Monday, December 10, 2018



Torn between two lovers
Feeling like a fool

     -Mary MacGregor

I know what I want
but I just don't know
how to go about getting it

    -Jimi Hendrix


Public Service Announcement 

Joint Interim Committee on Carbon Reduction meeting December 13


Greetings

Is it just me, or does it seem like things are accelerating?   It's been as busy couple of weeks 


The Washington Post sums it up better than I can

"In October, a top U.N.-backed scientific panel found that nations have barely a decade to take “unprecedented” actions and cut their emissions in half by 2030 to prevent the worst consequences of climate change. The panel’s report found “no documented historic precedent” for the rapid changes to the infrastructure of society that would be needed to hold warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels.
The day after Thanksgiving, the Trump administration released a nearly 1,700-page report co-written by hundreds of scientists finding that climate change is already causing increasing damage to the United States. That was followed by another report detailing the growing gap between the commitments made at earlier U.N. conferences and what is needed to steer the planet off its calamitous path.

Then, we learned that 2018 was a record year for emissions.  from the New York Times


"Worldwide, carbon emissions are expected to increase by 2.7 percent in 2018according to the new research, which was published by the Global Carbon Project, a group of 100 scientists from more than 50 academic and research institutions and one of the few organizations to comprehensively examine global emissions numbers. Emissions rose 1.6 percent last year, the researchers said, ending a three-year plateau

And that temperatures are not rising in as straight line, but are accelerating. from Nature


"Three trends — rising emissions, declining air pollution, and natural climate cycles — will combine over the next 20 years to make climate change faster and more furious than anticipated. In our view, there’s a good chance that we could breach the 1.5 °C level by 2030, not by 2040 as projected in the special report (see ‘Accelerated warming’). The climate-modeling community has not grappled enough with the rapid changes that policymakers care most about, preferring to focus on longer-term trends and equilibria.
Sources: Ref. 1/GISTEMP/IPCC Fifth Assessment Report (2014)


We know we need to have a carbon emissions peak by 2020. Washington Post
Everyone recognized that the national plans, when you add everything up, will take us way beyond 3, potentially 4 degrees Celsius warming," said Johan Rockstrom, the incoming director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.
"We know that we're moving in the wrong direction," Rockstrom told the AP. "We need to bend the global carbon emissions no later than 2020 - in two years' time - to stand a chance to stay under 2 degrees Celsius."
But, currently, it looks like we might not have a carbon emissions peak until 2030.  The UN Gap Report says 
Concerns about the current level of both ambition 
and action are thus amplified compared to 
previous Emissions Gap Reports. According to 
the current policy and NDC scenarios, global 
emissions are not estimated to peak by 2030, let 
alone by 2020

The problem?  The monkey trap.  We can't let go of economic growth. From Resilience  

Economic growth measures the increase in the number of goods and services produced by an economy over time, and it has historically been tightly coupled with CO₂ emissions. Decoupling these two factors is not impossible, and indeed many leading academics argue that the power of human ingenuity will solve the climate crisis. However, this is certainly unlikely in the timescales needed to tackle climate change in a just and equitable way.

So, we now enter a new phase .   Harvard scientists have started experimenting with solar geoengineering. from Vox




And while solar geoengineering helps address the temperature issues related to global warming, that’s hardly the only concern with climate change. As Irfan notes, geoengineering could threaten crop yields by reducing crops’ access to sunlight, and it does not address ocean acidification, a significant environmental threat associated with climate change.
But if the world continues on its current emissions path, we might have to choose, in 2030 or 2040 or 2050, between the (quite bad) option of geoengineering and the (also quite bad) option of enduring and adapting to the effects of large-scale global warming. And the Harvard experiment could help us understand which of those two bad options would be worse.

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