Climate Links: November 2019 #1

World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency. William J Ripple et al, Bioscience. Nov. 5, 2019.

Scientists have a moral obligation to clearly warn humanity of any catastrophic threat and to “tell it like it is.” On the basis of this obligation and the graphical indicators presented below, we declare, with more than 11,000 scientist signatories from around the world, clearly and unequivocally that planet Earth is facing a climate emergency.

Exactly 40 years ago, scientists from 50 nations met at the First World Climate Conference (in Geneva 1979) and agreed that alarming trends for climate change made it urgently necessary to act. Since then, similar alarms have been made through the 1992 Rio Summit, the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, and the 2015 Paris Agreement, as well as scores of other global assemblies and scientists’ explicit warnings of insufficient progress (Ripple et al. 2017). Yet greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are still rapidly rising, with increasingly damaging effects on the Earth's climate. An immense increase of scale in endeavors to conserve our biosphere is needed to avoid untold suffering due to the climate crisis (IPCC 2018).

Most public discussions on climate change are based on global surface temperature only, an inadequate measure to capture the breadth of human activities and the real dangers stemming from a warming planet (Briggs et al. 2015). Policymakers and the public now urgently need access to a set of indicators that convey the effects of human activities on GHG emissions and the consequent impacts on climate, our environment, and society. Building on prior work (see supplemental file S2), we present a suite of graphical vital signs of climate change over the last 40 years for human activities that can affect GHG emissions and change the climate (figure 1), as well as actual climatic impacts (figure 2). We use only relevant data sets that are clear, understandable, systematically collected for at least the last 5 years, and updated at least annually.

How Scientists Got Climate Change So Wrong. Eugene Linden, NYT. Nov. 8, 2019.

Few thought it would arrive so quickly. Now we’re facing consequences once viewed as fringe scenarios.

The Carbon Bomb. Tom Evans, Sean Maxwell , Scientific American. Nov. 8, 2019.

A new report shows that deforestation released a shocking 626 percent more CO2 between 2000 and 2013 than previously thought

Scientists Study Sea Levels 125,000 Years Ago And It's a Terrifying Look at Our Future. Fiona Hibbert et al, ScienceAlerts. Nov. 6, 2019.

scientific article at:
Asynchronous Antarctic and Greenland ice-volume contributions to the last interglacial sea-level highstand. Nature.com.