Climate Hawks

Did you ever have to make up your mind?

-Loving Spoonful

Forty thousand head men 

couldn't make me change my mind.

-Traffic

Greetings

I'm going to start off with public service announcement

The Clean Energy Jobs Bill is back before the legislature.

The bill will lower Oregon’s greenhouse gas emissions by adopting a cap, trade, and invest plan — we will cap greenhouse gas emissions from major sources, trade emission permits to allow maximum market efficiency in reducing carbon pollution, and invest proceeds to help Oregon transition to a greener, cleaner future.  You can learn about the bill and join the fight to protect our future in two ways:

For those who want to learn more about the CEJ Billbefore Lobby Day:

On Monday, Feb 5 at 3 PM the Joint Environmental and Energy and Natural Resources Committees will roll out the CEJ Billwith an Informational Meeting in Room F at the Capitol.

and on Wed, Feb 7 at 3 PM the same Joint Committee will hold a Public Hearing regarding the bill in Room F.

and you can join your friends from the Oregon League of Conservation Voters and Renew Oregon at the Clean Energy Jobs LOBBY DAY at the State Capitol on Monday, Feb. 12.  

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 You may want to stop reading here

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It may be a good idea to put this bill in perspective.  What can we hope to achieve?   What would we have to give up to get there?  Dave Roberts, a clear eyed "climate hawk"  displays what he sees as the best case scenario, as part of an article chiding environmentalists for getting in the way of implementing climate policy. see    Reckoning with Climate Change will demand ugly trade offs from environmentalists and everyone else  .  He says we can't meet our 2 degree target using solar and wind alone.   We also will need nuclear power, more dams, and loads of transmission lines running across sensitive habitats.

Mostly its because we waited so long, so we missed the gradual ramp down see e.g.

Implications for limiting warming to 2C

Here's what Roberts says it would take.   

It would mean an immediate, sustained global mobilization of a sort that has no precedent in human history.

If something like that mobilization were to happen, it would not be gentle or pretty. It would not unfold according to the best-laid plans of wonks. Some people, landscapes, and legitimately worthwhile priorities would suffer in the short- to mid-term.

One example: environmentalists often cite studies showing that high penetrations of renewables are possible in the US. But those studies all show that achieving high penetrations requires a country-spanning network of new transmission lines. If there’s a study showing how to fully decarbonize without tons of new transmission, I haven’t seen it. So yes, transmission lines connecting zero-carbon power sources and loads might disrupt some people and ecosystems, but systematically opposing them simply isn’t commensurate with being a climate hawk.

Another example: full decarbonization would require, among other things, an enormous industrial shift. Tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of jobs in polluting industries would be wiped out and workers displaced. There would be new jobs in clean energy, but the US has not typically handled such workforce transitions well. Being a climate hawk means accepting serious social and economic disruption.

Decarbonization will also involve a mind-boggling amount of manufacturing, building, and retrofitting. Multiple solar and wind gigafactories would be built every year. Renewables would cover every open surface. Every city would be as dense and transit-served as possible. Being a climate hawk means accepting that some natural areas will be turned over to energy production and that “the character of the neighborhood” is going to be disrupted by infill and multi-modal transportation systems.

Conservative climate hawks may have to tolerate climate solutions that involve heavy government intervention. Farmer climate hawks may have to tolerate swaths of their land being claimed for transmission lines or wind turbines. Wealthy climate hawks may have to tolerate restrictions on their consumer purchases or airline travel. Environmentalist climate hawks may have to tolerate large-scale carbon sequestration or new rivers given over to dams. And so on.

This is the future Roberts suggests that we need.   I am reminded of the "Chinese miracle".  New factories, new industries.  Forward !

So, lets put this activity in context.  How are we doing with respect to overshoot?    It just so happens that 15,000 scientists in 184 countries recently issued  a report :World Scientists' Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice"  which noted the a number of deteriorating trends

Among the negative 25-year global trends noted in the article are:

• A 26 percent reduction in the amount of fresh water available per capita
• A drop in the harvest of wild-caught fish, despite an increase in fishing effort
• A 75 percent increase in the number of ocean dead zones
• A loss of nearly 300 million acres of forestland, much of it converted for agricultural uses
• Continuing significant increases in global carbon emissions and average temperatures
• A 35 percent rise in human population
• A collective 29 percent reduction in the numbers of mammals, reptiles, amphibians, birds and fish

So, Robert's prescription would make some of those things worse.   But perhaps the additional impacts would be offset by the reduced impacts of climate change on the biosphere?

Well......no.     It turns out that climate change has had very little impact on species extinction.   This great extinction is bring caused by the ordinary things that humans do.   A recent article in Nature points out that main cause of species extinction is over consumption -  logging, fishing, agriculture, urban expansion, and pollution are the real culprits.     In fact climate change ranks very low.  see here

But even though climate change is going to have a very powerful impact on plants and wildlife world-wide, climate change has also become a sort of scape-goat, with a “growing tendency for media reports about threats to biodiversity to focus on climate change,” write the authors of a new study analyzing the impact each sector of our society has on life on Earth. According to their findings, the real culprits are staple human activities such as logging, hunting, or farming, which pose a far greater — and much more immediate — danger to Earth’s biodiversity.

“[Agriculture and rampant resource over-exploitation are] by far the biggest drivers of biodiversity decline,” the authors write in a comment published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

A team of scientists led by University of Queensland doctoral student Sean Maxwell analyzed thousands of species on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List of Threatened Species to determine exactly what we’re doing to put them on that list.

They found that over-exploitation, including logging, hunting, fishing and the gathering of plants is the biggest single killer of biodiversity, directly impacting 72 percent of the 8,688 species listed as threatened or near-threatened by the IUCN. Agricultural activity comes second, affecting 62 percent of those species, followed by urban development and pollution which threaten 35 and 22 percent respectively. Species such as the African cheetah and Asia’s hairy-noes otter are among the 5,407 species that find themselves threatened by agricultural practices, while illegal hunting impacts several populations such as the Sumatran rhino and African elephant.

Climate change on the other hand comes in on a surprising, if somewhat unimpressive, 7th place in the 11 threats identified by the team. Even when you combine all its effects, it currently threatens just 19 percent of the species on the list, the team reports. 

So add to that Robert's prescription of  a " ..... mind-boggling amount of manufacturing, building, and retrofitting. Multiple solar and wind gigafactories would be built every year. Renewables would cover every open surface"  

Of course, the alternative of doing nothing is much worse.   A recent article by David Spratt, author of Climate Code Red, puts the possible futures in perspective

 

Not going to zero emissions would be worse in the short term: other recent work shows warming would be 2.2-2.4°C by 2050 if we continue on the current high-emissions path.  And it would be disastrously worse not to go to zero emission very fast, due to the longer-term impacts: continuing on the current high-emissions trajectory would bring warming of 4.1–5°C by 2100.

Nevertheless,  Spratt, points out that even if we went to zero emissions tomorrow, we would be unlikely to avoid two degrees,

Thus, without solar radiation management (replacing anthropogenic aerosols from fossil fuel use with anthropogenic aerosols spread from planes or fired into the atmosphere) it will be difficult to avoid 2°C no matter what CO2 emissions path we take, and all but impossible not to overshoot 1.5°C by at least a third. It is not yet clear that there is demonstrable clear net environmental benefit from solar radiation management, and we should only do it if that is the case. But in not doing it, we need to be honest about what will be lost and what further tipping points may be crossed.

(Speaking of tipping points,  I suppose its worth pointing out here that a recent study suggests that 1.5 is likely to be the trigger to the beginning of the permafrost melt..  

      Roberts makes a good argument, but it contains a hidden premise.  It may be true that all of the things he mentions, nuclear plants, more dams, transmission lines crisscrossing the country will be needed, if we are to stop CO2 emissions,  and we are to continue to live a high consumption, high energy lifestyle.     But maybe its that lifestyle itself that is the problem.  Not just. for the climate.

 We want a functioning ecosystem.  We want to keep temperatures down.  And we want to continue our high consumption high energy lifestyle.  

We want all three.

But ,  perhaps Roberts is right.   We can't have all three.   

So, how about that lifestyle?

But how much energy do we really need?   Here is an interesting exploration of energy poverty and energy decadence

Peeing in the punch bowl?

Everybody's funny

Now you funny too

     - George Thoroughgood    (House Rent Blues)

This is not my beautiful automobile

     -Talking Heads

Greetings

     Well, I planted tomatoes today.  (Thanks to Mark H, for the starts)!    A lot earlier than last year,, but I guess we'll just have to get used to that...           

 Here's a part of a recent Op ed from Dr Oliver Geden (a German policy wonk) in  Nature

"Climate science advisers should use the time before Paris to reassess their role. Do they want to inform policy-makers or support the political process? The climate policy mantra — that time is running out for 2 °C but we can still make it if we act now — is a scientific nonsense. Advisers who shy away from saying so squander their scientific reputations and public trust in climate research"

      The use of the term "scientific" may be a slight exaggeration -  unless you include the "science" of psychology .(  For a fascinating tour through this particular psychological maze , check out this interview  with Per Stoknes   author of "What We Think About When We Try Not To Think About Global Warming".)

          As  Dave Roberts at Vox  explains, it really means that its a alot tougher than it sounds

"Now policymakers are being told that emissions can peak in 2030 and still keep temperature rise under 2°C. To get that result in a modeling scenario, emissions have to fall 6 percent a year, even with large amounts of BECCS thrown in. To find that plausible, one has to imagine all of human society turning on a dime, beginning in 2030, deploying massive amounts of nuclear, bioenergy, wind, and solar, and doing so every year for decades.

Brad Plummer puts it a little stronger

"The climate community has been slow to concede defeat. Back in 2007, the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published a report noting that the world could stay below 2°C — but only if we started cutting emissions immediately. The years passed, countries did little, and emissions kept rising. So, just this month, the IPCC put out a new report saying, OK, not great, but we can still stay under 2°C. We just need to act more drastically and figure out some way to pull carbon dioxide back out of the atmosphere. (Never mind that we still don’t have the technology to do the latter

       After all, many things are "possible", but not likely, given what we have seen of  "human nature", at least so far..   Dave Roberts again.

"It's "possible," yes, but at a certain point that term loses much meaning. Something that would require human beings to quickly and fundamentally change their collective behavior may not violate the laws of physics, but it is unlikely, given what we know about human beings, path dependence, and political dysfunction. This is what I once called the "brutal logic of climate change."

          The result?   Two degrees will remain the goal - but maybe a long term goal, after we take a quick trip to 3 or maybe 4.   Meanwhile Hanson says its crazy to think 2 degrees is a safe level.   And Michael Mann says we'll hit 2 by 2036

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Hope Break:
Here's a group that is serious, and willing to call a spade a spade.  Climate Mobilization  

"Our mission is to initiate a WWII-scale mobilization that protects civilization and the natural world from climate catastrophe. Climate truth is central to this mission. We believe that the climate movement’s greatest and most underutilized strategic asset is the truth: That we are now in a planet-wide climate crisis that threatens civilization and requires an immediate, all-out emergency response."

    See their well researched and  interesting manifesto here  (PDF 50 pages)

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          One of the psychological barriers singled out by Per Stoknes , he calls "Identity".  You might call it "cultural inertia".  We have a difficult time accepting any idea that would would mean a change in our beliefs or behavior.from here

           "We filter news through our professional and cultural identity. We look for information that confirms our existing values and notions, and filter away what challenges them. If people who hold conservative values, for instance, hear from a liberal that the climate is changing, they are less likely to believe the message. Cultural identity overrides the facts. If new information requires us to change our selves, then the information is likely to lose. We experience resistance to calls for change in self-identity."       

         To me, this helps explain the limits we place on what is an acceptable way out.   Our high energy lifestyle, although really only 50 or 60 years old, has  become part of our identity.   Therefore, the only solutions that are acceptable must continue that way of life.  All else is "beyond the pale".  So we are continually hear about "efficiency (or carbon intensity), and renewables (or nuclear power).     And so we are told that through some combination we can save our lifestyle, and our biosystem.
      As for efficiency, this has been discussed here before and I won't burden you with it, now.  Here is an interesting non-traditional perspective - from a physicist, (who argues that efficiency doesn't "save" energy, but , in fact, causes it to be consumed faster !) - Rebound, Backfire and Jevons Paradox  
      As for low carbon energy production techniques, I find these very tempting.  Those of us with a little extra cash are tempted to  put up some solar panels, with a cool Tesla battery for nighttime.   We can be part of the solution, right?    And if its good for one person, it must be a good idea to have a fast massive build out.   What could be simpler?
     In an interesting series of articles in Low Tech Magazine, researchers put together some important data on the "simple" approach.  here and here.    The answers are somewhat counter intuitive.  First and individual in Oregon who installs a Chinese made panel, and battery system, will provide some benefit - but "rather small".  However, a "massive build out" if done too fats, will create a large "carbon burp" .  , or carbon debt.  As the build out will take decades, by the time the  carbon debt is "paid off"   and the benefits accrue to the biosphere, we will be well past 2 degrees.  (see below).  
     
        We seem to find ourselves in the "monkey trap", wanting to hold on to that high energy lifestyle, but by holding on , we make Climate chaos worse.     If we are really serious about avoiding 2 degrees, we should get the message out that we will need to get by with less.   But, saying that is about as popular as peeing in the punch bowl.
       
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from here

"In conclusion, lithium-ion battery storage makes off-grid solar PV less carbon-intensive than conventional grid electricity in most western countries, even if the manufacturing of solar panels in China is taken into account. However, the advantage is rather small, which effects the speed at which solar PV systems can be deployed in a sustainable way. In the previous article, we have seen that the energy and CO2 savings made by the cumulative installed capacity of solar PV systems are cancelled out to some extent by the energy use and CO2 emissions from the production of new installed capacity. For the deployment of solar systems to grow while remaining net greenhouse gas mitigators, they must grow at a rate slower than the inverse of their CO2 payback time. [20, 21, 22]

For solar panels manufactured in China and installed in countries like Germany, the maximum sustainable growth rate is only 16-23% (depending on solar insolation), roughly 3 times lower than the actual annual growth of the industry between 2008 and 2014. If we also take lithium-ion battery storage into account, the maximum sustainable growth rate comes down to 4-14%. In other words, including energy storage further limits the maximum sustainable growth rate of the solar PV industry.

On the other hand, if we would produce solar panels in countries with very clean electricity grids (France, Canada, etc.) and install them in countries with carbon-intensive grids and high solar insolation (China, Australia, etc.), even off-grid systems with lithium-ion batteries would have GHG emissions of only 26-29 gCO2/kWh, which would allow solar PV to grow sustainably by almost 60% per year. This result is remarkable and shows the importance of location if we want solar PV to be a solution instead of a problem. Of course, whether or not there's enough lithium available to deploy battery storage on a large scale, is another question.

Feeling lucky?

Baby, even the losers

get lucky sometimes

   -Tom Petty

Greetings

     It seems that China and Obama have agreed on terms for a Climate Change treaty.   Ignoring for a moment whether Obama a can deliver, one might ask, whether it makes any difference.

      We are all used to the notion of compromise, and a " first step"  or a "step in the right direction".   And using that sort of measuring stick, you could argue that any US and China commitment to reduce emissions is a good thing. 

     Some folks are calling it  a landmark  agreement.   Grist calls it a "game changer"

    It's a little short on details, so it's hard to evaluate.    But let's assume the best.   According to this analysis, China' s 2030 peak is pretty much a given.   The US  reductions are a little more iffy.   So, that's 45% of the emissions . If the rest of the world made  similar commitments, ( also iffy) we might have a 50 - 50 chance of staying under 2 degrees.  

Are you feeling lucky?

      Other analyses may differ. Here's a recent piece from Scientific American where,  Dr Michael Mann shows argues (using an ECS of 3), in order to stay under 2 degrees, "  fossil-fuel burning would essentially have to cease immediately" , and that we will probably hit 2 degrees by 2036 (ECS of 3) or 2046 (ECS of 2.5).  

        Below, Kevin Anderson discusses the underlying question " Is some deal better than no deal"    ?      As you might guess,  he' s not too enamored  with a weak deal, because we'd just end up with " a slightly modified business as usual future heading for temperature rises of 4C or more."

"If we can’t get anywhere, then let’s have the international community be honest about this and admit they have failed to deliver and that the world must prepare for very high levels of climate change. We mustn’t continue to hide our abject failure behind some long, eloquent document absent of substance."

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https://www.chinadialogue.net/article/show/single/en/7473-The-world-is-heading-towards-a-weak-and-irrelevant-deal-on-climate-change

former director of the Tyndall Centre, the UK's leading academic climate change research organisation, talks to chinadialogue's Tom Levitt about climate politics and his hopes for a global deal on reducing emissions by the end of 2015.

Tom Levitt (TL): Is any deal better than no deal at the UN climate summit in Paris next year?

Kevin Anderson (KA): No, I don’t think it is. If no worthwhile deal appears to be forthcoming from Paris then first we have to be open and honest about that, and put in an emergency timetable to bring leaders together again to hammer out a deal. What will happen with a weak deal is targets or frameworks far removed from those necessary to meet the 2C commitments - first agreed by leaders at the Copenhagen Summit in 2009 - will be used to inform the basis of national policies. In practice we’d then likely only achieve a proportion of those and thereby lock in a slightly modified business as usual future heading for temperature rises of 4C or more.

Rather than having a weak and irrelevant deal that would stop the process of significant mitigation for another four or five years, we have to drive a process to bring our leaders back to negotiations. If we can’t get anywhere, then let’s have the international community be honest about this and admit they have failed to deliver and that the world must prepare for very high levels of climate change. We mustn’t continue to hide our abject failure behind some long, eloquent document absent of substance.

TL: How do you see the European Union’s leadership role on climate change?

KA: The EU has not developed internal policies that are in any way consistent with its repeated and expressed goals of avoiding the 2C characterisation of dangerous climate change. The EU is now aiming for what it says is an ambitious target of a 40% reduction in emissions by 2030. That’s far too weak. We need to achieve more than double that for the EU to be making its reasonably fair contribution to a 2C future as outlined by the IPCC. The science and the numbers that come out of the IPCC report in terms of the carbon budget – taking into account a reasonable element of equity - would mean nations and regions like the US, EU and Australia would need to reduce their emissions at a much faster rate than even the EU is considering.

TL: The UK has been seen as a leader on climate change since the passing of the Climate Change Act in 2008. But is it now in danger of ditching or failing to meet its commitments?

KA: To its credit the UK does have carbon budgets, but, unlike the 80% target for 2050 outlined in the Climate Change Act, they are not enshrined in law. The long-term, 2050 targets are irrelevant and worse still misleading in relation to climate change. The only thing that matters is the build-up of greenhouse gases, particularly CO2, in the atmosphere, in other words carbon budgets. The problem with the UK’s 2050 80% target is that it allows us to think that we can do things tomorrow that we failed to do today. If no agreement is reached in Paris next year, there may be increasing pressure on the government to repeal the Act itself. And even if the Act remains, I think the influence of the Committee on Climate Change may be reduced, and there is a risk that it could be abolished.

TL: If we were to have a realistic chance of meeting the 2C target, what expectation would that put on China?

KA: If we look at the IPCC's carbon budgets for a reasonable chance of staying within a 2C framing of climate change, then the message is fairly stark for Annex 1 countries, i.e. the US, Europe, etc. They have to eliminate fossil fuel use from their energy system early in the 2030s. For non-Annex 1 countries, including and dominated by China, they would need to eliminate all fossil fuels from their energy system by 2050, but also they need to peak their emissions by the mid 2020s and, by 2030, be delivering decarbonisation rates of at least 10% reductions year on year. Together these give a good chance of staying below a 2C rise in temperature.

A big point for China is the issue of infrastructure development. When China constructs airports, ports, roads or buildings it is currently locking in very high energy-use and hence carbon futures, as even China will not be able to transition to low-carbon energy sources at sufficient rate. The other issue is trying to overcome the way the West frames success and progress. China has a very different philosophical and cultural background to that of the West so has real scope to think differently about what it means to be successful. The model we’ve developed in the West is dominated by consumption – that’s how we repeatedly measure success – let us hope China can propose alternatives.

TL: How far can the policies promoted by The New Climate Economy report and others like them take us in reducing GHG emissions and tackling climate change?

KA: The first thing to bear in mind is that these reports are primarily about greening growth. They are not about climate stabilisation. That’s an important distinction. They are genuinely interested in how we can green the process of economic development, but they are not thinking about what the science says about carbon budgets and keeping to the 2C target. That’s a real danger because there is an assumption that if we green growth that’s adequate. But if the temperature keeps rising then the implications of a rapidly changed climate will, overall, play out negatively in terms of economic development.

These reports are authored by well meaning people trying to figure out how far you can push the current socio-economic and political systems to address climate change. The fact is that the speed and depth of mitigation now required for 2C begs fundamental questions of the current systems. Perhaps these systems could have addressed climate change if they’d responded appropriately at the time of the first IPCC report almost a quarter of a century ago. But in 2014 our emissions are 60-65% higher than they were in 1990 and are showing no signs of coming down in the next few years.

TL: Do you still have faith in the UN process or is it time to pursue alternatives like bilateral deals?

KA: I am all for continuing with the UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) and related processes, I think we need to be pushing them as hard as we can. But there are other things we should do alongside them. The UK’s Climate Change Act was a separate process, outside of the UNFCCC, as were the EU negotiations. We already have a mix of approaches. It’s a mistake to think that these can’t be designed to complement the UN negotiations. Ultimately however, if you are serious about climate change as a global problem then a global framework is necessary to understand the collective implications of everyone’s efforts. It is foolish and naïve to decry the UN process assuming you could substitute it for smaller, bilateral or other negotiations – these are necessary, but only as a complement to the UN process.

TL: Why do you think that message about 2C isn’t getting through to policymakers?

KA: Those of us in the scientific community who have been developing emissions scenarios and pathways have not served the policy-makers or civil society well. We have collectively adopted the approach of the New Climate Economy authors in trying to second-guess how hard we can push the political and economic system. It is our job as academics to stand outside of such constraints and say if the international community wants to meet it targets of 2C then these are the necessary carbon budgets and these are the range of accompanying emissions pathways. We should stand our ground as independent, objective analysts, much more than we have.

By trying to serve the political system in a way that is well meaning, we have ultimately undermined a robust understanding of the severity of the situation we have got ourselves into. It’s led us to the point today where we have squandered any reasonable opportunity of an evolutionary transition to 2°C, and now face revolutionary changes to our energy systems. The scale and timeframe of such systemic re-writing of energy supply, demand and distribution inevitably raises fundamental questions about the structure of contemporary society. 

We have squandered any reasonable chance of keeping within 2C of climate change unless we take draconian action, says climate scientist Kevin Anderson

The former director of the Tyndall Centre, the UK’s leading academic climate change research organisation, talks to chinadialogue’s Tom Levitt about climate politics and his hopes for a global deal on reducing emissions by the end of 2015.

…
KA: The EU has not developed internal policies that are in any way consistent with its repeated and expressed goals of avoiding the 2C characterisation of dangerous climate change. The EU is now aiming for what it says is an ambitious target of a 40% reduction in emissions by 2030. That’s far too weak. We need to achieve more than double that for the EU to be making its reasonably fair contribution to a 2C future as outlined by the IPCC. The science and the numbers that come out of the IPCC report in terms of the carbon budget – taking into account a reasonable element of equity – would mean nations and regions like the US, EU and Australia would need to reduce their emissions at a much faster rate than even the EU is considering.

TL: The UK has been seen as a leader on climate change since the passing of the Climate Change Act in 2008. But is it now in danger of ditching or failing to meet its commitments?

KA: To its credit the UK does have carbon budgets, but, unlike the 80% target for 2050 outlined in the Climate Change Act, they are not enshrined in law. The long-term, 2050 targets are irrelevant and worse still misleading in relation to climate change. The only thing that matters is the build-up of greenhouse gases, particularly CO2, in the atmosphere, in other words carbon budgets. The problem with the UK’s 2050 80% target is that it allows us to think that we can do things tomorrow that we failed to do today. If no agreement is reached in Paris next year, there may be increasing pressure on the government to repeal the Act itself. And even if the Act remains, I think the influence of the Committee on Climate Change may be reduced, and there is a risk that it could be abolished.

TL: If we were to have a realistic chance of meeting the 2C target, what expectation would that put on China?

KA: If we look at the IPCC’s carbon budgets for a reasonable chance of staying within a 2C framing of climate change, then the message is fairly stark for Annex 1 countries, i.e. the US, Europe, etc. They have to eliminate fossil fuel use from their energy system early in the 2030s. For non-Annex 1 countries, including and dominated by China, they would need to eliminate all fossil fuels from their energy system by 2050, but also they need to peak their emissions by the mid 2020s and, by 2030, be delivering decarbonisation rates of at least 10% reductions year on year. Together these give a good chance of staying below a 2C rise in temperature.

A big point for China is the issue of infrastructure development. When China constructs airports, ports, roads or buildings it is currently locking in very high energy-use and hence carbon futures, as even China will not be able to transition to low-carbon energy sources at sufficient rate. The other issue is trying to overcome the way the West frames success and progress. China has a very different philosophical and cultural background to that of the West so has real scope to think differently about what it means to be successful. The model we’ve developed in the West is dominated by consumption – that’s how we repeatedly measure success – let us hope China can propose alternatives.

TL: How far can the policies promoted by The New Climate Economy report and others like them take us in reducing GHG emissions and tackling climate change?

KA: The first thing to bear in mind is that these reports are primarily about greening growth. They are not about climate stabilisation. That’s an important distinction. They are genuinely interested in how we can green the process of economic development, but they are not thinking about what the science says about carbon budgets and keeping to the 2C target. That’s a real danger because there is an assumption that if we green growth that’s adequate. But if the temperature keeps rising then the implications of a rapidly changed climate will, overall, play out negatively in terms of economic development.

These reports are authored by well meaning people trying to figure out how far you can push the current socio-economic and political systems to address climate change. The fact is that the speed and depth of mitigation now required for 2C begs fundamental questions of the current systems. Perhaps these systems could have addressed climate change if they’d responded appropriately at the time of the first IPCC report almost a quarter of a century ago. But in 2014 our emissions are 60-65% higher than they were in 1990 and are showing no signs of coming down in the next few years.

TL: Do you still have faith in the UN process or is it time to pursue alternatives like bilateral deals?

KA: I am all for continuing with the UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) and related processes, I think we need to be pushing them as hard as we can. But there are other things we should do alongside them. The UK’s Climate Change Act was a separate process, outside of the UNFCCC, as were the EU negotiations. We already have a mix of approaches. It’s a mistake to think that these can’t be designed to complement the UN negotiations. Ultimately however, if you are serious about climate change as a global problem then a global framework is necessary to understand the collective implications of everyone’s efforts. It is foolish and naïve to decry the UN process assuming you could substitute it for smaller, bilateral or other negotiations – these are necessary, but only as a complement to the UN process.

TL: Why do you think that message about 2C isn’t getting through to policymakers?

KA: Those of us in the scientific community who have been developing emissions scenarios and pathways have not served the policy-makers or civil society well. We have collectively adopted the approach of the New Climate Economy authors in trying to second-guess how hard we can push the political and economic system. It is our job as academics to stand outside of such constraints and say if the international community wants to meet it targets of 2C then these are the necessary carbon budgets and these are the range of accompanying emissions pathways. We should stand our ground as independent, objective analysts, much more than we have.

By trying to serve the political system in a way that is well meaning, we have ultimately undermined a robust understanding of the severity of the situation we have got ourselves into. It’s led us to the point today where we have squandered any reasonable opportunity of an evolutionary transition to 2°C, and now face revolutionary changes to our energy systems. The scale and timeframe of such systemic re-writing of energy supply, demand and distribution inevitably raises fundamental questions about the structure of contemporary society.

Saying goodbye to 2

Breaking up is hard to do

  - Neil Sadaka

Why can't we
 just go on as 3

       -Jefferson Airplane

Greetings

       Things are looking tough for keeping temperatures below an additional 2 degrees.  We either deny the disease or the cure.    We are like the cancer patient that really doesn't want to get chemo.   Maybe herbs will work? 

      The problem seems to be that the cure is either  ten years of recession  (chemo), or "green growth" assuming  miraculous new technologies (herbs).

"...the IPCC figured that staying below 2°C would depend on a series of long-shot maneuvers: all nations would need to act right this second, ramp up wind and solar and nuclear power massively, and figure out still-nascent technologies to capture and bury emissions from coal plants. Crucially, we'd also have to invent some method of pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere — something that may never work on a large scale

      Anyone know what the "carbon budget" is for 3 degrees?  

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Two Degrees - How the world failed on climate change

Brad Plummer


 It  was the early 1990s. Climate scientists had long known that humans were warming up the planet. But politicians were just beginning to grasp that it would take a huge coordinated effort to get nations to burn fewer fossil fuels and avoid sharp temperature increases in the decades ahead.

Those policymakers needed a common goal — a way to say, Here’s how bad things will get and This is what we need to do to stop it. And that posed a dilemma. No one could really agree on how much global warming was unacceptable. How high did the seas need to rise before we had a serious problem? How much heat was too much?

Around this time, an advisory council of scientists in Germany proposed a stunningly simple way to think about climate change. Look, they reasoned, human civilization hasn’t been around all that long. And for the last 12,000 years, Earth’s climate has fluctuated within a narrow band. So, to be on the safe side, we should prevent global average temperatures from rising more than 2° Celsius (or 3.6° Fahrenheit) above what they were just before the dawn of industrialization.

Critics grumbled that the 2°C limit seemed arbitrary or overly simplistic. But scientists were already compiling evidence that the risks of global warming became especially daunting somewhere above the 2°C threshold: rapid sea-level rise, the risk of crop failure, the collapse of coral reefs. And policymakers loved the idea of a simple, easily digestible target. So it stuck.

The idea that the world can stay below 2°C looks increasingly delusional

By 2009, nearly every government in the world had endorsed the 2°C limit— global warming beyond that level was deemed "dangerous." And so, every year, the world’s leaders meet at UN climate conferences to discuss policies and emissions cuts that they hope will keep us below 2°C. Climate experts churn out endless papers on how we can adapt to 2°C of warming (or less).

Two decades later, there’s just one major problem with this picture. The idea that the world can stay below 2°C looks increasingly delusional.

Consider: the Earth’s average temperature has already risen 0.8°C since the 19th century. And if you look at the current rapid rise in global greenhouse-gas emissions, we’ll likely put enough carbon in the atmosphere by mid-century to surpass the 2°C limit — and go past the 4°C limit by century's end. That’s well above anything once deemed "dangerous." Getting back on track for 2°C would, at this point, entail the sort of drastic emissions cuts usually associated with economic calamities, like the collapse of the Soviet Union or the 2008 financial crisis. And we’d have to repeat those cuts for decades.

The climate community has been slow to concede defeat. Back in 2007, the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published a report noting that the world could stay below 2°C — but only if we started cutting emissions immediately. The years passed, countries did little, and emissions kept rising. So, just this month, the IPCC put out a new report saying, OK, not great, but we can still stay under 2°C. We just need to act more drastically and figure out some way to pull carbon dioxide back out of the atmosphere. (Never mind that we still don’t have the technology to do the latter.)

We're on track for 4°C of global warming — and 2°C is increasingly unlikely

Predicted temperature increases under various emissions scenarios:

On our current course, the world will put enough carbon-dioxide in the atmosphere by mid-century to breach the 2°C target.

Emissions would need to decline dramatically (and then go negative) for a good shot at staying below 2°C.

Source: Sanford et al. (2014)



"At some point, scientists will have to declare that it’s game over for the 2°C target," says Oliver Geden, a climate policy analyst at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs. "But they haven’t yet. Because nobody knows what will happen if they call this thing off." The 2°C target was one of the few things that everyone at global climate talks could agree on. If the goal turns out to be impossible, people might just stop trying altogether.

Recently, then, some scientists and policymakers have been taking a fresh look at whether the 2°C limit is still the best way to think about climate change. Is this simple goal actually making it harder to prepare for the warming that lies ahead? Is it time to consider other approaches to climate policy? And if 2°C really is so dangerous, what do we do when it’s out of reach?

The murky origins of the 2°C limit

Back in the 1970s, climate scientists understood that the carbon dioxide that humans had been emitting since the Industrial Revolution — from cars, power plants, factories — was intensifying the greenhouse effect that warms the planet. They also knew that man-made emissions were increasing each year as the global economy grew.

So how hot would it get? Early calculations suggested that if we doubled the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere over pre-industrial levels, the Earth would warm somewhere between 1.5°C and 4.5°C. In the decades since, scientists have amassed more evidence for this estimate of "climate sensitivity," but they haven't really narrowed the range.

The next step was to figure out how much warming humans could safely tolerate. There were a variety of ideas for defining "dangerous" interference with the Earth’s climate in the early 1990s. Maybe we should try to limit the rate of warming per decade, for instance.

Eventually, the 2°C limit won out — endorsed by, among others, a council of German scientists advising Angela Merkel, the nation’s environment minister at the time. Their thinking: human civilization had developed in a period when sea levels remained stable and agriculture could flourish. Staying within that bound — and preventing global average temperatures from rising more than 2°C — seemed like a reasonable rule of thumb.

"We said that, at the very least, it would be better not to depart from the conditions under which our species developed"

"We said that, at the very least, it would be better not to depart from the conditions under which our species developed," recalls Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, one of the scientists on that German advisory panel who helped devise the 2°C limit. "Otherwise we’d be pushing the whole climate system outside the range we’ve adapted to."

Over time, researchers gravitated toward this limit. An influential 2001report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change detailed a number of reasons to worry about climate change: increased heat waves and storms, the threat of mass extinctions, severe economic losses. Many of these so-called "reasons of concern" were projected to get much worse as global warming climbed past 2°C.

Now, there are good arguments that the 2°C limit is arbitrary. Any limit would be. For instance, subsequent research has found that plenty of worrisome impacts actually happen well before we hit 2°C: Arctic sea ice could collapse, coral reefs could die off, tiny island nations like Tuvalu could get swallowed by the rising seas. Conversely, other worrisome changes, such as crop damage in the United States, might not happen until we go above the 2°C threshold. Deciding where to draw this line is a political judgment as much as a scientific one. (To put it another way, no climate scientist thinks we'll be totally fine if we hit 1.9°C of warming but totally doomed if we hit 2.1°C.)

Economists, meanwhile, have often criticized the 2°C limit for not taking costs into account. After all, we don’t just burn oil, gas, and coal for fun. We use them to power our cars and homes and factories. And cutting back won't be painless. William Nordhaus, an economist at Yale, has argued that we should aim for a temperature limit where the costs of reducing fossil fuels matches the climate benefits. In his book The Climate Casino, he pegs this limit at 2.5°C or possibly higher, depending on how easily we can switch to clean energy sources.

Still, despite the criticisms, the 2°C limit has maintained its dominant position for more than a decade — in part because it created an easy focal point for international negotiations. Many policy proposals start by assuming the need to stay below 2°C and then work backward to hash out how each country should cut emissions. The European Union’s energy policies consistently reference this limit. The Obama administration’s upcoming rules to restrict carbon-dioxide emissions from US coal plants can be traced back to a pledge President Obama made in 2009 to help stay below 2°C.

That raises a question: what will happen if it becomes apparent that the 2°C limit is out of reach? Will we settle on a new limit? Or just give up altogether?

Why the 2°C limit looks increasingly impossible

Here’s how climate experts often think about the 2°C limit. Estimates of climate sensitivity tell us that the Earth will eventually warm somewhere between 1.5°C and 4.5°C if we double the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere over pre-industrial levels. And we’re almost halfway to doubling.

So, if we want reasonable odds of staying below 2°C, there’s only so much more additional carbon dioxide we can put in the atmosphere. That’s our "carbon budget" — around 485 billion metric tons.

There’s not a lot of wiggle room left. Humans added the equivalent of 10 billion metric tons of carbon into the atmosphere in 2012, and that amount is rising every year, as fast-growing countries like China and India build new factories, drive new cars, and burn lots of fossil fuels. At current rates, the world will exhaust its carbon budget in roughly three decades, setting the stage for 2°C of warming. (If climate sensitivity turns out to be low, that only buys us an extra decade or so.)

If we want to stay within the budget and avoid 2°C, then, our annual emissions need to start declining each year. Older, dirtier coal plants would need to get replaced with cleaner wind or solar or nuclear plants, say. Or gas-guzzling SUVs would need to get replaced with new low-carbon electric cars. But the longer we put this off, the harder it gets — the carbon budget gets smaller, and there are more coal plants and SUVs to replace.

The longer we wait on cutting emissions, the harder it gets

If we want a reasonable shot at staying below 2°C, there’s only so much more carbon-dioxide we can load into the atmosphere. If the world had started back in 2005, emissions could have decreased gently each year. If we wait until, say, 2020, the cuts have to be much sharper to catch up.

By now, countries have delayed action for so long that the necessary emissions cuts will have to be extremely sharp. In April 2014, the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concludedthat if we want to stay below the 2°C limit, global greenhouse-gas emissions would have to decline between 1.3 percent and 3.1 percent each year, on average, between 2010 and 2050.

"If you’re serious about 2°C, the rates of change are so significant, it begs the way we see the world"

To put that in perspective, global emissions declined by just 1 percent for a single year after the 2008 financial crisis, during a brutal recession when factories and buildings around the world were idling. We'd potentially have to triple that pace of cuts, and sustain it year after year.

Some climate experts are skeptical that countries can do this while maintaining their historical rates of economic growth. The fastest that any country has ever managed to decarbonize its economy without suffering a crushing recession was France, when it spent billions to scale up its nuclear program between 1980 and 1985. That was a gargantuan feat — emissions fell 4.8 percent per year — but the country only sustained it for a five-year stretch.

To stay within the 2°C budget, every country would have to keep up that pace for decades, decarbonizing not just power plants, but factories, and homes, and cars, and airplanes. That goes far beyond even the most ambitious climate proposals currently being considered, including Obama's big plan to curb emissions from US coal plants.

"If you’re serious about 2°C, the rates of change are so significant that it begs the way we see the world. That’s what people aren’t prepared to embrace," says Kevin Anderson, a climate scientist at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Research. "Essentially you’d have to start asking questions about our current society and how we develop and grow."

Anderson, for one, has argued that wealthy countries may need to sacrifice economic growth, at least temporarily, to stay below 2°C. In December, the Tyndall Centre hosted a conference on "radical emissions reductions" that offered some eye-popping suggestions: Perhaps every adult in wealthy countries could get a personal "carbon budget" tracked through an electronic credit card. Once they hit their limit, no more vacations or road trips. Other attendees suggested shaming campaigns against celebrities with outsized homes and yachts.

Not everyone is ready to go radical. The IPCC’s latest report suggested that an ambitious push on clean energy might only put a modest dent in global economic growth rates (a mere 0.06 percentage points per year). That's partly because the cost of solar and wind power has been dropping far faster than anyone expected.

But even when you account for that, the IPCC figured that staying below 2°C would depend on a series of long-shot maneuvers: all nations would need to act right this second, ramp up wind and solar and nuclear power massively, and figure out still-nascent technologies to capture and bury emissions from coal plants. Crucially, we'd also have to invent some method of pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere — something that may never work on a large scale.

If any of those assumptions falter, the IPCC noted, costs start rising. And, as the years go by and the world’s nations put off cutting emissions, the odds of staying below 2°C look vanishingly unlikely.

"Ten years ago, it was possible to model a path to 2°C without all these heroic assumptions," says Peter Frumhoff of the Union of Concerned Scientists. "But because we've dallied for so long, that's no longer true." In February, Frumhoff co-authored a paper in Nature Climate Change arguing that policymakers need to take the prospect of breaching the 2°C limit far more seriously than they're currently doing. Otherwise, we'll find ourselves unprepared for what comes next.

What’s so bad about 3°C or 4°C?

If 2°C looks increasingly out of reach, then it’s worth looking at what happens if we blow past that and go to, say, 3°C or 4°C.

Four degrees (or 7.2° Fahrenheit) may not sound like much. But the world was only about 4°C to 7°C cooler, on average, during the last ice age, when large parts of Europe and the United States were covered by glaciers. The IPCC concluded that changing the world’s temperature in the opposite direction could bring similarly drastic changes, such as "substantial species extinctions," or irreversibly destabilizing Greenland's massive ice sheet.

In 2013, researchers with the World Bank took a look at the science on projected effects of 4°C warming and were appalled by what they found. A growing number of studies suggest that global food production could take a big hit under 3°C or 4°C of warming. Poorer countries like Bangladesh, Egypt, Vietnam, and parts of Africa could see large tracts of farmland made unusable by rising seas.

But what seemed to unnerve the authors of the World Bank report most was all of the stuff we don’t know. Most climate models currently make predictions in a linear fashion. That is, they basically assume that the impacts of 4°C of warming will be twice as bad as those of 2°C. But that might be wrong. Impacts may interact with each other in unpredictable ways. Current agriculture models, they noted, don’t have a good sense for what will happen to crops if heat waves, droughts, new pests and diseases all combine together.

"If we keep assuming we can stay below 2°C as a matter of course, then we aren’t being honest about the adaptation challenges"

Here’s an analogy that Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, who helped compile some of the research for the World Bank, likes to use. "Take the human body. If your temperature rises 2°C, you have a significant fever. If it rises 4°C or 6°C you can die. It’s not a linear change. You’re pushing a complex system outside the range it’s adapted to. And all our assessments indicate that once you do that, the system’s resilience gets stretched thin."

Perhaps most significantly, the World Bank report wasn’t even sure if humanity could adapt to a 4°C world. At the moment, the large lender is helping poorer countries prepare for global warming by building seawalls, conducting crop research, and improving freshwater management. But, as an internal review found, most of these efforts are being done with relatively small temperature increases in mind. The bank wasn’t planning for 3°C or 4°C of global warming — because no one really knew what that might entail.

"[G]iven that uncertainty remains about the full nature and scale of impacts," the report said, "there is also no certainty that adaptation to a 4°C world is possible." And its conclusion was stark: "The projected 4°C warming simply must not be allowed to occur."

Only very recently have scientists even started trying to fill in those gaps in knowledge. Here’s a telling anecdote: back in 2011, the European Commission put out a call for papers exploring the impacts of a 2°C rise in temperature. Two years later, the call went out for impacts of warming greater than 2°C. What was once unthinkable is quickly becoming thinkable.

"If we keep assuming we can stay below 2°C as a matter of course, then we aren’t being honest about the adaptation challenges," says Frumhoff of the Union of Concerned Scientists. For example, he notes, California might need to completely overhaul its water-planning efforts for the coming century if 3°C or 4°C becomes a serious possibility.

But so far, these sorts of planning efforts are scant — because few policymakers are prepared to admit that we're going beyond 2°C.

The frantic search for alternatives to 2°C

The impossibility of staying below 2°C could also shake up the politics of climate change. After all, the UN climate talks are structured around this overarching goal. What will happen if everyone realizes it’s unreachable?

Last year, Geden, the German Institute researcher, broached this topic in a paper titled "Modifying the 2°C Target." Then, in October, 11 researchers at the Tyndall Centre published a paper in Climate Policyexploring further alternatives to the 2°C limit. Here are a few options on offer:

Geoengineering: We could try to stay below 2°C through last-ditch "geoengineering" efforts. Some scientists have pointed out that we could, in theory, cool the Earth by putting sulfate particles into the atmosphere that reflect the sun. The downside? This could have all sorts of gruesome side effects, such as messing up global rainfall patterns. And it wouldn't alleviate other dire impacts of our carbon-dioxide emissions, such as ocean acidification.

Accept (slightly) higher temperatures: Alternatively, policymakers could concede that 2°C is unworkable and instead work to stay below a slightly higher limit like 2.5°C or 3°C. This sounds easy: we simply accept that we’re going to face higher climate risks and try to adapt. And even if 3°C of warming is riskier than 2°C, it's less risky than 4°C.

But there’s a hitch. As Geden points out, relaxing the limit might make global climate talks even less productive than they already are. The temperature limits themselves would suddenly be open to negotiation and endless squabbling. The Tyndall researchers worried that this could allow the world to drift into a situation where 4°C or 6°C is accepted as inevitable.

Abandoning the 2°C limit might make international climate talks even less productive

Reframe the problem: Alternatively, the world could rephrase its goals in more appealing terms. Some experts have argued that 2°C was never a particularly useful limit because it was so difficult to translate into action. The University of Colorado’s Roger Pielke Jr. has suggested that we could focus on easier-to-grasp goals like increasing the proportion of carbon-free energy that the world uses — say, going from 13 percent today to 90 percent. That would achieve similar ends, but it’s a vastly different way of framing the problem.

"It puts you in a different intellectual space, where your answers are focused on the deployment of vast amounts of clean energy," Pielke told me earlier this year. "It’s a politics of possibility and opportunity where innovation is at the center. We may end up no better off than we are now. But the path we’re on now is going nowhere."

Similarly, David Victor of the University of California, San Diego has long argued that starting with an agreed-upon temperature limit and then brow-beating countries into adopt the required cuts is doomed to failure. Instead, it might be more productive for countries to focus on taking individual steps on climate and slowly building up toward an agreed-upon target.

In their Climate Policy paper exploring these alternatives, the Tyndall Centre researchers noted that all of the approaches carry drawbacks — reframing the problem, for instance, could divert attention away from the dangers of higher temperatures. Ultimately, they couldn’t let go of the idea that recommitting to the 2°C limit might just be the "least unattractive course of action." But, they noted, the world would have to take the problem much, much more seriously than it's currently doing.

Whatever the right answer here is, the authors wrote, it’s at least something that needs to be discussed more fully. "There’s a real danger that the 2°C goal will become discredited," says the Tyndall Centre’s Tim Rayner, one of the co-authors of the paper. "We think it’s important to begin the debate before that eventuality hits."




http://www.vox.com/2014/4/22/5551004/two-degrees

Plans B and C

Slip sliding away

-Paul Simon

I have my dreams like everybody else

But they're out of reach

I said, right out of reach

-Pretenders (Mystery Achievement)

Greetings

    Its becoming more clear that we are loosing control of the climate.   Not only are we unwilling to impose limits on CO2,  we are entering the tipping point era, where other feedback systems take the control out of our hands.

    A recent report on the arctic,  asserts that the ice free water - and the albino feedback- is now responsible for 25% of warming.  So, even assuming emissions stopped, and the air was scrubbed of excess CO2, this would continue to warm.

 .  Or put another way - remember all that stuff we didn't want to do, because the cost was too high?     

 Well..... add 25% 

  NASA study 

To measure the effect, Ian Eisenman of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, and colleagues turned to data from NASA's CERES satellite. They found that the Arctic Ocean's albedo – the fraction of sunlight it reflects back into space – dropped from 52 per cent in 1979 to 48 per cent in 2011. That may not seem like much, but it means a big rise in energy absorbed – equal to 25 per cent of that trapped by the rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide over the same period.

     Meanwhile, while  Hanson argues that a 1 degree target is more appropriate, and a common sense appraisal of the current weather anomalies make it clear that we have already gone too far.  Things are happening a head of schedule.    In Australia, they are experiencing the heat waves predicted for 2030.  See here .  Governments are already having to make hard choices about how to deal with the current climate.  See here for an interesting discussion of abandoning the coast of England and concentrating on saving London -  after their brutal winter storms.  

                At the same time, many climate scientists  appear to agree that 2 degrees is unachievable.    In a recent opinion piece in Nature Climate Change, climate scientists suggest  that while a focus on reducing emissions is needed, we can't ignore, the facts of current and future changes.

"Calling for swift and deep reductions in emissions, although essential, is not sufficient," said the scientists. "Confronting and managing the risks of high-magnitude warming will require a science-based policy narrative that honestly communicates these risks, accounts for potential policy failures and climate emergencies that may occur, and helps society weigh the adoption of mitigation and adaptation options that themselves pose significant risks, costs and uncertainties."

    They suggest that a singled minded  focus on 2 degrees, may blind us to the realities.  National Geographic 

Climate scientists first proposed the 2°C target in the mid-1990s as a way of giving substance to the commitment nations had made to address climate change at the 1992 Earth Summit at Rio de Janeiro. It was not until 2009 in Copenhagen, after the 15th annual session of negotiations around that goal failed to reach a binding treaty, that nations instead signed on to an accord pledging to work toward the 2°C limit.

Since then, the UCS scientists and colleagues wrote in their new commentary, "the foundation on which the 2°C target was built has steadily eroded." Not only have global carbon emissions continued to rise 3 percent a year, but the science has made more clear that human populations and natural systems face serious risk of substantial climate damage at warming less than 2°C, they said.

The scientists didn't spell out a different target in the new commentary, but instead, a different approach. They endorsed an idea borrowed from national security and defense planning, a framework for "climate security," that has been proposed by scientists at the London-based nonprofit EG3. This "ABC" approach says policymakers should aim for an "ambitious" target for reducing carbon emissions, while "building" for, or adapting for, greater warming than targeted, and engaging in "contingency" planning for future climate emergency.

Such an approach, the scientists said, would better communicate to the public the magnitude of climate risks the planet faces. It might increase public willingness to make necessary trade-offs, for example, to accept local impact on wildlife and ecosystems from the siting of renewable energy projects, such as wind turbines and large-scale solar plants, or to consider the risks of geoengineering for forced climate cooling. (See related "Video: The Tortoise and the Solar Plant" and "Mojave Mirrors: World's Largest Solar Plant Ready to Shine" and "Pictures: Seven Emergency Climate Fixes.")

The authors said it might also motivate "difficult but much-needed dialogue and planning" for the drastic measures needed to address "truly disruptive impacts." Two examples: relocation of development from floodplains around London after 2060 and the creation of water-efficient corn varieties for Africa, would require planning and investment now, they said. (See related "Quiz: What You Don't Know About Food, Water, and Energy.")