Book Review: Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet

Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet. by Mark Lynas. published 2007.

as described on Good Reads:
Possibly the most graphic treatment of global warming that has yet been published, Six Degrees is what readers of Al Gore's best-selling An Inconvenient Truth or Ross Gelbspan's Boiling Point will turn to next. Written by the acclaimed author of High Tide, this highly relevant and compelling book uses accessible journalistic prose to distill what environmental scientists portend about the consequences of human pollution for the next hundred years. In 2001, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a landmark report projecting average global surface temperatures to rise between 1.4 degrees and 5.8 degrees Celsius (roughly 2 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of this century. Based on this forecast, author Mark Lynas outlines what to expect from a warming world, degree by degree. At 1 degree Celsius, most coral reefs and many mountain glaciers will be lost. A 3-degree rise would spell the collapse of the Amazon rainforest, disappearance of Greenland's ice sheet, and the creation of deserts across the Midwestern United States and southern Africa. A 6-degree increase would eliminate most life on Earth, including much of humanity. Based on authoritative scientific articles, the latest computer models, and information about past warm events in Earth history, Six Degrees promises to be an eye-opening warning that humanity will ignore at its peril.

as reviewed by Jessica on GoodReads, Sep. 2009:

recommended for: every member of an industrialized nation, especially politicians and the captains of industry

Reading this book was like meeting someone, falling madly in love, and finding out she's got a terminal illness, all in the space of twenty minutes. It's been a decade since I've thought about Science, and not being much of a nature girl I forgot how mindblowingly amazing and complex the Earth is. The best parts of this book really reminded me of that. 

Did I say terminal illness? That's a bad metaphor, since disease seems sort of just to passively happen; also, we tend to think of illness as something slow and wasting that takes a long time to kill you. Reading this book is like meeting the most beautiful, fascinating woman who's ever existed, then watching her being sadistically brutalized, gang-raped, and tortured to death. I know that's a bit graphic, but the truth here is nasty. Of course, in an uncomfortable, Twilight-Zoney twist, one can't escape the reality that one numbers oneself among the rapists and torturers.... someone else on here compared this book to a slasher film, and it is one. If you've got a weak stomach or heart, this could be tough going. 

So the premise of this book is that Lynas, a British science guy journalist I think, goes over all these academic articles about climate change and related topics, and describes what our planet might be like when average global temperatures rise by +1, +2.... +6 degrees. A lot of these scenarios are based on what we know about how the planet was the last time it was at these temperatures. Since "chilling" is obviously not the right adjective for these descriptions, I'll just have to warn that you might crap your pants. It's scary! The book has a Dante's Inferno kind of frame, and the whole project really is extremely Biblical. The sense one gets really is that we as a species have cast ourselves out of an incredible Eden and into a spiraling, multi-leveled, intensifying Hell that is, for the most part, not much fun to read about. 

Six Degrees wasn't exactly a page turner. I did not enjoy most of it, which I'd like to blame on Lynas's writing style but which more likely has to do with the topic. Parts of it were really fascinating, especially all the stuff about how weather and water systems work, and the descriptions of geography and the changes over time in the earth's climate were very illuminating for someone like me who knows nothing about all this. But boy, what a downer.... 

Reading about this stuff is intense. I know the world's got a lot of problems and that there's no shortage of things to get one's panties in a twist about, but honestly nothing puts it all in perspective like global warming. I was surprised while reading this by the response I got from my friends. Most people really don't want to think or hear about global warming, which is pretty shocking honestly, since it's (a) kind of the main event and first priority for a lot of obvious reasons, and (b) something we can actually still affect at this point. The thing about all this is that it really is happening fast, as in, in our lifetimes. No one really knows how quickly things will get really bad, and there are certain tipping points and feedback loops that once you go past it's impossible to stop though no one can really say definitively how or at what speed this will all play out. Like, once the Amazon Rainforest burns down, we are irreparably Fucked. And by "we," I mean pretty much all of us creatures who live on this planet. The non-Biblical thing about all this is that it just isn't fair. It's not just the sinners who are being punished here, and the usual suspects will probably feel the heat least -- at least for a little awhile. As temperatures rise due to our bloated Western Sasquatch-sized carbon bootprints, it's the dainty Cinderella-slippered peoples closer to the equator whose habitats will be destroyed first, who'll run out of food and water and come surging up north.... Not the mention the animals, of course, and all other living things. We are taking this mother down with us like an obese and insane mall-shooting suicide, torching the whole place to leave a scorched ugly parking lot where there was once a beautiful shopping mall/planet. 

But yeah, so i found out most people really don't want to think about global warming. You know, everyone's always so down on Holocaust deniers, and I know they're lame, but on some level I understand the impulse to pretend like something so terrible just couldn't have happened. But I don't understand the "global warming is fake" people, because this is a problem we actually can still do something about. It's also not something in the hazy and very distant future; these horrific scenarios Lynas describes could occur within our lifetime (BTW, for those of you looking to feel a bit better about still smoking or being childless, this book could do the trick). At the end of Six Degrees, Lynas basically outlines what he sees as our options right now. According to his information, he guesses there's a 93% chance that we haven't crossed the threshold yet into Completely Fucked (though there is a 7% chance that enough ice has melted that we've activated some of those feedback loops, and are so screwed really fast, no matter what we do now). He says it's pretty much a done deal that global temperatures will climb one and probably two degrees, which will definitely suck and create a lot of problems; however, if we can get our collective shit together and peak emissions by 2015, we do have a chance of stabilizing before we reach three degrees, which is the point from which it seems there is no return, and everything escalates and our world turns to shit. 

Of course, at the moment, nothing like this is happening. Current political realities are incompatible with what science is telling us needs to happen this second, and unless there's a seismic shift really SOON, humanity will almost certainly succeed in the most heinous act of matricide in the history of anything anywhere. At the beginning of the book Lynas takes people to task for complaining that learning about climate change is depressing. He says that's like sitting in your fiery living room being depressed that your house is burning down, instead of getting up and doing something to put out the flames. Reading about this is depressing, though: the damage we've already done, and the global lack of initiative to take action now. It's depressing. 

I finished this book not really sure what I was supposed to do with this information. I'm pretty suspect of this school of independent environmentalism, this very individualistic American idea that if I bring my own bag to Whole Foods I can save the planet from destruction.... Clearly, collective action on a massive, global scale is necessary if this impending disaster is to be averted. Still, that doesn't mean I need to participate actively in grinding broken glass into the face of the woman I love as she dies. One thing this book made me feel is a lot more committed to living in New York. I've thought a lot in the last year about moving back to California, but when I think about being an Angeleno and driving every day, I get a sick feeling in my stomach, and I think that's right, more confidently now that I've read this. My carbon footprint living here's pretty reasonable, for an American, anyway, which is not saying much. I don't drive, I live in a small apartment, the only meat I eat is fish, I fly pretty infrequently, though I suppose I could fly less and buy more local food and what have you.... Reading this did make me think about how I feel good about those things, and then made me think more carefully about what I feel bad about. I could really do a lot better in terms of waste and consumption, and reading this book did motivate me to be more thoughtful about my consumption habits in a way I haven't been really since I moved here from Oregon several years ago. 

Still, I remain really unclear on what the solutions are. Obviously my bringing my lunch to work and not taking airplanes is not going to stop the polar ice caps from melting, so what is? I'd try to think of a brilliant new form of renewable energy, but I'm not very smart. Maybe my contribution will be to call all my scientist friends regularly, and ask them to work on it. Emily? Are you reading this? Could you synthesize a solution in your lab? 

I guess I should stop writing this book report and go do my job, though I have to say I do feel some loss of urgency about social problems. Aren't we just rearranging the deck chairs, really, with all these other things? I guess it's always that way, with each individual life. Still, there's something pretty awesome about the collective end of the world. It puts everything else in perspective, and it's scary and sad. I guess one comforting thought is that global warming now sort of seems like nuclear annihilation did during the Cold War. It's not like that threat is eliminated, but it seems like less of a pressing issue now than it was even when I was a kid. I don't know what needs to happen to be climate change's Berlin Wall or whatever, but I don't think it's impossible. I hope one day I do quit smoking and have kids, and I hope by the time they grow up they can look back at Lynas's book as an alarmist relic, like those old How to Survive the Bomb paperbacks you find in used bookstores sometimes, from the time before humanity started taking this shit seriously and really cleaned up its act.

Topic: Denial and Psychology

The American Denial of Global Warming. Naomi Oreskes, via youtube.

The Hoax of Climate Change Denial. Naomi Oreskes, via nakedcapitalism. Jun 17, 2015.

Unearthing America's Deep Network of Climate Change Deniers. Bloomberg. Nov 30, 2015.

New research for the first time has put a precise count on the people and groups working to dispute the scientific consensus on climate change. A loose network of 4,556 individuals with overlapping ties to 164 organizations do the most to dispute climate change in the U.S., according to a paper published today in Nature Climate Change. ExxonMobil and the family foundations controlled by Charles and David Koch emerge as the most significant sources of funding for these skeptics.

Understand faulty thinking to tackle climate change. George Marshall, New Scientist. Aug 13, 2014.

The amorphous nature of climate change creates the ideal conditions for human denial and cognitive bias to come to the fore

Daniel Kahneman is not hopeful. “I am very sorry,” he told me, “but I am deeply pessimistic. I really see no path to success on climate change.”

Kahneman won the 2002 Nobel prize in economics for his research on the psychological biases that distort rational decision- making. One of these is “loss aversion”, which means that people are far more sensitive to losses than gains. He regards climate change as a perfect trigger: a distant problem that requires sacrifices now to avoid uncertain losses far in the future. This combination is exceptionally hard for us to accept, he told me. 

Kahneman’s views are widely shared by cognitive psychologists. As Daniel Gilbert of Harvard University says: “A psychologist could barely dream up a better scenario for paralysis.

Your brain on climate change: why the threat produces apathy, not action. The Guardian. Nov 10, 2014.

With so much at stake, why do people fail to act? What’s happening inside their brains? Thanks to decades of collaboration between neuroscientists and psychologists – bolstered by the advent of imaging technologies, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging, which allows them to see exactly how the brain makes choices – we’re beginning to understand just why people behave so irrationally. 

Why Trump and Clinton Voters Won’t Switch: It’s in Their Brains. Natalie Jacewicz, Scientific American. May 3, 2016.
Neural images show it takes more than logic and facts to win a political argument

And to change opinions, candidates will have to contend with neurobiology. Scientists say there’s a tension in the brain between responding to new information and resisting overwhelming amounts of conflicting data—and the latter can prevent opinion change. Altering opinion depends on using different psychological methods tailored to different types of belief, according to research. “There’s not much convincing people,” even when the beliefs in question are purely false, says psychiatrist Philip Corlett of Yale University School of Medicine.

Antiscience Beliefs Jeopardize U.S. Democracy. Shawn Lawrence Otto, Scientific American. Nov 1, 2012.
The United States faced down authoritarian governments on the left and right. Now it may be facing an even greater challenge from within

Daily Climate Links: 4/14/2016

The Burgeoning Trend of Corporate Climate Policy Support. Tom Murray, Forbes.

Fracking's total environmental impact is staggering, report finds. Climate Progress.

Summer-like temperatures smash ice melt records for Greenland. Joe Romm, Climate Progress.

New Documents Show Oil Industry Even More Evil Than We Thought. Chris D'Angelo, Huffington Post.

In 1968, a pair of scientists from Stanford Research Institute wrote a report for the American Petroleum Institute, a trade association for America’s oil and natural gas industry. They warned that “man is now engaged in a vast geophysical experiment with his environment, the earth” — one that “may be the cause of serious world-wide environmental changes.”

The scientists went on: “If the Earth’s temperature increases significantly, a number of events might be expected to occur including the melting of the Antarctic ice cap, a rise in sea levels, warming of the oceans and an increase in photosynthesis.” 

That 48-year-old report, which accurately foreshadowed what’s now happening, is among a trove of public documents uncovered and released Wednesday by the Washington-based Center for International Environmental Law. Taken together, documents that the organization has assembled show that oil executives were well aware of the serious climate risks associated with carbon dioxide emissions decades earlier than previously documented — and they covered it up.

Daily Climate Links: 4/12/2016

Can GDP growth and carbon emissions be delinked? Real News Network, via naked capitalism.

Can Markets Solve Climate Change? This Democratic Socialist Thinks So. Mark Paul, Anders Fremstad and James K. Boyce. The Nation. Apr. 12, 2016.

Here’s What Science Has To Say About Convincing People To Do Something About Climate Change. Joe Romm, Climate Progress.

We tested how best to ‘sell’ climate policy. Here’s what we found. Thomas Bernauer and Liam McGrath, Washington Post.

their scientific paper that this news article was based on is here:
Simple framing unlikely to boost public support for climate policy. Nature Climate Change.

People still don't get the link between meat consumption and climate change. Annick de Witt, Scientific American.

Daily Climate Links: 4/11/2016

Sorry, Feds: Kids can sue over climate negligence, judge says. Climate Progress.

A group of youngsters just won a major decision in their efforts to sue the federal government over climate change. An Oregon judge ruled Friday that their lawsuit, which alleges the government violated the constitutional rights of the next generation by allowing the pollution that has caused climate change, can go forward.

more here: Judge Denies Motions by Fossil Fuel Industry and Federal Government in Landmark Climate Change Case. Our Children's Trust, ecowatch.

“This decision marks a tipping point on the scales of justice,” Kelsey Juliana, one of the youth plaintiffs from Eugene, said. “Youth voices are uniting around the world to demand that government uphold our constitutional rights and protect the planet for our and future generations’ survivability. This will be the trial of the century that will determine if we have a right to a livable future, or if corporate power will continue to deny our rights for the sake of their own wealth.”

Earth is tipping because of climate change. Scientific American.

Should the World Ditch the 2-Degree Celsius Target? Umair Irfan, ClimateWire, via Scientific American. Apr. 6, 2016.

The established international target of limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius leaves too much wiggle room and doesn’t move the world fast enough to avert catastrophic warming, explained Oliver Geden, head of the E.U. research division at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs.

“The whole discourse on 2 degrees is focusing on targets and not action,” Geden said. “If you say 2 degrees, you’re addressing us all, which is humanity, which diffuses responsibility.”

He made his case for setting an objective of driving carbon emissions down to zero in a commentary article published Monday in the journal Nature Geoscience

Daily Climate Links: 4/8/2016

Warning for investors, not just environmentalists, in fossil fuel spending. Don Pittis, CBC.

What if pipelines, oilsands and power plants don't last long enough to pay off? 

new research raises concerns about the valuation of any future investments, saying they may not last long enough to pay off. 

The report, published in the academic journal Applied Energy, does not focus directly on pipelines or oilsands development. Instead, it addresses electrical power plants driven by fossil fuels. 

The innovation of the report, however, is to extend the concept of "stranded assets" beyond fossil fuels still in the ground. It says they now include the plant and equipment used to turn those resources into energy used by our economy.

"If the 2 C target is to be taken seriously, then current and future assets will have to be written off before the end of their economically useful life (become stranded assets) or we will have to rely on large-scale investments down the line in carbon capture and storage technologies that are as yet unproven and expensive," says the report.

Americans believe 2015 was record-warm, but split on why. Gallup.

• 69% of Americans believe reports of record-high temperatures
• Republicans are least likely to believe the reports
• 49% think reason for record warmth is human-caused climate change
• 46% think reason for record temps was natural changes
• 72% of Democrats but just 27% of Republicans attributed climate change to human activity

Climate Change is Natural? And That Doesn’t Freak You Out? Triple Pundit.

Why do some people feel better that climate change is a “natural” process, that we have had no part in it and therefore no control over? 

If you ask me “natural” climate change is much scarier than a man-made one, particularly one for which said natural cause is unknown

Bill Nye's Global Meltdown

Bill Nye's Global Meltdown, on National Geographic. youtube.

if that link doesn't work, try via Nature Bats Last.


more Science Guy:
9 Times Bill Nye Blew Our Minds With Climate Change Knowledge. ecowatch.

for something lighter:

Bill Nye takes one badass photo, becomes hilarious meme. Nerdlist.

Topic: Oceans

Australia is letting the Great Barrier Reef die, over a lot of coal. Motherboard.

Worst bleaching ever observed on the Great Barrier Reef. Motherboard.

Sea creatures dissolving in warming Pacific ocean. RT. Apr. 19, 2017.

Topic: Politics and International Agreements

Will the Paris climate deal save the world? Jeff Goodell, Rolling Stone. January 13, 2016.

It will probably be 10 years before anyone can say whether the Paris climate deal, which was agreed to with much hoopla on December 12th, was a historic event that marked the moment when the human race finally got serious about the fight against climate change, or just a United Nations therapy session whose main role was to make us feel better about our headlong plunge toward climate catastrophe.... 

Before it can enter legal force, the agreement will need to be formally ratified by 55 nations. That won't be a problem in the U.S. – because of the way the agreement is structured, President Obama can sign off on it without submitting it to the Senate. But it will likely take a year or longer for other nations to formalize the agreement. Meanwhile, there is still a lot of detail work to do regarding the rules on complex issues like how emissions will actually be monitored and verified. But the real threat to the agreement is not procedural but political: "The most critical question is how to sustain political momentum," says the Environmental Defense Fund's Dan Dudek. "As governments change, how can the will to implement INDCs be mustered over successive administrations? This is the real global governance issue."...

In the end, the most striking thing about the Paris agreement may be the degree to which it bets the future of civilization on individual actions... And depending on your view of human nature, that may be the most risky bet of all.

Chomsky: Republicans are a danger to the human species. alternet.

The Republican majority vote eliminates any future legal step through a court of appeal and eliminates all the opinions of the courts that preceded this decision. Their message to the participants at the Paris conference is, in practice, “Go to hell.” 

Not that the Paris conference had achieved much in terms of limiting global warming, but it must be remembered that the most thorny and difficult problem was getting the agreements made between governments to be binding through an international treaty. And France knew well that the Republican Party in the Senate would never ratify agreements binding on the government. Consequently the five Republican judges on the Supreme Court virtually expressed, with their decision, what they think of the rapid advance toward the destruction of the planet and the human species.

The human species is facing a situation that is unprecedented in the history of Homo sapiens,” he said. “We are at the crossroads of a situation that has never occurred before, and very soon we will have to decide whether we want the human species to survive into something that has the appearance of existence as we know it, or if we want to create a planetary devastation so extreme that one cannot even imagine what could emerge.

Daily Climate Links: 4/7/2016

The Co-operators sets ambitious impact investing target. Newswire.

How coastal cities are preparing for climate change. The Onion.

Trying to put a price on Big Oil's climate obstruction efforts. Bloomberg.

that article references this:
Shareholder Resolutions. Ceres.

Ceres tracks shareholder resolutions filed by our investor network participants on sustainability-related issues that companies are facing, focusing on climate change, energy, water scarcity, and sustainability reporting. These resolutions are part of broader investor efforts encouraging companies to address the full range of environmental, social and governance issues. The resolutions are filed by some of the nation’s largest public pension funds, foundations, and religious, labor and socially responsible investors. Many of the investors are members of Ceres’ Investor Network on Climate Risk (INCR).

which led me to find this:
2016 Investor Summit on Climate Risk. Ceres.
held Jan. 27, 2016 in NYC at UN HQ
a few videos of plenary sessions available at the link

Mapping the Gap: The Road from Paris. Finance Paths to a 2°C Future. Ceres and Bloomberg.

Topic: Solutions

How to pull Earth back from the brink. Johan Rockstrom, World Economic Forum via Business Insider.

A little hope and some VERY scary math about climate change. David Ropeik, Big Think.

Reducing carbon emissions won't halt economic growth. naked capitalism. Mar 19, 2016.

So what we did not succeed in doing in Paris, in my mind, is two fundamental things. Number 1, we still don’'t have a sense of the magnitude, the urgency if we believe climate science. China is talking about stabilizing emissions in 2030. They need to get emissions down by 20% by 2030. You know realistically, India needs to stabilize emissions where they are now or even get them down modestly; not let them grow 3 fold. Now, secondly, the United States needs to reduce emissions by 40-50%. That’s the magnitude of the challenge. 

Secondly, the point is all of this can be done in the context of economic growth by investing in energy efficiency and clean renewable energy. It'’s good for jobs, it'’s good for poverty reduction, it’'s good for community development, it’'s good for urban development. Those are the messages that need to get through and that’s the way through which, in my view, is the only way we’’re going to generate enough activity that is going to reach the stabilization goals.

Climate Change Solutions: What you thought you knew is obsolete. Dr. Joe Romm. Sep 2016. via youtube. video (52 min)




Sucking carbon out of the air won’t solve climate change. David Roberts, vox. Jun. 14, 2018.

This book ranks the top 100 solutions to climate change. The results are surprising. David Roberts, vox. Apr. 22, 2019.

A chat with Paul Hawken about his ambitious effort to “map, measure, and model” global warming solutions.

An electrifying idea. George Monbiot. Nov. 6, 2018.

if this works, it could help, alongside political mobilisation, to change almost everything. Places which have become agricultural deserts, trashed by giant corporations, could be reforested, drawing carbon dioxide from the air on a vast scale. The ecosystems of land and sea could recover, not just in pockets but across great tracts of the planet. A new age of global hunger becomes less likely. 

Crude and destructive technologies got us into this mess. Refined technologies can help get us out of it. The struggle to save every possible species and ecosystem from the current wave of destruction is worthwhile. One day, perhaps within our lifetimes, they could repopulate a thriving world.

Topic: Sustainable Development

UN plan to save Earth is “fig leaf” for Big Business: insiders. Nafeez Ahmed, Medium. Sept. 4, 2015.

Why the new Sustainable Development agenda is “fundamentally compromised” by corporate interests

The problem is that this business-centric vision of “inclusive economic growth” is barely different from the failed neoliberal paradigm of market fundamentalism, which critics say has widened inequalities and accelerated debt.

this article's criticism pertains to UN's Millennium Development Goals, but the way that corporate interests and politics and ideological agendas and business-as-usual interfere with the process and with attainment of outcomes seems just as pertinent as well to process related to UNFCCC and IPCC etc.

for instance:

the SDG’s focus on cultivating more “growth, industrialisation and urbanisation” fails to account for “ecological footprints as compared to planetary boundaries.”

As the politics of development are completely removed from discussion in the SDG process, this agenda gets adopted by default without any deliberation or debate. Add to this the myopic focus on growth as the only solution and we get the antithesis of sustainability or inclusive economics as a result

“The big corporate powers... and the rich nations have already agreed on what the fig leaf will look like,” said Ladha. “Whatever the SDGs end up saying will, by the very logic of the system they serve, promote a growth-at-all-costs, neoliberal game plan of trickle-down economics and climate destruction.”

In search of lost time: the rise and fall of limits to growth in international sustainability policy.
Erik Gómez-Baggethun , José Manuel Naredo

Abstract: International environmental policy has failed to reverse climate change, resource depletion and the generalized decline of biodiversity and ecological life support systems. This paper traces economic roots of current environmental problems and examines the evolution of sustainability policy since the publication of Club of Rome’s report Limits to growth and the celebration of the first Earth summit in Stockholm in 1972 to the publication of UNEP’s Green economy report and the celebration of the last Earth summit in Rio 2012. Our emphasis is on the evolving framing of the relations between growth and the environment and the role of markets and states in the sustainability policy agenda. We review influential policy documents and Earth summit declarations since the early 1970s. Three major changes are identified in international sustainability discourse: (1) an analytical shift from a notion of growth versus the environment to a notion of growth for the environment, (2) a shift in focus from direct public regulation to market-based instruments, and (3) a shift from a political to a technocratic discourse. We note that attempts in sustainability policy to address the conflict between growth and the environment have pulled back severely since the 1970s and discuss the observed patterns of change in relation to changes in the balance of political and ideological forces. We conclude summarizing main insights from the review and discussing perspectives of the sustainability debate on growth and the environment.

More growth? An unfeasible option to overcome critical energy constraints and climate change.
Iñigo Capellán-Pérez , Margarita Mediavilla, Carlos de Castro, Óscar Carpintero, Luis Javier Miguel

Abstract: Growing scientific evidence shows that world energy resources are entering a period shaped by the depletion of high-quality fuels, whilst the decline of the easy-to-extract oil is a widely recognized ongoing phenomenon. The end of the era of cheap and abundant energy flows brings the issue of economic growth into question, stimulating research for alternatives as the de-growth proposal. The present paper applies the system dynamic global model WoLiM that allows economic, energy and climate dynamics to be analyzed in an integrated way. The results show that, if the growth paradigm is maintained, the decrease in fossil fuel extraction can only be partially compensated by renewable energies, alternative policies and efficiency improvements, very likely causing systemic energy shortage in the next decades. If a massive transition to coal would be promoted to try to compensate the decline of oil and gas and maintain economic growth, the climate would be then very deeply disturbed. The results suggest that growth and globalization scenarios are, not only undesirable from the environmental point of view, but also not feasible. Furthermore, regionalization scenarios without abandoning the current growth GDP focus would set the grounds for a pessimistic panorama from the point of view of peace, democracy and equity. In this sense, an organized material de-growth in the North followed by a steady state shows up as a valid framework to achieve global future human welfare and sustainability. The exercise qualitatively illustrates the magnitude of the challenge: the most industrialized countries should reduce, on average, their per capita primary energy use rate at least four times and decrease their per capita GDP to roughly present global average levels. Differently from the current dominant perceptions, these consumption reductions might actually be welfare enhancing. However, the attainment of these targets would require deep structural changes in the socioeconomic systems in combination with a radical shift in geopolitical relationships.

Feature Reference Articles #1

Excerpts from feature reference articles

The awful truth about climate change no one wants to admit. David Roberts, vox. May 15, 2015.

"A 4°C warmer world can, and must be, avoided," said the World Bank president. 

But that's where we're headed. It will take enormous effort just to avoid that fate. Holding temperature down under 2°C — the widely agreed upon target — would require an utterly unprecedented level of global mobilization and coordination, sustained over decades. There's no sign of that happening, or reason to think it's plausible anytime soon. And so, awful shit it is....

Climate scientists, Geden says, feel pressure to provide the good news. They're worried that if they don't, if they come off as "alarmist" or hectoring, they will simply be ignored, boxed out of the debate. And so they construct models showing that it is possible to hit the 2°C target. The message is always, "We're running out of time; we've only got five or 10 years to turn things around, but we can do it if we put our minds to it." That was the message in 1990, in 2000, in 2010. How can we still have five or 10 years left? The answer, Geden says, is that scientists are baking increasingly unrealistic assumptions into their models.

 

Limiting Global Warming to 2 Degrees Celsius Won’t Save Us. Kate Dooley and Peter Christoff, New Republic. May 27, 2015.

Can we limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius? 

The 2 degrees Celsius warming limit or “guardrail” has long been controversial. It was rejected by many developing countries at Copenhagen and over two thirds of Parties to the Convention call for a 1.5 degrees Celsius limit. So is this ambitious temperature limit still within reach? 

The carbon budget approach—adopted by the IPCC in its latest report—defines the amounts of cumulative CO2 emissions which will drive warming to a given global temperature limit. The most stringent IPCC scenario gives a remaining (from 2011) carbon budget of 1,000 billion tonnes of CO2, for a “likely” chance of keeping global temperature within 2 degrees Celsius.

Yet whether a lower temperature limit is still within reach, and the pathway to get there, is debated. The more ambitious mitigation scenarios reported by the IPCC are characterized by overshooting the budget and then removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. This usually means relying on bioenergy plus carbon capture and storage (burning biomass for energy, removing the CO2, and then storing it underground) to remove carbon from the atmosphere—which comes with its own risks.

1.5 degrees Celsius pathways which do not rely on negative emissions depend on a much lower remaining budget. Even a 50 percent chance of keeping below 1.5 degrees Celsius requires immediate and radical emission reductions. This would mean unprecedented annual rates of decline which are not in line with current levels of energy consumption or ideas of economic growth...

The UNFCC expert group recognized that limiting global warming to below even 2 degrees Celsius necessitates a radical transition, not merely a fine-tuning of current trends, yet such radical emissions reduction pathways are so far excluded from IPCC assessment, leaving policy makers with little evidence on the impacts and feasibility of lower targets.

Where to from here?

The group concluded that the world is not on track to achieve the long-term global goal of 2 degrees Celsius, noting that the longer we wait to bend the curve of global greenhouse gas emissions, the steeper we will have to bend it down later.

Two degrees: The world set a simple goal for climate change. We're likely to miss it. Brad Plumer, vox. Apr. 22, 2014.

It was the early 1990s. Climate scientists had long known that humans were warming up the planet. But politicians were only beginning to appreciate that it would take a staggering coordinated effort to get nations to burn fewer fossil fuels and avoid sharp temperature increases in the decades ahead. 

Those policymakers needed a common goal — a way to say, Here’s how bad things will get and This is what we need to do to stop it. But that posed a dilemma. No one could agree on how much global warming was actually unacceptable. How high did the seas need to rise before we had a serious problem? How much heat was too much? 

Around this time, an advisory council of scientists in Germany proposed an alluringly simple way to think about climate change. Look, they reasoned, human civilization hasn’t been around all that long. And for the last 12,000 years, Earth’s climate has fluctuated within a narrow band. So, to be on the safe side, we should prevent global average temperatures from rising more than 2° Celsius (or 3.6° Fahrenheit) above what they were just before the dawn of industrialization. 

Critics grumbled that the 2°C limit seemed arbitrary or overly simplistic. But scientists were soon compiling evidence that the risks of global warming became fairly daunting somewhere above the 2°C threshold: rapid sea-level rise, the risk of crop failure, the collapse of coral reefs. And policymakers loved the idea of a simple, easily digestible target. So it stuck. 

By 2009, nearly every government in the world had endorsed the 2°C limit — global warming beyond that level was widely considered "dangerous." And so, every year, the world’s leaders meet at UN climate conferences to discuss policies and emissions cuts that they hope will keep us below 2°C. Climate experts churn out endless papers on how we can adapt to 2°C of warming or less. 

Two decades later, there’s just one huge problem with this picture. The idea that the world can stay below 2°C looks increasingly delusional.

John H. Richardson: When the End of Human Civilization is Your Day Job. Esquire. July 7, 2015.

Among many climate scientists, gloom has set in. Things are worse than we think, but they can’t really talk about it.

Jason Box: "If even a small fraction of Arctic sea floor carbon is released to the atmosphere, we're f'd."

Now, with one word, Box had ventured into two particularly dangerous areas. First, the dirty secret of climate science and government climate policies is that they're all based on probabilities, which means that the effects of standard CO2 targets like an 80 percent reduction by 2050 are based on the middle of the probability curve. Box had ventured to the darker possibilities on the curve's tail, where few scientists and zero politicians are willing to go.

As a recent study from the University of Bristol documented, climate scientists have been so distracted and intimidated by the relentless campaign against them that they tend to avoid any statements that might get them labeled "alarmists," retreating into a world of charts and data.

"I think most scientists must be burying overt recognition of the awful truths of climate change in a protective layer of denial (not the same kind of denial coming from conservatives, of course). I'm still amazed how few climatologists have taken an advocacy message to the streets, demonstrating for some policy action." 

...a study by the U. S. Navy says that the Arctic could lose its summer sea ice by next year, eighty-four years ahead of the models

And yet, despite some encouraging developments in renewable energy and some breakthroughs in international leadership, carbon emissions continue to rise at a steady rate, and for their pains the scientists themselves—the cruelest blow of all—have been the targets of an unrelenting and well-organized attack that includes death threats, summonses from a hostile Congress, attempts to get them fired, legal harassment, and intrusive discovery demands so severe they had to start their own legal-defense fund, all amplified by a relentless propaganda campaign nakedly financed by the fossil-fuel companies. Shortly before a pivotal climate summit in Copenhagen in 2009, thousands of their e-mail streams were hacked in a sophisticated espionage operation that has never been solved

Michael E. Mann: How Close Are We to ‘Dangerous’ Planetary Warming?. Huffington Post. Dec. 23, 2015.

It has been widely reported that 2015 will be the first year where temperatures climbed to 1C above the pre-industrial. That might make it seem like we’ve got quite a ways to go until we breach the 2C limit. But the claim is wrong. We exceeded 1C warming more than a decade ago. The problem is that here, and elsewhere, an inappropriate baseline has been invoked for defining the “pre-industrial.” The warming was measured relative to the average over the latter half of the 19th century (1850-1900). In other words, the base year implicitly used to define “pre-industrial” conditions is 1875, the mid-point of that interval. Yet the industrial revolution and the rise in atmospheric CO2 concentrations associated with it, began more than a century earlier

The IPCC graphic suggests that keeping net CO2 emissions below 3 trillion tons — and thereby stabilizing maximum CO2 concentrations below 450 ppm — would likely keep warming below the “dangerous” 2C limit. Unfortunately, that conclusion is overly optimistic because, once again, it relies on the use of an artificially warm, too-recent baseline for defining the pre-industrial period roughly 0.3C greenhouse warming had already taken place by 1900, and roughly 0.2C warming by 1870

When we take this factor into account (orange dotted curve), the warming for 450 ppm stabilization is now is seen to approach 2.5C, well about the “dangerous” limit. Indeed, CO2 concentrations now have to be kept below 405 ppm (where we’ll be in under three years at current rates of emissions) to avoid 2C warming (blue dotted curve). 

So evidently, we don’t have 1/3 of our total carbon budget left to expend, as implied by the IPCC analysis. We’ve already expended the vast majority of the budget for remaining under 2C. And what about 1.5C stabilization? We’re already overdrawn. 

The more we delay rapid reductions in fossil fuel burning, the more we will need to offset additional carbon emissions by sequestration of atmospheric carbon, either through massive reforestation projects, or ‘geoengineering’ technology such as “direct air capture,” which involves literally sucking the CO2 back out of the atmosphere

Michael E. Mann. Earth Will Cross the Climate Danger Threshold by 2036. Scientific American. April 1, 2014.

The rate of global temperature rise may have hit a plateau, but a climate crisis still looms in the near future.

If the world continues to burn fossil fuels at the current rate, global warming will rise to two degrees Celsius by 2036, crossing a threshold that will harm human civilization. To avoid the threshold, nations will have to keep carbon dioxide levels below 405 parts per million. 

In its September 2013 report, the IPCC extended the stick back in time, concluding that the recent warming was likely unprecedented for at least 1,400 years. 

Although the earth has experienced exceptional warming over the past century, to estimate how much more will occur we need to know how temperature will respond to the ongoing human-caused rise in atmospheric greenhouse gases, primarily carbon dioxide. Scientists call this responsiveness “equilibrium climate sensitivity” (ECS). ECS is a common measure of the heating effect of greenhouse gases. It represents the warming at the earth's surface that is expected after the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere doubles and the climate subsequently stabilizes (reaches equilibrium). 

The preindustrial level of CO2 was about 280 parts per million (ppm), so double is roughly 560 ppm. Scientists expect this doubling to occur later this century if nations continue to burn fossil fuels as they do now—the “business as usual” scenario—instead of curtailing fossil-fuel use. The more sensitive the atmosphere is to a rise in CO2, the higher the ECS, and the faster the temperature will rise. ECS is shorthand for the amount of warming expected, given a particular fossil-fuel emissions scenario. 

It is difficult to determine an exact value of ECS because warming is affected by feedback mechanisms, including clouds, ice and other factors. Different modeling groups come to different conclusions on what the precise effects of these feedbacks may be. Clouds could be the most significant. They can have both a cooling effect, by blocking out incoming sunlight, and a warming effect, by absorbing some of the heat energy that the earth sends out toward space. Which of these effects dominates depends on the type, distribution and altitude of the clouds—difficult for climate models to predict. Other feedback factors relate to how much water vapor there will be in a warmer atmosphere and how fast sea ice and continental ice sheets will melt. 

Because the nature of these feedback factors is uncertain, the IPCC provides a range for ECS, rather than a single number 

An ECS of three degrees C means that if we are to limit global warming to below two degrees C forever, we need to keep CO2concentrations far below twice preindustrial levels, closer to 450 ppm. Ironically, if the world burns significantly less coal, that would lessen CO2emissions but also reduce aerosols in the atmosphere that block the sun (such as sulfate particulates), so we would have to limit CO2 to below roughly 405 ppm. 

The conclusion that limiting CO2 below 450 ppm will prevent warming beyond two degrees C is based on a conservative definition of climate sensitivity that considers only the so-called fast feedbacks in the climate system, such as changes in clouds, water vapor and melting sea ice. Some climate scientists, including James E. Hansen, former head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, say we must also consider slower feedbacks such as changes in the continental ice sheets. When these are taken into account, Hansen and others maintain, we need to get back down to the lower level of CO2 that existed during the mid-20th century—about 350 ppm.

Michael E. Mann is Distinguished Professor of Meteorology at Pennsylvania State University and contributed to the International Panel on Climate Change work that received the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. He has written the book The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines, as well as Dire Predictions: Understanding Global Warming.

related research:
Defining Dangerous Anthropogenic Interference. Michael E. Mann in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, Vol. 106, No. 11, pages 4065–4066; March 17, 2009.

Separating Forced from Chaotic Climate Variability over the Past Millennium. Andrew P. Schurer et al. in Journal of Climate, Vol. 26, No. 18, pages 6954–6973; September 2013.


John Carey. Is Global Warming Happening Faster Than Expected? Scientific American. November 1, 2012.

Loss of ice, melting of permafrost and other climate effects are occurring at an alarming pace.

Keeping planetary warming below two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) would, it was thought, avoid such perils as catastrophic sea-level rise and searing droughts. Staying below two degrees C would require limiting the level of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to 450 parts per million (ppm), up from today's 395 ppm and the preindustrial era's 280 ppm.

an example of how alarm bells were being rung over 5 years ago:
The brutal logic of climate change. David Roberts, Grist. Dec 6, 2011.

As you can see, the 2 degrees C “guardrail” that separated acceptable from dangerous in 2001 is, in 2009, squarely inside several red zones. Today, the exact same social and political considerations that settled on 2 degrees C as the threshold of safety by all rights ought to settle on 1 degree C [1.8 degrees F]. After all, we now know 2 degrees C is extremely dangerous. 

At this point, however, stopping at 1 degree C is physically impossible (we can thank our past inaction for that). Indeed, as we’ll see, stopping at 2 degrees C is getting close to impossible as well. There is no longer any reasonable chance of avoiding “dangerous” climate change, so 1 degree C vs. 2 degrees C is a somewhat academic debate. At this point we’re just shooting to avoid super-duper-dangerous. ...

The thing is, if 2 degrees C is extremely dangerous, 4 degrees C is absolutely catastrophic. In fact, according to the latest science, says Anderson, “a 4 degrees C future is incompatible with an organized global community, is likely to be beyond ‘adaptation’, is devastating to the majority of ecosystems, and has a high probability of not being stable.”...

Oh, and by the way: According to the International Energy Agency, we’re currently on course for 6 degrees C [10.8 degrees F]. That is, beyond any reasonable doubt, game over.

Oliver Geden: Climate advisers must maintain integrity. Nature. May 6, 2015.

The negotiations' goal has become what is politically possible, not what is environmentally desirable. Gone is a focus on establishing a global, 'top down' target for stabilizing emissions or a carbon budget that is legally binding. The Paris meeting will focus on voluntary, 'bottom up' commitments by individual states to reduce emissions. 

There is another casualty: scientific advice. Climate scientists and economists who counsel policy-makers are being pressured to extend their models and options for delivering mitigation later. This has introduced dubious concepts, such as repaying 'carbon debt' through 'negative emissions' to offset delayed mitigation — in theory.
Scientific advisers must resist pressures that undermine the integrity of climate science. Instead of spreading false optimism, they must stand firm and defend their intellectual independence, findings and recommendations — no matter how politically unpalatable 

Climate researchers who advise policy-makers feel that they have two options: be pragmatic or be ignored. They either distance themselves from the policy process by declaring that it is no longer possible to stay within a 2 °C-compatible carbon budget, or they suggest practical ways to dodge carbon-budget constraints3. 

Many advisers are choosing pragmatism. This can lead to paradoxical positions, as exemplified by shifting assumptions in climate economics over the past few years. 

Each year, mitigation scenarios that explore policy options for transforming the global economy are more optimistic4 — and less plausible. Advisers once assumed that the global emissions peak would have to be reached before 2020 and that annual emissions-reduction rates of more than 3% were not feasible. Those assumptions keep changing. 

For example, the fourth assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), published in 2007, stated that emissions must peak by 2015 to stay within 2 °C of warming; yet the fifth IPCC report, released last year, refers to 2030 emissions levels higher than today's that are still compatible with this limit, albeit with annual emissions-reduction rates of 6%

climate economists got around past 'make-or-break' points for the 2 °C target by adding 'negative emissions' — the removal of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere during the second half of this century. Most models assume that this can be achieved using a combination of approaches known as BECCS: bioenergy (which would require 500 million hectares of land — 1.5 times the size of India)4 and carbon capture and storage, an unproven technology.

The climate policy mantra — that time is running out for 2 °C but we can still make it if we act now — is a scientific nonsense. Advisers who shy away from saying so squander their scientific reputations and public trust in climate research 

Everyday politics is therefore dominated not by evidence-based policy-making but by attempts at 'policy-based evidence-making'.  

Jonathan Chait: Climate Change and Conservative Brain Death. New York Magazine. March 14, 2016.

asked about climate change, and Marco Rubio supplied an answer that, while banal and dogmatic, was fascinating in its own way… Rubio repeated his formulaic and un-categorical opposition to any policy to limit the greenhouse-gas emissions that are in the process of sinking his home city. Rubio’s reply was not just the last gasp of a dying campaign, but a state-of-the-art expression of party doctrine. Trump is what the regular Republicans are trying to stave off; Rubio represents what they are fighting to preserve: a delusional anti-government ideology unable to process or cope with real-world conditions. 

The green-energy revolution is really two revolutions acting in tandem: an increase in political willpower, and the rise of new technologies to reduce carbon usage. The two forces interact with each other in powerful ways. As elected officials commit to emissions reductions, the market invests in clean energy technologies, bringing down their price; and as transitioning to lower emissions gets cheaper and more convenient, elected officials can promise deeper reductions still. Rubio revealed the mind-set of a party that remains fully in denial of all this — not just the science but the diplomatic and technological transformation now well under way. The horror of the populist insurgency besieging the GOP from its perimeter has diverted attention from the deep intellectual rot at its core 

Dr. Gideon Polya: G7 Pledge of Zero Emissions by 2100 Masks Worsening Climate Emergency and Need for Urgent Action. June 10, 2015.

The June 2015 G7 pledges of  (a) zero emissions by 2100 and (b) avoidance of a plus 2 degrees C  temperature rise were greeted as “the end of fossil fuels”. Unfortunately (a) the World will exceed its Terminal Carbon Budget for a 75% probability of avoiding plus 2 degrees C in about 3 years, and (b) a plus 2 degrees C temperature  rise is disastrous for Humanity and the Biosphere, yielding at equilibrium  sea levels “at least  6 to 8 metres higher” according to Dr James Hansen of NASA 

Dr Andrew Glikson (a paleoclimate scientist and earth scientist, ANU, Canberra, Australia) (2008),  “For some time now, climate scientists warned that melting of subpolar permafrost and warming of the Arctic Sea (up to 4 degrees C during 2005–2008 relative to the 1951–1980) are likely to result in the dissociation of methane hydrates and the release of this powerful greenhouse gas into the atmosphere 

Dr. T. Goreau (President of the Global Coral Reef Alliance, an international NGO for restoration of coral reefs, and a member of the Jamaican delegation to UNCCC;  previously Senior Scientific Affairs Officer at the United Nations Centre for Science and Technology for Development, in charge of Global Climate Change and Biodiversity issues, where he contributed to the original draft of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change) (2009):  “The long-term sea level that corresponds to current CO2 concentration is about 23 meters above today's levels, and the temperatures will be 6 degrees C or more higher. These estimates are based on real long term climate records, not models" 

Dr James Hansen (a leading US climate scientist, former  head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City, a part of the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, an adjunct professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University, first warned the US Congress about the danger from man-made climate change over 20 years ago, and  published “Storms of My Grandchildren” in 2009) (2015):  “2 degrees is actually a prescription for disaster. That's actually well understood by the scientific community. We know that the prior interglacial period about 120,000 years ago – its called the Eemian in Europe – was less than 2C warmer than pre-industrial conditions and sea level was a least 6 to 8 metres higher, so it's crazy to think that 2 degrees Celsius is a safe limit… make the  price of fossil fuels honest”

Renewable Energy After COP21: Nine issues for climate leaders to think about on the journey home.
Richard Heinberg, Post Carbon Institute, Dec 14, 2015.


UN Predicts Disaster if Global Warming Not Checked. Peter James Spielmann, AP News Archive. Jun 29, 1989.

Noel Brown, director of the New York office of the U.N. Environment Program, or UNEP, said governments have a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effect before it goes beyond human control.... He said even the most conservative scientists ''already tell us there's nothing we can do now to stop a ... change'' of about 3 degrees.

Flashback: 1956

One Big Greenhouse. Time Magazine. May 1956.

Since the start of the industrial revolution, mankind has been burning fossil fuel (coal, oil, etc.) and adding its carbon to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. In 50 years or so this process, says Director Roger Revelle of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, may have a violent effect on the earth’s climate… 

Dr. Revelle has not reached the stage of warning against this catastrophe, but he and other geophysicists intend to keep watching and recording. During the International Geophysical Year (1957-58), teams of scientists will take inventory of the earth’s CO2 and observe how it shifts between air and sea. They will try to find out whether the CO2 blanket has been growing thicker, and what the effect has been. When all their data have been studied, they may be able to predict whether man’s factory chimneys and auto exhausts will eventually cause salt water to flow in the streets of New York and London.

Recommended Reading List #1

Have Read

An Illustrated Short History of Progress. Ronald Wright.

Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. Jared Diamond.

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Jared Diamond.

Carbon Shift. Thomas Homer-Dixon.

The Ingenuity Gap: Can We Solve the Problems of the Future? Thomas Homer-Dixon.

The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilization. Thomas Homer-Dixon.

The Weather Makers: How Man is Changing the Climate and What it Means for Life on Earth. Tim Flannery.

Here on Earth: An Argument for Hope. Tim Flannery.

The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century. James Howard Kunstler.

The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future. Naomi Oreskes.

The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality. Richard Heinberg.

Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change. Clive Hamilton.

Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization. Roy Scranton.

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs The Climate. Naomi Klein.

Climate Change Denial: Heads in the Sand. Haydn Washington and John Cook.

Hot Air: Meeting Canada's Climate Change Challenge. Jeffrey Simpson.

Heat: How to Stop the Planet From Burning. George Monbiot.

Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth About the Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity. James Hansen.

Dire Predictions: Understanding Climate Change. Michael Mann and Lee R. Kump.

The Two Mile Time Machine: Ice Cores, Abrupt Climate Change, and Our Future. Richard B. Alley.

Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis. Al Gore.

The Assault on Reason. Al Gore.

Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance. Robert N. Proctor.

Our Ecological Footprint: Reducing Human Impact on the Earth. Mathis Wackernagel.

The Sixth Extinction. Elizabeth Kolbert.

Dark Age America: Climate Change, Cultural Collapse and the Hard Future Ahead. John Michael Greer.


To Read

Now or Never: Why We Must Act Now to End Climate Change and Create a Sustainable Future. Tim Flannery.

Atmosphere of Hope: Searching for Solutions to the Climate Crisis. Tim Flannery.

Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet. Mark Lynas.

Abrupt Climate Change: Inevitable Surprises. National Research Council.

The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines. Michael Mann.

The Climate Crisis: An Introductory Guide to Climate Change. David Archer.

With Speed and Violence: Why Scientists Fear Tipping Points in Climate Change. Fred Pearce.

Global Weirdness: Severe Storms, Deadly Heat Waves, Relentless Droughts, Rising Seas, and the Weather of the Future. Climate Central.

Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System. Ian Angus.

The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us. Christophe Bonneuil.

The Anthropocene and the Global Environmental Crisis: Rethinking Modernity in a New Epoch. Clive Hamilton.

The Weather of the Future. Heidi Cullen.

Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature and Climate Change. Elizabeth Kolbert.

The Next Species: The Future of Evolution in the Aftermath of Man. Michael Tennesen.

Global Catastrophic Risks. Nick Bostrom.

Energy Transitions: History, Requirements, Prospects. Vaclav Smil.

Climate Wars. Gwynne Dyer.

The Bridge at the End of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability. James Gustave Speth.

Systems Thinking for Geoengineering Policy: How to Reduce the Threat of Dangerous Climate Change by Embracing Uncertainty and Failure. Robert Chris.

Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions and Everyday Life. Kari Marie Norgaard.

The Collapse of Complex Societies. Joseph Tainter.

Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change. William Catton.

The Arrogance of Humanism. David Ehrenfeld.

Creating A Climate For Change: Communicating Climate Change And Facilitating Social Change. Susanne C. Moser (Editor)

Our Renewable Future: Laying the Path for One Hundred Percent Clean Energy. Richard Heinberg and David Fridley.

Daily Climate Links: 4/6/2016

Wind and solar are crushing fossil fuels. Bloomberg.

New study estimates global warming of 2.5 centigrade degrees by 2100 would put at risk trillions of dollars of world’s financial assets. Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment.

The lead author on the paper, Professor Simon Dietz, said: “Our results may surprise investors, but they will not surprise many economists working on climate change because economic models have over the past few years been generating increasingly pessimistic estimates of the impacts of global warming on future economic growth. But we also found that cutting greenhouse gases to limit global warming to no more than 2°C substantially reduces the climate Value at Risk, particularly the tail risk of big losses.”

Canadian company pays Tesla Model 3 deposits for its employees. Clean Technica.



excerpt from William Gibson's The Peripheral.
as quoted at naked capitalism

It was androgenic, he said, and she knew from Ciencia Loca and National Geographic that meant because of people. Not that they’d known what they were doing, had meant to make problems, but they’d caused it anyway. And in fact the actual climate, the weather, caused by there being too much carbon, had been the driver for a lot of other things. How that got worse and never better, and was just expected to, ongoing. Because people in the past, clueless as to how that worked, had fucked it all up, then not been able to get it together to do anything about it, even after they knew, and now it was too late. 

So now, in her day, he said, they were headed into androgenic, systemic, multiplex, seriously bad shit, like she sort of already knew, figured everybody did, except for people who still said it wasn’t happening, and those people were mostly expecting the Second Coming anyway. She’d looked across the silver lawn, that Leon had cut with the push-mower whose cast-iron frame was held together with actual baling wire, to where moon shadows lay, past stunted boxwoods and the stump of a concrete birdbath they’d pretened was a dragon’s castle, while Wilf told her it killed 80 percent of every last person alive, over about forty years. … 

No comets crashing, nothing you could really call a nuclear war. Just everything else, tangled in the changing climate: droughts, water shortages, crop failures, honeybees gone like they almost were now, collapse of other keystone species, every last alpha predator gone, antibiotics doing even less than they already did, diseases that were never quite the one big pandemic but big enough to be historic events in themselves. And all of it around people: how people were, how many of them there were, how they’d changed things just by being there. … 

But science, he said, had been the wild card, the twist. With everything stumbling deeper into a ditch of shit, history itself become a slaughterhouse, science had started popping. Not all at once, no one big heroic thing, but there were cleaner, cheaper energy sources, more effective ways to get carbon out of the air, new drugs that did what antibiotics had done before, nanotechnology that was more than just car paint that healed itself or camo crawling on a ball cap. Ways to print food that required much less in the way of actual food to begin with. So everything, however deeply fucked in general, was lit increasingly by the new, by things that made people blink and sit up, but then the rest of it would just go on, deeper into the ditch. A progress accompanied by constant violence, he said, by sufferings unimaginable. … 

None of that, he said, had necessarily been as bad for very rich people. The richest had gotten richer, there being fewer to own whatever there was. Constant crisis bad provided constant opportunity. That was where his world had come from, he said. At the deepest point of everything going to shit, population radically reduced, the survivors saw less carbon being dumped into the system, with what was still being produced being eaten by those towers they’d built… And seeing that, for them, the survivors, was like seeing the bullet dodged. 

“The bullet was the eighty percent, who died?”

Daily Climate Links: 4/5/2016

Why fossil fuel power plants will be left stranded. Martin Wolf, FT.

After last year’s Paris climate conference, the world congratulated itself on having agreed a new process, even though real action was postponed. Yet, given the longevity of a large part of the capital stock, the time for decisive change is right now, not decades in future. But the world is not really serious about climate, is it? It prefers fiddling while the planet burns.

Agriculture on the brink. Dahr Jamail, Truthout.

Increasingly, farmers -- and all of us who depend on them -- will be facing the fact that food scarcity is becoming the new normal.

Climate change is going to hurt us in a lot of weird ways. Climate Progress.

Arctic heat waves cause exceptional Greenland melt, says new study. Sima Sahar Zerehi, CBC News.

A new study by researchers from Denmark and Canada's York University says Arctic heat waves cause exceptional melts of the Greenland ice sheet, calling into question commonly-used climate models that may underestimate the impact of warm weather episodes.

Can economies rise as emissions fall? The evidence says yes. NYT.

The roads to decoupling: 21 countries are reducing carbon emissions while growing GDP. World Resources Institute.

Are global investors playing defense or offense after Paris Accord? Mark W. McDivitt and Tim Nixon, at Yale Climate Connections.

Entrepreneurial global investors are strategically playing offense and defense to meet new Paris Agreement demands and reap tangible results and a strong 'bottom line' in a warming world. 

...increased awareness and related commitment by the global investor community will prove to be among the main drivers that start to mitigate global warming. The Paris Agreement, unlike Copenhagen, Kyoto, and other COP gatherings, drove home the point that the private sector, partnered with individual Country INDCs, will be the impetus needed to start to limit overall global warming to less than 2°C

Topic: Sea level rise

If all the ice melted. National Geographic.

Antarctic tipping points for multi-metre sea level rise. David Spratt, Climate Code Red. Feb. 17, 2017.

Scientific journal articles:

Millions projected to be at risk from sea-level rise in the continental United States. Mathew E. Hauer, Jason M. Evans & Deepak R. Mishra. Nature Climate Change.

Future flood losses in major coastal cities. Stephane Hallegatte, Colin Green, Robert J. Nicholls & Jan Corfee-Morlot. Nature Climate Change.

Daily Climate Links: 4/4/2016

Last Month Was The Hottest March In The Global Satellite Record, And The Arctic Is Still Sizzling. Joe Romm. Climate Progress.

Higher highs and higher lows — the warming trend is quite clear in the satellite data

University of Toronto rejects call to dump holdings in fossil fuel industry. National Observer.

The University of Toronto has rejected recommendations to sell off its fossil fuel investments, but says it will consider environmental, social and governance factors in making investment decisions.

China's Carbon Emissions May Have Peaked, But It's Hazy. New York Times.

But determining if China’s carbon emissions have peaked and are declining is difficult. Scientists measure emissions by extrapolating from official energy data and can provide only rough estimates for emissions from individual countries. Conclusions about whether a country’s emissions have peaked are definitive only in hindsight, years after the fact. Even then, economic changes could result years later in a resurgence in emissions.

Problems with the accuracy of Chinese data make figuring out what is happening here particularly challenging. A paper published late last month by the journal Nature Climate Change warned that preliminary energy statistics from China were unreliable, and that “the most easily available data is often insufficient for estimating emissions.”

Renewable energy demands the undoable. Climate New Network.

Switching to renewable energy as fast as the world needs to will require changes so massive that they are unlikely to happen, scientists say.

To even come close to achieving the goals of the Paris Agreement, 50% of our energy will need to come from renewable sources by 2028, and today it is only 9%, including hydropower. For a world that wants to fight climate change, the numbers just don’t add up to do it

These 11 photos illustrate an Arctic in crisis — and hint at what could be in store for the rest of our planet. Business Insider.

Study Confirms World’s Coastal Cities Unsavable If We Don’t Slash Carbon Pollution. Joe Romm. Climate Progress.

The Danger of a Runaway Antarctica. New York Times.

Antarctica at Risk of Runaway Melting, Scientists Discover. Climate Central.

Sea level has risen a lot — 10 to 20 meters — in warm periods in the past, and our ice sheet models couldn’t make the Antarctic ice sheet retreat enough to explain that...

Assessments by the United Nations and others have previously assumed the effects on Antarctica’s ice sheet would be negligible as temperatures rise. The new study is the latest in a growing list of peer-reviewed papers that rejects that optimistic scenario as unrealistic.