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. 

I wish I had a river I could skate away on

Little darling, I feel that ice is slowly melting
Little darling, it seems like years since it's been clear

   - The Beatles, 

Meltdown expected, the wheat is growin' thin
Engines stop running, but I have no fear
'Cause London is drowning, and I, I live by the river

   -The Clash

Dates to remember

September 4 CNN Candidate Town Hall on Climate

September 20-27  Climate Strike

Greetings

It was about 100 degrees here yesterday. 

And the Amazon, Siberia, and Indonesia are all on fire 

 So, maybe its a good to think about ice.   The melting ice in Greenland is getting a lot of attention, with good reason

Glaciers just aren't acting the way they should. see here  and here

Now, however, a team of researchers has figured out how to directly probe these melt processes and has tested the method out on one glacier in Alaska. What it found, published this week in Science, is worrying: the glacier is melting far faster than current theories had suggested “The melt rates that we measured were about 10 to 100 times larger than what theory predicted,” says lead study author David A. Sutherland, an oceanographer at the University of Ore

But it's not just the arctic .  In fact, Antarctica is also melting rapidly.

GRADUAL ANTARCTIC SEA ICE INCREASES [HAVE BEEN] FOLLOWED BY DECREASES AT RATES FAR EXCEEDING THE RATES SEEN IN THE ARCTIC

“A newly completed 40-y record of satellite observations is used to quantify changes in Antarctic sea ice coverage since the late 1970s. Sea ice spreads over vast areas and has major impacts on the rest of the climate system, reflecting solar radiation and restricting ocean/atmosphere exchanges. The satellite record reveals that a gradual, decades-long overall increase in Antarctic sea ice extents reversed in 2014, with subsequent rates of decrease in 2014–2017 far exceeding the more widely publicized decay rates experienced in the Arctic. The rapid decreases reduced the Antarctic sea ice extents to their lowest values in the 40-y record, both on a yearly average basis (record low in 2017) and on a monthly basis (record low in February 2017).”

Of course one effect of ice melting is sea level rise.   

Here's a recent presentation on sea-level rise, by John Englander

He makes the point that the melting of the glaciers is now unstoppable.  There is so much heat in the ocean and the air that it is just a matter of time before all melts and the sea rises 120 meters.  We just don't know when. 

 Portland has an elevation of 50 feet, less than 20 meters, Salem is 154 around 30 meters. 

He says he expects around 1 meter by 2050. But who knows?  It moves by fits and starts, slow for a while fast for a while. 

    

And here's a nice summary from Counterpunch

Englander’s key points:

1. Sea level never rises smoothly. It’s not a straight line or a curved line. There are inflection points when it suddenly rises. So far, that has not been experienced. In fact, over the past 100 years, temps are up 1°C and sea-level rise is only up 4 inches.

2. Sea level has been stable, at current levels, throughout human recorded history for 5,000+ years.

3. Thus, it’s very difficult for people to imagine a change in sea level, especially after 5,000 years of rock-solid stability.

Today’s big problem: Sea levels are now (today) at an early stage of exponential growth, meaning, the rate of growth is doubling, cycle-by-cycle, for the first time in known history. Based upon satellite recordings since 1993: sea-level rise 1993-98 +1.5MM/yr. 1998-2011 +3.2MM/yr. 2011-2018 5.0MM/yr. That’s nearly double every cycle, which is an exponential function, and it’s trouble, very-very big trouble.

Exponential.   As Professor Al Bartlett has said

The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function."

So, suppose sea level rise were to double every ten years.  So 5 MM in 2020.  10 MM in 2030. etc   By 2080 its 3 meters. 2100 its 12 meters. Portland goes under in 2110, when it hits 24 M

Melting floating ice doesn't affect sea level, but does increase the amount of blue water.  A new study from Scripps tells us the likely impact

Losing the reflective power of Arctic sea ice will lead to warming equivalent to one trillion tons of CO2 and advance the 2ºC threshold by 25 years. Any rational policy would make preventing this a top climate priority for world leaders,” said Ramanathan, a professor of atmospheric and climate sciences at Scripps.

 2 degrees 25 years sooner than currently predicted?  Hmmm...  

This means that after the blue ocean event, temperatures rise quickly.   A recent study has linked sea ice melting to abrupt climate change such as a spike in temperature .

..from this they determined that sea ice changes were massively significant in past climate change events in the North Atlantic. These periods, called Dansgaard-Oeschger events2, are some of the fastest and largest abrupt climate changes ever recorded. During some of these events, Greenland temperatures are likely to have increased by 16 degrees Celsius in less than a decade.

 Here's one scenario that incorporates a blue ocean event.  see here (PDF)

  2030–2050: Emissions peak in 2030, and start to fall consistent with an 80 percent reduction in fossil-fuel energy intensity by 2100 compared to 2010 energy intensity. This leads to warming of 2.4°C by 2050, consistent with the Xu and Ramanathan “baseline-fast” scenario. However, another 0.6°C of warming occurs  taking the total to 3°C by 2050 — due to the activation of a number of carbon-cycle feedbacks and higher levels of ice albedo and cloud feedbacks than current models assume. [It should be noted that this is far from an extreme scenario: the low-probability, high-impact warming (five percent probability) can exceed 3.5–4°C by 2050 in the Xu and Ramanathan scheme.]   

You can track air  temperature  rising here.   As you can see the same issue of exponential curve arises here.

According to this smoothed estimate, the trend — which is where we look for climate change (man-made or not) — has shown two episodes of warming since the year 1900. The first, from about 1910 to 1945, it rose roughly 0.43°C, while from about 1975 to now it has risen around 0.84°C. That’s basically twice as much.

So, when will we see a blue ocean event ?  

Current models say between 2030 and 3050,  closer to  2030 being more likely

So, whats the plan?

Dave Roberts put out a nice post explaining that what it will take is not evolutionary but revolutionary.  No pain no gain.  He says

"The facts of climate change mean that there is no such thing as a 'moderate' position on it. You do the radical things necessary to meet IPCC targets or you sit back & let radical impacts unfold."

"Most Americans say they want the U.S. to take “aggressive” action to stop climate change, yet only a minority would put up with even small increases in their taxes or electricity bills to do so.

Bernie's Green New Deal.?  $ 16 trillion

Hmmm......

So, its probably going to get hotter

 For a view into our future see  "Can we survive extreme heat?" . here.  " It starts with a blackout "  

“Hurricane Katrina caused a cascading failure of urban infrastructure in New Orleans that no one really predicted,” Chester explains. “Levees broke. People were stranded. Rescue operations failed. Extreme heat could lead to a similar cascading failure in Phoenix, exposing vulnerabilities and weaknesses in the region’s infrastructure that are difficult to foresee.”

In Chester’s view, a Phoenix heat catastrophe begins with a blackout. It could be triggered any number of ways. During periods of extreme heat, power demand surges, straining the system. Inevitably, something will fail. A wildfire will knock out a power line. A substation will blow. A hacker might crash the grid. In 2011, a utility worker doing routine maintenance near Yuma knocked out a 500-kilovolt power line that shut off power to millions of people for up to 12 hours, including virtually the entire city of San Diego, causing economic losses of $100 million. A major blackout in Phoenix could easily cost much more, says Chester.

But it’s not just about money. When the city goes dark, the order and convenience of modern life begin to fray. Without air conditioning, temperatures in homes and office buildings soar. (Ironically, new, energy-efficient buildings are tightly sealed, making them dangerous heat traps.) Traffic signals go out. Highways gridlock with people fleeing the city. Without power, gas pumps don’t work, leaving vehicles stranded with empty tanks. Water pipes crack from the heat, and water pumps fail, leaving people scrounging for fresh water. Hospitals overflow with people suffering from heat exhaustion and heatstroke. If there are wildfires, the air will become hazy and difficult to breathe. If a blackout during extreme heat continues for long, rioting, looting, and arson could begin.

Cognitive Dissonance

Manic depression 

Fractures my soul

     - Jimi Hendrix

I just don't know

       -Allman Brothers

PSA :.    Several African countries got "rain bombed",thanks to the carbon we emitted over the last 50 years.  Here are some ways to help. 

Here's Eric Holthaus on the fundamental injustice of climate change

"The initial post-storm reports are harrowing: 90 percent of Beira, Mozambique — a city of more than 500,000 people — has been destroyed by floodwaters. The first aid workers to reach the hardest-hit areas found people clinging to trees and rooftops, awaiting rescue, with waters still rising. Social media posts from Zimbabwe showed people swept away on flooded roads and aerial images in Mozambique showed countless homes underwater. Nearly 3 million people have been affected across the region, one of the poorest in the world.

Greetings

        I've been watching Gretta Thuberg videos.    It's just so fascinating.   And heart breaking.  Here is a 16 year old who knows more about climate change than 99 percent of adults.   But she's wired differently than the rest of us.   She is a straight shooter.  She lacks cognitive dissonance.  She can't hold two opposing ideas in her head at the same time.  The rest of say, "Yeah, its a big problem, but let's not think about it.".  She thinks " Well, if it's a big problem, we should think about it.  It's precisely what we should think about."

      Maybe it's her super power.  Maybe it's her curse.

       Here's her TED talk

       Here she is with her dad.   

        It's not easy being Gretta, or her dad.

      The NYT had an op Ed piece by David Wallace Wells called "Time to Panic",   which makes the same basic point.   Time is running out.   And he explains with charts and graphs what's going to happen

"As temperatures rise, this could mean many of the biggest cities in the Middle East and South Asia would become lethally hot in summer, perhaps as soon as 2050. There would be ice-free summers in the Arctic and the unstoppable disintegration of the West Antarctic’s ice sheet, which some scientists believe has already begun, threatening the world’s coastal cities with inundation. Coral reefs would mostly disappear. And there would be tens of millions of climate refugees, perhaps many more, fleeing droughts, flooding and extreme heat, and the possibility of multiple climate-driven natural disasters striking simultaneously.

Nevertheless, we expect things to go on as they are

"I know the science is true, I know the threat is all-encompassing, and I know its effects, should emissions continue unabated, will be terrifying. And yet, when I imagine my life three decades from now, or the life of my daughter five decades now, I have to admit that I am not imagining a world on fire but one similar to the one we have now. That is how hard it is to shake complacency. We are all living in delusion, unable to really process the news from science that climate change amounts to an all-encompassing threat. Indeed, a threat the size of life itself.

How can we be this deluded? One answer comes from behavioral economics. The scroll of cognitive biases identified by psychologists and fellow travelers over the past half-century can seem, like a social media feed, bottomless, and they distort and distend our perception of a changing climate. These optimistic prejudices, prophylactic biases and emotional reflexes form an entire library of climate delusion.

We build our view of the universe outward from our own experience, a reflexive tendency that surely shapes our ability to comprehend genuinely existential threats to the species. We have a tendency to wait for others to act, rather than acting ourselves; a preference for the present situation; a disinclination to change things; and an excess of confidence that we can change things easily, should we need to, no matter the scale. We can’t see anything but through cataracts of self-deception."

This "feature "of  human psycho!ogy is very useful to the energy companies, who have, as Robert Hunzicer points out, inserted themselves into the COP process.

" Fossil fuel companies were significant sponsors at COP24 in Katowice. Their logos were ubiquitous. And, at a mind-blowing out of this world event, the Polish Pavilion was stuffed full of actual lumps of black coal, as samplers.

Poland’s President Andrzej Duda told COP24 delegates: “Using coal is not in contradiction with climate protection in Poland because we can lower the emissions and ensure economic growth at the same time.” What!!! Who falls for this kind of claptrap?

ExxonMobil pledged to cut its methane emissions and contribute funds for a carbon tax campaign in the U.S. Oh, please, stop it! Pseudo solutions like carbon markets and geo-engineering promises (that don’t work to scale) are pushed by corporate interests to legitimatize their current CO2 emissions. Oh please! It’s a ruse because if you lay claim to geo-engineering technology that fixes CO2 emissions, then you legitimize using as much fossil fuel as your little heart desires. But, the brutal truth is the technology is not perfected. Not by a long shot. Then what?"

Here in the US, there is some new interest in dealing with the climate problem.  Unfortunately many see it as just  another club to bash the other side in the" culture wars".  

Meanwhile Gretta is still waiting