Monday, August 9, 2021

IPCC report AR6 released

Major climate changes inevitable and irreversible – IPCC’s starkest warning yet. The Guardian. Aug. 9, 2021.

Report warns temperatures likely to rise by more than 1.5C bringing widespread extreme weather

  • IPCC’s verdict on climate crimes of humanity: guilty as hell
  • ‘Not too late’: Australian scientists call for urgent action to avoid worst of climate crisis
  • Climate crisis ‘unequivocally’ caused by humans, says IPCC



UN sounds alarm on 'irreversible' climate impacts, but offers hope. CBC. Aug. 9, 2021.

"This report must sound a death knell for coal and fossil fuels, before they destroy our planet." ~ UN Secretary General António Guterres.



The era of 'rapid' climate change has begun. Eric Holthaus. Aug. 9, 2021.

Here's what the new IPCC report says, and what it doesn't, about the most important moment of our lives.

...

What the report says
  • It’s warming ‘almost everywhere’.
  • It’s warming ‘rapidly’.
  • It’s been a long time since our planet has been this warm.
  • It’s going to get worse before it gets better.
  • Fixing it ‘requires’ net zero carbon globally as soon as possible.

Here’s the links to read the new IPCC report yourself:

The report’s press release.

A video recording of today’s press conference, with Q&A.

The report itself.

For the first time, the IPCC has also published an Interactive Atlas.




Here are some of the key findings and details from the 3,949-page report, which was released alongside a 42-page "summary for policymakers". The report was signed by 234 scientists from 60 countries. Temperatures will continue to rise until "at least" 2050, causing "further extreme weather events." And without “immediate, rapid and large-scale reductions" reductions, stopping global warming will be impossible, as the global temperature will likely rise 2C above pre-industrial levels by 2100.
  • The world has already risen 1.1ºC from pre-industrial levels, and is likely to temporarily reach 1.5C of warming within 20 years even in a "best-case scenario" where greenhouse gas emissions see "deep" reductions.
  • The past decade was most likely hotter than any period in the last 125,000 years, when sea levels were as much as 10 meters higher. Combustion and deforestation have also raised carbon dioxide in the atmosphere higher than they’ve been in two million years, according to the report, and agriculture and fossil fuels have contributed to methane and nitrous oxide concentration higher than any point in at least 800,000 years.
  • The document is “a code red for humanity,” said Antonio Guterres, secretary-general of the United Nations, in prepared remarks tied to the release. “This report must sound a death knell for coal and fossil fuels before they destroy our planet.”
  • The pledges from Paris Climate Accord signatories is "“insufficient to reduce greenhouse gas emission enough” to keep global warming well below 2°C.
  • The more temperatures rise beyond 2°C, the worse the impact will be. Like with anything, climate change risks triggering feedback loops, as rising temperatures cause more Arctic ice to melt, unlocking carbon buried deep in the permafrost, which could make its way into the atmosphere.
  • US special presidential envoy for climate John Kerry said the findings underscored “the overwhelming urgency of this moment”.
  • Saudi Arabia allegedly tried tampering with the report, per the FT: In virtual negotiations KSA objected to some of the wording of the summary as representatives of the oil-exporting powerhouse sought to replace references to "carbon emissions" with "greenhouse gas emissions". But "the science prevailed". Funny, we thought those phrases were synonymous.
  • For the first time, the report apparently ties climate change to incidents of "extreme weather". The deadly heat wave that killed hundreds this summer in the North American Pacific Northwest would have been "virtually impossible" without the climate crisis. The IPCC says heavy rainfall that used to occur once every 10 years now occurs 30% more frequently, with droughts occurring more than 70% more often.
  • Ocean levels have climbed by 8 inches (on average) over the past century, and the rate of increase has doubled since 2006.
  • The AP called this next detail the "Big Catch" from the report: Meeting the most ambitious goal of the Paris accord, which involves keeping temperature increases to 1.5°C by the end of the century, is believed to only be possible via what is known as "negative emissions": That means sucking more carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere than is added. In other words, being "emissions neutral" or "zero emissions" or whatever American Tech giants like Microsoft are calling it these days, is no longer enough.
  • Just 25 big cities - almost all of them in China - accounted for more than half of the climate-warming gases pumped out by a sample of 167 urban hubs around the world.




You may have heard there's a climate science report out.

It will generate a thousand stories and messages, in every language on the planet.

Most will center on interpretations and agendas because the findings are not new. This U.N.-chartered Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in its sixth comprehensive assessment of global warming science since it was created in 1988, is charged only with reviewing published research.

The core conclusions are plenty stark enough and need no embellishment. Go to the I.P.C.C.'s list of headline statements for key takeaways but here are three distilled points:
  • From "fire weather" to hurricane strength, heat waves to deluges, melting ice to searing drought, much of what has been unfolding around the planet is already, to a growing extent, intensified by the climate-altering power of hundreds of billions of tons of heat-trapping carbon dioxide and other pollutants emitted so far as a consequence of humanity's "great acceleration" of industrial development.
  • Because of the long life of CO₂ and heat already banked in the oceans and other factors, centuries lie ahead with rising temperatures, rising seas and a dangerous melange of extreme events, but the pace and the odds of deeply disruptive worst-case outcomes are still a function of humanity's decisions, or continuing indecision, around stopping the growth of our heat-trapping carbon footprint in the atmosphere.
  • In theory, there's still time to stop dangerous warming altogether, and to forestall the worst impacts on people and the world's ecosystems if emissions can be brought down from today's 40-billion-tons-plus a year (and rising) to a net of zero.
That last point remains key. Every step toward emissions reduction is a step toward a safer relationship with climate in the decades ahead, including holding at bay potential deeply destabilizing abrupt or compounded changes - the "monsters behind the door," to use an apt old phrase from Princeton scientist Steve Pacala.

But that's where this report, “Climate Change 2021 - The Physical Science Basis,” leaves off. Unfortunately, the antiquated architecture of the panel, established decades ago, means two crucial additional parts of this assessment - on warming impacts, vulnerabilities and adaptation options and ways to mitigate warming - won't be out until next February and March, and a final synthesis report comes in September 2022...

And that's what's most urgently needed.

Click back to two other periodic United Nations products - the latest reports on the glaring global "Emissions Gap" and "Adaptation Gap" - and you'll see the deep hollowness behind many of the pledges by the nations that have spent the last century thriving on a fossil fueled energy diet. (Keep in mind there are no teeth in the 2015 Paris Agreement and the foundational 1992 Framework Convention on Climate Change that it builds on.)



The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will provide guidance for policy-makers urgently facing down the current and long-term effects of the climate crisis




Discontinuity is the Job. Alex Steffen. Aug. 9, 2021.
How climate change and the planetary crisis are changing what works

THE PLANETARY CRISIS IS NOT AN ISSUE, BUT A CHANGE IN ERA
When we smashed an unsustainable economy into an immovable planetary reality, we broke our continuity with the past.
The material fundamentals of the systems that surround us are in cataclysmic conflict with the biological fundamentals of our planet (and the practical realities of societal needs). The planetary crisis is not an issue, or set of issues, but a change in era, one that’s already happened.
As I wrote at the start of this series:
“To unlock insight into the world we’re living in, it helps to remember that we’re in a new era, surrounded by systems designed and built in the old.”
To be alive right now is to find ourselves flattened against the fact that the entire human world—our cities and infrastructure, our economy and education system, our farms and factories, our laws and politics—was built for a different planet.
Our understandings of how things work—the assumptions we’ve taken for granted, the experiences we’ve acquired, the skills we’ve learned—no longer offer good guidance for the chaos unfolding around us. Discontinuity surrounds us. While this is certainly true for physical systems, it’s actually even more true for our societies as a whole. Nothing is as it was.
We must learn to remake our world, even as our planet convulses with change. Thinking about this problem is basically what I do for a living. I'm increasingly convinced that almost no one has yet totally engaged this reality. Perhaps literally no one.




A 10-Point Platform (and Anti-Platform) on Climate Change. Stephen Eisenman, Anthropocene Alliance; via Counterpunch. Aug. 6, 2021.



The IPCC’s 6th Assessment Report and implications for #Manchester (aka “Eleven Theses on futility, backed up with footnotes (1)”). Marc Hudson. Aug. 9, 2021

Today the latest “we are all doomed” climate report comes out. It is the latest in a long long (see below) line of such reports.  Climate activists will want to believe that this, at last will “wake up” everyone, from the sheeple to the world leaders who are supposed to be meeting in Glasgow in November.  “Surely,” they think to themselves, “THIS time, the message will get through.”

Yeah, sure.

Below are eleven theses on these sorts of reports, the state of the climate “movement” and a quarter-hearted attempt at addressing the ‘what is to be done’ question (perhaps best framed as ‘what was to be done?’ or ‘what could have been done?’.)

This rant stared out as a blog for Climate Emergency Manchester, but it gets a little ripe, a little beyond the “cynical but not TOO cynical” boundaries of what that small organisation is about,  so even the usual disclaimer of “Marc Hudson, writing in a personal capacity” would probably not render it publishable there. 

First Warning: contains hackneyed references to Groundhog Day, The Bourne Ultimatum and forced references to song lyrics, only some of which are linked. ...



CON26. Automatic Earth. Aug. 9, 2021.

The IPCC came out with another report today, which is a lead-in to another climate conference, this time in Glasgow in Oct-Nov 2021. All the headlines and reactions are exactly the same as they always are: There is no time to lose!, We have to act now!, but also: There is still hope! Since it’s all the same, I thought I’d repost an article from December 2015, ahead of the Paris conference named COP21. All I had to do was change the number and call this one not CON21 but CON26.

No, we’re not going to act in time, and no, there is no hope to halt the degradation of our planet. It’s all long baked into the cake, and if it wasn’t we’d still not stop it. We can do things as individuals but not as a group, let alone as a species. We cannot change our approach to the problems because we cannot change who we are.



Related Tweets

Newsfeed says it all. Although we don't buy the whole, "it's all China's fault". Canada is one of the highest per-capita emitters. 
We need a drastic change in  how we move, live, eat, and tread on this land.


icymi:
1. we're at 417 ppm of atmospheric CO2 for the first time in 23 million years
2. carbon-sucking technologies stronger than all Earth’s oceans & plants combined likely won't exist by 2045 so we're in deep shit and need degrowth, climate justice action
3. media are silent

1. The global economy has caused a mass extinction event. Earth's major ecosystems are collapsing. Habitat destruction, toxic pollution, abrupt climate change.. they will wreck everything without us moving very rapidly towards a postgrowth future.

2. Net-zero by 2050? A grim fantasy.. we'd somehow need to start matching the vast and mighty Oceans of planet Earth by sucking billions of tonnes of CO2 out of the atmosphere every single year, and this process would have to begin by *checks IPCC* 2020.

3. 'The abrupt increase of greenhouse gas distribution today is unprecedented in Earth's 23-million-year history, indicating that ecosystems and global temperatures may be more sensitive to smaller changes in CO2 levels than previously thought.' 

4. "The obvious acceleration of the breakdown of our stable climate simply confirms that—when it comes to the climate emergency—we are in deep, deep shit," Bill McGuire, a professor emeritus of geophysical and climate hazards at University College London


Good luck swerving the absolute avalanche of horse shit disguised as serious analysis today.


As they tell you it's now IRREVERSIBLE ...they don't want you to feel bad
And talk about "hope" and "make a difference"
As #centralbanks print trillions to bury mankind in more emissions
The intensity of denial is simply surreal




“Every approach that promises both bold action and the continuation of current practices and systems leads us inexorably into magical thinking.”


Is there any mea culpa in the report? That would allow a reflection on the limits of the ideology of the scientific establishment & thus some more holistic, integrated, transdisciplinary, radical & #postnormal science as we work out what to do within this new era of disasters.


The new IPCC report highlights the silliness of men: worrying over a hangnail (covid) while the house is burning down (self-extinction). Plutocracy rules and only ineffectual response will be made - just like the covid pandemic.


'We cannot say we were not warned. Even worse, we cannot say to our children that we even tried. We are knowingly condemning young people to a world of fires, storms, and floods.'




One bit of the IPCC report that should be taken with a grain of salt the size of the Earth itself: the call for “limiting” emissions and striving for net-zero goals rather than absolute decarbonization is entirely political and represents an extraordinary moral failure. 1/
Anyone paying attention, and certainly most climate scientists, knows that most net-zero pledges are nearly meaningless, allow for decades of deferral, and rely on technology that does not currently exist. 2/
This is a nod to political consensus, and as such a disastrous act of cowardice. Likewise the report, as @EricHolthaus mentions, does not mention fossil fuels at all, much less the corporations who profit off of their (and our) exploitation 3/


Dangerous climate change has arrived 
We humans, wildlife trees and all life on Earth are now just beginning to struggle for our survival 
To continue with fossil fuels is the greatest criminal act in the history of human kind


1. Biden won't even ban fracking.
2. Ending the fossil fuel era in 2050 is so late as to guarantee the end of humanity.
3. Congress & Biden are doing nothing but giving EVEN MORE corporate welfare to oil companies.
4. #RiseUp, & do it now. Or be ready to explain to your kids.








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