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.