Monday, January 15, 2018

After the horse has left the barn



I went to the desert on a horse with no name
It felt good to get out of the rain

-  America

Well be riding Wildfire
  -Micheal Murphy



Greetings. And Happy New Year

     

      Personally, I'm not too sad to see 2017 go. 2017 was when we hit the carbon threshold of 400 ppm 400

Last year marked the first time in several million years that atmospheric concentrations of CO2 passed 400 parts per million. By looking at what Earth’s climate was like in previous eras of high CO2 levels, scientists are getting a sobering picture of where we are headed.
Last year will go down in history as the year when the planet’s atmosphere broke a startling record: 400 parts per million of carbon dioxide. The last time the planet’s air was so rich in CO2 was millions of years ago, back before early predecessors to humans were likely wielding stone tools; the world was a few degrees hotter back then, and melted ice put sea levels tens of meters higher.
“We’re in a new era,” says Ralph Keeling, director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography’s CO2 Program in San Diego. “And it’s going fast. We’re going to touch up against 410 pretty soon.”
There’s nothing particularly magic about the number 400. But for environmental scientists and advocates grappling with the invisible, intangible threat of rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, this symbolic target has served as a clear red line into a danger zone of climate change.
(For an interesting discussion of some of the scientific papers from 2017 see "What we Lerned about the Climate System in 2017 That should send shivers down the spines of policy makers.")
And a few other disturbing things happened in 2017.  Are they canaries in a coal mine?    Some ecosystems are, or have, moved into new states.  Permanently. 

For instance, coral reefs     (I don't like it much when people start talking about " last rites for an ecosystem ")


A study published Thursday in Science by some of the world’s top coral experts amounts to last rites for the ecosystems often referred to as “the tropical rainforests of the sea.” Scientists surveyed 100 reefs around the world and found that extreme bleaching events that once occurred every 25-30 years now happen about every five or six years.
“These impacts are stacking up at a pace and at a severity that I had never anticipated, even as an expert,” says Kim Cobb, a climate scientist and coral researcher at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “It’s really the rapidity of it that is so sobering and shocking — and for me personally, life-altering.”
“Before the 1980s, mass bleaching of corals was unheard of,” Terry Hughes, a coral scientist at Australia’s James Cook University and lead author of the new study, said in a statement.
The new study finds that 94 percent of surveyed coral reefs have experienced a severe bleaching event since the 1980s. Only six sites surveyed were unaffected. They are scattered around the world, meaning no ocean basin on Earth has been entirely spared.

Interview with one of the authors here


The region is now definitively trending toward an ice-free state, the scientists said, with wide-ranging ramifications for ecosystems, national security, and the stability of the global climate system. It was a fitting venue for an eye-opening reminder that, on its current path, civilization is engaged in an existential gamble with the planet’s life-support system.
In an accompanying annual report on the Arctic’s health — titled “the Arctic shows no sign of returning to reliably frozen region of recent past decades” — the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which oversees all official U.S. research in the region, coined a term: “New Arctic.

This, of course, has devastating effects on the humans and other animals who relied on the " old arctic".    
The loss of sea ice is already having profound changes all the way down at the base of the Arctic food web. As more sunlight hits darkly-colored open water, more heat energy is retained, and temperatures are rising further. That’s kicking off what Mathis, of NOAA’s Arctic Program characterizes as “an almost runaway effect,” involving a lengthening of the growing season, a greening of the tundra, a surge in wildfires, and a boom in plankton growth. All that adds up to a wide-ranging disruption to patterns that Arctic natives have relied on for millennia.

But it also has other knock effects, like melting permafrost 

In the NOAA report, Arctic scientists lay out their best ideas of what this shift could mean for the world. Their depictions are sobering.
Take, for instance, the hypothesis of University of Alaska-Fairbanks permafrost scientist Vladimir Romanovsky: So far, 2017 has seen the highest permafrost temperatures in Alaska on record. If that warming continues at the current rate, widespread thawing could begin in as few as 10 years. The impact of such defrosting “will be very very severe,” Romanovsky says, and could include the destruction of local infrastructure — like roads and buildings — throughout the Northern Hemisphere and the release of additional greenhouse gases that have been locked for generations in the ice.

Roughly a quarter of the planet is slowly turning into a perpetual desert.

study published Monday inpre-industrialNature Climate Change contains a stark warning for humankind: If global temperatures rise 1.5 degrees C above pre-industrial levels by 2050, between 20 and 30 percent of the world’s land surface could face desertlike conditions.
Swaths of Asia, Europe, Africa, Central America, and southern Australia would be hit particularly hard by drought and aridification, the long-term reduction of moisture in soil. More than 1.5 billion people currently live in these regions
Things would go much better, the researchers find, if we managed to stay within 1.5 degrees Celsius of pre-industrial levels. Manoj Joshi, one of the study authors from the University of East Anglia, said in a statement: “Our research predicts that aridification would emerge over about 20-30 percent of the world’s land surface by the time the global mean temperature change reaches 2 degrees Celsius.

 But two thirds of the affected regions could avoid significant aridification if warming is limited to 1.5 degrees Celsius.”
Kind of spooky -   read that last sentence again .   One third of the desertification happens before we hot 1.5  (2040?). 

“Loss of oxygen in many ways is the destruction of an ecosystem,” Breitburg says. “If we were creating vast areas on land that were uninhabitable by most animals, we’d notice. But we don’t always see things like this when they are happening in the water… These low-oxygen zones occur naturally, but have grown by more than 4.5 million square kilometers — an area roughly as large as the entire European Union—just since the mid-20th century. In part that’s because of rising temperatures.
  So, welcome to a new era
So, what are we doing about it ?  We have two responses   One is widely advertised. Another is a bit more hidden
The one that's obvious is called "decoupling ".    It is hoped that that by installing renewables, and making machinery more efficient, fossil fueled plants will become unnecessary.   The economy would grow, and fossil fuel use would shrink.      So far that hasn't really paid off. 
"... it is just not happening, at least at the global scale. Just take a look at this image:

Note how closely related the GDP an the world's energy consumption are. It is impressive because the GDP is measured in terms of money flows.

 For an interesting review of how little has been accomplished through efficiency efforts see here   (hat tip Sarah D).  This study shows how little fossil fuel has been displaced by renewable power to date . (2012)   But  still one hopes.   We need a substantial change.  Here is an illustration of what it would take.  From here

"...true "decoupling" would mean inverting the trend, as shown below (again from Le Petit's paper), where we see what we expect from the IEA scenarios



As you see, true decoupling is quite a challenge. 



Everyone seems to admit that "decoupling" will not get us to  1.5 or 2 degrees above pre industrial  So, the backstop is "Negative Emissions Technologies" , which essentially means sucking the carbon out of the air.  As more fully explained in this November 2017 video, by Kevin Anderson.  Anderson points out that not only  is our reliance on this technology hidden in the fine print,   technology not yet exist,  the policy makers are 

It also assumes that we can run things in reverse.  That we can put CO2 in the atmosphere now, and take it out later, and everything will go back to where it was.  This is apparently not the case for the ocean

"The researchers based their simulation on real-world carbon dioxide emissions from 1800 to 2005, and then projected those emissions into the year 2250. Then they simulated what would happen if technology could remove 18 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year—about half of present-day emission rates—from 2250 until 2700. The researchers found this did decrease atmospheric CO2 levels but could not restore the ocean’s preindustrial dissolved oxygen content or temperature. Even after 450 years of geoengineering, the model ocean was still almost as acidic as it would have been without any intervention at all.



 “It is clear that rather than trying to clean up a mess, it would be wiser to simply not create the mess in the first place.”



What can we expect in 2018?  Here's a hint.     Sacrifice areas.   
The IPCC is due to release a report on the likelihood and effects of achieving 1.5 degrees.  Reuters has obtained a draft .  It confirms that there is a   low probability of success: “There is very high risk that […] global warming will exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels [should emissions continue at the current pace].”The draft also states that meeting the climate goal would require an “unprecedented” leap from fossil fuels to renewable sources of energy and extensive reforms everywhere from industry to agriculture."    

"Additionally, while curbing global temperatures would help reduce some of the worst impacts of climate change, including sea level rise and droughts, it would not be enough to protect the planet’s most fragile ecosystems, including polar ice caps and coral reefs.
One wonders what else will be sacrificed on the alter of the growth of the industrial economy.  The Amazon?  Low lying areas in South east Asa? 


And as for the Negative Emissions Technology ?

"Gabriel Marty, a climate change analyst and former U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) delegate for France, told Futurism that it’s too soon to speculate on the content of the final report.However, once it is released, he said readers should note the treatment of the uncertainties and risks of the so-called “bio-energy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS)” technologies designed to suck carbon emissions out of the atmosphere.  The risks associated [with heavily relying on these technologies] must be clearly outlined,” said Marty. “They do not exist yet, the scale that would be needed would be enormous, and the adverse impacts on land and water resources would likely be huge.”According to sources familiar with the IPCC’s proceedings, the panel has been criticized in the past for being too coy about the limitations of BECCS and for understating their risks in order to present the 2 degrees Celsius target as “still viable.”

So it goes...

Labels: , , , , , ,