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Is 'Prescription for Disaster' Our 'Most Optimistic' Climate Future?
New data indicates warming of 2C now planet's "most optimistic" scenario
New climate information from French scientists indicate that global warming of 2 C is the "most optimistic" scenario. Yet this is the amount of warming James Hansen has referred to as a "prescription for disaster."
Agence France-Presse reports on the new climate scenarios:
French scientists unveiling new estimates for global warming said on Thursday the 2 C (3.6 F) goal enshrined by the United Nations was "the most optimistic" scenario left for greenhouse-gas emissions.
The estimates, compiled by five scientific institutes, will be handed to the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for consideration in its next big overview on global warming and its impacts. [...]
The French team said that by 2100, warming over pre-industrial times would range from two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) to 5.0 C (9.0 F).
The most pessimistic scenarios foresee warming of 3.5-5.0 C (6.3-9.0 F), the scientists said in a press release.
Achieving 2C, "the most optimistic scenario," is possible but "only by applying climate policies to reduce greenhouse gases," they said.
The climate summit in Copenhagen in 2009 had agreed to a limit of 2 C in global warming, a deal many saw as a failure to stop runaway global warming. John Sauven, executive director of Greenpeace UK, said at the time:
"The city of Copenhagen is a crime scene tonight, with the guilty men and women fleeing to the airport. [...] It is now evident that beating global warming will require a radically different model of politics than the one on display here in Copenhagen."
James Hansen: "Limiting human-caused warming to 2 degrees is not sufficient. It would be a prescription for disaster."
In December of 2011, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies James Hansen stated at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union:
"The paleoclimate record reveals a more sensitive climate than thought, even as of a few years ago. Limiting human-caused warming to 2 degrees is not sufficient," Hansen said. "It would be a prescription for disaster."
"We don’t have a substantial cushion between today's climate and dangerous warming," Hansen said. "Earth is poised to experience strong amplifying feedbacks in response to moderate additional global warming."
"Humans have overwhelmed the natural, slow changes that occur on geologic timescales," Hansen said.
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260 Comments so far
Show AllMBendzela wrote: Whether or not climate change leads to "mankind's destruction" is an open question.
Some things which are not open questions:
Nihilistically, MBendzela relishes the irony of all this.
Please once again explain how your insults have lowered carbon emissions? You emit carbon with every key stroke.
Everything on your list is correct, and yet we don't know how humanity might adapt.
Please explain what motivates your defeatism. It's easy to feel superior, when you have given up on making any positive contribution, by sneering that those working for change haven't accomplished anything, either. It is a defense mechanism which absolves you of responsibility.
It is useful that you come around to exemplify this perspective on the worst problem ever to face humanity, because it is commonly held. But cynical submission to destruction is the coward's path. It doesn't matter what we do, you say, human nature will guarantee our descent into the abyss. I beg to differ - it is your attitude, not human nature, which provides this guarantee.
Your last few sentences deserve to be repeated again.
"But cynical submission to destruction is the coward's path. It doesn't matter what we do, you say, human nature will guarantee our descent into the abyss. I beg to differ - it is your attitude, not human nature, which provides this guarantee."
http://www.peopleforbikes.org/page/speakout/don-t-let-the-senate-make-bi...
although i favor revolutionary change, every small act of resistance (speaking out) is critical. overcome cynicism by engaging in a few small acts of resistance/participation each day.
...peace...
Peoples use the technology they have at hand. We've been in the 'advancing our tools' stage for all of human history. The judicious use of said tools always lags behind acceptance of them, sadly. Thus, the increasingly deadly weaponry as well as the topic, fossil fuel misuse and pollution.
Re finfish and shellfish, where are the wooly mammoths? I'm only partly being facetious.
Indeed, our survival as a species has been due entirely to (chance and) our adaptability. I can only hope and trust that that wonderful human quality will help us deal with extreme weather and drastic climate change.
Yes, it should have been "extinct." Careless spelling error.
I recommend "embracing the consequences of our evolutionary success" because you simply cannot reverse them. These forces are greater than us and should inspire awe rather than contempt. As individuals, we have to embrace the inevitability of personal death, and it's hubris to think one can do otherwise.
"Collective suicide" implies will. The "collective" has no will. I personally want to stay around as long as possible!
If Empire prevails, it will attempt some form(s) of geoengineering to slowdown the effects of the Climate Calamity, but those attempts will fail as nothing can stop the ocean's acidification, which will strangle the food chain at its most important point--plankton: The Soylent Green scenario. How long terrestial megafauna can survive without the ocean's plankton is unknown, but given the degree of Overshoot, I think a few decades to a century at most. Zager and Evans's "2525" was prescient.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident:
"That the real, physical world is the source of our own lives, and the lives of others. A weakened planet is less capable of supporting life, human or otherwise.
"Thus the health of the real world is primary, more important than any social or economic system, because all social or economic systems are dependent upon a living planet.
"It is self-evident that to value a social system that harms the planet’s capacity to support life over life itself is to be out of touch with physical reality....."
karlof1
I like that very much. It's something Bolivia has voted for, Christopher Stone has written about, and all of us know somewhere deep inside:
Rather than this pointless Rio+20 meeting, the United Nations General Assembly could adopt your well worded proposal immediately - as a set of guidelines - non-binding preferably - for what is related in your post is "self-evident" to any sane person.
Respect & Honor the Natural World
=========----- 1. Shape the marketplace.
If you know your farmer, then know your energy supplier too.
For that matter, know your manufacturer. Does your store research its source manufacturers?
Act as communities yourselves. Quit trusting Mall-Wart to solve your environmental problems. Deal in fair climate goods.
Boycott the billionaires who hire the climate change deniers that write total baloney on this forum.
----- 2. Get our governments to shape our marketplace.
The government should factor in the hidden costs of invading someone else's oil fields and of climate change.
Insulating homes is work. We have a permanent surplus of workers. So, we should put more national value on labor.
Reform our government so that it works better, and so that it has fewer blood-sucking parasites.
----- 3. Do things yourself so they are done right.
Act as communities yourselves. Quit trusting Mall-Wart to solve your environmental problems.
Quit trusting Exxon to do all of the research. They have gum on their shoe and can't move. If you're feeling courageous, set yourselves up to do product development. That's where the most change lies.
Otherwise, do your own market research as to why so many good energy ideas die before they reach popular product acceptance.
Show the public how much you care. Get the word around.
----- 4. Brace for collision
Fight mass extinctions. Hand-carry plants and non-flying bugs northward so that the species will survive.
Freeze species embryos in liquid nitrogen for 500 years until we've restored the climate. Start now with the nearly extinct species. Or, put marine microplankton in fish tanks for 500 years. Think WALL-E.
Yes. - The way things are going with the "locked-in" technologies in use and planned.
So much planned by humans that hasn't happened yet but which practically can't be avoided without disaster to hundreds of millions of people, mostly the poorest and middle class in every nation. Homo sapiens mentes non compos.
Did he fail to mention them? Or is this the editor's fault?
VERY important geologic and biospheric history for our current situation!
Anthropogenic gas release might best be compared to a -geologically instant- centuries-long period of medium-severe to severe impacts due to a close-call with a body that then broke-up, and stayed in our path as smaller pieces, or the same scenario with one of the other planets providing the break-up.
Think Shoemaker-Levy 9 hitting Jupiter, but on a smaller scale.
The Biosphere has survived and adapted to events such as this multiple times. THIS is the geologically history that is relevant, not the "slow changes that occur on geologic timescales."
Of course Hansen has discussed the history of Earth's climate. He recently wrote an interesting paper on the subject:
The three pillars of climate science are paleoclimate, modeling, and monitoring. Because the thermal response of the world ocean is sluggish, the most reliable indicator of the full response to greenhouse gases is paleoclimate.
For a while, after it was proven that the chicxulub meteor caused the fifth great extinction (the end-Cretaceous, 65 mya), it was thought that all the other extinctions came about this way, as well. No longer, though. No evidence has turned up of any other impacts like chicxulub. The biggest extinction ever (the end-Permian, 251 mya), is thought to have been triggered by a huge volcanic event, spanning a million years, called the Siberian traps.
It's also possible that volcanic activity played a role in the end-Cretaceous, or that meteor impacts played a role in the end-Permian. A large enough impact could definitely trigger volcanism. At any rate, there are indications of one or more global temperature whiplashes around both events: a nuclear winter caused by massive amounts of aerosols, immediately followed by rapid warming due to greenhouse gases.
Regarding the biosphere's ability to survive and adapt to such crises, a relevant consideration is whether the impact of anthropogenic greenhouse gases is similar to the shock of one of the lesser extinction events, or to the end-Permian. If the latter, we're talking about a perturbation which came perilously close to wiping out all multi-cellular organisms. If the latter, then the chance of the apex predator (Homo sapiens) surviving is slim.
And I'm not talking about "extinction events", I am talking about the more frequent, smaller impacts, that often happen in clusters.
Anthropogenic gas release doesn't rise to the level of the K-T Boundary Event, let alone the Permian extinction.
As your own repetition of the "million year volcanism" theory clearly shows, comparisons between AGW and the Permian extinction are just plain silly.
The novelty of AGW is the fundamental problem with all these "scientific" predictions.
Massive CO and CO2 release without massive ash and dust release is unheard of in the geological record. Though -as I said- small impactor clusters (and the resultant volcanic activity) come closest to our situation, they are still quite a ways off -because of the ash and dust.
Hansen talks of paleoclimate, but somehow doesn't get the message being sent by the Medieval Warm Period or the Holocene Maximum -or the ice ages.
Would it make you stop for a moment and rethink?
Would it make you even CONSIDER apologizing?
'Cause YOU ARE WRONG. ;)
My "motive" is simply to find and discuss any analogues in the record to what we are facing today. Or if we can't do that -which I have not been able to on my own so far- to discuss how not having past analogues effects our ability to understand our current situation.
What's your "motive" for the way you have acted on this thread, and in too many others?
matti,
I've never heard of climate changes attributed to small impactor clusters (and the resultant volcanic activity). If you have been reading something along these lines, I'd be most interested. There are little bits of stuff striking the Earth all the time, but an impact would need to be fairly large, I should think, to have any effect on climate or volcanic activity.
Though aerosols accompany volcanic CO2 releases, the lifetime of aerosols is the blink of an eye - a couple of years - while the lifetime of atmospheric CO2 is hundreds of thousands of years. So the geologic record is replete with long periods of elevated atmospheric CO2 unaccompanied by aerosols.
The Medieval Warm Period and the Holocene Maximum both fall within the period of time considered in Hansen's paleoclimate paper (linked above). Hansen has said that the current global mean temperature (a 0.8°C increase over the preindustrial level) is roughly equal to that of the Holocene Maximum.
One message being sent by the ice ages is that 5°C is that the difference between interglacial warmth and a mile-thick ice sheet over half of North America. Two degrees of warming would take the Earth past the maximum temperature of all Pleistocene ice-age cycles. Five degrees would take the Earth to a thermal state it hasn't seen for 40 million years, since before there were polar ice-caps.
I really meant "smaller than the KT -level impactors".
To be honest, I'm getting the notion from multiple not-so-well-remembered sources that talked of theoretical impacts during the warming period at the end of the most recent ice age -so...grain of salt, grain of salt. ;)
I'm more searching for a better analogue than suggesting one.
As for Hansen and the Maximum et al:
Firstly, IIRC, the Holocene Maximum was hotter than that -more like 2 degrees than .8 above preindustrial.
But my point about the "messages" was that both of the "historical" warm periods were good times, not bad, for civilization, and that ice ages are worse than hot ages.
This is where -in my opinion- Hansen and too many others go off the reservation a bit.
They take the current warming, compare it to warming in history, finding it better or worse, observe that the trend involves human activity, and then jump right to the conclusion that this warming is just going to make everything super-suck for humanity and life.
That's the part I can't follow them in.
Your example of the Eocene demonstrates my point:
There was really drastic change, many old forms couldn't handle it, and were succeded by new forms that thrived in it. But many old forms did just fine.
I don't see why us oh-so-adaptive humans would fail to adapt to even an Eocene-level change.
The transition from the Paleocene to the Eocene 55 mya, called the PETM, is the most rapid era of climate change known to paleoclimatologists. But human-caused warming today is about 30 times faster than the peak rate of the PETM. Because the evolution of long-lived organisms takes time, the rate of change makes a big difference. Evolution has never before had to adapt to such a fast rate of change.
The main survival adaptation in periods of climate change is migration. In today's world, numerous barriers constructed by humans obstruct the ability of organisms to migrate to hospitable climes. When you combine heating at an unprecedented pace with insuperable barriers, you've set up the greatest extinction event since Life began. Humans would have slim chances of survival on such a lonely planet.
Prevention was always a pipe-dream, really. ;)
I know it sounds science-fictional, but look at how little of the natural world is left and humanity simply Does Not Care. What does it care about? Mobile phones, communication grids, supercomputers, sophisticated weapons to kill the last human holdouts against the globalized techno-rapture.
One could argue that technology itself is the dominant life form on this plant already, and it does not give a fuck about anything natural: not humans, not birds, not the climate, not coral reefs, not one damned living thing. How fast is the fiber? How wide is the bandwidth? How many nodes of information? How many processor cores on the chip? How much storage capacity? How smart the artificial intelligence systems?
I think the Derrick Jensens and James Hansens of the world are going to be blown to pieces finally by robotic drones flying over the United States within a decade or two. The planet will clearly be a hell for humans, but a blooming paradise for technology itself.
The final act of course, is the liberation of technology from man and the exinction of man as a vestigial oddity; a transitional species.
Basically, I worry more and more that the fucking Unabomber was right.
Nature is all we have. It is the basis for our existence and we are part of it. We either learn to live with Nature without doing permanent harm, or we die.
As there are already too many people on Earth for available natural resources, many will die in the climate change struggles. So be it.
Meanwhile, inform and organize the populace to stop the warming of Earth.
The Inuits managed to survive in the wind swept frozen Arctic with only driftwood, rocks, animal bones and ivory for their tools. They learned how to make fire from ice, using a small block of ice as a magnifing glass and sunbems to cause igniting heat on dry grass and seaweed.
The Inuit learned many things over the centuries, how to construct a fishing boat with walrus skin, how to stalk and kill a polar bear and not eat the poisonous liver.. They learned how to tame an Arctic fox pup, how to only take one egg from a bird's nest, how to make leather and fur soft, how to use wolvering hair on their parka hoods that would not ice up from their breath, so many things and they learned how to live with nature.
An Inuit elder once said to some American missionaries who in derision called them "Eskimos". meaning "eaters of blubber"... He said in a quiet voice, "lay down your books, your precious modern things and come with me. Follow me into the dark and frozen Arctic,,, and learn how to live with nature."
The rapidly thawing Arctic due to global warming, and the result of vast amounts of Ch4, methane gas, entering the armosphere's greenhouse gas mix is going to insure we will have runaway and irreverisible global warming within the next few years, probably by 2020 or perhaps much sooner... It (could be) reversed and that will require full co-operation of world leaders and or world governments as ~Siouxrose~ correctly stated.
~Aleph Null~ said it exactly, that we must have a massive reduction of our Co2 and plant billions of trees (now)... That would be for starters.. We can discuss human nature, human traits, human evolution, etc, but there is only one (*most serious*) issue, that is the Arctic methane threat and talking about it is not how to reverse the coming castatrophic disaster.
A person can deny that, ignore it, pretend it is not happening, scoff at it, talk about other things and do as they so please.. But unless we find a way to greatly reduce our Co2 emissions and stop the Arctic's permafrost from melting, we most likely are not going to see 2040... We means everybody.
http://ghgdata.epa.gov/ghgp/main.d
However, I grieve for all that our grandchildren lose permanently. It's not right.
At some point I call for each one of us to think about moving beyond mourning. Mourning over one particular catastrophe for all of one's life gets a bit stale. We're here on earth until we're not. We should ask what, if anything, are we actually going to do about the catastrophe before the time that we're not here?
About the year 2040, we are both estimating, or guessing, but I fully agree with you about the grandchildren,,,,, and the children and young adults now living in my opinion.
I base my "guesstimates" on the year 2040 or even sooner, that a mass extintion of life will begin in ernest, or at the bare minimum, life will be Hell on Earth, on the following.
Every year since 2005, scientists hae been amazed that things are happening due to global warming ten times faster than they had predicted, especialy so the thawing Arctic Ocean perennial ice and the sub sea permafrost.
If only a half billion tons of methane escapes from the thawing Arctic permafrost in a year's time, we will learn what global warming really means, it will be horrible.... A billion tons and it will be cause for horrific, incredible damaging climate changes, especially very, very high temperatures.
If that continues for three to five consecutive years, life will be Hell on Earth. At the current rate Arctic methane is already releasing, by 2040 we may be very "well done" from the high heat.
Now from your comments PaulK, I detect you do not approve of my comments about such catastrophic disaster.. .Well, then you are denying what is sure to occur if we do not act now or very, very soon to reverse the damage of the thawing Arctic ice and permafrost... Do you have any suggestions on how that could be accomlished?
And I am in wonder of your first paragraph, are you comparing you or I to a rat or a cockroach? I do not understand the meaning of that paragraph.
And a half billion or a billion tons or more of methane escaping from the Arctic permafrost in a year? __ That will be more than just possible by 2020 or sooner... Do you know of a more serious (pending) issue facing humanity and all other life on Earth? Why would anyone have a problem of discussing such a serious issue? What is more serious? What pending issue could cause a mass extintion of life on Earth? I believe you agree it may, can, or will happen. We just disagree on when or how soon.. . .