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. 

Ten Years After

I'd love to change the world

But I don't know what to do

So I leave it up to you

   - Ten Years After

And I'm sorry when I say that

straight to this very day

It was the wrong way

     -Sublime

Good news

EU parliament declares climate emergency

Coal for electricity falls

Greetings

     Happy Black Friday!

    I just received the latest work from the Dark Mountain Project.  It's their 10th anniversary.   As you may recall 10 years ago, they famously put out a  manifesto, See also this  which suggested that the current approach to reversing the ecological damage reversing by humans was a losing battle, and the efforts to deal with climate change (new green deal) would probably do the ecosystem more harm than good.

Ten years later things haven't improved much. 

  Carbon emissions continue to increase

GREENHOUSE GAS CONCENTRATIONS AGAIN BREAK RECORDS

Atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases once again reached new highs in 2018. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) says the increase in CO2 was just above the average rise recorded over the last decade. Levels of other warming gases, such as methane and nitrous oxide, have also surged by above-average continue to u t Since 1990 there’s been an increase of 43% in the warming effect on the climate of long-lived greenhouse gases.

And, “There is no sign of a slowdown, let alone a decline, in greenhouse gases concentration in the atmosphere despite all the commitments under the Paris agreement on climate change.”

  Recently we passed the 500 CO2 equivalence marker.  

Sea level keeps rising and recent studies show that by 2050, large cities in Asia will be flooded 

According to the new analysis, roughly three times as many people are at risk of being inundated by rising seas than previously reported — 150 million people are now living on land that will be below high tide by 2050. And this is a hopeful scenario, where warming is held to 2 degrees C and the ice sheets don’t collapse in the near future. In a more pessimistic scenario, the numbers double to 300 million people flooded out by 2050. That is roughly equivalent to the entire population of the United States going underwater in the next three decades.

Clean-energy investments in the developing world plummeted last year while coal use reached a record high.

Current carbon credit program may provide little or no environmental gain

“A 2016 study found that 73 percent of carbon credits provided little or no environmental gain, as they

provided little or no environmental gain, as they supported projects that would have happened anyway. That figure rose to 85 percent of projects under the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism

Recently climate scientists have published a warning that the earth may be close, or have passed, to several climate tipping points .

Prof Tim Lenton at the University of Exeter, the lead author of the article, said: “We might already have crossed the threshold for a cascade of interrelated tipping points. The simple version is the schoolkids [striking for climate action] are right: we are seeing potentially irreversible changes in the climate system under way, or very close.”

“As a scientist, I just want to tell it how it is,” he said. “It is not trying to be alarmist, but trying to treat the whole climate change problem as a risk management problem. It is what I consider the common sense way.”

Phil Williamson at the University of East Anglia, who did not contribute to the article, said: “The prognosis by Tim Lenton and colleagues is, unfortunately, fully plausible: that we might have already lost control of the Earth’s climate.”

The new article comes as the UN warns action is very far from stopping global temperature rise, with the world currently on track for 3C-4C. The commentary lists nine tipping points that may have been activated.

But, it seems that politicians have decided that we can slowly add renewable resources, and continue to use fossil fuels as long as possible.

And if you think Obama might be embarrassed about that, you’d be wrong. As the former president told a cheering Texas audience last year, “You wouldn’t always know it ,but it [oil and gas production] went up every year I was president,” he said. “That whole, ‘suddenly America’s like the biggest oil producer and the biggest gas,’ that was me, people.”

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau explained the logic most succinctly a couple of years ago, speaking to another crowd in Texas. “No country would find 173 billion barrels of oil in the ground and leave them there,” he said, referring to the amount of recoverable crude in Alberta’s tar sands region. “The resource will be developed.”

.

           The main climate proposal is to electrify everything.  The fires in California demonstrate that if that means lots of power lines going through hit dry country, that could create it's own problems.

Of course, electricity is for stuff like electric vehicles which require lots of new lithium mines

Last week, Bloomberg published a report detailing how the boom in lithium mining is irreversibly destroying the local environment of northern Chile’s Atacama desert. Mining for lithium means removing large amounts of water, which means depleting the water supply for locals. According to the report, the Tilopozo meadow in Chile used to be a shelter for shepherds traveling at night, yet has become barren due to lack of grass or water. That puts a severe strain on local farmers.

“We’re fooling ourselves if we call this sustainable and green mining,” Cristina Dorado, a Chilean biologist, told Bloomberg. “The lithium fever should slow down because it’s directly damaging salt flats, the ecosystem, and local communities.”

Cairn Energy Research Advisors estimates the lithium-ion industry is expected to grow from 100 gigawatt-hours (GWh) of annual production in 2017 to 800 GWh in 2027—not only as a result of electric cars but also because lithium is used in batteries to power various electrical and electronic goods, including mobile phones. Much of this will be mined from South America’s Lithium Triangle, which spans across Argentina, Bolivia and Chile, an area that is said to hold more than half the world’s supply of the metal beneath its salt flats. 

Also cobalt

Then there’s cobalt. In addition to the environmental concerns related to lithium production, cobalt mining is unequivocally destructive on multiple levels. Currently, half of the world’s cobalt is produced in the Republic of Congo. Concerning cobalt mining in the Congo region, journalists have revealed human and environmental abuses ranging from child and slave labor to toxic waste leakage and radioactivity in cobalt mines. “In 2014, according to UNICEF, about 40,000 children were working in mines across southern DRC, many of them extracting cobalt,” The Guardian reported.

             All of which could make a person discouraged.  In a recent article William Reese professor of ecology, and ecological economics says that we have placed ourselves in an untenable situation

"Reducing fossil fuel use on a vastly sped-up schedule, in the absence of adequate substitutes and a comprehensive wind-down plan, would soon produce some combination of inadequate energy supplies, broken supply lines, reduced production, declining incomes, rising inequality, widespread unemployment, food and other resource shortages, at least local famines, civil unrest, abandoned cities, mass migrations, collapsed economies and geopolitical chaos.

What politician is likely to let this scenario unfold? Would the public tolerate it?

As economists have long recognized, humans are spatial, temporal and social discounters — we naturally favour the here and now, and close relatives and friends, over distant places, merely possible futures and total strangers. Under what circumstances would hundreds of millions of people in scores of countries with disparate political philosophies and political ideologies — people who currently enjoy the “good life” — be induced simultaneously to risk wrecking their comfortable lives to stave off a climate or eco-crisis that many are not convinced is happening and, even if it is, it is perceived likely mainly to affect other people somewhere else?

And keep in mind, the world is committed to accommodating several additional billions who have yet to join the energy-addicted consumer party but are pounding on the door to be let in.

....

Perversely then, policy for climate disaster-avoidance seems designed to serve the capitalist growth economy and make the latter appear as the solution rather than cause of the problem. “Unfortunately,” as University of Vienna public policy professor Clive Spash points out, “many environmental non-governmental organisations have bought into this illogical reasoning.” (Note that many NGOs are dependent on the corporate sector for financial support.)

And this is why the international community — despite the Paris accord, Greta Thunberg, climate strikes and mass public protests — seems determined to stay its growth-driven fossil-fuelled course.

In these circumstances, the world can anticipate more and longer heat waves/droughts, desertification, tropical deforestation, melting permafrost, methane releases, regional water shortages, failing agriculture, regional famines, rising sea levels, the flooding (and eventual loss) of many coastal communities, abandonment of over-heated cities, civil unrest, mass migrations, collapsed economies and possible geopolitical chaos.

Perhaps the Dark Mountain Project was on track 10 years ago, as Paul Kingsnorth acknowledged in this interview

 CHARLOTTE DU CANN  Looking back at the decade, from the time of the manifesto to now, what strikes you as most significant in terms of the zeitgeist? 

PAUL KINGSNORTH  Perhaps the most significant fact about the last decade is how much was said in the manifesto that has become pretty much widely accepted. In terms of the culture, it was quite a wild thing to be saying: that it is not possible to stop the collapse and that we need to write about the situation for real. 

Now the kind of things we were publishing in the first books you can find in the New York Times and the Guardian; in the fact that Extinction Rebellion are called Extinction Rebellion. Most people are saying: we are in the catastrophe now, ecologically speaking. Which is a shame because it would have been nice if we had been entirely wrong.  

Some wise person said "Rowing harder doesn't help if the boat is headed in the wrong direction"

Which suggests we should change direction.   Here are William Reese's suggestions

"So, where might we go from here? A rational world with a good grasp of reality would have begun articulating a long-term wind-down strategy 20 or 30 years ago. The needed global emergency plan would certainly haveincluded most of the 11 realistic responses to the climate crisis listed below — which, even if implemented today would at least slow the coming unravelling. And no, the currently proposed Green New Deal won’t do it.

Here, then, is what an effective “Green New Deal” might look like:

1. Formal recognition of the end of material growth and the need to reducethe human ecological footprint;

2. Acknowledgement that, as long as we remain in overshoot — exploiting essential ecosystems faster than they can regenerate — sustainable production/consumption means less production/consumption;

3. Recognition of the theoretical and practical difficulties/impossibility of an all-green quantitatively equivalent energy transition;

4. Assistance to communities, families and individuals to facilitate the adoption of sustainable lifestyles (even North Americans lived happily on half the energy per capita in the 1960s that we use today);

5. Identification and implementation of strategies (e.g., taxes, fines) to encourage/force individuals and corporations to eliminate unnecessary fossil fuel use and reduce energy waste (half or more of energy “consumed” is wasted through inefficiencies and carelessness);

6. Programs to retrain the workforce for constructive employment in the new survival economy;

7. Policies to restructure the global and national economies to remain within the remaining “allowable” carbon budget while developing/improving sustainable energy alternatives;

8. Processes to allocate the remaining carbon budget (through rationing, quotas, etc.) fairly to essential uses only, such as food production, space/water heating, inter-urban transportation;

9. Plans to reduce the need for interregional transportation and increase regional resilience by re-localizing essential economic activity (de-globalization);

10. Recognition that equitable sustainability requires fiscal mechanisms for income/wealth redistribution;

11. A global population strategy to enable a smooth descent to the two to three billion that could live comfortably indefinitely within the biophysical means of nature.