"The periodic reports of the IPCC are lapsing into self-parody. 'This is your last warning' they say. 'Get a move on. Don't sit idly by'! Yet people around the world have mostly responded like children holding fingers in their ears and yelling: 'Nyah, nyah, nyah!' to drown out bad news... When I saw the recent report I nearly ignored it because just like everyone else I've read it a million times. I knew it would frighten me, make me feel powerless. That's why such reports can seem counterproductive. People grow inured. They get depressed, vow not to bring children into the world. Or they flip to the sports pages, tell themselves other news is more urgent. Like Ukrainians massacred in Bucha or inflation.
But let's not kid ourselves. We can click past the IPCC report but the facts remain. Serious trouble is coming and we're not doing nearly enough to stop it." - Michelle Goldberg, 'You've Heard It All Before, This Time Listen!' NY Times
As Michelle Goldberg observes, Monday's newly issued report from the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is sure to be ignored by too many in this country, already besieged by negative news about Ukraine, soaring inflation (especially with gas prices) and now a newly emergent bird flu that promises to clobber poultry prices. But the truth is that we now have barely 8 years to cut fossil fuel consumption by 50 % or see hell descend upon us with unrelenting climate horrors - from the impending heat waves (watch out for this summer) to the collapse of power grids from a/c overuse, to plagues of unwelcome critters (parasitic worms, West Nile mosquitoes, ticks) to water shortages.
In respect of the last, the biggest impact will be in the U.S. Mountain West, where 75% of the water depends on snow melt. For example, the Colorado River is fed by mountain snow and supplies drinking water for more than 41 million people. But climate researchers, in line with the latest IPCC report, have forecast the West will be "nearly snowless" for decades.
Do Americans in particular really want to hear this? Probably not when their weekly gasoline tag is already likely running more than they pay for groceries. But...if they were serious about lowering fossil fuel consumption they'd have sucked it up by now. They are not. Still...
In the words of the report’s co-chair, James Skea of Imperial College London:
"If we continue acting as we are now, we’re not even going to limit warming to 2 degrees, never mind 1.5 degrees."
Meanwhile, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said the report revealed: "a litany of broken climate promises” by governments and corporations, accusing them of stoking global warming by clinging to harmful fossil fuels.
Basically, we are informed that temperatures on Earth will shoot past a key danger point (2 C) unless greenhouse gas emissions fall faster than countries have committed, also warning of the dire consequences of inaction. Once that 2C threshold is crossed, as I've posted before, we enter a radically new global 'equilibrium' - best summed up by climate scientist Richard Rood in a Sunday Denver Post op-ed: i.e. that if humans can prevent the 2C threshold being crossed then Earth could reach a global surface air temperature peak in 10 years or so. But this is only the peak, when temperatures start to stabilize. It does not mean a reversal of climate change or cooling.
The greenhouse conditions we're in, then, essentially keep the 'boiler' going and the accumulation of heat near the surface but now spreading it to the oceans as well, which take on the role of "radiators". Indeed, the rate of ocean heating alone is now equivalent to seven Hiroshima A-bombs detonating every second, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, e.g.
The Ocean Absorbed 20 Sextillion Joules of Heat in 2020 | Earth.Org - Past | Present | Future
That heat is then distributed around the planet via ocean currents and weather systems. Think of how a home is heated by a radiator and you get the picture: water is first heated by a boiler then the hot water circulates through pipes and the radiators warm up air in the rooms. Even after the boiler is turned off the already heated water continues to circulate through the system, heating the house. This is by way of analogy to the fact that the average CO2 molecule caan reside in our atmosphere - with its heat-retention properties - for at least 100 years. There is no on-off switch for climate change. Thus the CO2 emission effects for a given year(e.g. 2021) are not just for that year but inclusive of the cumulative emissions for all the years preceding. One can think of it like a series with 100 terms, i.e.
CO2( 2021) = x 1 + x 2 + x 3 + x 4 +.............+ x 1 00
Thus, in Prof. Rood's parlance, "global air temperature is more like the temperature in the room of a boiler-heated home, and not the best measure of climate change." The amount of heat retained in the boiler-radiator system is a better analogous measure. In the analogous case (climate change) the retention of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere which keeps the heating going. So even if the global air temperatures were to peak and stabilize the system-wide climate effects would continue in a pattern of degradation (e.g. sea level rise, ice sheet collapse, glacier melting, spread of tropical diseases etc.) , due to the already accumulated heat.
In other words we will still be stuck in a new greenhouse world, more radically different than the one we are in now. Now it is true the rate of growth of greenhouse emissions has slowed from 2.1% per year in the early part of this century to 1.3% per year between 2010 and 2019, the report’s authors said. But they also voiced “high confidence” that unless countries step up their efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions, the planet will on average be 2.4C to 3.5C (4.3 to 6.3F) warmer by the end of the century — a level experts say is sure to cause severe impacts for much of the world’s population.
My own math shows even more dire effects by extrapolating from the current CO2 concentration in the atmosphere to what can be expected at the turn of this century. If it is just over 415 ppm now - by many conservative measures then doing the math (adding 2.5 ppm and 2.5 W/ m2 heating increment per year) puts us in jeopardy (near 600 ppm or runaway greenhouse level) even before 2100.
The report, numbering thousands of pages (see link at bottom) , doesn’t single out individual countries for blame. But the figures show much of the carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere was released by rich countries like the U.S. - loaded with spoiled citizens who suffer from an entitlement mentality in terms of recreational travel when they want, e.g. Spring Break. Most of these spoiled nations were the first to burn coal, oil and gas beginning with the industrial revolution.
The U.N. panel attributed 40%
of emissions from Europe and North America, and just over 12% to East Asia. The latter includes China. (But China took over the
position as world’s top emissions polluter from the United States in the
mid-2000s.)
Many countries (and companies) have cynically used recent climate meetings to paint rosy pictures of their emissions -cutting efforts, while continuing to invest in fossil fuels and other polluting activities, the UN's Guterres charged. In his words from an AP piece in the Denver Post Monday:
“Some government and
business leaders are saying one thing but doing another. Simply put,
they are lying. And the results will be catastrophic.”
But as ghastly and hypocritical as that is, what can we say of universities that actually do climate change research but from the 'dime' of fossil fuel polluters, oil companies? Can we call it what it it? Execrable. "But how will our atmospheric research faculty get funding otherwise?" Well, how about using some of those $1 billion-plus endowment funds?
The British government’s former chief science adviser, David King- who wasn’t involved in writing the report- has stated there are too optimistic assumptions about how much CO2 the world can afford to emit. I agree with this take, and my own estimates (see above) confirm it. We simply aren't doing enough - in the time - to avoid a climate calamity by 2030-35. As King put it (ibid.):
“We don’t actually have a remaining carbon budget to burn. It’s just the reverse. We’ve already done too much in the way of putting greenhouse gases up there.”
The impending global climate catastrophe is a perfect opportunity for Americans to demonstrate they really want to leave a halfway habitable planet for their kids, grandkids. That would mean, of course, sucking up the higher gas prices without whining, and especially not calling for their state to knock out gasoline taxes, which will only make a meager difference anyway. My bet is that instead they will (mostly, in polls) call for putting the climate agenda on hold and releasing much more oil from the strategic reserves. Or - get more light sweet crude from the Saudis - the same lot responsible for 9/11.
See Also:
And:
Record heat to bake Calif. as April snowpack nears 70-year low
And:
by Jane Braxton Little | March 22, 2022 - 6:43am | permalink
And:
by Andrea Mazzarino | March 30, 2022 - 6:02am | permalink
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by Stan Cox | April 1, 2022 - 6:13am | permalink
Excerpt:
While the Ukrainian people bear the lethal brunt of Russia’s invasion, shockwaves from that war threaten to worsen other crises across the planet. The emergency that loomed largest before Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine began — the heating of the Earth’s climate — is now looming larger still. The reason is simple enough: a war-induced rush to boost oil and gas production has significantly undercut efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
U.N. Secretary General António Guterres made that clear in an angry March 21st address blasting world leaders scrambling for yet more oil and gas. “Countries could become so consumed by the immediate fossil-fuel supply gap that they neglect or knee-cap policies to cut fossil-fuel use,” he said, adding, “This is madness.” He linked obsessive fuel burning with the endpoint toward which today’s clash of world powers could be pushing us, using a particularly frightening term from the original Cold War. “Addiction to fossil fuels is,” he warned, “mutually assured destruction.”
And:
by Thomas Neuburger | March 26, 2022 - 5:27am | permalink
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