2020 Vision

I can see clearly now

          -Jimmy Cliff

I was feeling single

and seeing double

wound up in a whole lotta trouble

         - George Jones

Good news : Researchers suggest that it is unlikely that human emissions will reach the levels implied by the "worst case" scenario - RCP 8.5/ (see below)*

Greetings

     

       2020 is shaping up to be  a pivotal year for Climate Change.   Johann Rochstrom of the Potsdam Institute calls it  "the year of truth"  

Rockström said the UN conference must grapple urgently with reversing emissions of greenhouse gases, which are still on the rise despite repeated scientific warnings over three decades and multiple resolutions by governments to tackle the problem.

“We must bend the curve next year,” he told the Guardian, citing stark warnings from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “Next year is the year of truth. The year when we must move decisively to an economy that really starts to reduce investments in fossil fuels.”

     Likewise the IPCC says that in order to avoid 1.5 degrees of warming, emissions must peak in 2020 and be cut by 45% by 2030

The idea that 2020 is a firm deadline was eloquently addressed by one of the world's top climate scientists, speaking back in 2017.

"The climate math is brutally clear: While the world can't be healed within the next few years, it may be fatally wounded by negligence until 2020," said Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, founder and now director emeritus of the Potsdam Climate Institute.

The sense that the end of next year is the last chance saloon for climate change is becoming clearer all the time.

One of the understated headlines in last year's IPCC report was that global emissions of carbon dioxide must peak by 2020 to keep the planet below 1.5C.

Current plans are nowhere near strong enough to keep temperatures below the so-called safe limit. Right now, we are heading towards 3C of heating by 2100 not 1.5.

As countries usually scope out their plans over five and 10 year time frames, if the 45% carbon cut target by 2030 is to be met then the plans really need to be on the table by the end of 2020.

*As for the news about RCP 8.5,  it is not completely a good news story.  Although emissions may be lower the climate may be more sensitive to those emissions.   As David Wallace Wells reports

On top of which, a next generation of more advanced models are currently being developed to better predict what amount of temperature rise would result from certain emissions levels, and while the models are by no means speaking in unison, a concerning proportion of those that have been released show that the climate could be considerably more sensitive to emissions than previously understood — meaning we could find ourselves in a better place, emissions wise, this century, and still end up in roughly the same place we thought we would, when we were expecting higher emissions. (Or perhaps, in theory, even a worse place.)

The third takeaway is that anyone who sees a world of 3 degrees warming — or even 2.5 degrees — as a positive or happy outcome has a pretty grotesque, or at least deluded, perspective on human suffering. At just two degrees, the U.N. estimates, damages from storms and sea-level rise could grow 100-fold. Cities in South Asia and the Middle East that are today home to many millions of people would be so hot during summer heat waves, scientists have projected, even going outside during the day could mean risking heatstroke or heat death. The number of climate refugees could pass 200 million, according to the U.N., and more than 150 million would die from the impacts of air pollution alone. North of two degrees, of course, the strain accumulates and intensifies, and while some amount of human adaptation to these forces is inevitable, the scale of adaptation required at even two degrees begins to seem close to impossible.

As climate goals are harder and harder to reach, climate watchers focus of the potential tippings points ; self reinforcing warming beyond human control.   Recently a group of scientists have warned that more than half of the climate tipping points identified a decade ago are now "active"

For those of you scoring at home, here are the nine active tipping points with recent news items:

1. Arctic sea ice

Recent extreme melting offers dramatic evidence, many scientists say, that the region’s sea ice has passed a tipping point and that sometime in the next decade or two the North Pole will be largely ice-free in summer.

2. Greenland ice sheet

3. Boreal forests

4. Permafrost

Arctic regions have captured and stored carbon for tens of thousands of years, but a new study shows winter carbon emissions from the Arctic may now be putting more carbon into the atmosphere than is taken up by plants each year.

One researcher suggests that by 2035 permafrost thaw may continue on its own, disregarding the processes that have kept it frozen for thousands of years.

5. Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation

6. Amazon rainforest

The precious Amazon is teetering on the edge of functional destruction and, with it, so are we,” Thomas Lovejoy of George Mason University and Carlos Nobre of the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil, both of whom have studied the world’s largest rainforest for decades, wrote in an editorial in the journal Science Advances. “Today, we stand exactly in a moment of destiny: The tipping point is here, it is now.”

7. Warm-water corals

8. West Antarctic Ice Sheet

The Paris Agreement target temperature of 1.5°C is sufficient to drive runaway retreat of the WAIS.

9. Parts of East Antarctica

Of course some of those tipping points may not fully play out for years in the future.  Others may be faster. As William Gibson has pointed out   "The future is already here, its just not even;y distributed".   If you want to see a likely future, take a look at the heat and firers in Australia.    And this is only 1 degree.   

When might we expect to hit 1.5?   Here's what professor Miles Allen of Oxford University says.

"Using the World Meteorological Organisation’s definition of global average surface temperature, and the late 19th century to represent its pre-industrial level (yes, all these definitions matter), we just passed 1°C and are warming at more than 0.2°C per decade, which would take us to 1.5°C around 2040.

That said, these are only best estimates. We might already be at 1.2°C, and warming at 0.25°C per decade – well within the range of uncertainty. That would indeed get us to 1.5°C by 2030

And then what should we expect?  see here  and here,   Here is a handy chart

   At 1.5°C of warming, about one in twenty insect and vertebrate species will disappear from half of the area they currently inhabit, as will around one in ten plants. At 2°C, this proportion doubles for plants and vertebrates. For insects, it triples.

Such high levels of species loss will put many ecosystems across the world at risk of collapse. We rely on healthy ecosystems to pollinate crops, maintain fertile soil, prevent floods, purify water, and much more. Conserving them is essential for human survival and prosperity.

Between 1.5°C and 2°C, the number of extremely hot days increases exponentially. Some parts of the world can also expect less rain and more consecutive dry days, while others will receive more extreme floods. Collectively, this will place agriculture, water levels and human health under severe stress – especially in southern African nations, where temperatures will increase faster than the global average. The Mediterranean is another key area at particular risk above 1.5°C of heating, where increased drought will alter flora and fauna in a way without precedent in ten millennia.

  Many US cities are drawing up plans to deal with "killer heat waves",and food  shocks may also be occur

In the future, food shocks are likely to get much worse. The risk of multi-breadbasket failure is increasing, and rises much faster beyond 1.5℃ of global heating – a threshold we could hit as early as 2030 should emissions continue unchecked. Such shocks pose grave threats – rocketing food prices, civil unrest, major financial losses, starvation and death.

The most worrying thing about all of this is that compared to long- and medium-term climate models, we know relatively little about just how fragile the various parts of our clockwork global economy are in the near-term. By the UN’s admission, for example, the way we model the effects of crop failure is no longer viable. We urgently need to better understand how our human systems will respond to shock events, which will occur with ever more frequency and severity as the climate destabilises further.

Above all, much more prominence must be given to experts in systems, food security, migration, energy transitions, supply chains and security, to develop our understanding of short-term responses within society. In particular, we need a better handle on how trigger events such as food price spikes, droughts or forest fires, overlay onto the most vulnerable and politically unstable countries.

As for our response to these locked-in threats, we must ask more immediate questions than what sort of society we want in the future given that we may have already lost control of the Earth’s climate. 

See also :Newly identified jet-stream pattern could imperil global food supplies, says study

          So, given the increasing likelihood of serious climate changes, what is an appropriate response?   Professor Dennis Meadows, , co author of the ground breaking book, Limits to Growth and a long time advocate for sustainability has given this question serious thought.  In a recent interview he said

Now, as to what’s happened in the last 15 years, well, we had at one time actually intended to write the 4^th edition of the book. But I finally decided not to do that because sort of the conceptual framework which you use simply no longer applies. In the first three editions, we could show how current policies were leading to a period of overshoot decline, and we could lay out, at least in theory, some changes, cultural and other changes so it would avoid that outcome and produce not infinite long-term welfare, but at least sustain our species in its current form, more or less, for another century.

Well, in  the last 15 years, there's been such an acceleration in demand for energy and materials, the natural resources of the earth have deteriorated sufficiently, and the population has grown to the point where I no longer see ways realistically of changing the model to produce a so-called sustainable development scenario.

And it’s caused me, in my own thinking, to shift from this notion of sustainable development, which is actually a kind of an oxymoron anyway, over to the concept of resilience. How do you structure a system, a personal system, your family, your firm, your household, your town, your nation, so that it will absorb the shocks which are coming and continue to afford a basis for a humane existence?

Resilience has a benefit of being scalable. You can think about resilient policies at the household level. You can think about resilient policies at the national level. That’s less true over the long term for sustainable development. I don't know how an individual can think about sustainable development of a household over say the next 30, 40, 50 years in the midst of a nation which is pursuing exactly the opposite goal.

Looking at Australia, on can understand his lack of optimism.  Here is a rich country which is staring devastation in the face and can presumably afford a transition, but whose leaders say there is no problem.   Why?  Perhaps because like most countries with large deposits of fossil fuels,  (which help it become rich),  their political system, the economic system, the social system, and the preservation of "the way things are" are dependent in selling as much of those fuels as possible.  For many years , many of us had assumed that at some point things would get so bad that people (and people in power)  would have an "aha" moment and start looking things in a different way.  Australia will be the test case for that hypothesis.