Ultima Thule
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then why tagged me in your every thread, if i am arrogant man @undertakerwwefan
Climate Change l Global Warming l Update, News & Discussion
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Yongpeng Sun-Tastaufen
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To make you see the light.
Ultima Thule
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Yongpeng Sun-Tastaufen
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https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/grandfather-climate-science-leaves-final-warning-earth-n978426
After struggling with heart disease for decades, the renowned climate scientist Wallace Smith Broecker had made it clear he was acutely aware of his own mortality. So when he sat down in front of a video camera to record a final message to his fellow scientists in mid-February, the 87-year-old researcher knew his days were few.
The man who popularized the term “global warming” and who first described the critical role the world’s oceans play in the climate had an urgent message for 40 of the world’s top climate scientists. Humanity was not moving quickly enough to slow the production of carbon dioxide that was warming the Earth, Broecker said Feb. 11, his live-streaming image projected onto a big screen at Arizona State University, where researchers had met to discuss untested solutions to global warming.
It was time for humankind and the world’s scientific community to begin to seriously study more extreme solutions to the climate crisis, Broecker said. That included creating a massive solar shield in the Earth’s atmosphere, a tactic known variously as “geoengineering,” "the sulfur solution," “solar radiation management" and the "Pinatubo Strategy.”
“If we are going to prevent the planet from warming up another couple of degrees, we are going to have to go to geoengineering,” he said. The price of continued inaction, he added somewhat ominously, could be “many more surprises in the greenhouse” known as Earth.
Broecker (pronounced “broker”) regretted he could not be at Arizona State’s first Planetary Management Symposium on Climate Engineering but said he was glad he could address his longtime colleagues remotely. Though he was using a wheelchair and breathing through an oxygen tube, he assured his colleagues that “my mind is running pretty smoothly.”
A week after his dramatic appeal, Broecker died of congestive heart failure, inspiring praise for his work as the “grandfather” of modern climate science. His death, and his final message to scientists, re-energized the debate over the sort of re-engineering of the Earth’s climate systems that Broecker and other academics had broached as early as the 1970s.
The theory is that the planet might be cooled, in a worst-case scenario, by releasing massive amounts of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere some 70,000 feet above the Earth’s surface. The idea would be for jets to release so much SO2 that they would mimic a massive volcanic eruption, like the one at Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991, which shrouded much of the planet in a sulfurous cloud, cooling the Earth by about 1 degree Fahrenheit for a full year.
Many scientists have been hesitant about pursuing such an extreme measure, citing scientific, ethical, legal and political dilemmas. Tampering with Earth’s atmosphere was not a preferred alternative, Broecker had acknowledged, but he insisted that his fellow academics needed to be ready, should last-ditch measures be needed to prevent a climate catastrophe.
Broecker told the symposium that he had worked with another prominent climatologist on mechanical units that might remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. But 100 million of the devices would be needed to get the job done, he said, and there was no sign that the world’s leaders had the political will to get the job done.
In the days that followed, Broecker’s final admonition to his fellow climate scientists touched off an intensive discussion about whether humanity has reached a tipping point that requires more radical solutions. The debate has been conducted civilly and mostly via email among climate researchers around the world. It has no predictable outcome. A majority of the world’s climate scientists may oppose radical geoengineering, but most of those who heard Broecker’s words agreed that research on the sulfur solution should proceed.
In the meantime, scientists on both sides of the debate said their biggest takeaway from Broecker’s final public appearance is one of profound respect for a colleague known as “an absolute giant” of climate science, who conducted more than a half century of research at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.
“To see this great scientist speaking at this late point in his life, when he was so obviously sick and frail, was really just very, very moving,” John Shepherd, a British climatologist, said. “To see Wally speak so coherently and so inspirationally was quite a moment.”
Jeffrey Severinghaus, who studies ice cores to understand the history of global warming at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, also described Broecker’s parting message as hard to forget.
“It was very touching. It was very profound,” Severinghaus, who studied under Broecke, said. “He was dying and every small effort was difficult for him. But it was important to him to speak to us.”
“This was the last message from someone who shaped our field for half a century,” said Peter Schlosser, the lead organizer of the symposium and vice president of Arizona State’s Global Futures program. “I don’t think his effort and his determination was lost on anyone.”
That sense of moment was acknowledged even by those, such as Severinghaus, who disagreed with Broecker’s position. Those scientists believe that sulfur injections into the atmosphere have too many potential pitfalls. They could alter weather and rainfall patterns so severely that agriculture would be disrupted on a mass scale. They could trigger unknown collateral weather calamities. And, perhaps the biggest concern of all: They could prompt humanity to continue with the dangerous burning of fossil fuels.
“Even though I disagreed,” Severinghaus said, “I could see he was coming from a place of caring and concern for all of us and for the planet.”
The Arizona State University meeting had been in the works for many months, prompted to a large degree by Broecker himself. The peripatetic scientist had written a memo in late 2017 to 17 colleagues, urging more intensive discussion about what he called “SO2 Cooling.”
“Over the last 50 years, the ratio of energy from fossil fuels (85 percent) to that from other sources (15 percent) has not changed. Several billion people still live in poverty. . .Those who own fossil fuel reserves will do everything possible to make sure they are burned,” he wrote. “I wish I could be my usual optimistic self and believe those who say we are on the brink of an energy revolution. But I can’t.”
Following that 2017 memo, Broecker began to work with Schlosser and other old associates to organize a meeting about radical solutions to global warming.
The topic was provocative enough to draw some of the world’s leading climate scientists to the campus in Tempe, Arizona. While Broecker was too sick to join, his association with the event gave it extra appeal. Many recognized him as their mentor, a renaissance man who was not constrained by formal academic boundaries. “He had breadth of knowledge about Earth systems that few people could ever touch,” Schlosser said.
Broecker grew up in the Chicago suburbs, the son of evangelical Christians. He attended a Christian liberal arts college and planned a career as an actuary, until a friend helped him land an internship at what would later become Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. He immediately took to science and emerging fields like carbon dating and quickly transferred to Columbia. He spent the rest of his life studying the forces that affect the Earth’s climate.
Broecker often spoke about the climate system he studied for his entire academic life as “an angry beast,” adding, “and we are poking it with sticks.”
Like the vast majority of the scientific community, he supported a shift to sustainable fuels and away from oil, gas and coal. He also backed research into carbon capture technologies. But he despaired that humanity was moving too slowly and spoke in recent years with increasing fervor about the possible need for a solar shield.
“He was not advocating that it should be done, but he was advocating we should at least get the knowledge to enable us to decide whether or not we ought to look in that direction,” said Shepherd, an emeritus professor of Earth system science at the University of Southampton in England. “Wally could see his time on Earth was quite limited and I think he wanted to make sure there were a bunch of people who would carry on the initiative after he was gone.”
Rafe Pomerance, a senior fellow at the Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts, shared a similar feeling.
“His view is impossible to ignore,” Pomerance said. “His critiques of the current path must be answered.”
Broecker’s wife, Elizabeth Clark, worked in his lab for many years. She emphasized in an email the urgency her husband felt about the search for climate change solutions. But, she said, he also worried that he might appear weak in his final public appearance.
“The truth is, Wally was never weak,” Clark said, “most especially when it came to science, most especially when it came to saving the planet to any and every degree possible.”
After struggling with heart disease for decades, the renowned climate scientist Wallace Smith Broecker had made it clear he was acutely aware of his own mortality. So when he sat down in front of a video camera to record a final message to his fellow scientists in mid-February, the 87-year-old researcher knew his days were few.
The man who popularized the term “global warming” and who first described the critical role the world’s oceans play in the climate had an urgent message for 40 of the world’s top climate scientists. Humanity was not moving quickly enough to slow the production of carbon dioxide that was warming the Earth, Broecker said Feb. 11, his live-streaming image projected onto a big screen at Arizona State University, where researchers had met to discuss untested solutions to global warming.
It was time for humankind and the world’s scientific community to begin to seriously study more extreme solutions to the climate crisis, Broecker said. That included creating a massive solar shield in the Earth’s atmosphere, a tactic known variously as “geoengineering,” "the sulfur solution," “solar radiation management" and the "Pinatubo Strategy.”
“If we are going to prevent the planet from warming up another couple of degrees, we are going to have to go to geoengineering,” he said. The price of continued inaction, he added somewhat ominously, could be “many more surprises in the greenhouse” known as Earth.
Broecker (pronounced “broker”) regretted he could not be at Arizona State’s first Planetary Management Symposium on Climate Engineering but said he was glad he could address his longtime colleagues remotely. Though he was using a wheelchair and breathing through an oxygen tube, he assured his colleagues that “my mind is running pretty smoothly.”
A week after his dramatic appeal, Broecker died of congestive heart failure, inspiring praise for his work as the “grandfather” of modern climate science. His death, and his final message to scientists, re-energized the debate over the sort of re-engineering of the Earth’s climate systems that Broecker and other academics had broached as early as the 1970s.
The theory is that the planet might be cooled, in a worst-case scenario, by releasing massive amounts of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere some 70,000 feet above the Earth’s surface. The idea would be for jets to release so much SO2 that they would mimic a massive volcanic eruption, like the one at Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991, which shrouded much of the planet in a sulfurous cloud, cooling the Earth by about 1 degree Fahrenheit for a full year.
Many scientists have been hesitant about pursuing such an extreme measure, citing scientific, ethical, legal and political dilemmas. Tampering with Earth’s atmosphere was not a preferred alternative, Broecker had acknowledged, but he insisted that his fellow academics needed to be ready, should last-ditch measures be needed to prevent a climate catastrophe.
Broecker told the symposium that he had worked with another prominent climatologist on mechanical units that might remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. But 100 million of the devices would be needed to get the job done, he said, and there was no sign that the world’s leaders had the political will to get the job done.
In the days that followed, Broecker’s final admonition to his fellow climate scientists touched off an intensive discussion about whether humanity has reached a tipping point that requires more radical solutions. The debate has been conducted civilly and mostly via email among climate researchers around the world. It has no predictable outcome. A majority of the world’s climate scientists may oppose radical geoengineering, but most of those who heard Broecker’s words agreed that research on the sulfur solution should proceed.
In the meantime, scientists on both sides of the debate said their biggest takeaway from Broecker’s final public appearance is one of profound respect for a colleague known as “an absolute giant” of climate science, who conducted more than a half century of research at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.
“To see this great scientist speaking at this late point in his life, when he was so obviously sick and frail, was really just very, very moving,” John Shepherd, a British climatologist, said. “To see Wally speak so coherently and so inspirationally was quite a moment.”
Jeffrey Severinghaus, who studies ice cores to understand the history of global warming at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, also described Broecker’s parting message as hard to forget.
“It was very touching. It was very profound,” Severinghaus, who studied under Broecke, said. “He was dying and every small effort was difficult for him. But it was important to him to speak to us.”
“This was the last message from someone who shaped our field for half a century,” said Peter Schlosser, the lead organizer of the symposium and vice president of Arizona State’s Global Futures program. “I don’t think his effort and his determination was lost on anyone.”
That sense of moment was acknowledged even by those, such as Severinghaus, who disagreed with Broecker’s position. Those scientists believe that sulfur injections into the atmosphere have too many potential pitfalls. They could alter weather and rainfall patterns so severely that agriculture would be disrupted on a mass scale. They could trigger unknown collateral weather calamities. And, perhaps the biggest concern of all: They could prompt humanity to continue with the dangerous burning of fossil fuels.
“Even though I disagreed,” Severinghaus said, “I could see he was coming from a place of caring and concern for all of us and for the planet.”
The Arizona State University meeting had been in the works for many months, prompted to a large degree by Broecker himself. The peripatetic scientist had written a memo in late 2017 to 17 colleagues, urging more intensive discussion about what he called “SO2 Cooling.”
“Over the last 50 years, the ratio of energy from fossil fuels (85 percent) to that from other sources (15 percent) has not changed. Several billion people still live in poverty. . .Those who own fossil fuel reserves will do everything possible to make sure they are burned,” he wrote. “I wish I could be my usual optimistic self and believe those who say we are on the brink of an energy revolution. But I can’t.”
Following that 2017 memo, Broecker began to work with Schlosser and other old associates to organize a meeting about radical solutions to global warming.
The topic was provocative enough to draw some of the world’s leading climate scientists to the campus in Tempe, Arizona. While Broecker was too sick to join, his association with the event gave it extra appeal. Many recognized him as their mentor, a renaissance man who was not constrained by formal academic boundaries. “He had breadth of knowledge about Earth systems that few people could ever touch,” Schlosser said.
Broecker grew up in the Chicago suburbs, the son of evangelical Christians. He attended a Christian liberal arts college and planned a career as an actuary, until a friend helped him land an internship at what would later become Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. He immediately took to science and emerging fields like carbon dating and quickly transferred to Columbia. He spent the rest of his life studying the forces that affect the Earth’s climate.
Broecker often spoke about the climate system he studied for his entire academic life as “an angry beast,” adding, “and we are poking it with sticks.”
Like the vast majority of the scientific community, he supported a shift to sustainable fuels and away from oil, gas and coal. He also backed research into carbon capture technologies. But he despaired that humanity was moving too slowly and spoke in recent years with increasing fervor about the possible need for a solar shield.
“He was not advocating that it should be done, but he was advocating we should at least get the knowledge to enable us to decide whether or not we ought to look in that direction,” said Shepherd, an emeritus professor of Earth system science at the University of Southampton in England. “Wally could see his time on Earth was quite limited and I think he wanted to make sure there were a bunch of people who would carry on the initiative after he was gone.”
Rafe Pomerance, a senior fellow at the Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts, shared a similar feeling.
“His view is impossible to ignore,” Pomerance said. “His critiques of the current path must be answered.”
Broecker’s wife, Elizabeth Clark, worked in his lab for many years. She emphasized in an email the urgency her husband felt about the search for climate change solutions. But, she said, he also worried that he might appear weak in his final public appearance.
“The truth is, Wally was never weak,” Clark said, “most especially when it came to science, most especially when it came to saving the planet to any and every degree possible.”
Yongpeng Sun-Tastaufen
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Yongpeng Sun-Tastaufen
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All species evolve. All planets die. Even the Sun will one day die. Nothing lasts forever. Think about all those advanced ET civilizations and what happened to them. Just Milky Way alone has billions of stars. There are tons of advanced civilizations being born and dying every day.
Yongpeng Sun-Tastaufen
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https://www.theguardian.com/environ...-must-not-exceed-15c-warns-landmark-un-report
Urgent changes needed to cut risk of extreme heat, drought, floods and poverty, says IPCC
The world’s leading climate scientists have warned there is only a dozen years for global warming to be kept to a maximum of 1.5C, beyond which even half a degree will significantly worsen the risks of drought, floods, extreme heat and poverty for hundreds of millions of people.
The authors of the landmark report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released on Monday say urgent and unprecedented changes are needed to reach the target, which they say is affordable and feasible although it lies at the most ambitious end of the Paris agreement pledge to keep temperatures between 1.5C and 2C.
The half-degree difference could also prevent corals from being completely eradicated and ease pressure on the Arctic, according to the 1.5C study, which was launched after approval at a final plenary of all 195 countries in Incheon in South Korea that saw delegates hugging one another, with some in tears.
“It’s a line in the sand and what it says to our species is that this is the moment and we must act now,” said Debra Roberts, a co-chair of the working group on impacts. “This is the largest clarion bell from the science community and I hope it mobilises people and dents the mood of complacency.”
Policymakers commissioned the report at the Paris climate talks in 2016, but since then the gap between science and politics has widened. Donald Trump has promised to withdraw the US – the world’s biggest source of historical emissions – from the accord. The first round of Brazil’s presidential election on Sunday put Jair Bolsonaro into a strong position to carry out his threat to do the same and also open the Amazon rainforest to agribusiness.
The world is currently 1C warmer than preindustrial levels. Following devastating hurricanes in the US, record droughts in Cape Town and forest fires in the Arctic, the IPCC makes clear that climate change is already happening, upgraded its risk warning from previous reports, and warned that every fraction of additional warming would worsen the impact.
Scientists who reviewed the 6,000 works referenced in the report, said the change caused by just half a degree came as a revelation. “We can see there is a difference and it’s substantial,” Roberts said.
At 1.5C the proportion of the global population exposed to water stress could be 50% lower than at 2C, it notes. Food scarcity would be less of a problem and hundreds of millions fewer people, particularly in poor countries, would be at risk of climate-related poverty.
At 2C extremely hot days, such as those experienced in the northern hemisphere this summer, would become more severe and common, increasing heat-related deaths and causing more forest fires.
But the greatest difference would be to nature. Insects, which are vital for pollination of crops, and plants are almost twice as likely to lose half their habitat at 2C compared with 1.5C. Corals would be 99% lost at the higher of the two temperatures, but more than 10% have a chance of surviving if the lower target is reached.
Sea-level rise would affect 10 million more people by 2100 if the half-degree extra warming brought a forecast 10cm additional pressure on coastlines. The number affected would increase substantially in the following centuries due to locked-in ice melt.
Oceans are already suffering from elevated acidity and lower levels of oxygen as a result of climate change. One model shows marine fisheries would lose 3m tonnes at 2C, twice the decline at 1.5C.
Sea ice-free summers in the Arctic, which is warming two to three times faster than the world average, would come once every 100 years at 1.5C, but every 10 years with half a degree more of global warming.
Time and carbon budgets are running out. By mid-century, a shift to the lower goal would require a supercharged roll-back of emissions sources that have built up over the past 250 years.
The IPCC maps out four pathways to achieve 1.5C, with different combinations of land use and technological change. Reforestation is essential to all of them as are shifts to electric transport systems and greater adoption of carbon capture technology.
Carbon pollution would have to be cut by 45% by 2030 – compared with a 20% cut under the 2C pathway – and come down to zero by 2050, compared with 2075 for 2C. This would require carbon prices that are three to four times higher than for a 2C target. But the costs of doing nothing would be far higher.
“We have presented governments with pretty hard choices. We have pointed out the enormous benefits of keeping to 1.5C, and also the unprecedented shift in energy systems and transport that would be needed to achieve that,” said Jim Skea, a co-chair of the working group on mitigation. “We show it can be done within laws of physics and chemistry. Then the final tick box is political will. We cannot answer that. Only our audience can – and that is the governments that receive it.”
He said the main finding of his group was the need for urgency. Although unexpectedly good progress has been made in the adoption of renewable energy, deforestation for agriculture was turning a natural carbon sink into a source of emissions. Carbon capture and storage projects, which are essential for reducing emissions in the concrete and waste disposal industries, have also ground to a halt.
Reversing these trends is essential if the world has any chance of reaching 1.5C without relying on the untried technology of solar radiation modification and other forms of geo-engineering, which could have negative consequences.
In the run-up to the final week of negotiations, there were fears the text of the report would be watered down by the US, Saudi Arabia and other oil-rich countries that are reluctant to consider more ambitious cuts. The authors said nothing of substance was cut from a text.
Bob Ward, of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change, said the final document was “incredibly conservative” because it did not mention the likely rise in climate-driven refugees or the danger of tipping points that could push the world on to an irreversible path of extreme warming.
The report will be presented to governments at the UN climate conference in Poland at the end of this year. But analysts say there is much work to be done, with even pro-Paris deal nations involved in fossil fuel extraction that runs against the spirit of their commitments. Britain is pushing ahead with gas fracking, Norway with oil exploration in the Arctic, and the German government wants to tear down Hambach forest to dig for coal.
At the current level of commitments, the world is on course for a disastrous 3C of warming. The report authors are refusing to accept defeat, believing the increasingly visible damage caused by climate change will shift opinion their way.
“I hope this can change the world,” said Jiang Kejun of China’s semi-governmental Energy Research Institute, who is one of the authors. “Two years ago, even I didn’t believe 1.5C was possible but when I look at the options I have confidence it can be done. I want to use this report to do something big in China.”
The timing was good, he said, because the Chinese government was drawing up a long-term plan for 2050 and there was more awareness among the population about the problem of rising temperatures. “People in Beijing have never experienced so many hot days as this summer. It’s made them talk more about climate change.”
Regardless of the US and Brazil, he said, China, Europe and major cities could push ahead. “We can set an example and show what can be done. This is more about technology than politics.”
James Hansen, the former Nasa scientist who helped raised the alarm about climate change, said both 1.5C and 2C would take humanity into uncharted and dangerous territory because they were both well above the Holocene-era range in which human civilisation developed. But he said there was a huge difference between the two: “1.5C gives young people and the next generation a fighting chance of getting back to the Holocene or close to it. That is probably necessary if we want to keep shorelines where they are and preserve our coastal cities.”
Johan Rockström, a co-author of the recent Hothouse Earth report, said scientists never previously discussed 1.5C, which was initially seen as a political concession to small island states. But he said opinion had shifted in the past few years along with growing evidence of climate instability and the approach of tipping points that might push the world off a course that could be controlled by emissions reductions.
“Climate change is occurring earlier and more rapidly than expected. Even at the current level of 1C warming, it is painful,” he told the Guardian. “This report is really important. It has a scientific robustness that shows 1.5C is not just a political concession. There is a growing recognition that 2C is dangerous.”
Urgent changes needed to cut risk of extreme heat, drought, floods and poverty, says IPCC
The world’s leading climate scientists have warned there is only a dozen years for global warming to be kept to a maximum of 1.5C, beyond which even half a degree will significantly worsen the risks of drought, floods, extreme heat and poverty for hundreds of millions of people.
The authors of the landmark report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released on Monday say urgent and unprecedented changes are needed to reach the target, which they say is affordable and feasible although it lies at the most ambitious end of the Paris agreement pledge to keep temperatures between 1.5C and 2C.
The half-degree difference could also prevent corals from being completely eradicated and ease pressure on the Arctic, according to the 1.5C study, which was launched after approval at a final plenary of all 195 countries in Incheon in South Korea that saw delegates hugging one another, with some in tears.
“It’s a line in the sand and what it says to our species is that this is the moment and we must act now,” said Debra Roberts, a co-chair of the working group on impacts. “This is the largest clarion bell from the science community and I hope it mobilises people and dents the mood of complacency.”
Policymakers commissioned the report at the Paris climate talks in 2016, but since then the gap between science and politics has widened. Donald Trump has promised to withdraw the US – the world’s biggest source of historical emissions – from the accord. The first round of Brazil’s presidential election on Sunday put Jair Bolsonaro into a strong position to carry out his threat to do the same and also open the Amazon rainforest to agribusiness.
The world is currently 1C warmer than preindustrial levels. Following devastating hurricanes in the US, record droughts in Cape Town and forest fires in the Arctic, the IPCC makes clear that climate change is already happening, upgraded its risk warning from previous reports, and warned that every fraction of additional warming would worsen the impact.
Scientists who reviewed the 6,000 works referenced in the report, said the change caused by just half a degree came as a revelation. “We can see there is a difference and it’s substantial,” Roberts said.
At 1.5C the proportion of the global population exposed to water stress could be 50% lower than at 2C, it notes. Food scarcity would be less of a problem and hundreds of millions fewer people, particularly in poor countries, would be at risk of climate-related poverty.
At 2C extremely hot days, such as those experienced in the northern hemisphere this summer, would become more severe and common, increasing heat-related deaths and causing more forest fires.
But the greatest difference would be to nature. Insects, which are vital for pollination of crops, and plants are almost twice as likely to lose half their habitat at 2C compared with 1.5C. Corals would be 99% lost at the higher of the two temperatures, but more than 10% have a chance of surviving if the lower target is reached.
Sea-level rise would affect 10 million more people by 2100 if the half-degree extra warming brought a forecast 10cm additional pressure on coastlines. The number affected would increase substantially in the following centuries due to locked-in ice melt.
Oceans are already suffering from elevated acidity and lower levels of oxygen as a result of climate change. One model shows marine fisheries would lose 3m tonnes at 2C, twice the decline at 1.5C.
Sea ice-free summers in the Arctic, which is warming two to three times faster than the world average, would come once every 100 years at 1.5C, but every 10 years with half a degree more of global warming.
Time and carbon budgets are running out. By mid-century, a shift to the lower goal would require a supercharged roll-back of emissions sources that have built up over the past 250 years.
The IPCC maps out four pathways to achieve 1.5C, with different combinations of land use and technological change. Reforestation is essential to all of them as are shifts to electric transport systems and greater adoption of carbon capture technology.
Carbon pollution would have to be cut by 45% by 2030 – compared with a 20% cut under the 2C pathway – and come down to zero by 2050, compared with 2075 for 2C. This would require carbon prices that are three to four times higher than for a 2C target. But the costs of doing nothing would be far higher.
“We have presented governments with pretty hard choices. We have pointed out the enormous benefits of keeping to 1.5C, and also the unprecedented shift in energy systems and transport that would be needed to achieve that,” said Jim Skea, a co-chair of the working group on mitigation. “We show it can be done within laws of physics and chemistry. Then the final tick box is political will. We cannot answer that. Only our audience can – and that is the governments that receive it.”
He said the main finding of his group was the need for urgency. Although unexpectedly good progress has been made in the adoption of renewable energy, deforestation for agriculture was turning a natural carbon sink into a source of emissions. Carbon capture and storage projects, which are essential for reducing emissions in the concrete and waste disposal industries, have also ground to a halt.
Reversing these trends is essential if the world has any chance of reaching 1.5C without relying on the untried technology of solar radiation modification and other forms of geo-engineering, which could have negative consequences.
In the run-up to the final week of negotiations, there were fears the text of the report would be watered down by the US, Saudi Arabia and other oil-rich countries that are reluctant to consider more ambitious cuts. The authors said nothing of substance was cut from a text.
Bob Ward, of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change, said the final document was “incredibly conservative” because it did not mention the likely rise in climate-driven refugees or the danger of tipping points that could push the world on to an irreversible path of extreme warming.
The report will be presented to governments at the UN climate conference in Poland at the end of this year. But analysts say there is much work to be done, with even pro-Paris deal nations involved in fossil fuel extraction that runs against the spirit of their commitments. Britain is pushing ahead with gas fracking, Norway with oil exploration in the Arctic, and the German government wants to tear down Hambach forest to dig for coal.
At the current level of commitments, the world is on course for a disastrous 3C of warming. The report authors are refusing to accept defeat, believing the increasingly visible damage caused by climate change will shift opinion their way.
“I hope this can change the world,” said Jiang Kejun of China’s semi-governmental Energy Research Institute, who is one of the authors. “Two years ago, even I didn’t believe 1.5C was possible but when I look at the options I have confidence it can be done. I want to use this report to do something big in China.”
The timing was good, he said, because the Chinese government was drawing up a long-term plan for 2050 and there was more awareness among the population about the problem of rising temperatures. “People in Beijing have never experienced so many hot days as this summer. It’s made them talk more about climate change.”
Regardless of the US and Brazil, he said, China, Europe and major cities could push ahead. “We can set an example and show what can be done. This is more about technology than politics.”
James Hansen, the former Nasa scientist who helped raised the alarm about climate change, said both 1.5C and 2C would take humanity into uncharted and dangerous territory because they were both well above the Holocene-era range in which human civilisation developed. But he said there was a huge difference between the two: “1.5C gives young people and the next generation a fighting chance of getting back to the Holocene or close to it. That is probably necessary if we want to keep shorelines where they are and preserve our coastal cities.”
Johan Rockström, a co-author of the recent Hothouse Earth report, said scientists never previously discussed 1.5C, which was initially seen as a political concession to small island states. But he said opinion had shifted in the past few years along with growing evidence of climate instability and the approach of tipping points that might push the world off a course that could be controlled by emissions reductions.
“Climate change is occurring earlier and more rapidly than expected. Even at the current level of 1C warming, it is painful,” he told the Guardian. “This report is really important. It has a scientific robustness that shows 1.5C is not just a political concession. There is a growing recognition that 2C is dangerous.”
Yongpeng Sun-Tastaufen
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Actually, the first 10 ppm CO2 already absorbed 98% of whatever IR CO2 absorbs. So whether CO2 increases to 1000 ppm or reduced to 100 ppm makes no difference on temperature.
The ozone layer, our Earth's sunscreen, absorbs about 98 percent of this devastating UV light.
https://www.nationalgeographic.org/encyclopedia/ozone-layer/
The total mass of ozone in the atmosphere is about 3 billion metric tons. That may seem like a lot, but it is only 0.00006 percent of the atmosphere. The peak concentration of ozone occurs at an altitude of roughly 32 kilometers (20 miles) above the surface of the Earth. At that altitude, ozone concentration can be as high as 15 parts per million (0.0015 percent).
https://ozonewatch.gsfc.nasa.gov/facts/SH.html
@pakistanipower @nahtanbob @gambit @vostok @F-22Raptor @LeGenD @KAL-EL
The ozone layer, our Earth's sunscreen, absorbs about 98 percent of this devastating UV light.
https://www.nationalgeographic.org/encyclopedia/ozone-layer/
The total mass of ozone in the atmosphere is about 3 billion metric tons. That may seem like a lot, but it is only 0.00006 percent of the atmosphere. The peak concentration of ozone occurs at an altitude of roughly 32 kilometers (20 miles) above the surface of the Earth. At that altitude, ozone concentration can be as high as 15 parts per million (0.0015 percent).
https://ozonewatch.gsfc.nasa.gov/facts/SH.html
@pakistanipower @nahtanbob @gambit @vostok @F-22Raptor @LeGenD @KAL-EL
Ultima Thule
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for god sake leave me alone and don't tag me again for your stupid threads @undertakerwwefan
Yongpeng Sun-Tastaufen
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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/mar/04/climate-change-emergency-westminster
Westminster’s lacklustre approach is incredible. We need nothing short of a transformation of the way we live our lives
MPs debated climate change in the Commons chamber last week for the first time in two years. It was our first opportunity since September 2016 to talk about the biggest and most urgent crisis humanity has ever faced. Just 40 MPs showed up. This absenteeism speaks volumes. Even as we’ve sweated through a record-breaking February, as wildfires tear through our ancient woodlands, as insect and wildlife populations collapse around us, the words “climate change” are scarcely whispered in the corridors of Whitehall.
Since 2010, this government has built a bonfire out of the measures designed to cut emissions. Zero carbon homes targets have been scrapped. Onshore wind has been effectively banned. Solar power has been shafted. The Green Investment Bank has been flogged off. Fracking has been forced on communities who have rejected it. Ministers champion the drop in our domestic carbon dioxide emissions – but they neglect to mention the true scale of our impact. Between 1997 and 2015, our total carbon footprint – taking into account everything we import and consume, as well as what we produce – declined by a pitiful 3.8%.
On the opposition benches, while many MPs grasp the severity of this situation, their parties’ policies are littered with impossible inconsistencies. We cannot tackle climate change and build new runways, or prop up North Sea oil and gas, or spend billions on new roads. And we cannot tackle climate change with an economy built on the assumption that precious minerals, fresh air, clean water and rare species can magically regenerate themselves in an instant – that somehow the Earth will expand to meet our voracious appetite for new stuff.
The world’s top scientists say we need to cut emissions to net zero by the middle of the century. But during that same period, the global economy is set to nearly triple in size. It would be hard enough to decarbonise existing levels of production and consumption in just a few decades. To do it three times over is nigh on impossible. To pursue never-ending economic growth – or even to keep things ticking along as they are – is to gamble with the fate of humanity. We need nothing short of a transformation of the way we live our lives – and the way we measure progress.
In the US, congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has reinvigorated the idea of a Green New Deal – an initiative I was proud to have co-founded 10 years ago here in the UK. It takes its inspiration from Roosevelt’s New Deal of the 1930s, which used massive investment in jobs and infrastructure to pull the US out of the Great Depression.
In 2019, we face an even bigger challenge. To avoid climate catastrophe, we must go beyond what is considered politically possible. A Green New Deal would mobilise resources on a scale unprecedented in peacetime, to tackle the climate emergency and address spiralling inequality. It would involve huge investment in clean energy, warm homes and affordable public transport – delivering a decent, well-paid job to everyone who wants one. It would rebuild once proud communities that have been hollowed out by deindustrialisation and austerity, allowing them to thrive as part of a collective endeavour to protect the planet. And it would protect and restore threatened habitats and carbon sinks like forests, wild places, soils and oceans.
To do this, we must be able to leverage whatever finance is necessary to tackle the crisis. This is not a Trumpian border wall emergency – this is a real emergency. Critics might denounce such a plan as fantasy politics – but I ask them, with just 11 years left to halve global climate emissions, what is your alternative?
Young people understand what’s needed to secure their futures. Last month, they went on school strike across the country to protest about government inaction on climate change. In our cities and towns, Green councillors have persuaded more than 25 local authorities to declare a climate emergency – and now schools and universities are doing the same. These are some of the most inspirational and hopeful acts I’ve seen in years. And where the people lead, politicians must follow.
Parliament must now declare a climate emergency. It must debate climate change regularly. It must develop the laws necessary to implement a Green New Deal and climate-proof every piece of legislation. And the government must ensure climate change is a priority in all departmental and cabinet decision-making. But government and parliament will only act if we tell them to. So talk about climate breakdown – to your friends, your family, your neighbours and your colleagues. Join the school strikes. Join peaceful direct action initiatives like Extinction Rebellion. Write to your MP. Write to your councillors. Write to your banks. This is an emergency. Let’s treat it like one.
Westminster’s lacklustre approach is incredible. We need nothing short of a transformation of the way we live our lives
MPs debated climate change in the Commons chamber last week for the first time in two years. It was our first opportunity since September 2016 to talk about the biggest and most urgent crisis humanity has ever faced. Just 40 MPs showed up. This absenteeism speaks volumes. Even as we’ve sweated through a record-breaking February, as wildfires tear through our ancient woodlands, as insect and wildlife populations collapse around us, the words “climate change” are scarcely whispered in the corridors of Whitehall.
Since 2010, this government has built a bonfire out of the measures designed to cut emissions. Zero carbon homes targets have been scrapped. Onshore wind has been effectively banned. Solar power has been shafted. The Green Investment Bank has been flogged off. Fracking has been forced on communities who have rejected it. Ministers champion the drop in our domestic carbon dioxide emissions – but they neglect to mention the true scale of our impact. Between 1997 and 2015, our total carbon footprint – taking into account everything we import and consume, as well as what we produce – declined by a pitiful 3.8%.
On the opposition benches, while many MPs grasp the severity of this situation, their parties’ policies are littered with impossible inconsistencies. We cannot tackle climate change and build new runways, or prop up North Sea oil and gas, or spend billions on new roads. And we cannot tackle climate change with an economy built on the assumption that precious minerals, fresh air, clean water and rare species can magically regenerate themselves in an instant – that somehow the Earth will expand to meet our voracious appetite for new stuff.
The world’s top scientists say we need to cut emissions to net zero by the middle of the century. But during that same period, the global economy is set to nearly triple in size. It would be hard enough to decarbonise existing levels of production and consumption in just a few decades. To do it three times over is nigh on impossible. To pursue never-ending economic growth – or even to keep things ticking along as they are – is to gamble with the fate of humanity. We need nothing short of a transformation of the way we live our lives – and the way we measure progress.
In the US, congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has reinvigorated the idea of a Green New Deal – an initiative I was proud to have co-founded 10 years ago here in the UK. It takes its inspiration from Roosevelt’s New Deal of the 1930s, which used massive investment in jobs and infrastructure to pull the US out of the Great Depression.
In 2019, we face an even bigger challenge. To avoid climate catastrophe, we must go beyond what is considered politically possible. A Green New Deal would mobilise resources on a scale unprecedented in peacetime, to tackle the climate emergency and address spiralling inequality. It would involve huge investment in clean energy, warm homes and affordable public transport – delivering a decent, well-paid job to everyone who wants one. It would rebuild once proud communities that have been hollowed out by deindustrialisation and austerity, allowing them to thrive as part of a collective endeavour to protect the planet. And it would protect and restore threatened habitats and carbon sinks like forests, wild places, soils and oceans.
To do this, we must be able to leverage whatever finance is necessary to tackle the crisis. This is not a Trumpian border wall emergency – this is a real emergency. Critics might denounce such a plan as fantasy politics – but I ask them, with just 11 years left to halve global climate emissions, what is your alternative?
Young people understand what’s needed to secure their futures. Last month, they went on school strike across the country to protest about government inaction on climate change. In our cities and towns, Green councillors have persuaded more than 25 local authorities to declare a climate emergency – and now schools and universities are doing the same. These are some of the most inspirational and hopeful acts I’ve seen in years. And where the people lead, politicians must follow.
Parliament must now declare a climate emergency. It must debate climate change regularly. It must develop the laws necessary to implement a Green New Deal and climate-proof every piece of legislation. And the government must ensure climate change is a priority in all departmental and cabinet decision-making. But government and parliament will only act if we tell them to. So talk about climate breakdown – to your friends, your family, your neighbours and your colleagues. Join the school strikes. Join peaceful direct action initiatives like Extinction Rebellion. Write to your MP. Write to your councillors. Write to your banks. This is an emergency. Let’s treat it like one.
Yongpeng Sun-Tastaufen
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Blythe Pepino and Alice Brown say they are so scared about the future of the planet they do not want to have children.
They are part of a group called BirthStrike, and spoke to Victoria Derbyshire about how their fears have grown.
Watch the Victoria Derbyshire programme on BBC Two and BBC News Channel, 10:00 to 11:00 GMT - and see more of our stories here.
Asimzranger
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they should come to pakistan
Yongpeng Sun-Tastaufen
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The steel mills on the Hamilton waterfront harbour are shown in Hamilton, Ont., on Tuesday, October 23, 2018. Canada's push to be a world leader in the fight against climate change may be hampered by its distinction for producing the most greenhouse gas emissions per person among the world's 20 largest economies. (THE CANADIAN PRESS/Nathan Denette)
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government has come up with a new way to meet Canada’s greenhouse gas emission targets under the Paris climate accord.
Except it doesn’t reduce emissions. It’s an accounting trick.
Since there’s no way we can meet our looming target for 2030 that Trudeau agreed to when he signed the 2015 Paris climate deal — lowering Canada’s emissions to 30% below 2005 levels — the Liberals have started moving the goalposts closer to the target.
But it has nothing to do with what we’ve been told is the real problem — industrial emissions from man-made activities when burning fossil fuels (oil, coal and natural gas) for energy.
What the Trudeau government is now starting to do is to include annual emission reductions from the amount of carbon dioxide stored in Canada’s forests, in calculating the country’s total annual emissions, which it hasn’t done before.
The reason it hasn’t — which is allowed under the Paris treaty — is that Canada’s forests have been a net contributor to annual CO2 emissions for almost 20 years.
That’s due to natural occurrences which kill trees such as forest fires caused by lightning strikes and insect damage, because all living things emit carbon dioxide when they die.
As the CBC’s Robert Fletcher recently reported, that increased Canada’s annual emissions by 78 megatonnes (one megatonne, or Mt, equals one million tonnes) in 2016 alone, the last year for which figures are available.
But if you only count emissions caused by human activities versus natural occurrences in what are called managed forests — such as logging and replacing felled trees with new ones — then our forests become what’s called a carbon sink, reducing our annual emissions by about 26 megatonnes per year since 2001.
To be sure, that’s a drop in the bucket compared to what Trudeau agreed to in the Paris accord.
Canada’s emissions in 2016 were 704 megatonnes, the last year for which figures are available, while Trudeau’s commitment under the Paris deal for 2030 works out to 512 megatonnes annually, or 192 megatonnes less.
And we’re heading in the wrong direction.
In December, Environment Canada announced that even if Canada does everything it has promised to do to reduce its emissions, including completing measures not even begun, we will still fall 79 Mt short of Trudeau’s Paris target, up from 66 Mt short as of December, 2017.
That’s why Canada, along with many other countries, is now looking for ways to reduce emissions other than by reducing emissions, by counting forests as a carbon sink, but only by arbitrarily factoring in only human activities in those forests rather than natural occurrences.
As Bjorn Lomborg, director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center and author of The Skeptical Environmentalist and Cool It noted in a recent column, “Faking It on Climate Change”, published by Project Syndicate, nations all over the world are using similar accounting tricks to artificially lower emissions.
“Because honest and deep emissions cuts are staggeringly hard to make, achieving carbon neutrality anytime soon is an empty ambition … almost everywhere” Lomborg writes. “But countries continue to make big promises and massage their emission numbers to give a false sense of progress on combatting global warming.”
Another method being considered by Canada and other countries to lower emissions is by purchasing carbon credits on global carbon markets with taxpayers’ money, the problem in that case being that many are riddled with fraud and do not result in actual emission reductions.
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