Thursday, November 15, 2018

The art of the possible


I support the left
Though I'm leaning to the right
I'm just not there
 when it comes to a fight
     - Cream (Political Man)


Come Senators Congressmen
Please head the call
     - Bob Dylan

Greetings



       Well, the election returns are in, and the results are not that good for the environment.  Citizens of several states, unhappy with the pace of legislative action attempted to appeal directly  to the people.   The fossil fuel companies joined the fight, and the people were persuaded by their arguments.  However some environmentally minded representatives were elected.  See here and here

         The current political situation means that the only movement in the next two years will be with states and cities.   In the meantime it is encouraging to see young people getting organized and putting pressure on the democratic establishment to put together a climate program for 2020.  See here


Protesters have a simple question for Nancy Pelosi. Nelson Klein, Sunrise
On Tuesday, close to 200 climate activists crowded into the Capitol Building offices of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who will re-assume the position of House speaker when the new Congress is sworn in come January.


Meanwhile carbon emissions continue to rise.   And the effects of 1 degree continue to be felt in places liked California.   So, where does that leave us?  Here is one way to describe it.   In short, keeping below two degrees is very unlikely if not impossible.  Bellow three is the new target.  Two is a long-term disaster, three is a short-term one.  see here


The odds of succeeding, according to a recent study based on current emissions trends, are one in 20. If by some miracle we are able to limit warming to two degrees, we will only have to negotiate the extinction of the world’s tropical reefs, a sea -level rise of several meters and the abandonment of the Persian Gulf. The climate scientist James Hansen has called two-degree warming “a prescription for long-term disaster.” Long-term disaster is now the best-case scenario. Three-degree warming is a prescription for short-term disaster: forests in the Arctic and the loss of most coastal cities. Robert Watson, a former director of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has argued that three-degree warming is the realistic minimum. Four degrees: Europe in permanent drought; vast areas of China, Indi, a Bangladesh claimed by desert; Polynesia swallowed by the sea; the Colorado River thinned to a trickle; the American Southwest largely uninhabitable. The prospect of a five-degree warming has prompted some of the world’s leading climate scientists to warn of the end of human civilization
Caldeira and a colleague recently published a paper in Nature finding that the world is warming more quickly than most climate models predict. The toughest emissions reductions now being proposed, even by the most committed nations, will probably fail to achieve “any given global temperature stabilization target.”
More carbon has been released into the atmosphere since the final day of the Noordwijk conference, Nov. 7, 1989, than in the entire history of civilization preceding it. In 1990, humankind emitted more than 20 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide. By 2017, the figure had risen to 32.5 billion metric tons, a record. Despite every action taken since the Charney report — the billions of dollars invested in research, the nonbinding treaties, the investments in renewable energy — the only number that counts, the total quantity of global greenhouse gas emitted per year, has continued its inexorable rise.
The timetable for this approaching disaster is always changing, as new studies find that things are moving "faster than expected".  One recent study suggests that the best guidance is  the one described by the IPPC as the worst case. RCP8.5 

One reason is that the climate is changing faster than expected, leaving the models behind.  As Ken Caldeira, one of the authors explained here and here


But an emerging challenge is that the climate is changing faster than the models are improving, as real-world events occur that the models didn’t predict. Notably, Arctic sea ice is melting more rapidly than the models can explain, suggesting that the simulations aren’t fully capturing certain processes. 

“We’re increasingly shifting from a mode of predicting what’s going to happen to a mode of trying to explain what happened,” Caldeira says.



See here for a detailed explanation of that study.

Here is the key graph:

Brown Caldeira 2017 Nature
Figure 2d
This would suggest that unless things significantly change, the following temperatures can be expected in 2020: 1.25,  2030: 1.75, 2040: 2.0,  2050: 2.5 2060: 3,  et cetera 
But, hopefully, that prognosis is too pessimistic.   After all, RCP8.5 assumes that the world will continue in its fossil-fueled ways for the rest of the century.  It doesn't address the possibility of a peak in fossil fuel use, either because of supply or demand.

When could we reasonably expect such a peak?  Well, here is a study from Carbon Tracker and Grantham that shows a scenario of peak carbon emissions by 2020.   On the other hand, the International Energy Agency suggests that fossil fuels will continue to dominate energy use and that CO2 emissions will not peak before 2040.  see here.  See also. Renewable energy is surging but not fast enough to stop warming

So, for now, lets split the difference and assume that CO2 peaks in 2030 and drops after that.    Based on the Caldeira study, by 2030 we would be at 1.75 degrees above pre-industrial.  What then?   Do we get off the RCP 8.5 curve?

I'd suggest that we may actually stay on the curve for another 10-20 years for two reasons.   First, after the peak we will continue to emit CO2, just at a lower level.  The difference will be small for a while.  I addition, as Dirk has pointed out, shutting down coal plants will reduce aerosols which are currently cooling the planet.   See here  (NASA) The removal of aerosols from the atmosphere will cause the temperature to rise by .5 to 1 degree.   These factors may offset each other in the short term resulting in continued warming..  

But those temperature predictions are not the important point.  What is important is what happens when we reach those temperatures.  And once again the story keeps changing.

Here is what experts currently expect at various temperatures   From here. 

"At two degrees, the melting of ice sheets will pass a tipping point of collapse, flooding dozens of the world’s major cities this century. At that amount of warming, it is estimated, global GDP, per capita, will be cut by 13 percent. Four hundred million more people will suffer from water scarcity, and even in the northern latitudes heat waves will kill thousands each summer. It will be worse in the planet’s equatorial band. In India, where many cities now numbering in the many millions would become unbelievably hot, there would be 32 times as many extreme heat waves, each lasting five times as long and exposing, in total, 93 times more people. This is two degrees — practically speaking, our absolute best-case climate scenario.
At three degrees, southern Europe will be in permanent drought. The average drought in Central America would last 19 months and in the Caribbean 21 months. In northern Africa, the figure is 60 months — five years. The areas burned each year by wildfires would double in the Mediterranean and sextuple in the United States. Beyond the sea-level rise, which will already be swallowing cities from Miami Beach to Jakarta, damages just from river flooding will grow 30-fold in Bangladesh, 20-fold in India, and as much as 60-fold in the U.K. This is three degrees — better than we’d do it all the nations of the world honored their Paris commitments, which none of them are. Practically speaking, barring those dramatic tech deus ex machinas, this seems to me about as positive a realistic outcome as it is rational to expect.
At four degrees, there would be eight million cases of dengue fever each year in Latin America alone. Global grain yields could fall by as much as 50 percent, producing annual or close-to-annual food crises. The global economy would be more than 30 percent smaller than it would be without climate change, and we would see at least half again as much conflict and warfare as we do today. Possibly more. Our current trajectory, remember, takes us higher still, and while there are many reasons to think we will bend that curve soon — the plummeting cost of renewable energy, the growing global consensus about phasing out coal — it is worth remembering that, whatever you may have heard about the green revolution and the price of solar, at present, global carbon emissions are still growing.
None of the above is news — most of that data is drawn from this single, conventional-wisdom fact sheet

But these expectations may be optimistic. Other studies are noting that more significant impacts can occur at lower temperatures.


Here's an example.  Recently biologists study a wildlife preserve in Puerto Rico.  This is an area which is far from the effects of humans.  No poisons, no hunting.  But no reserve can be far from climate change.  Robert Hunziker reports on their findings here



Biologists Brad Lister and Andres Garcia of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México returned to Puerto Rico’s Luquillo Rainforest after 40 years, and what they found blew them away. The abundance of insects, and arthropods in general, declined by as much as 60-fold and average temps had risen by 2°C over the past four decades. According to the scientists, global warming is impacting the rainforest with distinctive gusto.
According to Lister: “It was just a collapse in the insect community. A really dramatic change… The insect populations in the Luquillo forest are crashing.” (Source: Climate-Driven Crash in a Rainforest Food Web, Every Day Matters, Oct. 22, 2018).
It doesn’t get much worse than “crashing” of ecosystem support systems, i.e., insects and arthropods in general, which are in the phylum Euarthropoda, inclusive of insects, arachnids, myriapods, and crustaceans. This equates to a loss of basic structures of biosphere life forces.
The research team believes they are already seeing today what the recent IPCC report predicted for climate change in 2040. In their words: “It’s a harbinger of a global unraveling of natural systems.”
“The central question addressed by our research is why simultaneous, long-term declines in arthropods, lizards, frogs, and birds have occurred over the past four decades in the relatively undisturbed rainforests of northeastern Puerto Rico. Our analyses provide strong support for the hypothesis that climate warming has been a major factor driving reductions in arthropod abundance and that these declines have in turn precipitated decreases in forest insectivores in a classic bottom-up cascade.” (Lister)


The reference to "what the recent IPCC report predicted for climate change in 2040", refers to the IPCC report that came out last month.  It describes some of the impacts which are predicted if we reach 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial, and it suggests that this could happen as soon as 2040.  See here from the New York Times


The report, issued on Monday by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of scientists convened by the United Nations to guide world leaders, describes a world of worsening food shortages and wildfires, and a mass die-off of coral reefs as soon as 2040 — a period well within the lifetime of much of the global population.
The report “is quite a shock, and quite concerning,” said Bill Hare, an author of previous I.P.C.C. reports and a physicist with Climate Analytics, a nonprofit organization. “We were not aware of this just a few years ago.” The report was the first to be commissioned by world leaders under
The scientists in Puerto Rico are suggesting that the impacts predicted for 2040 are already occurring,  20 years early,  and that the impacts are occurring at 1-degree c,  not 1.5 degrees. 

And of course, it's not just insects that are in trouble

From 1970 to 2014, 60 percent of all animals with a backbone – fish, birds, amphibians, reptiles, and mammals – were wiped out by human activity, according to WWF’s Living Planet report, based on an ongoing survey of more than 4,000 species spread over 16,700 populations scattered across the globe.  see here

Fish, in particular, are on the edge

The world’s ocean fish stocks are “on the verge of collapse,” according to a special report from IRIN. Already small fishers in poor countries are reeling, turning to ever-more destructive techniques and suffering from poor health and dwindling livelihoods.
.....
The main trend of the world marine fisheries catches is not one of ‘stability’ as cautiously suggested early by FAO,” they write, “but one of decline.”
An estimated 70 percent of fish populations are fully used, overused, or in crisis as a result of overfishing and warmer waters. If the world continues at its current rate of fishing, there will be no fish left by 2050, according to a study cited in a short video produced by IRIN for the special report.  see here


It's kind of amazing is that although this information is available, most people's response is to completely ignore it.    But some folks have a different response.  As Joe Hill says " Don't mourn, organize"  Here's what George Monbiot says.  The Earth is in a Death Spiral, It will take Radical Action to Save Us




Those to whom we look for solutions trundle on as if nothing has changed. As if the accumulating evidence has no purchase on their minds. Decades of institutional failure ensures that only “unrealistic” proposals – the repurposing of economic life, with immediate effect – now have a realistic chance of stopping the planetary death spiral. And only those who stand outside the failed institutions can lead this effort.
Two tasks need to be performed simultaneously: throwing ourselves at the possibility of averting collapse, as Extinction Rebellion is doing, slight though this possibility may appear; and preparing ourselves for the likely failure of these efforts, terrifying as this prospect is. Both tasks require a complete revision of our relationship with the living planet.
Because we cannot save ourselves without contesting oligarchic control, the fight for democracy and justice and the fight against environmental breakdown are one and the same. Do not allow those who have caused this crisis to define the limits of political action. Do not allow those whose magical thinking got us into this mess to tell us what can and cannot be done.

But for many people, especially those folks on the front lines in California, mourning may be appropriate.  Eric Holthaus at Grist offers this


An organization called Good Grief is trying to take on the challenge of helping to guide people like me who sometimes struggle with the loss and uncertainty that comes with being immersed in stories of climate disaster. They’ve developed a 10-step path to resiliency that I think everyone could benefit from. (Here’s some background on how they developed these steps.)
Of course, for people close enough to experience the smoke of the fire, the grief is even more intense. There’s a national disaster distress hotline that was set up specifically for times like this. Studies show that PTSD in survivors of previous disasters is often triggered during national crises. Survivor’s guilt is real.
Feeling like this is expected, at least some of the time. We feel this way because we love each other and we love the world. The changes we’re seeing are happening at a geological scale, faster than at any time in our planet’s history. We humans just aren’t built to process that kind of change.
It’s also worth remembering — every damn day — that a burned and broken world is not our destiny. We aren’t fated to any particular future, and the choices each of us make every day mean a lot, especially at this important moment in history. The best thing that each of us can do going forward is to talk about how important climate change is with everyone you can. It’s only by building up a groundswell of support that our leaders will notice and take bold action in the time we have left.

There's another group of people, including those with young children,  who are hoping -hoping that people will try to fix things, and to the extent its too late, will try to help each other.    Here is a perceptive piece from environmental reporter Brian Merchant,  from here

My second son was born last week, right before two historic wildfires hit his new home state and burned whole cities to the ground. One burned about thirty miles west of the hospital he was born in, thickening the air with smoke, turning the sun deep red—we marked his first week anniversary by watching ash fall from the sky into our front yard. The other burned an hour and a half's drive north of where I grew up, of where my parents live, and reduced a town of thirty thousand people to embers so fast that the highway was left littered with abandoned and charred cars attempting escape, and dozens dead.  
...
My sons are going to live in cities on fire, in nations led by men who don't care, and they are going to have to learn to help tackle the problem, as we are. If I can in any way help them tap into that capacity that I felt last night, if they can help me, and if others can—and if that relation can help topple power in denial—then maybe we can sustain this pre-apocalypse, whether it takes another blue wave or nine, a political revolution, mass psilocybin hallucinations, or something else. If we can relate that goodness where applicable and confront power whenever possible, my sons may not have to live their adult lives in omnipresent fear of fires.
People are basically good, power corrupts but is not de-corruptible, and there is a lot of work to do.
At least, that's what gave me hope that week as I watched the world burn, literally and figuratively, but mostly literally, as my beautiful new ward eked out his being amongst the smoke.

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