Climate Links: January 2020

Goals in Paris Agreement Might Be Out of Reach. Nature World News. Jan. 21, 2020.

Causes of Higher Climate Sensitivity in CMIP6 Models. Mark D. Zelinka et al, AGU pubs. Jan. 3, 2020.

Abstract 

Equilibrium climate sensitivity, the global surface temperature response to CO urn:x-wiley:grl:media:grl60047:grl60047-math-0001 doubling, has been persistently uncertain. Recent consensus places it likely within 1.5–4.5 K. Global climate models (GCMs), which attempt to represent all relevant physical processes, provide the most direct means of estimating climate sensitivity via CO urn:x-wiley:grl:media:grl60047:grl60047-math-0002 quadrupling experiments. Here we show that the closely related effective climate sensitivity has increased substantially in Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 6 (CMIP6), with values spanning 1.8–5.6 K across 27 GCMs and exceeding 4.5 K in 10 of them. This (statistically insignificant) increase is primarily due to stronger positive cloud feedbacks from decreasing extratropical low cloud coverage and albedo. Both of these are tied to the physical representation of clouds which in CMIP6 models lead to weaker responses of extratropical low cloud cover and water content to unforced variations in surface temperature. Establishing the plausibility of these higher sensitivity models is imperative given their implied societal ramifications. 

Plain Language Summary

The severity of climate change is closely related to how much the Earth warms in response to greenhouse gas increases. Here we find that the temperature response to an abrupt quadrupling of atmospheric carbon dioxide has increased substantially in the latest generation of global climate models. This is primarily because low cloud water content and coverage decrease more strongly with global warming, causing enhanced planetary absorption of sunlight—an amplifying feedback that ultimately results in more warming. Differences in the physical representation of clouds in models drive this enhanced sensitivity relative to the previous generation of models. It is crucial to establish whether the latest models, which presumably represent the climate system better than their predecessors, are also providing a more realistic picture of future climate warming.

Carbon dioxide emissions continue to grow amidst slowly emerging climate policies. Glen Peters et al, Nature. Jan. 2020.

A failure to recognize the factors behind continued emissions growth could limit the world’s ability to shift to a pathway consistent with 1.5 °C or 2 °C of global warming. Continued support for low-carbon technologies needs to be combined with policies directed at phasing out the use of fossil fuels.

Timelapse Maps: Stunning Overviews Of Our Changing Planet. via visual capitalist.


Commentary: Climate change is remaking the world. Andrew E. Dessler, San Antonio Express-News. Jan. 21, 2020.
behind paywall, so also available here.


Oil and gas emissions are reversing progress from coal’s decline. Naveena Sadasivam, grist. Jan 8, 2020.

Schaeffer cautioned that the numbers projected by the EIP are most likely underestimates. For one, the report only tallies emissions from the largest facilities that are required to secure permits under the Clean Air Act. “There are thousands of smaller [facilities] that aren’t picked up in our numbers — compressor stations, tank batteries, big storage terminals, gas processors, and so on,” Schaeffer said.

There are also signs that companies are underreporting emissions data. As oil and gas producers run out of pipeline capacity to transport fossil fuels from drilling sites to refineries and markets, they’re increasingly burning it off into the air in a process called flaring. Companies operating in the Permian Basin reported flaring about 1.37 million tons of natural gas in 2017, but independent satellite analyses by environmental groups and research firms indicate the actual number is about double that. Similarly, emissions from accidents — like the massive 2016 Aliso Canyon leak in southern California — and other malfunctions and maintenance activities are either not reported or are undercounted, the report noted.

2019 in climate science: A continued warming trend and 'bleak' research. Dana Nuccitelli, Yale Climate Connections. Jan. 7, 2020.


Bad Planet. John Davis, counterpunch. Jan. 2, 2020.

Australia is an island continent composed of a vast treeless desert edged with a fringe of heavily urbanized temperate bush where the fierce heat of the land is moderated by onshore ocean breezes from the Pacific to the East and the Indian Ocean to the West. Now, areas of this temperate fringe are aflame as hot desert winds fan bush fires amidst a record series of early-summer heat waves. A world audience watches in horror as news reaches them framed in terms of houses destroyed, lives lost, koalas scorched and kookaburras that no longer sing in the oppressive heat. Greta tweets, “Not even catastrophes like these seem to bring any political action. How is this possible?”

But it is indeed possible, probable, and arguably even inevitable because the climate crisis, née global warming, is embedded in a mostly white, liberal, humanist civilization whose peoples, at least since the middle of the fifteenth century, have privileged the appropriation of land, labor and geological resources over an ecological accommodation of the rest of the planet. It is this ideology, rooted in capital accumulation, that now manifests as extreme weather events. Their remediation requires not just political action, but an almost unimaginable civilizational reboot. We refuse to make this leap because making it threatens the accustomed terms of our existence.

Lessons from Australia’s Bushfires: We Need More Science, Less Rhetoric. Claire Lehmann, Quillette. Jan. 8, 2020.




If words make worlds, then we urgently need to tell a new story about the climate crisis. Here is one vision of what it could look and feel like to radically, collectively take action.
In 2030, we ended the climate emergency. Here’s how. Eric Holthaus, The Correspondent. Jan. 8, 2020.

... A big part of why this crisis has spun into an emergency is that there has been too much of a focus on numbers: In a series of widely read essays, Bill McKibben has written about this kind of terrifying climate math.– 1.5C,  350 parts per million,  12 years  – and not enough attention on collective stories of a better world.

Still, the most important number is easy to remember: zero.  Get to zero emissions globally as quickly as possible. Zero is revolutionary.

There are an infinite number of possible paths ahead of us, and what follows is just one of them, gathered with the help of friends from around the world.

This is a story about our journey to 2030 – a vision of what it could look and feel like if we finally, radically, collectively act to build a world we want to live in.

The economics of extinction: a reason for rebellion. Jem Bendell and Rabbi Jeffrey Newman. Jan. 7, 2020.

What would a sane society do, knowing that one of its luxury food supplies was being exhausted? Consume less perhaps? Or grow more? Japan, knowing that the Bluefin tuna is going extinct, does neither. Bluefish tuna make the most profit for fishermen the nearer they are to extinction, as their rarity endows all the more status on their consumers.

Some might think that is a quirky Japanese behaviour or an anomaly of economics, but actually the free-market system in which individuals compete for profit is resplendent with such stupidities. How else could the investment in fracking or tar sands be explained? Or the way Brazil is consuming the lungs of the Earth to pay back its debts. Or the way industry externalises the cost of processing much of its waste, poisoning the Earth and its future consumers?

The logic that leads to these flaws has long been understood, and there have been waves of visceral protest as the ideology of markets became more entrenched. It is two decades since we were shutting down city centres hosting WTO and World Bank conferences; and almost a decade since Occupy camps squatted in the sacred places of decadent high finance. This time our issue is more than economic justice – it is the way governments are standing by as the global house we live in is burning down. We now see clearer than ever how a stupid financial system is driving an environmental breakdown and mass extinction which will undermine our very civilisation.

Omnicide: Who is responsible for the gravest of all crimes? Danielle Celermajer, ABC. Jan. 3, 2020.

As the full extent of the devastation of the Holocaust became apparent, a Polish Jew whose entire family had been killed, Raphael Lemkin, came to realise that there was no word for the distinctive crime that had been committed: the murder of a people. His life work became finding a word to name the crime and then convincing the world to use it and condemn it: genocide. Today, not only has genocide become a dreadful part of our lexicon. We recognise it as perhaps the gravest of all crimes. 

During these first days of the third decade of the twenty-first century, as we watch humans, animals, trees, insects, fungi, ecosystems, forests, rivers (and on and on) being killed, we find ourselves without a word to name what is happening. True, in recent years, environmentalists have coined the term ecocide, the killing of ecosystems — but this is something more. This is the killing of everything. Omnicide.