sands are the worst. Not only are they really hard to get out of the ground, requiring enormous amounts of energy; not only are they difficult to transport and to refine; not only are they more polluting than regular oils; they even have a by-product called “petcoke” that’s used in power plants, but is dirtier than regular coal.
This stuff is worse than regular oil, worse than coal, worse than anything. Anyone who is serious about climate change cannot agree to mine and burn tar sands. To maintain climate change below critical thresholds, tar sands need to be left in the ground.
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If you care about climate change, then it is not logically possible to approve any pipeline or other infrastructure that may further worsen our climate. We are already screwing up the climate enough as it is.
Abstract
This article analyses the trends in primary demand for fossil fuels and renewables, comparing regions with large and small domestic fossil fuel reserves. We focus on countries that hold 80% of global fossil fuel reserves and compare them with key countries that have meagre fossil fuel reserves. We show that those countries with large domestic fossil fuel reserves have experienced a large increase in primary energy demand from fossil fuels, but only a moderate or no increase in primary energy from renewables, and in particular from non-hydro renewable energy sources (NHRES), which are assumed to represent the cornerstone of the future transformation of the global energy system. This implies a tremendous threat to climate change mitigation, with only two principal mitigation options for fossil-fuel-rich economies if there is to be compliance with the temperature goals of the Paris Agreement: (1) leave the fossil fuels in the ground; and (2) apply carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies.
Combinations of these two options to exploit their respective possibilities synergistically will require strong initiatives and incentives to transform a certain amount of the domestic fossil fuel reserves (including the associated infrastructure) into stranded assets and to create an extensive CCS infrastructure. Our conclusion is that immediate and disruptive changes to the use of fossil fuels and investments in non-carbon-emitting technologies are required if global warming is to be limited to well below 2°C. Collective actions along value chains in business to divert from fossil fuels may be a feasible strategy.
Key policy insights
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As the world moves to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and combat climate change renewable energy deployment will need to be an ever-increasing part of the solution. Yet as the Ontario experience has demonstrated, there’s a tangible limit on ratepayer willingness to pay for a cooler planet. Let’s just hope that policy makers around the world learn from Ontario and strive not to repeat its mistakes. Otherwise, we’ll all be shoulder high in water from rising seas with nothing more to show than many black eyes and a collection of hockey pucks.
“Most people have no clue how much more damage is coming if it doesn’t stop. The industry doesn’t want people to know about this.”
The biggest energy project you’ve never heard of commonly goes by the acronym ASTH—the Appalachian Storage and Trading Hub. This massive petrochemical hub in West Virginia and Pennsylvania would be the largest infrastructure in the region’s history, consisting of hundreds of miles of pipelines, fracked gas processing facilities, and underground storage of petrochemicals and fracked gas liquids.
ADDRESSING AN IMAGINED READER in the all-too-likely “hot dark world” of our all-too-near human future, William T. Vollmann begins his two-volume, twelve-hundred-plus-page Carbon Ideologies (the second volume of which was published last week) with a curious and characteristically audacious gambit. In the opening pages of Volume I: No Immediate Danger, as he sets out upon this tome concerning fossil fuels and nuclear energy, Vollmann explains: “I do my best to look as will the future upon the world in which I lived—namely, as surely, safely vanished. Nothing can be done to save it; therefore, nothing need be done. Hence this little book scrapes by without offering solutions. There were none; we had none.”
Some twelve hundred pages later, near the end of Volume II: No Good Alternative—having heard from coal miners and refinery workers, oil executives and nuclear engineers, fracking enthusiasts and carbon lobbyists, politicians and industry-captured regulators, residents of variously poisoned communities and even a few beleaguered activists—Vollmann beseeches his future reader to go easy on him and us. “If you could end up saying, ‘well, yes, we might have made the same mistakes as you, if we’d been lucky enough to live when you did,’ I’d feel that Carbon Ideologies had accomplished some of its purpose,” Vollmann writes. “How you judge us can mean nothing to us who are dead, but to you it might mean something, to accept that we were not all monsters; and forgiveness benefits the forgiver, so why wouldn’t I prefer you to call our doings mistakes instead of crimes?” But Vollmann suspects this is a bit much to ask. “Most likely,” he wearily admits, “you are a hard, angry person. . . . Beset by floods, droughts, diseases and insect plagues . . . fearing for your children in the face of multiplying perils, how can you feel anything better than impatient contempt for my daughter and me, who lived so wastefully for our own pleasure?”
Now, perhaps this is unfair, but it occurs to me that Vollmann’s imagined reader, sweating and hungry beside a dead, acidic ocean, may be entitled to ask why the author spent years of his comfortable (as he never tires of confessing) carbon-powered life writing a twelve-hundred-page book about energy and global warming without offering more than a dismissive hand-wave in the direction of “solutions” like solar, wind, geothermal, batteries, smart grids, etc.—at the very moment in history when such renewable energy technologies and their economics were beating all expectations. Well, it seems Mr. Vollmann simply doesn’t believe there’s anything we humans can do about a problem as big and complicated as climate change—after all, as a friendly pastor in West Virginia said to him, the Earth is so large! And even if there were, it would almost certainly require people like himself to engage politically and make some kind of sustained collective effort, which would be tedious and boring and difficult. And while it’s possible that the logically fallacious (see tu quoque) obsession with his own carbon complicity and supposed “hypocrisy” may offer him a convenient excuse for not lifting a finger, it may also be the case that he simply doesn’t want to look like the sentimental chump who falls for some hope-mongering twaddle about fighting for humanity and not giving up on each other, and all of that. Whatever the reason, he tells his misfortunate reader: “I am sorry.”
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And yet, for all that I find enjoyable and admirable in Vollmann’s project, I’m also sharply opposed to his brand of climate fatalism, which seems to be symptomatic, a kind of irresistible temptation, among intellectuals and other expensively educated types these days. And it’s this sense of utter futility and resignation in the face of our human emergency which would seem to warrant a reply. Because Vollmann is correct on some important level, but only up to a point. To borrow the phrase he used in Rising Up and Rising Down (2003), his seven-volume moral treatise on violence—which, along with Poor People (2007), he considers a companion to Carbon Ideologies—his “moral calculus” here is fundamentally flawed, based as it is on a common misunderstanding or mischaracterization of the climate catastrophe.
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And there’s a good bit that Vollmann gets right, or so it seems to me, in terms of the moral calculus on climate. This is especially the case in his vivid, often affecting, unerringly humane portraits of ordinary people caught up in the carbon system—and nowhere more so than in West Virginia, where the people he meets, at all social levels, have been literally poisoned by that system, indoctrinated and deceived by its ideologues, sacrificed on the altar of limitless profits and the so-called patriotic duty to “keep the lights on.” He knows there’s no moral equivalence between these folks and the executives, lobbyists, politicians, and revolving-door regulators who do everything in their considerable power—including pitiful appeals to victimhood—to keep the system humming along. So it’s satisfying when he drops all sarcasm near the end of the book and lays it on the line:
Those who found themselves compelled by economics to be complicit in the production, distribution and consumption of harmful energies . . . were not especially at fault. For them, fossil fuels constituted sheer subsistence. . . . Even less could I accuse those who had not been educated to understand the almost invisibly approaching misery.
However, I began to believe that those who selfishly, maliciously or with gross negligence did harm ought to be singled out, shamed and maybe even . . . punished.—What constituted gross negligence? A parent who left a loaded gun in reach of a baby was surely responsible for the result. Those West Virginia officials, Colorado lobbyists and Oklahoma Chamber of Commerce types who publicly advanced the agendas of their chosen fossil fuels but refused to even acknowledge questions about global warming stood convicted, in my mind at least, of authoritarian partisanship. I would have heard their side; they were not even willing to tell me theirs, much less ask about mine. And they had power. . . . These are the ones, my friend. These are the ones who laid you low.
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Nevertheless, for a writer so finely attuned to the nuances of moral reasoning, Vollmann displays a surprisingly simplistic and binary view of the climate catastrophe.
Just how fucked ‘we’ or ‘they’ will be—that is, what kind of civilization, or any sort of social justice, will be possible in the coming centuries or decades—depends on many things.
Yes, of course, we’re fucked. (Though it’s important to specify the “we” in this formulation, because the global poor, the disenfranchised, the young, and the yet-to-be-born are certifiably far more fucked than such affluent, white, middle-aged Americans as Vollmann and myself.) But here’s the thing: with climate change as with so much else, all fuckedness is relative. Climate catastrophe is not a binary win or lose, solution or no-solution, fucked or not-fucked situation. Just how fucked we/they will be—that is, what kind of civilization, or any sort of social justice, will be possible in the coming centuries or decades—depends on many things, including all sorts of historic, built-in systemic injustices we know all too well, and any number of contingencies we can’t foresee. But most of all it depends on what we do right now, in our lifetimes. And by that I mean: what we do politically, not only on climate but across the board, because large-scale political action—the kind that moves whole countries and economies in ways commensurate with the scale and urgency of the situation—has always been the only thing that matters here. (I really don’t care about your personal carbon footprint. I mean, please do try to lower it, because that’s a good thing to do, but fussing and guilt-tripping over one’s individual contribution to climate change is neither an intellectually nor a morally serious response to a global systemic crisis. That this still needs to be said in 2018 is, to say the least, somewhat
disappointing.)
As experts (and other people, like me) have been saying for years now, it is almost certainly too late to prevent highly disruptive and, in many places, catastrophic climate change within this century, with all the human misery and death that will bring. But it’s also the case that rigorous analyses (though you won’t find them in Carbon Ideologies) show how most of the world’s energy systems could in fact be radically decarbonized in the coming decades; that the barriers are not technological or economic; and that there are now signs of the political and economic winds shifting globally, in spite of (and in response to) Donald Trump’s election. Are they shifting fast enough? Not even close. Is the carbon lobby still doing everything it can to obstruct and delay? Yes, by all means. And even if the world somehow miraculously moves as fast as possible between now and mid-century, as scientists are calling for, will it prevent dangerous and destabilizing climate disruption for centuries and possibly millennia to come? Probably not. In fact, achieving the vaunted Paris Agreement goals would actually require “negative emissions” technologies, capable of pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere on a vast scale, which remain largely speculative (not to say fantasy).
So, yes, Vollmann and other doomists are right that it’s a no-win situation—depending on what you mean by “win.” If you mean “stopping” or “solving” climate change and preserving the world as we’ve known it, then the climate fight was “lost” a long time ago, maybe before it began. And yet science also tells us that, even at this late date, some versions of “losing” could look far worse than others. We can still lose less badly! Not the most inspiring battle cry, perhaps, but when you understand the stakes—human survival—still a cause worth lifting a finger for.
Scientists don’t really know with precision (which means William T. Vollmann doesn’t really know) where the atmospheric tipping points actually are, and whether we’ve already crossed some of them or soon will—see, for example, the accelerating collapse of Arctic sea ice and the melting permafrost—making worst-case scenarios unstoppable. Climate experts will tell you that every fraction of a degree of warming we prevent could be well worth the effort. So is it too late to prevent many catastrophic impacts across much of the world? Almost certainly. Is it too late to prevent the worst-case scenarios and thus even greater suffering of billions more human beings? Maybe. Maybe not. We don’t know. And that’s the point. As for the politics, maybe the obstacles really are insurmountable. But maybe they’re not. History shows that revolutionary change, both political and technological, is almost never foreseen—or even believed possible—by those living in the historical moment. Again, that’s the point. We don’t know exactly when it will be “too late” (“too late for what?,” we should always ask), or what may be possible if we keep pushing hard enough.
If you’re comfortable throwing up your hands and doing nothing in the face of this kind of uncertainty, very well; it’s your choice. Vollmann won’t think any less of you, and quite honestly, neither will I. Political action, sustained commitment, sacrifice—these are a lot to ask of anyone. But please don’t take moral comfort from assurances that there is nothing to be done. There’s plenty.
Which is one reason it’s too bad that Vollmann, though he does profile a few seemingly isolated activists fighting the Carbon Goliaths in West Virginia and Colorado and Bangladesh, never acknowledges the existence of the global grassroots climate movement that has become a serious force over the past decade. In case you’re unaware, this is the bottom-up movement that has not only stopped fossil-fuel mega-projects like the Keystone XL pipeline, Pacific Northwest coal export terminals, and regional fracked-gas infrastructure in the Northeast, with thousands of ordinary citizens putting their bodies on the line—and hundreds of thousands coming into the streets—to do so. It’s also the movement that’s pushed global institutions with more than $6 trillion in assets to divest from the fossil-fuel industry, fundamentally altering the conversation on climate and carbon—bringing concepts like “stranded assets” and “carbon bubble” into the mainstream (but not into Carbon Ideologies)—putting the industry’s political culpability and its criminally reckless business model front and center, even beginning to hurt its bottom line. These are no small accomplishments.
But there’s plenty to be done, too, for those who can’t see themselves as climate activists—because the basic political struggles for democracy and human rights, in this country and around the world, are as central to our climate future as the fights to keep carbon in the ground. For those who must try to adapt and live through what’s coming—including Vollmann’s daughter and my own kids—there won’t be any climate justice, or any justice at all, no matter what the global temperature may be, if we lose our democracy.
Unfortunately, many of the sort of educated, literate folks Vollmann is writing for don’t seem to understand all this. Or maybe they don’t want to understand. Perhaps they prefer to look away. It’s so much easier to tell oneself the game is up, that nothing can be done, that nothing ever could have been done, so why bother? It’s perversely comforting to wallow in tragic-ironic guilt over one’s carbon complicity, using it as a pathetic excuse.
The fact that there’s no purity and no “solution” (a word that should be struck from the climate lexicon) in the simplistic binary sense doesn’t mean that nothing can or should be done, even at this late date, even in the face of catastrophe on some unknowable schedule and scale—especially if you care at all about your fellow human inhabitants of this planet, as William T. Vollmann most clearly, and unironically, does. If nothing else, just holding onto our humanity as we sweat in the dark ought to keep us busy.
A cataclysmic decline in insects is taking place, virtually unnoticed. Bruce Munro talks to renowned entomologist Anthony Harris about love, loss and the impending Sixth Mass Extinction, which could wipe land-based life from the globe.
SCIENTISTS are wading in with troubling findings of their own.
Twenty years ago, one billion monarch butterflies made the annual migration from Canada to Mexico. Entomologists say the latest count is 56.5 million, less than 1% of new-millennium numbers.
In October, last year, researchers revealed that, since 1989, three-quarters of all flying insects had disappeared from nature reserves throughout Germany.
The findings prompted warnings of an impending "ecological armageddon''.
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The globe's 7.6 billion people account for just 0.01% of all living things.
And yet our impact on the globe has been enormous - some would say catastrophic.
According to the Proceedings article, humans are responsible for the possibly irreparable loss of large chunks of the animal and plant kingdoms; more than 80% of all wild animals and half of all plants.
Anthony Harris finds it deeply disturbing.
"Farmed poultry now makes up 70% of all birds on the planet, with just 30% wild,'' he says with a shocked tone.
"The picture for mammals is worse. Sixty percent of all mammals on earth are livestock, mostly cattle and pigs, 36% are humans and just 4% of all mammals are wild.''
It is no wonder insects are dying out, he says.
Industrialised farming is one of the main causes.
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Just why the decline of insects is such a catastrophe is perhaps not immediately obvious.
Here's why, Harris says. They do everything from cleaning up waste to keeping plants alive and feeding us and the animals.
A study in New York city revealed urban insects get rid of thousands of kilograms of food waste each year. It adds up to less rotting garbage, recycled waste and fewer disease-bearing vermin.
Insects form the base of many thousands of food chains. ...
Insects also take a lead role in pollinating flowering plants. About 70% of the human diet comes from flowering plants, which include the staples of most diets worldwide; wheat, corn and rice.
Insects keep the global ecosystem rolling down the highway of life.
They may be less the canary in the global mine and more the linchpin that is falling out of the world's axle and will cause the whole bus, with everybody and everything aboard, to suddenly lurch and crash in a spray of sparks and a cacophony of metal grinding on chip seal.
Without insects, we face total ecological collapse and global famine. It is being called the Sixth Mass Extinction. The Fifth Mass Extinction was the one that killed off the dinosaurs, 66 million years ago.
Harvard entomologist Prof E.O. Wilson has estimated that, without insects and other land-based invertebrates, humanity would only last a few months. Land-based plants and animals would be next to go. The planet would fall quiet and still.
The last time the earth was like that was 440 million years ago.
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"Craig and I both feel that humanity is on the verge of precipitating a massive extinction event and that it is the responsibility of both artists and scientists to wake people up.''
We live in a state of perpetual war, and we never feel it. While you get your gelato at the hip place where they put those cute little mint leaves on the side, someone is being bombed in your name. While you argue with the 17-year-old at the movie theater who gave you a small popcorn when you paid for a large, someone is being obliterated in your name. While we sleep and eat and make love and shield our eyes on a sunny day, someone’s home, family, life and body are being blown into a thousand pieces in our names.
Once every 12 minutes.
The United States military drops an explosive with a strength you can hardly comprehend once every 12 minutes. And that’s odd, because we’re technically at war with—let me think—zero countries. So that should mean zero bombs are being dropped, right?
Hell no! You’ve made the common mistake of confusing our world with some sort of rational, cogent world in which our military-industrial complex is under control, the music industry is based on merit and talent, Legos have gently rounded edges (so when you step on them barefoot, it doesn’t feel like an armor-piercing bullet just shot straight up your sphincter), and humans are dealing with climate change like adults rather than burying our heads in the sand while trying to convince ourselves that the sand around our heads isn’t getting really, really hot.
You’re thinking of a rational world. We do not live there.
Instead, we live in a world where the Pentagon is completely and utterly out of control.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about the $21 trillion (that’s not a typo) that has gone unaccounted for at the Pentagon. But I didn’t get into the number of bombs that ridiculous amount of money buys us. President George W. Bush’s military dropped 70,000 bombs on five countries. But of that outrageous number, only 57 of those bombs really upset the international community.
Because there were 57 strikes in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen—countries the U.S. was neither at war with nor had ongoing conflicts with. And the world was kind of horrified. There was a lot of talk that went something like, “Wait a second. We’re bombing in countries outside of war zones? Is it possible that’s a slippery slope ending in us just bombing all the goddamn time? (Awkward pause.) … Nah. Whichever president follows Bush will be a normal adult person (with a functional brain stem of some sort) and will therefore stop this madness.”
We were so cute and naive back then, like a kitten when it’s first waking up in the morning.
The Bureau of Investigative Journalism reported that under President Barack Obama there were “563 strikes, largely by drones, that targeted Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen. …”
It’s not just the fact that bombing outside of a war zone is a horrific violation of international law and global norms. It’s also the morally reprehensible targeting of people for pre-crime, which is what we’re doing and what the Tom Cruise movie “Minority Report” warned us about. (Humans are very bad at taking the advice of sci-fi dystopias. If we’d listened to “1984,” we wouldn’t have allowed the existence of the National Security Agency. If we listened to “The Terminator,” we wouldn’t have allowed the existence of drone warfare. And if we’d listened to “The Matrix,” we wouldn’t have allowed the vast majority of humans to get lost in a virtual reality of spectacle and vapid nonsense while the oceans die in a swamp of plastic waste. … But you know, who’s counting?)
There was basically a media blackout while Obama was president. You could count on one hand the number of mainstream media reports on the Pentagon’s daily bombing campaigns under Obama. And even when the media did mention it, the underlying sentiment was, “Yeah, but look at how suave Obama is while he’s OK’ing endless destruction. He’s like the Steve McQueen of aerial death.”
And let’s take a moment to wipe away the idea that our “advanced weaponry” hits only the bad guys. As David DeGraw put it, “According to the C.I.A.’s own documents, the people on the ‘kill list,’ who were targeted for ‘death-by-drone,’ accounted for only 2% of the deaths caused by the drone strikes.”
Two percent. Really, Pentagon? You got a two on the test? You get five points just for spelling your name right.
But those 70,000 bombs dropped by Bush—it was child’s play. DeGraw again: “[Obama] dropped 100,000 bombs in seven countries. He out-bombed Bush by 30,000 bombs and 2 countries.”
You have to admit that’s impressively horrific. That puts Obama in a very elite group of Nobel Peace Prize winners who have killed that many innocent civilians. The reunions are mainly just him and Henry Kissinger wearing little hand-drawn name tags and munching on deviled eggs.
However, we now know that Donald Trump’s administration puts all previous presidents to shame. The Pentagon’s numbers show that during George W. Bush’s eight years he averaged 24 bombs dropped per day, which is 8,750 per year. Over the course of Obama’s time in office, his military dropped 34 bombs per day, 12,500 per year. And in Trump’s first year in office, he averaged 121 bombs dropped per day, for an annual total of 44,096.
Trump’s military dropped 44,000 bombs in his first year in office.
He has basically taken the gloves off the Pentagon, taken the leash off an already rabid dog. So the end result is a military that’s behaving like Lil Wayne crossed with Conor McGregor. You look away for one minute, look back, and are like, “What the fuck did you just do? I was gone for like, a second!”
Under Trump, five bombs are dropped per hour—every hour of every day. That averages out to a bomb every 12 minutes.
And which is more outrageous—the crazy amount of death and destruction we are creating around the world, or the fact that your mainstream corporate media basically NEVER investigates it? They talk about Trump’s flaws. They say he’s a racist, bulbous-headed, self-centered idiot (which is totally accurate)—but they don’t criticize the perpetual Amityville massacre our military perpetrates by dropping a bomb every 12 minutes, most of them killing 98 percent non-targets.
When you have a Department of War with a completely unaccountable budget—as we saw with the $21 trillion—and you have a president with no interest in overseeing how much death the Department of War is responsible for, then you end up dropping so many bombs that the Pentagon has reported we are running out of bombs.
Oh, dear God. If we run out of our bombs, then how will we stop all those innocent civilians from … farming? Think of all the goats that will be allowed to go about their days.
And, as with the $21 trillion, the theme seems to be “unaccountable.”
Journalist Witney Webb wrote in February, “Shockingly, more than 80 percent of those killed have never even been identified and the C.I.A.’s own documents have shown that they are not even aware of who they are killing—avoiding the issue of reporting civilian deaths simply by naming all those in the strike zone as enemy combatants.”
That’s right. We kill only enemy combatants. How do we know they’re enemy combatants? Because they were in our strike zone. How did we know it was a strike zone? Because there were enemy combatants there. How did we find out they were enemy combatants? Because they were in the strike zone. … Want me to keep going, or do you get the point? I have all day.
This is not about Trump, even though he’s a maniac. It’s not about Obama, even though he’s a war criminal. It’s not about Bush, even though he has the intelligence of boiled cabbage. (I haven’t told a Bush joke in about eight years. Felt kind of good. Maybe I’ll get back into that.)
This is about a runaway military-industrial complex that our ruling elite are more than happy to let loose. Almost no one in Congress or the presidency tries to restrain our 121 bombs a day. Almost no one in a mainstream outlet tries to get people to care about this.
Recently, the hashtag #21Trillion for the unaccounted Pentagon money has gained some traction. Let’s get another one started: #121BombsADay.
One every 12 minutes.
Do you know where they’re hitting? Who they’re murdering? Why? One hundred and twenty-one bombs a day rip apart the lives of families a world away—in your name and my name and the name of the kid doling out the wrong size popcorn at the movie theater.
We are a rogue nation with a rogue military and a completely unaccountable ruling elite.
The government and military you and I support by being a part of this society are murdering people every 12 minutes, and in response, there’s nothing but a ghostly silence. It is beneath us as a people and a species to give this topic nothing but silence.
It is a crime against humanity.
We often ask, what would we do if there was another Holocaust? Surely we would do something? Surely, at least, we would not be complicit?
The question might have been answered in Rwanda, where the UN commander begged the UN for orders to intervene, orders which never came. The general, Romeo Dallaire, has spent the rest of his life curled around his failure to act despite orders.
Mark Lowcock, the UN’s emergency relief coordinator, expressed his concern regarding the “recent decline of commercial food imports through the Red Sea ports” — adding that, if conditions do not improve, the number of Yemenis at the brink of starvation would rise from the current figure of 8.4 million to 18.4 million by this December. Given that there are approximately 28 million people in Yemen, a continuation of the Saudi-led blockade would mean that nearly two-thirds of the entire country’s population will soon face starvation.
Not sure how many of those who face starvation will starve to death, rather than simply sit on the edge of death, but millions of lives are at risk, this is deliberate, it is happening in slow motion, and the rest of the world is doing nothing.
Well, if they aren’t helping the mass murder, like America (and America was helping under Obama, so no, this isn’t a partisan issue.)
America could stop Saudi Arabia cold if it wanted to; and it certainly could at least not participate.
But, of course, we all know that in the run up to World War II no one cared what was happening to the Jews: we refused to let in Jewish refugee ships, after all. If all Hitler had done was the Holocaust, no one would have gone to war with him over that.
Not that the US needs to go to war; the simple credible threat of sanctions would bring Saudi Arabia to its knees. Nor does the US, post shale oil, need Saudi Arabia’s oil, but the Saudis, in any case, are no longer in a position to not sell. Their own society would implode in months.
Europe could do this too: SWIFT is located in Europe and subject to European law. Apparently Iran’s non-existent nuclear weapons program, which Netanyahu has stated was 5 years from a nuclear bomb since the early nineties, was worth Europeans forcing SWIFT to cut them off (SWIFT objected), but not millions of Yemeni deaths.
Since Europe = Germany (no, don’t pretend, if Germany wants it, it happens), that means the Germans, having done the Holocaust are now sitting aside when they could stop millions of deaths, and doing nothing.
Lovely.
Well, I guess we’ll just watch.
We’re living through a massive artificial famine, right now. In NW Yemen, home of the Yemeni Shia who’ve fought off a Saudi-financed invasion, the “coalition” of invaders has settled on a slower, more effective strategy: artificial famine and blockade. This is how you kill off a troublesome population, not with bombs and guns alone. Hunger and disease are much better mass killers than firearms and bombs.
NW Yemen has been blockaded for years now. And the Saudi strategy is working well. Yemen has had up to a million cases of cholera, an illness unheard of in countries with modern antibiotics. Untreated cholera is fatal in about half of all cases (versus 1% when normal treatment is available). Since medical supplies are being blockaded (with the help of the US Navy), and few journalists have made much effort to find out what has been going on in the blockaded areas, we may be dealing with an unreported death toll of half a million people, most of them children.
So the situation is lining up very nicely, militarily, for the UAE, Saudi, and their friends in D.C. and London. All you need to tighten the noose at this point in a campaign of extermination by famine/blockade is the silent collusion of world media.
And Lord, how happy the Anglo media have been to supply that last necessary element! Compare this silence to alleged starvation stories from Sunni regions of Syria.
If there was even a rumor that Sunni Syrians might be going hungry, every mainstream media outlet was all over the story. If their CIA-funded shills from the White Helmets made ridiculous claims of massacres and giant famines, later disproved, you could count on everyone from BBC to CNN to blast them over every TV in the Anglosphere.
But the hundreds of thousands of verified, real famine and epidemic cases in Yemen get very little coverage. There’s nothing subtle about why not.
It’s no wonder that most Americans are clueless about why “their” country is feared and hated the world over. It remains unthinkable to this day, for example, that any respectable “mainstream” U.S. media outlet would tell the truth about why the United States atom-bombed the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As Gar Alperovitz and other historians have shown, Washington knew that Japan was defeated and ready to surrender at the end of World War II. The ghastly atomic attacks were meant to send a signal to Soviet Russia about the post-WWII world: “We run the world. What we say goes.”
However, as far as most Americans who even care to remember Hiroshima and Nagasaki know, the Japanese cities were nuked to save American lives certain to be lost in a U.S. invasion required to force Japan’s surrender. This false rationalization was reproduced in the “The War,” the widely viewed 2007 PBS miniseries on World War II from celebrated liberal documentarians Ken Burns and Lynn Novick.
An early challenge to Uncle Sam’s purported right to manage postwar world affairs from the banks of the Potomac came in 1950. Korean forces, joined by Chinese troops, pushed back against the United States’ invasion of North Korea. Washington responded with a merciless bombing campaign that flattened all of North Korea’s cities and towns. U.S. Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay boasted that “we burned down every town in North Korea” and proudly guessed that Uncle Sam’s gruesome air campaign, replete with napalm and chemical weapons, murdered 20 percent of North Korea’s population. This and more was recounted without a hint of shame—with pride, in fact—in the leading public U.S. military journals of the time. As Noam Chomsky, the world’s leading intellectual, explained five years ago, the U.S. was not content just to demolish the country’s urban zones:
Since everything in North Korea had been destroyed, the air force was then sent to destroy North Korea’s dams, huge dams that controlled the nation’s water supply—a war crime for which people had been hanged in Nuremberg. And these official journals … talk[ed] excitedly about how wonderful it was to see the water pouring down, digging out the valleys and the ‘Asians’ scurrying around trying to survive. The journals exulted in what this meant to those Asians—horrors beyond our imagination. It meant the destruction of their rice crop, which in turn meant starvation. How magnificent!
The United States’ monstrous massive crimes against North Korea during the early 1950s went down George Orwell’s “memory hole” even as they took place. To the American public they never occurred—and therefore hold no relevance to current U.S.-North Korean tensions and negotiations as far as most good Americans know.
Things are different in North Korea, where every schoolchild learns about the epic, mass-murderous wrongdoings of the U.S. “imperialist aggressor” from the early 1950s.
“Just imagine ourselves in their position,” Chomsky writes. “Imagine what it meant … for your country to be totally levelled—everything destroyed by a huge superpower, which furthermore was gloating about what it was doing. Imagine the imprint that would leave behind.”
That ugly history rarely makes its way into the “mainstream” U.S. understanding of why North Korea behaves in “bizarre” and “paranoid” ways toward the U.S.
Outside the “radical” margins where people read left critics and chroniclers of “U.S. foreign policy” (a mild euphemism for American imperialism), Americans still can’t grapple with the monumental and arch-imperialist crime that was “the U.S. crucifixion of Southeast Asia” (Chomsky’s term at the time) between 1962 and 1975.
Contrary to the conventional U.S. wisdom, there was no “Vietnam War.” What really occurred was a U.S. War on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia—a giant and prolonged, multi-pronged and imperial assault that murdered 5 million southeast Asians along with 58,000 U.S. soldiers. Just one U.S. torture program alone—the CIA’s Operation Phoenix—killed more than two-thirds as many Vietnamese as the total U.S. body count. Unbeknownst to most Americans, the widely publicized My Lai atrocity was just one of countless mass racist killings of Vietnamese villagers carried out by U.S. troops during the crucifixion. Vietnam struggles with an epidemic of birth defects created by U.S. chemical warfare to this day.
America’s savage saturation bombing of Cambodia (meant to cut off supply lines to Vietnamese independence fighters) created the devastation out of which arose the mass-exterminating Khmer Rouge regime, which Washington later backed against Vietnam.
...
Thanks to its poor fit with American exceptionalist doctrine—according to which Uncle Sam always tries to do the morally right thing, even if it sometimes goes too far in overzealous pursuits of its consistently good intentions—this gruesome imperial crime was only a minor story in U.S. “mainstream” media. The same was true three years earlier when the American battleship USS Vincennes shot down Iran Air Flight 655, killing 290 civilians on a clearly marked commercial jet in Iranian air space over the Persian Gulf. (Two years later, the Vincennes’ commander and his chief air-war artillery officer were given medals for “exceptionally meritorious conduct” during this heroic slaughter of harmless innocents.)
Imagine the U.S. response if, say, a Chinese navy ship had shot down an American Airlines flight in U.S. airspace over San Francisco Bay.
The U.S. shootdown of Flight 655 is well remembered in Iran. Not so in the United States of Imperial Amnesia, where official doctrine holds that, in Albright’s words, “The United States is good. We try to do our best everywhere.”
...
It is unthinkable that anyone in the reigning American exceptionalist U.S. media-politics-and-culture complex would raise the question of the denuclearization of the United States. It’s no small matter. The world’s only superpower, the only nation to ever attack civilians with nuclear weapons, is embarking on a super-expensive top-to-bottom overhaul of a U.S. nuclear arsenal that already houses 5,500 weapons with enough menacing power between them to blow the world up five times over. This $1.7 trillion rebuild includes the creation of provocative new first-strike weapons systems likely to escalate the risks of nuclear exchanges with Russia and/or China. Everyday Americans could have opportunities to more than just imagine what the innocents of Nagasaki experienced in August 1945.
But don’t blame Donald Trump. Our current reality was initiated under Obama, leader of a party that is positioning itself as the real and anti-Russian and CIA-backed party of empire in the 2018 and 2020 U.S. elections.
This extraordinarily costly retooling heightens prospects for human self-extermination in a world in dire need of public investment to end poverty (half the world’s population “lives” on less than $2.50 a day), to replace fossil fuels with clean energy (we are marching to the fatal mark of 500 carbon parts per atmospheric million by 2050—if not sooner), and to clean up the titanic environmental mess we’ve made of our planet.
The perverted national priorities reflected in such appalling, Darth Vader-esque “public investment”—a giant windfall for the high-tech U.S. weapons-industrial complex—are symptoms of the moral collapse that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. warned the United States about in the famous anti-war speech he gave one year to the day before his assassination (or execution). “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift,” King said, “is approaching spiritual death.”
That spiritual death is well underway. Material and physical death for the species is not far off on America’s eco- and nuclear-exterminating path, led in no small part by a dominant U.S. media that obsesses over everything Trump and Russia while the underlying bipartisan institutions of imperial U.S. oligarchy lead humanity over the cliff. Americans might want to learn how to take Chomsky’s challenge—imagine ourselves in others’ situation—before it’s too late to imagine anything at all.
The US servicemen and women who have fought and died in America’s nonstop acts of military expansionism and wars of aggression are not heroes. They are victims. They are victims of a sociopathic power establishment which does not care about them, and never has.
If what I just wrote bothered you, it is because you have been conditioned to oppose such ideas by generations of war propaganda. If you believe that US soldiers are heroes, it means that you believe that they are fighting and dying for a noble cause; for your freedom, for democracy, for the good and the just. It turns the deaths of the fallen into a tragic but noble sacrifice in your eyes, which keeps you from realizing that they have actually been dying for the profit margins of war plutocrats, land and resource assets, and the neoconservative agenda to secure control of the planet.
There is nothing heroic about being thrown into the gears of the war machine and having one’s body and mind ripped apart for the advancement of plutocratic interests. But if your rulers can trick you into thinking that dead US soldiers died for something worth dying for, you won’t turn around and lay the blame on the war profiteers and ambitious sociopaths who are truly responsible for their deaths.
So they lie to you. Constantly.
“If we truly want to support our troops and honor our men and women in uniform, we would stop requiring them to have their limbs blown off, their bodies paralyzed, their eyes blinded, their minds destroyed and their lives lost for wars that have NOTHING to do with protecting America and EVERYTHING to do with enriching globalists, bankers, politicians, and war profiteers.
“We would stop using them for political nation-building, regime change and drug dealing. We would stop using them as global cops. And we would especially stop using them to fight perpetual wars of aggression for Zionist Israel.
“Short of the above, all of the hype about “supporting our troops” is just so much hot air. No! It’s even worse than that: It’s pure propaganda for the sake of benefiting the merciless, murderous war merchants and heads of state who profit off of the sacrifices of their country’s sons and daughters, fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters and husbands and wives.
“The best way to ‘support our troops’ is to BRING THEM HOME.”
... climate change is a defining issue of our time, whether or not one accepts what science tells us. And unfortunately, the US is now confounded from Washington DC by a brand of deeply cynical politics that threatens our species tackling climate change soon enough. Historically, the largest source of climate changing pollution, the US and DC is turning its back on the Paris Agreement, a global treaty enforcing the ambition to keep climate warming under +1.5 C above pre-industrial. Our species is acting late on this crisis. Already today at +1C above pre-industrial, we’re beginning to see profound damaging effects including increased storm severity, the drying of continental interiors, and melting ice sheets.
All of these climate change effects have overall strongly negative impacts, primarily on reducing food and water security for humans and nature that surrounds.At this stage, by supporting dirty energy from projects like the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines, against the will of the majority of people and treaties signed with indigenous first nations peoples, it’s clear US climate denial is a result of a bought-out political system and a fossil fuel dominated economy. US republicans and some democrats are choosing more expensive climate destabilizing energy over cleaner and safer energy systems that benefit people and nature long term.
The most profitable industry in history, rather than using their capital and technical capacity to transition itself to become sustainable energy, its leaders like Exxon have chosen an anti-science, greedy, and reckless path.
Fortunately, and despite obfuscation from fossil fuel corporations, fossil energy is clearly emerging as yesterday’s energy. Still, clean energy couldn’t be coming on soon enough given that carbon emissions and concentrations are already so high that we’re losing the ice sheets and harming our oceans through carbonic acidification. Our species needs to find a way to maintain a steep fall rate for carbon emissions for the foreseeable future and engage in what has been largely a missing conversation and action of turning emissions negative until we stabilize somewhere below 350 parts per million CO2. We’re currently more than 40% above pre-industrial CO2. We thus need not only to cut carbon emissions but drawdown many Giga tons carbon from the atmosphere. While an enormous task, it’s possible and urgent to avoid a Mad Max future.
The combination of 1.) extra ocean to atmosphere heat transfer enabled by record low sea ice and 2.) pulses of warm air from the south has produced stunning large temperature departures from normal.
... alarmed we’re in uncharted climate territory driven by abrupt human-driven climate change
If even a small fraction of Arctic sea floor carbon is released to the atmosphere, we're f'd.
A top climate scientist is warning that climate change will wipe out all of humanity unless we stop using fossil fuels over the next five years.
In a recent speech at the University of Chicago, James Anderson — a professor of atmospheric chemistry at Harvard University — warned that climate change is drastically pushing Earth back to the Eocene Epoch from 33 million BCE, when there was no ice on either pole. Anderson says current pollution levels have already catastrophically depleted atmospheric ozone levels, which absorb 98 percent of ultraviolet rays, to levels not seen in 12 million years.
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While some governments have made commitments to reduce carbon emissions (Germany has pledged to cut 95 percent of carbon emissions by 2050), Anderson warned that those measures were insufficient to stop the extinction of humanity by way of a rapidly changing climate. Instead, Anderson is calling for a Marshall Plan-style endeavor in which all of the world takes extreme measures to transition off of fossil fuels completely within the next five years.
Recovery is all but impossible, he argued, without a World War II-style transformation of industry—an acceleration of the effort to halt carbon pollution and remove it from the atmosphere, and a new effort to reflect sunlight away from the earth’s poles.
This has to be done, Anderson added, within the next five years.
“The chance that there will be any permanent ice left in the Arctic after 2022 is essentially zero,” Anderson said, with 75 to 80 percent of permanent ice having melted already in the last 35 years.
The level of carbon now in the atmosphere hasn't been seen in 12 million years, a Harvard scientist said in Chicago Thursday, and this pollution is rapidly pushing the climate back to its state in the Eocene Epoch, more than 33 million years ago, when there was no ice on either pole.
"We have exquisite information about what that state is, because we have a paleo record going back millions of years, when the earth had no ice at either pole. There was almost no temperature difference between the equator and the pole," said James Anderson, a Harvard University professor of atmospheric chemistry best known for establishing that chlorofluorocarbons were damaging the Ozone Layer.
"The ocean was running almost 10ºC warmer all the way to the bottom than it is today," Anderson said of this once-and-future climate, "and the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere would have meant that storm systems would be violent in the extreme, because water vapor, which is an exponential function of water temperature, is the gasoline that fuels the frequency and intensity of storm systems."
People have the misapprehension that we can recover from this state just by reducing carbon emissions, Anderson said in an appearance at the University of Chicago.
Recovery is all but impossible, he argued, without a World War II-style transformation of industry—an acceleration of the effort to halt carbon pollution and remove it from the atmosphere, and a new effort to reflect sunlight away from the earth's poles.
This has do be done, Anderson added, within the next five years.
"The chance that there will be any permanent ice left in the Arctic after 2022 is essentially zero," Anderson said, with 75 to 80 percent of permanent ice having melted already in the last 35 years.
"Can we lose 75-80 percent of permanent ice and recover? The answer is no."
The answer is no in part because of what scientists call feedbacks, some of the ways the earth responds to warming. Among those feedbacks is the release of methane currently trapped in permafrost and under the sea, which will exacerbate warming. Another is the pending collapse of the Greenland ice sheet, which Anderson said will raise sea level by 7 meters (about 23 feet).
"People at this point haven't come to grips with the irreversibility of this sea-level rise problem," Anderson said.
...
In Chicago Thursday, he prosecuted a moral argument that implicates university administrators who refuse to divest from fossil fuels, journalists who fail to fact-check false statements made by political candidates, and executives of fossil fuel companies who continue to pursue activities that are exacerbating climate change—especially those who mislead the public about those effects.
"I don't understand how these people sit down to dinner with their kids,"
I “retired” so that I can focus my time better on (1) climate science, (2) communications thereof, and (3) policy implications. I will do this via research published in the scientific literature and translations for a wider audience.
I have had the good fortune of my research being reported by top science writers: Walter Sullivan on the first major climate paper that my colleagues and I published (1), Richard Kerr (2) on my congressional testimony in the late 1980s, and Justin Gillis (3) on my retirement. Their articles raised some issues and queries, which are relevant to the task of getting the public to understand the urgency of effective policy actions.
1. Exaggeration?
I have been told of specific well-respected people who have asserted that “Jim Hansen exaggerates” the magnitude and imminence of the climate threat. If only that were true, I would be happy.
“Magnitude and imminence” compose most of the climate story.
Magnitude. CO2, the dominant climate forcing on the long run, will stay in the climate system for millennia. The magnitude of the eventual climate response to increasing CO2 depends especially on climate sensitivity. Our best evaluation of climate sensitivity comes from Earth’s paleoclimate history, via comparisons of periods with differing climate forcings.{a}
Unfortunately, paleoclimate data show that our early estimates of climate sensitivity were not an exaggeration. This is made clear in a paper (4) in press at the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (world’s oldest scientific journal). The journal issue containing our paper will not appear until this summer. However, the publishers have allowed us to make available a nearly final version of the paper on the arXiv website for preprints.
This paper concludes, among other things, that climate sensitivity is in the upper half of the range that has usually been estimated. Furthermore, slow feedbacks, such as change of ice sheet size and methane emissions, make the sensitivity still higher.
Before the paper is published we will write a summary for a broader audience.
Imminence. Recently a smart young person told me that she tends to discount global warming as a concern, because of prior assertions that we only had 5 years or 10 years before disastrous consequences — and her observation that not much has changed in the past 5 years.
That exposes another communications problem. Scientists did not expect sea level rise of meters or “a different planet” in 5 or 10 or 20 years. In 2005 (AGU meeting) I noted that we needed to get on a different global emissions path, with decreasing emissions, within 10 years — not because dramatic climate change would occur in 10 years, but because otherwise we will build into the climate system future changes that will be out of our control.
Climate effects are occurring already and are generally consistent with expectations. The perceptive person should notice that the climate dice are now loaded. However, changes so far a are small compared with what will happen if we are so foolish as to continue down the path of extracting and burning every fossil fuel we can find. See below.
2. Jumping the Gun
It has been said that I reach conclusions before the evidence warrants them. Two examples suffice to illustrate the predicament that we face.
Late 1980s. Dick Kerr colorfully titled a 5-day scientific meeting after my 1988/89 congressional testimonies as “Hansen vs. the World on the Greenhouse Threat”{2}. Yet one of the participants told him “if there were a secret ballot at this meeting on the question, most people would say the greenhouse warming is probably there.”
Scientific conclusions are based on integration of multiple sources of information: climate changes observed today, Earth’s history, basic theory, models, etc. Interpretation inherently involves assumptions and subjectivity, yet valid conclusions are possible.
Communication of developing science might be affected by the phenomenon of scientific reticence.{5} In the 1980s I could shrug off criticism with “It’s just a logical, well-reasoned conclusion that the greenhouse is here now,”{2} go back to research, and let nature clarify matters.
Today it is different. The science is much clearer. And we are running out of time.
Today. I was recently at a meeting that included many of the top researchers in climate change. There was universal agreement about the urgency of the climate crisis.
Certainty of our predicament follows from basic considerations including: (1) huge inertia and thus slow response of key parts of the climate system, especially the ocean and ice sheets, and improving observations by Argo floats and gravity satellites that confirm trends and the existence of further change in the pipeline, (2) long lifetime of any ocean warming that is allowed to occur, (3) millennial time scale that fossil fuel CO2 will stay in the climate system, (4) paleoclimate confirmation of the magnitude of the eventual climate response to large CO2 increase.
These scientists, people who know what they are talking about, were not concerned about jumping the gun, but rather about whether the race might already be over. So they were considering the potential for air capture of CO2, in effect geo-engineering to counteract our unintended geo-engineering.
What’s wrong with this picture? We can pass from “jumping the gun” to unavoidable deleterious consequences without passing through demands for common sense policy actions? Let’s come back to this matter after “The Venus Syndrome”.
3. The Venus Syndrome
I get questions from the public about the Venus Syndrome: is there a danger of “runaway” greenhouse warming on Earth leading to Venus-like conditions? Related questions concern specific positive (amplifying) feedbacks such as methane hydrates: as warming thaws tundra and destabilizes methane hydrates on continental shelves, thus releasing methane, won’t this cause more warming, thus more methane release, thus more warming — a runaway warming?
Amplifying feedbacks. Let’s consider a positive climate forcing (say a solar irradiance increase or CO2 increase) that causes a unit of warming. Let’s ask how this unit warming will be amplified by a very strong feedback, one that increases the initial warming by 50%. The added warming of 0.5 induces more feedback, by 0.5×0.5 = 0.25, and so on, the final response being 1 + 0.5 + 0.25 + 0.125 + … = 2. So this very strong feedback causes the final warming to be twice as large as it would have been without the feedback. But it is not a runaway effect.
The strongest feedback that we observe on Earth today, from water vapor, is almost as strong as this example. Other feedbacks are occurring at the same time, some amplifying and some diminishing (negative). The net effect of all fast feedbacks can be assessed by comparing different well-characterized climate states in Earth’s history, as described in our paper,{4} treating slow changes such as ice sheet size as specified boundary conditions. It turns out that the net effect of fast feedbacks is to amplify the global temperature response by about a factor of 2-3.{b}
Other feedbacks become important on longer time scales. As the planet becomes warmer the ice sheet area tends to decrease, exposing a darker surface that absorbs more sunlight. And as the planet warms the ocean and land release long-lived greenhouse gases, mainly CO2 and CH4 (methane). Thus Earth’s climate is dominated by amplifying feedbacks on time scales of 10-100,000 years and less. For this reason, Earth can be whipsawed between glacial and interglacial conditions by the small climate forcings caused by perturbations of Earth’s orbit.{6}
The dominance of amplifying feedbacks and the resulting high climate sensitivity make Earth susceptible to what we can call a mini-runaway. By mini-runaway, I refer to a case with an amplifying feedback large enough that the total feedback reaches runaway (the infinite series above does not converge), but eventually that process runs out of fuel. Evidence of such behavior is provided by hyperthermal events in Earth’s history, sudden rapid warmings that occurred during periods of more gradual warming.
The most studied hyperthermal is the PETM (Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum), which occurred in the middle of a 10 million year period of gradual warming. A rapid warming spike occurred in conjunction with injection of a large amount of CO2 into the climate system on a time scale of the order of a millennium. The source of the rapid CO2 increase is most commonly suggested to have been the melting of methane hydrates due to a warming ocean, with an alternative suggestion being incineration of large peat deposits, especially on Antarctica.
Whatever the CO2 source, global temperature increased about 6°C over several millennia. The continental weathering process provided a negative feedback, as a pumped-up hydrologic cycle drew down atmospheric CO2 and deposited it as carbonate on the ocean floor. However, this feedback requires tens of thousands of years, so the rapid warming stopped only when the fuel source was depleted.
Are hyperthermals relevant now, as a possible amplification of fossil fuel warming? Unfortunately, they may be. Burning all fossil fuels would produce such large ocean warming, which would continue to exist for centuries, that ignition of a hyperthermal amplification of global warming is a possibility. Consequences are unclear. Carbon release in prior hyperthermals occurred over a millennium or more, at a rate up to ~ 5 GtC/year. This can be compared with the present global rate of fossil fuel burning, which is ~ 9 GtC/year.
It is instructive to consider the task of dealing with such continuing carbon release, in the event that we did set it off. Humanity could defuse a continuous release of 5 GtC/year, thus avoiding hyperthermal warming, by capturing and sequestering the carbon. The American Physical Society estimates {7} the cost of capture and sequestration as ~ $2 trillion per GtC. Given that the United States is responsible for 26% of the fossil fuel CO2 in the air today {8}, the U.S. cost share for removing 5 GtC/year would be ~$2.6 trillion each year. Technology development might be able to lower that cost, but fundamental energy constraints imply that cost reduction at most will be a factor of a few. {9}
We had better be sure to avoid a mini-runaway. If we phase out fossil fuels rapidly and move to a clean energy future in accord with a scenario that my colleagues and I have described {8}, we could be reasonably confident of avoiding that situation.
We know that prior interglacial periods were moderately warmer than the current (Holocene) interglacial. A fossil fuel emissions scenario similar to the one we have defined is needed for other reasons, especially for the purpose of maintaining reasonably stable shorelines, i.e., avoiding sea level rise of many meters, which would destroy thousands of coastal cities all around the world.
In contrast, if we burn all the fossil fuels it is certain that sea level would eventually rise by tens of meters. The only argument is how soon the rise of several meters needed to destroy habitability of all coastal cities would occur. It is also possible that burning all fossil fuels would eventually set off a hyperthermal event, a mini-runaway. Is it conceivable that we could get a runaway leading all the way to the Venus Syndrome, Venus-like conditions on Earth?
Runaway Greenhouse. Venus today has a surface pressure of about 90 bars, compared with 1 bar on Earth. The Venus atmosphere is mostly CO2. The huge atmospheric depth and CO2 amount are the reason Venus has a surface temperature of nearly 500°C.
Venus and Earth probably had similar early atmospheric compositions, but on Earth the carbon is mostly in Earth’s crust, not in the atmosphere. As long as Earth has an ocean most of the carbon will continue to be in the crust, because, although volcanoes inject crustal carbon into the atmosphere as CO2, the weathering process removes CO2 from the air and deposits it on the ocean floor as carbonates. Venus once had an ocean, but being closer to the Sun, its atmosphere became hot enough that hydrogen could escape from the upper atmosphere, as confirmed today by the extreme depletion on Venus of normal hydrogen relative to heavy hydrogen (deuterium), the lighter hydrogen being able to escape the gravitational field of Venus more readily.
Earth can “achieve” Venus-like conditions, in the sense of ~90 bar surface pressure, only after first getting rid of its ocean via escape of hydrogen to space. This is conceivable if the atmosphere warms enough that the troposphere expands into the present stratosphere, thus eliminating the tropopause (see Fig. 7 in our paper {4} in press), causing water vapor to be transported more rapidly to the upper atmosphere, where it can be dissociated and the hydrogen can then escape to space. Thus extreme warming of the lower atmosphere with elimination of the cold-trap tropopause seems to be the essential physical process required for transition from Earth-like to Venus-like conditions.
If Earth’s lower atmosphere did warm enough to accelerate escape of hydrogen it would still take at least hundreds of millions of years for the ocean to be lost to space. Additional time would be needed for massive amounts of CO2 to accumulate in the atmosphere from volcanoes associated with plate tectonics and convection in Earth’s mantle. So Venus-like conditions in the sense of 90 bar surface pressure and surface temperature of several hundred degrees are only plausible on billion-year time scales.
Is it possible, with the present surface pressure of ~ 1 bar, for Earth’s surface to become so hot that that the planet is practically uninhabitable by humans? That is the situation I depicted in “Storms of My Grandchildren” {10}, which was presumed to be a consequence of burning all fossil fuels over a period of several centuries, with warming further amplified by ignition of PETM-like hyperthermal warming. Support for the possibility of large warming was provided by global climate model simulations indicating an upturn in climate sensitivity at climate forcings ~10 W/m2 (Fig. 30 in “Storms” {10}). If other forcings are unchanged, a 10 W/m2 forcing requires a CO2 increase by a factor of 4-8 times its pre-industrial amount (~280 ppm) — an increase that is possible if all extractable fossil fuels are burned {4,8}. Other complex global climate models also find an upturn in climate sensitivity or climate model “crash” when CO2 amount reaches such high levels {11}, raising the question of whether such a level of climate forcing is already trending toward a runaway greenhouse effect.
The concept of a runaway greenhouse effect was introduced {12} by considering a highly idealized situation with specified troposphere-stratosphere atmospheric structure, a simple approximation for atmospheric radiation, and no inclusion of how clouds might change as climate changes, as is appropriate for introduction of a concept. More recent studies {13} relax some of the idealizations and are sufficient to show that Earth is not now near a runaway situation, but the idealizations are still sufficient that the studies do not provide a picture of where Earth is headed if all fossil fuels are burned.
An alternative promising approach is to employ the fundamental equations for atmospheric structure and motions, i.e., the conservation equations for energy, momentum, mass, and water, and the ideal gas law. These equations form the core of atmospheric general circulation models and global climate models. However, today’s global models generally contain representations of so many additional physical processes that the models are difficult to use for investigations of extreme climatic situations, because invariably some approximations in the scores of equations become invalid in extreme climates. In contrast, my long-term colleague Gary Russell has developed a global model that solves the fundamental equations with the minimum additional physics needed to investigate climate sensitivity over the full range from snowball Earth to a hothouse uninhabitable planet. The additional physics includes accurate spectral dependence of solar and thermal radiation, convection, and clouds. Although the precision of the results depends on the representation of clouds, we suggest that the simple prescription employed is likely to correctly capture essence of cloud change in response to climate change.
We use the Russell model in our paper to show that the tropopause rises in response to the global warming that occurs with larger and larger CO2 amounts (Fig. 7 in our paper {4}), and cloud cover decreases with increasing CO2. In consequence climate sensitivity initially increases as CO2 increases, consistent with the upturn of sensitivity found in more complex global climate models {11}. With the more realistic physics in the Russell model the runaway water vapor feedback that exists with idealized concepts {12} does not occur. However, the high climate sensitivity has implications for the habitability of the planet, should all fossil fuels actually be burned. Furthermore, we show that the calculated climate sensitivity is consistent with global temperature and CO2 amounts that are estimated to have existed at earlier times in Earth’s history when the planet was ice-free.
One implication is that if we should “succeed” in digging up and burning all fossil fuels, some parts of the planet would become literally uninhabitable, with some time in the year having wet bulb temperature exceeding 35°C. At such temperatures, for reasons of physiology and physics, humans cannot survive, because even under ideal conditions of rest and ventilation, it is physically impossible for the environment to carry away the 100 W of metabolic heat that a human body generates when it is at rest {14}. Thus even a person lying quietly naked in hurricane force winds would be unable to survive. Temperatures even several degrees below this extreme limit would be sufficient to make a region practically uninhabitable for living and working.
The picture that emerges for Earth sometime in the distant future, if we should dig up and burn every fossil fuel, is thus consistent with that depicted in “Storms” — an ice-free Antarctica and a desolate planet without human inhabitants. Although temperatures in the Himalayas may have become seductive, it is doubtful that the many would allow the wealthy few to appropriate this territory to themselves or that humans would survive with the extermination of most other species on the planet. At least one sentence in “Storms” will need to be corrected in the next edition: even with burning of all fossil fuels the tropical ocean does not “boil”. But it is not an exaggeration to suggest, based on best available scientific evidence, that burning all fossil fuels could result in the planet being not only ice-free but human-free.
4. Summary Discussion
The inertia of the climate system is not our friend. Because climate responds slowly, we have felt so far only about half of the effect of gases already in the air. This limited response makes it easier for people to believe that we are exaggerating the climate threat.
Climate system inertia means that it will take several centuries for the eventual extreme global warming mentioned above to occur, if we are so foolish as to burn all of the fossil fuel resources. Unfortunately, despite the ocean’s thermal inertia, the transient climate phase this century, if we continue business-as-usual fossil fuel burning, is likely to cause an extended phase of extreme climate chaos. As ice sheets begin to shed ice more and more rapidly, our climate simulations indicate that a point will be reached when the high latitude ocean surface cools while low latitudes surfaces are warming. An increased temperature gradient, i.e., larger temperature contrast between low and high latitudes, will drive more powerful storms, as discussed in “Storms of My Grandchildren”.{10}
The science of climate change, especially because of the unprecedented human-made climate forcing, includes many complex aspects. This complexity conspires with the nature of reporting and the scientific method itself, with its inherent emphasis of caveats and continual reassessment of conclusions, to make communications with the public difficult, even when the overall picture is reasonably clear.
My principal objective in “retiring”, i.e., in leaving government service, is to create more time that will allow me to try to contribute more effectively to this communications effort. I also had concluded that the future of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies and its people would be better served by a younger person who could be focused on leading GISS. My own heart is turning more and more toward trying to make the science and its implications for policy clearer.
I appreciate very much the well wishes I have received from many of you. I am not good at keeping up with e-mail correspondence, so I apologize to anyone who I may have failed to respond to. I also realize that the interview I gave regarding my retirement {3} may have left the impression that I would now be working mainly on specific actions to stem fossil fuel extraction and use. I believe all the individual actions occurring at many places are very important and the sum of them may help turn the tide to clean energies. But I must keep up with and contribute to climate science or I cannot be effective, so I hope to be doing more science rather than less — and science requires more than 40 hours a week — so it is not practical for me to respond to all the requests that I am receiving. I also want to support two or three people working with me, so I need to spend time in fund raising – and I am finding that it is not easy to get foundation support. I hope that papers and testimony that I provide for cases of Our Children’s Trust, or cases regarding coal exports, tar sands and other unconventional fossil fuels, can find wider use with little modification. I will continue to support the growing 350.org movement. I support CitizensClimateLobby.org especially, because of their focus on fee-and-dividend, which I believe is the sine qua non for phase out of fossil fuels. I hope you noticed the op-ed supporting fee-and-dividend in the Wall Street Journal by George Shultz and Gary Becker {15}, who point out that fee-and-dividend plus removal of energy subsidies would provide a level playing field and be good for the economy and jobs. There is also a Democratic (Boxer/Sanders) bill in Congress, but as usual they cannot keep their hands off our wallets, proposing to take 40% of the money to make government bigger, including congressional specification of how 15% of the money is to be spent. Washington seems likely to remain dysfunctional on climate policy, so when we get a bit closer to 2016 I will argue why I think we need a third party. In the meantime we must try to do what we can with what we have. Somebody with access to the President should wake him up to the implications of going down the unconventional fossil fuels route (I have tried, but failed to get access). He will have a heck of a lousy legacy if he takes the big step down that road with the Keystone pipeline. This is an area where he could reach across the aisle, suggesting that he is open to the idea of a revenue neutral carbon fee, which would save much more carbon than the Keystone pipeline would carry, but he would have to give up the Democratic penchant for telling us how to spend our money.
Finally, I recognize that in this Summary Discussion I failed to answer the question “How can we pass from “jumping the gun” to unavoidable deleterious consequences without passing through demands for common sense policy actions?” Delving into that matter requires getting into how our government functions and fails to function. That is a big subject and, as you can see, I am running out of steam for this present communication.
the British physicist warns Earth could soon become as hot as Venus if action to halt climate change is not taken immediately.
Hawking says Venus was once an Earth-like planet with surface water, mild temperatures and an appropriate atmosphere. According to NASA, Venus was an inhabitable planet for a period of about two billion years as recently as four billion years ago.
Now temperatures on Venus reach 250°C with powerful 300mph winds. Hawking says a greenhouse effect burned the planet's oceans and lands, and that something similar could happen right here on Earth if climate change continues unabated.
"Next time you meet a climate-change denier, tell them to take a trip to Venus; I will pay the fare," says the physicist
Question: What fraction of Earth’s land area would be needed to sequester the 50 ppm CO2 surplus we currently have in our atmosphere, 50 ppm above the upper safe limit of 350 ppm?
It’s not a fraction, per se. No. Seven times Earth’s land area would need to be in cultivation. I earlier had a more optimistic value based on 30 tons per hectare, half the Earth’s land area would need to be in cultivation. Yet, unfortunately, the associated crops are not suited for long term sequestration.
ps. The calculations are on one of the 9 benefits of the massive scale tree planting I believe we need to increase climate stability and peace globally:
- carbon sequestration
- humidification of ground and air
- wildlife habitat restoration
- food production
- human habitat creation
- employment in forestry and related industry
- sustainable timber production
- sustainable economic development modeling
- hope
