Moonbeams...and fairy tails

Dear Mr Fantasy

play us a tune

something to make us all happy

      -Traffic

We had it all

Just like Bogie and Bacall

   _Bertie Higgens

    

Good news

Over 6 million people in 185 countries, from schoolchildren to trade-unionists, took to the streets demanding that political elites do something meaningful to address the climate crisis. Taken together, this was the largest protest the world has ever seen. 

Public Service Announcement

Dr. Sarah Myhre will deliver this year's Salem Peace Lecture. Her topic will be "Living, Loving, and Loathing on a Hot and Finite Planet: the Path Towards Climate Leadership." at Willamette University's Hudson Hall, located in the Mary Stuart Rogers Music Center on the Willamette University campus, at 7:30 pm on Wednesday, October 16, 2019. 

Greetings

Many of you have heard Gretta Thunberg's speech to the UN.  Here's a little snip.

Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!

Of course, she good reason to be upset.  Here we are at merely 1 degree above pre industrial and things were already dangerous. 

20% of they earth has already warmed by 1.5 degrees and 10% by 2 degrees.

People are already dying from excess heat

800,000 homes in Berkley, San Jose, and Oakland  loose electricity thanks to wild fire threat 

A recent report from the World Meteorology Association indicates that climate change impacts on sea level are accelerating

The Amazon is on fire, and near a tipping point where it would cease to be a forest last all. 

The Australian rainforest is on fire and faces the worst fires in recorded history.

Meanwhile

CO2 concentrations continue to accelerate

Fossil fuel use rising more than renewables

Recent recalibration of models show warming faster than expected

Our planet’s climate may be more sensitive to increases in greenhouse gas than we realized, according to a new generation of global climate models being used for the next major assessment from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The findings—which run counter to a 40-year consensus—are a troubling sign that future warming and related impacts could be even worse than expected.

Gretta doesn't give much credence to the "solutions" offered by the IPPC

The popular idea of cutting our emissions in half in ten years only gives us a 50 percent chance of staying below 1.5 degrees [Celsius], and the risk of setting off irreversible chain reactions beyond human control,” she said. “Fifty percent may be acceptable to you. But those numbers do not include tipping points, most feedback loops, additional warming hidden by toxic air pollution, or the aspects of equity and climate justice. They also rely on my generation sucking hundreds of billions of tons of your CO2 out of the air with technologies that barely exist.”

“How dare you pretend that this can be solved with just ‘business as usual’ and some technical solutions?” she asked finally. “There will not be any solutions or plans presented in line with these figures here today, because these numbers are too uncomfortable. And you are still not mature enough to tell it like it is.” 

50%  is not good enough.  Which is a reasonable complaint.  Would you board a plan that had a 50% chance of crashing.  How about 25%? 10%?

The fact is there  there are event with small chance but a large impact.  For instance abrupt sea level rise, which could happen any time, as explained by Dr Richard Alloey

So who is Richard Alley? He is professor of geosciences at Penn State and a member of the Earth and Environmental Sciences Institute. His expertise is in glaciology, ice sheet stability, ice core analysis, and erosion of ice sheets. He tells Jeff Goodell of Rolling Stone that as bad as we think climate change might be in the coming decades, the reality could be far worse. Within the lifetime of his students there’s some risk — small but not as small as we might hope — that the seas could rise as much as 15 to 20 feet.

If that happens, kiss goodbye virtually every major coastal city in the world. Miami, New Orleans, large parts of Boston and New York City and Silicon Valley, not to mention Shanghai, Jakarta, Ho Chi Min City, Lagos, Mumbai  — all gone. ” I don’t mean ‘sunny day flooding’ where you get your feet wet on the way to the mall,” Goodell writes. “I mean these cities, and many more, become scuba diving sites.”

Why is Alley’s threat assessment greater than the people who are preparing reports for IPCC? Bureaucracy, mostly. They are written in collaboration with a large group of scientists and are often watered down by endless debate and consensus-building. In total there are 18 lead authors and 69 contributing authors on the chapter that considers sea-level rise. Also, by the time the final reports are written, the underlying data is often not the most current available.

Michael E. Mann, Alley’s colleague at Penn State, argues that most coastal areas are incapable of dealing effectively with even a 3 foot rise in ocean levels. “The US is not ready for a meter of sea level rise by 2100. Just look at what happened in the wake of Superstorm Sandy, Katrina, in Houston, or Puerto Rico,” he says.

Greta also seems to give short shrift to "green growth" or new green deal 

"Wherever I go I seem to be surrounded by fairytales. Business leaders, elected officials all across the political spectrum spending their time making up and telling bedtime stories that soothe us, that make us go back to sleep. These are ‘feel-good’ stories about how we are going to fix everything. How wonderful everything is going to be when we have ‘solved’ everything. But the problem we are facing is not that we lack the ability to dream, or to imagine a better world. The problem now is that we need to wake up. It’s time to face the reality, the facts, the science. 

And the science doesn’t mainly speak of ‘great opportunities to create the society we always wanted’. It tells of unspoken human sufferings, which will get worse and worse the longer we delay action – unless we start to act now. And yes, of course a sustainable transformed world will include lots of new benefits. But you have to understand. This is not primarily an opportunity to create new green jobs, new businesses or green economic growth. This is above all an emergency, and not just any emergency. This is the biggest crisis humanity has ever faced.”

And she is not alone

This is essentially the view of the climate situation laid out by University of Manitoba environmental scientist Vaclav Smil’s new book Growth, which was excerpted this week in New York magazine. “[N]o government has ever made policies with the biosphere in mind,” it reads. “No government has advocated moderate, subdued economic growth as its priority, even in the world’s most affluent countries, and no major political party has been serious about reconsidering the pace of economic growth.” Seriousness, for Smil and other pessimistic climate analysts, would mean accepting a world of “deliberately declining levels and performances that would put civilization into a state of ‘regress.’” 

Perhaps a state of "regress" is in the cards no matter what.

Here is a recent tweet from Kevin Anderson

Whatever the arguments for or against XR’s actions, their demands for emission cuts more accurately reflect the rates & timeframe of 1.5°C than those proposed by any government. There is no non-extreme future. Extreme 1.5-2°C mitigation or status quo & extreme impacts/adaptation.

See here for Extinction Rebellion's demands

"Government must act now to halt biodiversity loss and reduce greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2025.

Here is one version of the "extreme future" of the status quo, from Nature:

Speeding freight train

Three lines of evidence suggest that global warming will be faster than projected in the recent IPCC special report.

First, greenhouse-gas emissions are still rising. In 2017, industrial carbon dioxide emissions are estimated to have reached about 37 gigatonnes2. This puts them on track with the highest emissions trajectory the IPCC has modelled so far. This dark news means that the next 25 years are poised to warm at a rate of 0.25–0.32 °C per decade3. That is faster than the 0.2 °C per decade that we have experienced since the 2000s, and which the IPCC used in its special report.

Second, governments are cleaning up air pollution faster than the IPCC and most climate modellers have assumed. For example, China reduced sulfur dioxide emissions from its power plants by 7–14% between 2014 and 2016 (ref. 4). Mainstream climate models had expected them to rise. Lower pollution is better for crops and public health5. But aerosols, including sulfates, nitrates and organic compounds, reflect sunlight. This shield of aerosols has kept the planet cooler, possibly by as much as 0.7 °C globally6.

Third, there are signs that the planet might be entering a natural warm phase that could last for a couple of decades. The Pacific Ocean seems to be warming up, in accord with a slow climate cycle known as the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation7. This cycle modulates temperatures over the equatorial Pacific and over North America. Similarly, the mixing of deep and surface waters in the Atlantic Ocean (the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation) looks to have weakened since 2004, on the basis of data from drifting floats that probe the deep ocean8. Without this mixing, more heat will stay in the atmosphere rather than going into the deep oceans, as it has in the past.

These three forces reinforce each other. We estimate that rising greenhouse-gas emissions, along with declines in air pollution, bring forward the estimated date of 1.5 °C of warming to around 2030, with the 2 °C boundary reached by 2045. These could happen sooner with quicker shedding of air pollutants. Adding in natural decadal fluctuations raises the odds of blasting through 1.5 °C by 2025 to at least 10% (ref. 9). By comparison, the IPCC assigned probabilities of 17% and 83% for crossing the 1.5 °C mark by 2030 and 2052, respectively.

So, 2 degree by 2045, that's not so bad, is it?   Here's climate scientist Christopher Reyer, one of the co-authors of  "Turn Down the Heat: Confronting the New Climate Normal"

"Two degrees is not a picnic either. Imagine events like the 2003 European heat wave, the 2010 Russian heat wave which had repercussions on the global wheat market, and Hurricane Katrina, all of them happening simultaneously everywhere in the world."