'There will be no ice age again. The human impact is so powerful already (that's why they call it the Anthropocene) that we have suppressed the Quaternary planetary dynamics.' – H.J. Schellenhuber, PNAS
Most media and the majority of the Republican party (and some Democrats) have lied to us for decades about the climate emergency. If they were honest, they would all note that every mass extinction the earth has endured is due to climate change. Our climate is the weather at a particular place and time. Earth's climate is what you get when you put all those different places having weather together. The climate is getting angry, as evidenced by the recent heatwaves, floods, and droughts that last longer and are more powerful.
Deniers, enablers, and Fossil Fuel industries always mention that climate change is natural; it's always changed, they say. They are right. It has. But this is not the "own the libs” moment they think it is. Instead, the changing climate today will be as unforgiving and punishing in the near and long term as other extinction events have shown through fossil records.
Paleoclimatology research had shown that our carbon emissions are as high as they were three million years ago when CO2 in the atmosphere was 450 ppm. During that time, Crocodilia lived in the Arctic, which was as warm and steamy as their habitat today in extreme South Florida. We also know that CO2 levels at 300 ppm are ideal for humanity; there is no record of humans surviving any concentration of CO2 higher. We are now over 420.00 ppm.
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If you care about the planet, and about the people and animals who live on it, there are two ways to think about this. You can keep on hoping that catastrophe is preventable, and feel ever more frustrated or enraged by the world's inaction. Or you can accept that disaster is coming, and begin to rethink what it means to have hope. Jonathan Franzer
In the most common climate change denial campaigns and stubbornly persistent climate myths, the claim is made that high levels of CO2 in the long past, somehow actually contradict the warming effect of CO2. However, this is simply not the case. In fact, significant items from the paleoclimate record are often missing from these debates. Michael E. Mann, Paleoclimatologist says “such a myopic view of weather extremes can be exploited by those who look to cast doubt on the overwhelming scientific consensus behind human-caused climate change.”
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The Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) which occurred 56mya is often cited by scientists to show the direct causal relationship between CO2 and dangerous temperature rise. The last time CO2 levels were this high, the earth was uninhabitable. In this PBS EONS video the PETM is introduced:
The amount of carbon added to the atmosphere during this event varies between 2,000-10,000 billion tonnes of carbon according to reconstructions of this data. Although climate archives become less certain the further back we go, it is estimated that the carbon release must have been below 1.1 billion tons of carbon per year. That is quantified as about one-tenth of the rate of today’s carbon emissions from human activities such as burning fossil fuels; a cautionary tale if ever there was one.
The rate of release of carbon into the atmosphere today is nearly 10x as fast as during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), 55.9 million years ago, and again is the best analog we have for current global warming, according to an international team of geologists. Furthermore new studies (video) are showing we are already on track for at least a 3-5°C temperature rise. Dr. Neil Swart of the Canadian Center for Climate Modelling & Analysis says a new model predicts nearly 8°C of heating (video) by 2100 in a high emissions scenario.
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This data visualization shows the global distribution and variation of the concentration of mid-tropospheric carbon dioxide observed by the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) on the NASA Aqua spacecraft over a 20 year timespan. One obvious feature that we see in the data is a continual increase in carbon dioxide with time, as seen in the shift in the color of the map from light yellow towards red as time progresses.
One short day ago, the BBC headlined human extinction in their article titled, Climate change: More studies needed on possibility of human extinction. The article's significance is a big fucking deal to break the logjam and begin a conversation critical to our survival. No more greenwashing, no more not connecting the dots and no more sugarcoating how dire the climate breakdown is. Tell the truth so we can begin to sort out what is doable and what is not to lessen the worst impacts of the calamity bearing down on us.
To properly assess all these risks, the authors are calling on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to carry out a special report on catastrophic climate change.
The researchers said that seriously studying the consequences of worst-case scenarios was vital, even though it might scare people.
They said that carrying out this research would allow scientists to consider emergency options such as climate engineering which might involve pumping coolants into the atmosphere. Researchers would be able to carry out a risk analysis for these drastic interventions compared to the worst effects of climate change. Focussing on the worst-case scenarios could also help inform the public - and might actually make the outcomes less likely.
"Understanding these plausible but grim scenarios is something that could galvanise both political and civil opinion," said Dr Kemp.
"We saw this when it came to the identification of the idea of a nuclear winter that helped compel a lot of the public efforts as well as the disarmament movement throughout the 1970s and '80s."
"And I hope if we can find similar concrete and clear mechanisms when it comes to thinking about climate change, that it also has a similar effect."
The plea for serious study of more extreme scenarios will chime with many younger climate activists, who say they are often not addressed for fear of frightening people into inaction.
Even a correct decision is wrong when it's too late. Lee Iacocca
How bad could climate change get? As early as 1988, the landmark Toronto Conference declaration described the ultimate consequences of climate change as potentially “second only to a global nuclear war.” Despite such proclamations decades ago, climate catastrophe is relatively under-studied and poorly understood.The potential for catastrophic impacts depends on the magnitude and rate of climate change, the damage inflicted on Earth and human systems, and the vulnerability and response of those affected systems. The extremes of these areas, such as high temperature rise and cascading impacts, are underexamined. As noted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), there have been few quantitative estimates of global aggregate impacts from warming of 3 °C or above (1). Text mining of IPCC reports similarly found that coverage of temperature rises of 3 °C or higher is underrepresented relative to their likelihood (2). Text-mining analysis also suggests that over time the coverage of IPCC reports has shifted towards temperature rise of 2 °C and below https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2022EF002876. Research has focused on the impacts of 1.5 °C and 2 °C, and studies of how climate impacts could cascade or trigger larger crises are sparse.A thorough risk assessment would need to consider how risks spread, interact, amplify, and are aggravated by human responses (3), but even simpler “compound hazard” analyses of interacting climate hazards and drivers are underused. Yet this is how risk unfolds in the real world. For example, a cyclone destroys electrical infrastructure, leaving a population vulnerable to an ensuing deadly heat wave (4). Recently, we have seen compound hazards emerge between climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic (5). As the IPCC notes, climate risks are becoming more complex and difficult to manage, and are cascading across regions and sectors (6).Why the focus on lower-end warming and simple risk analyses? One reason is the benchmark of the international targets: the Paris Agreement goal of limiting warming to well below 2 °C, with an aspiration of 1.5 °C. Another reason is the culture of climate science to “err on the side of least drama” (7), to not to be alarmists, which can be compounded by the consensus processes of the IPCC (8). Complex risk assessments, while more realistic, are also more difficult to do.This caution is understandable, yet it is mismatched to the risks and potential damages posed by climate change. We know that temperature rise has “fat tails”: low-probability, high-impact extreme outcomes (9). Climate damages are likely to be nonlinear and result in an even larger tail (10). Too much is at stake to refrain from examining high-impact low-likelihood scenarios. The COVID-19 pandemic has underlined the need to consider and prepare for infrequent, high-impact global risks, and the systemic dangers they can spark. Prudent risk management demands that we thoroughly assess worst-case scenarios.
I suspect I will take a few bullets for this diary; the fact is realists advocate for fighting global emissions and creating an adaptation infrastructure as all other environmental activists do.
Whatever the case, even if litigation hangs up some, most, or all climate-related executive actions, Biden should take action anyway. Better to have fought and lost than surrendered without a fight. In the past 30 years, we've had enough of that when it comes to climate policy. Meteor Blades, Daily Kos.
Turn off the lights! Extinction Rebellion activists in Paris.