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

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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.