Slow Down, you move too fast

The train it won't stop going 
But it could slow down  

    -Jethro Tull

I ride the mail train, baby

Can't buy a thrill

    Bob Dylan

Good news:

The whole country is on grid parity for rooftop solar. See here

Public Service Announcements

Joint Interim Committee on Carbon Reduction.  Next meeting November 8

Greetings

     Well the new IPCC report has got people stirred up. Perhaps it could be the spark that gets things moving.  Let's hope so.

     They set some ambitious timetables- reducing emissions by 45% by 2030,  and by 100% by 2100.  See here

     So,  one way to look at the future is two phases.  First, the time between now and when we hit between 1.5 -2 degrees above pre-industrial.  This is the opportunity to stop the warming before the "positive " reinforcing system, the "tipping points", start to kick in.   Second is what I call  the 'autopilot date".    At some point between 1.5 and 2,  no one knows when, its a lock, the tipping points take over and the system goes on autopilot.  Once that happens it will take centuries to millennia to stop.

 From then on humans can no longer stop climate change by reducing emissions, they can merely slow it down.

The window on the first phase is getting smaller and smaller. The IPCC says we have about 10 years.   Depending on how you measure it, we may have already passed 1.5.  And we are beginning to see some of the self-reinforcing systems already.

Unfortunately these self-reinforcing system or "tipping points". are not well enough understood for the IPPC to include them in the models they use to project temperatures.

This creates some problems.  see e.g  here

 

For instance, the following editorial by Mario Molina. Nobel prizewinner in Chemistry appearing in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.  Here is a snip:

These cascading feedbacks include self-reinforcing Arctic’s sea ice, which could disappear entirely in summer in the next 15 years. The ice serves as a shield, reflecting heat back into the atmosphere, but is increasingly being melted into water that absorbs heat instead. Losing the ice would tremendously increase the Arctic’s warming, which is already at least twice the global average rate. This, in turn, would accelerate the collapse of permafrost, releasing its ancient stores of methane, a super climate pollutant 30 times more potent in causing warming than carbon dioxide.

By largely ignoring such feedbacks, the IPCC report fails to adequately warn leaders about the cluster of six similar climate tipping points that could be crossed between today’s temperature and an increase to 1.5 degrees—let alone nearly another dozen tipping points between 1.5 and 2 degrees. These wildcards could very likely push the climate system beyond human ability to control. As the UN Secretary-General reminded world leaders last month, “We face an existential threat. Climate change is moving faster than we are. If we do not change course by 2020, we risk missing the point where we can avoid runaway climate change, with disastrous consequences….”

Here is a good site explaining tipping points

Unfortunately recent studies indicate  that some of these tipping points are already being triggered.  Abrupt permafrost melting.  ,  Mineral weathering of permanfrost  Permafrost will melt faster than thought

So the question is, how big and how fast are these feedbacks?    The good news is that they are relatively slow, so in the short term ( out to 2100) they are not expected to be too large.  The bad news is that in the long term they just keep growing.   This is explained pretty well in the so called " Hothouse Earth" paper..  You probably should read it.

Here's what it looks like

 Agricultural production and water supplies are especially vulnerable to changes in the hydroclimate, leading to hot/dry or cool/wet extremes. Societal declines, collapses, migrations/resettlements, reorganizations, and cultural changes were often associated with severe regional droughts and with the global megadrought at 4.2–3.9 thousand years before present, all occurring within the relative stability of the narrow global Holocene temperature range of approximately ±1 °C (56).

SI Appendix, Table S4 summarizes biomes and regional biosphere–physical climate subsystems critical for human wellbeing and the resultant risks if the Earth System follows a Hothouse Earth pathway. While most of these biomes or regional systems may be retained in a Stabilized Earth pathway, most or all of them would likely be substantially changed or degraded in a Hothouse Earth pathway, with serious challenges for the viability of human societies.

For example, agricultural systems are particularly vulnerable, because they are spatially organized around the relatively stable Holocene patterns of terrestrial primary productivity, which depend on a well-established and predictable spatial distribution of temperature and precipitation in relation to the location of fertile soils as well as on a particular atmospheric CO2 concentration. 

The authors of that paper explain what would needed to avoid the hothouse earth, and take path to a  "new normal"as follows

The Stabilized Earth trajectory requires deliberate manage-

ment of humanity’s relationship with the rest of the Earth System if

the world is to avoid crossing a planetary threshold. We suggest

that a deep transformation based on a fundamental reorienation of human values, equity, behavior, institutions, economies, and

technologies is required. Even so, the pathway toward Stabilized

Earth will involve considerable changes to the structure and func-

turning of the Earth System, suggesting that resilience-building

strategies are given much higher priority than at present in decision

making. 

So, it seems we are between a rock and a hard place.  If the recommendations made above were followed we might be able to avoid the tipping points. And avoid the hothouse earth.   But we would still have whatever warming we have caused.   That would be our " new normal ".    This would last for a long time as the CO2 slowly washed out of the atmosphere.    We would still have made significant changes to the earth's climate.

Even now, with less than 1.5 degrees, the changes are significant..  The tropical climate zones are shifting .  The climate is changing so fast that it creates a moving baseline for experiments

so, here we are.

This is all pretty hard to take.   Eric Holthaus wrote a good piece in Grist called:  If you are suffering from climate grief, you are not alone.  You may want to read it.  Here is part of it.

Last week’s U.N. climate report gave a terrifyingly clear picture of a world on the brink of locking in catastrophe. It told us what was needed and the horrors that awaited if we failed to mobilize. As a scientific report, it was dazzling. But it didn’t tell us how to process, cope, and adapt our lives to the grief of that overwhelming knowledge.

In 1969, after interviewing hundreds of terminally ill patients, psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross wrote On Death and Dying, a milestone text on how humans process permanent loss. Kübler-Ross’ description of those reactions — denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance — are now famous, but they were never meant to be an orderly progression of “stages.” There is no “correct,” linear way to grieve. Our reactions are complicated because people are complicated.

There’s no one-size-fits-all approach for taking in something like the looming existential threat of climate change. I’ve been listening to a lot of ’90s country music. One of my colleagues has substantially upped her sleep, while one of our Grist editors “stress bakes.” What we feel is what we feel, and it determines our reality — and importantly, our response, to the news.

And then

What we need now is a major mobilization on climate change. That would require, in the words of the IPCC, “rapid and far-reaching transitions” in “all aspects of society.” We’re taking much more than just solar panels and reusable shopping bags here. After decades of delay, the scale of changes that are necessary will force us to rethink everything. To put in the changes necessary, we have to be able to connect our emotions to our actions. We have to process our grief. We have to somehow move through it, and we have to do all that together.  

   

Growing Pains

Eat a lot of peaches

     -John Prine

     

Eat a Peach

    - Allman Brothers

PSA:   Watch Anote's Ark, a film, and hear Professor Dickerson on climate refugees, Oct 16

News:  New IPCC report due Monday

Quick preview 

"The report will be released on October 8. From leaked drafts, we know the basics of scientists’ findings: World greenhouse gas emissions must peak by 2020 — just 15 months from now. The scientists also show the difference in impacts between 1.5 and 2 degrees would not be minor — it could be make-or-break for the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, for example, which would flood every coastal city on Earth should it collapse.

Or here

"After only one degree of warming, the world has seen deadly storms engorged by rising seas and a crescendo of heatwaves, drought, flooding and wild fires made more intense by climate change.

Without a radical course change, we are headed for an unliveable 3C or 4C hike. And yet, humanity has avoided action for so long that any pathway to a climate-safe world involves wrenching economic and social change "unprecedented in terms of scale," the report said.

Greetings

I recently read a nice piece by George Monbiot, noting that the current strategy of replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy isnt really working.   

Despite the growth of wind and solar,  fossil fuel use just isn't dropping.  So far renewables are not a substitute, but a way of having more energy.

This, of course, has been our history.   Each time we have added a new energy resource, we have asks continued to use the old one, merely increasing the total amount of energy used.

Monbiot notes that a growing economy makes this task of substitution more difficult if not impossible. 

See also this article Why Growth Can't Be Green. summarizing recent studies.

 We are essentially trying to go on a healthy diet, we are willing to eat more vegetables but we can't seem to give up the cake!   And as long as we won't give up the cake, we continue to spew CO2.

Hopefully, this state of affairs won't last much longer.   And hopefully, the transition will occur "in time". 

In our case, it appears that "in time" means pretty soon.   Otherwise we may experience a "hothouse Earth",  a 4-5 degree increase in temperature, and 20 meter rise in sea levels.

If this grim scenario is to be avoided, emissions would have to peak within two to three years and then decline by 6-7 percent a year, Rockström said. Far from peaking, though, energy-related greenhouse gas emissions hit a new record high last year, as cuts in the U.K., the U.S. and, Japan were offset by continued carbon dioxide pollution, particularly in China.

See also No country on track to meet Paris goals

And this: Biggest coal mining country in Europe plans output hike

The question of the timing of an energy transition was recently portrayed in an unusual way.   From the perspective of space.  see How Aliens Solve their Climate Change Problem  .  It is generally believed that life has evolved on many planets and on some of them a species has been able to harness the available energy and create an industrial civilization, as we have.   The fact that we haven't heard from any of them, create the so-called Fermi paradox.  Where are they?    Frank suggests that perhaps alien civilizations have run into the same problem we have - the need to move from one energy source to a less polluting one before the pollution destroys the civilization.  He creates a very simple modern to explore the importance of the timing of the transition.  He then ran the model thousands of times with different transition times.

"So, what did the model tell us? We saw three distinct kinds of civilizational histories. The first—and, alarmingly, most common—was what we called “the die-off.” As the civilization used energy, its numbers grew rapidly, but the use of the resource also pushed the planet away from the conditions the civilization grew up with. As the evolution of the civilization and planet continued, the population skyrocketed, blowing past the planet’s limits. The population, in other words, overshot the planet’s carrying capacity. Then came a big reduction in the civilization’s population until both the planet and the civilization reached a steady state. After that, the population and the planet stopped changing. A sustainable planetary civilization was achieved but at a high cost. In many of the models, we saw as much as 70 percent of the population perish before a steady state was reached. In reality, it’s not clear that a complex technological civilization like ours could survive such a catastrophe.

The second kind of trajectory held the good news. We called it the “soft landing.” The population grew and the planet changed but together they made a smooth transition to a new, balanced equilibrium. The civilization had changed the planet but without triggering a massive die-off.

The final class of trajectory was the most worrisome: full-blown collapse. As in the die-off histories, the population blew up. But these planets just couldn’t handle the avalanche of the civilization’s impact. The host worlds were too sensitive to change, like a houseplant that withers when it’s moved. Conditions on these planets deteriorated so fast the civilization’s population nose-dived all the way to extinction.

The timing turned out to be an important factor.   In some cases, the transition was made but not " in time"

"You might think switching from the high-impact energy source to the low-impact source would make things better. But for some trajectories, it didn’t matter. If the civilization used only the high-impact resource, the population reached a peak and then quickly dropped to zero. But if we allowed the civilization to switch to the low-impact energy resource, the collapse still happened in certain cases, even if it was delayed. The population would start to fall, then happily stabilize. But then, finally and suddenly, it rushed downward to extinction.

The collapses that occurred even when the civilization did the smart thing demonstrated an essential point about the modeling process. Because the equations capture some of the real world’s complexity, they can surprise you. In some of the “delayed collapse” histories, the planet’s own internal machinery was the culprit. Push a planet too hard, and it won’t return to where it began. We know this can happen, even without a civilization present, because we see it on Venus. That world should be a kind of sister to our own. But long ago Venus’s greenhouse effect slipped into a runaway mode, driving its surface temperatures to a hellish 800 degrees Fahrenheit. Our models were showing, in generic terms, how a civilization could push a planet down the hill into a different kind of runaway through its own activity.

See study here. 

Why?  Tipping points, unfortunately.  Civilizations may stop emissions, but if feed-backs can swamp the effect.  And feed-backs on Earth are not that far off.

See Abrupt permafrost thawing 

"Using a combination of computer models and field measurements, Walter Anthony and an international team of U.S. and German researchers found that abrupt thawing more than doubles previous estimates of permafrost-derived greenhouse warming. They found that the abrupt thaw process increases the release of ancient carbon stored in the soil 125 to 190 percent compared to gradual thawing alone. What's more, they found that in future warming scenarios defined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, abrupt thawing was as important under the moderate reduction of emissions scenario as it was under the extreme business-as-usual scenario. This means that even in the scenario where humans reduced their global carbon emissions, large methane releases from abrupt thawing are still likely to occur.

The impact on the climate may mean an influx of permafrost-derived methane into the atmosphere in the mid-21st century, which is not currently accounted for in climate projections.

The Arctic landscape stores one of the largest natural reservoirs of organic carbon in the world in its frozen soils. But once thawed, soil microbes in the permafrost can turn that carbon into the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and methane, which then enter into the atmosphere and contribute to climate warming.

"The mechanism of abrupt thaw and thermokarst lake formation matters a lot for the permafrost-carbon feedback this century," said first author Katey Walter Anthony at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, who led the project that was part of NASA’s Arctic-Boreal Vulnerability Experiment (ABoVE), a ten-year program to understand climate change effects on the Arctic. "We don’t have to wait 200 or 300 years to get these large releases of permafrost carbon. Within my lifetime, my children’s lifetime, it should be ramping up. It’s already happening but it’s not happening at a really fast rate right now, but within a few decades, it should peak."

In our situation,  it is not clear exactly when would be "too late".  We need a lot more information.   we generally get that from the IPPC.   A recent report by David Sprat, What Lies Beneath  calls into question the accuracy of the information provided by the IPCC, because its reports are overly optimistic. Risks are understated, and it contains optimistic assumptions.   It's a very through report, so I will merely provide the summary and invite you to read it. 

What Lies Beneath analyses why:

• Human-induced climate change is an existential risk to human civilization: an adverse outcome that will either annihilate intelligent life or permanently and drastically curtail its potential unless dramatic action is taken.
• The bulk of climate research has tended to underplay these risks and exhibited a preference for conservative projections and scholarly reticence.
• IPCC reports tend toward reticence and caution, erring on the side of “least drama”, and downplaying the more extreme and more damaging outcomes, and are now becoming dangerously misleading with the acceleration of climate impacts globally.
• Why this is a particular concern with potential climatic “tipping points”, the passing of critical thresholds which result in step changes in the climate system. Under-reporting on these issues is contributing to the “failure of imagination” in our understanding of, and response to, climate change.

What's next?  Well "hothouse Earth" might be the next stop.  It looks something like this:

"The last time the Earth saw these kinds of carbon dioxide levels was 3m years ago, well before Homo sapiens appeared, in what is called the “Mid Piacenzian Warm Period” of the Pliocene Epoch. This was warm – but not yet truly hot. The Earth still had a lot of polar ice, especially over Antarctica, but ice on Greenland and West Antarctica was much less extensive, and sea levels were some ten metres or more higher. Global mean temperature was perhaps a couple of degrees warmer than at present, with more warming around the poles than at the equator. If carbon dioxide levels now hold steady, this is the kind of Earth we could be heading towards.

This period in Earth’s history was also Eden-like, with a diversity of life on land and at sea – but getting to that state may be traumatic for crowded humanity as the sea level keeps rising. A true Hothouse Earth emerged when carbon dioxide levels reached something like 800ppm – about double those of today. This was the world of the dinosaurs, 100m years ago. There was little or no ice on Earth and the polar regions had forests and dinosaurs which were adapted to living half the year in darkness.

The biosphere thrived, though equatorial regions tested the thermal limits of life. Much of the low-lying land had been claimed by the sea, which was now a worldwide warm bath in which animals steered a course to avoid the large, oxygen-depleted regions, a result of the sluggish ocean currents typical of an ice-free world. Even this type of Earth is not so unpleasant, though – once you’re there.

But it’s the transition that’s tricky. Some combination of unrestrained carbon emissions and the natural feedbacks of greenhouse gas released from melting permafrost and forest die-back might set us on such a trajectory in little more than a century. Humanity, in such a world, might crowd on to the remaining land and mourn its drowned cities.