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TechnoratiClimate Roulette
They say that everyone who finally gets it about climate change has an "Oh, shit" moment--an instant when the full scientific implications become clear and they suddenly realize what a horrifically dangerous situation humanity has created for itself. Listening to the speeches, groundbreaking in their way, that President Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao delivered September 22 at the UN Summit on Climate Change, I was reminded of my most recent "Oh, shit" moment.
It came in July, courtesy of the chief climate adviser to the German government. Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, chair of an advisory council known by its German acronym, WBGU, is a physicist whose specialty, fittingly, is chaos theory. Speaking to an invitation-only conference at New Mexico's Santa Fe Institute, Schellnhuber divulged the findings of a study so new he had not yet briefed Chancellor Angela Merkel about it. The study has now been published. If its conclusions are correct--and Schellnhuber ranks among the world's half-dozen most eminent climate scientists--it has monumental implications for the pivotal meeting in December in Copenhagen, where world leaders will try to agree on reversing global warming.
Schellnhuber and his WBGU colleagues go a giant step beyond the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN body whose scientific reports are constrained because the world's governments must approve their contents. The IPCC says that rich industrial countries must cut emissions 25 to 40 percent by 2020 (from 1990 levels) if the world is to have a fair chance of avoiding catastrophic climate change. By contrast, the WBGU study says the United States must cut emissions 100 percent by 2020--i.e., quit carbon entirely within ten years. Germany, Italy and other industrial nations must do the same by 2025 to 2030. China only has until 2035, and the world as a whole must be carbon-free by 2050. The study adds that big polluters can delay their day of reckoning by "buying" emissions rights from developing countries, a step the study estimates would extend some countries' deadlines by a decade or so.
Needless to say, this timetable is light-years more demanding than what the world's major governments are talking about in the run-up to Copenhagen. The European Union has pledged 20 percent reductions by 2020, which it will increase to 30 percent if others--like the United States--do the same. Japan's new prime minister likewise has promised 25 percent reductions by 2020 if others do the same. Obama didn't mention a number, but the Waxman-Markey bill, which he supports, would deliver less than 5 percent reductions by 2020. Obama's silence--doubtless a function of the fact that Republicans are implacably opposed to serious emissions cuts--allowed Hu to claim the higher ground at the UN. Hu went further than any Chinese leader has before, pledging to curb greenhouse gas emissions growth by a "notable margin" by 2020. Obama dropped his own bombshell, however, urging that all G-20 governments phase out subsidies for fossil fuels. "The time we have to reverse this tide is running out," Obama declared. Alas, the WBGU study suggests that our time is in fact all but gone.
Obama, like other G-8 leaders, agreed in July to limit the global temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above the preindustrial level at which human civilization developed. Schellnhuber, addressing the Santa Fe conference, joked that the G-8 leaders had agreed to the 2C limit "probably because they don't know what it means." In fact, even the "brutal" timeline of the WBGU study, Schellnhuber cautioned, would not guarantee staying within the 2C target. It would merely give humanity a two-out-of-three chance of doing so--"worse odds than Russian roulette," he wryly noted. "But it is the best we can do." To have a three-out-of-four chance, countries would have to quit carbon even sooner. Likewise, we could decide to wait another decade or so to halt all greenhouse emissions, but this lowers the odds of hitting the 2C target to fifty-fifty. "And what kind of precautionary principle is that?" Schellnhuber asked.
There is a fundamental political assumption underlying the WBGU study: that the right to emit greenhouse gases is shared equally by all people on earth. Known in diplomatic circles as "the per capita principle," this approach has long been insisted upon by China and most other developing countries and thus is seen as essential to an agreement in Copenhagen, though among G-8 leaders only Merkel has endorsed it. The WBGU study applies the per capita principle to the world population of 7 billion people and arrives at an annual emissions quota of 2.7 tons of carbon dioxide per person. That's harsh news for Americans, who emit 20 tons per person annually, and it explains why the US deadline is the most imminent. But China won't welcome this news either. Its combination of high annual emissions and huge population gives it a deadline only a few years later than Europe's and Japan's.
"I myself was terrified when I saw these numbers," Schellnhuber said. He urges governments to agree in Copenhagen to launch "a Green Apollo Project." Like John Kennedy's pledge to land a man on the moon in ten years, a global Green Apollo Project would aim to put leading economies on a trajectory of zero carbon emissions within ten years. Combined with carbon trading with low-emissions countries, Schellnhuber says, such a "wartime mobilization" might still save us from the worst impacts of climate change. The alternative is more and more "Oh, shit" moments for all of us.
19 Comments so far
Show AllI know the commenters on this thread will be upset with me, but take at look at http://www.mailonsunday.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1220052/Austria-sees-earliest-snow-history-America-s... or other recent articles to see a different perspective on the problem.
If the present trend continues, you can relax a little. The recent cooling has given us at least a reprieve from the global death sentence announced by people like Schellnhuber and his WBGU colleagues.
The Daily Mail mightn't be the best source for good science. Like their corresponding rags in the US, they're very committed to denial, and forcefully interpret everything in that light even as they do a quick knee-bend to reality.
I don't think I'd agree with the idea that we can relax. There's no evidence that we're not going to get continued crazy weather, desertification, acidification of the oceans, etc. during this tiny non-heating period ('cooling' isn't quite right, since we're talking about a momentary return to winters something like what most of us grew up thinking was 'normal'). At most, this respite, if it lasts a few years, might make it possible for us to reverse climate change without also dropping over from heatstroke.
I'll ask my usual question: given what we're facing, how many here would be willing to essentially abandon their current lives to work on a solution, if a framework to achieve a solution were at hand and needed years of unending hard work to make it happen?
In his book "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress", the late Robert Heinlein made a very telling (I thought) point. I didn't care for his politics at all even though he was apparently a very ethical person in his own way and regarded cats as people (a perception I share), but along with the dreck he produced the occasional diamond. Or at least a high-quality spinel.
The particular insight I'm thinking of in that book was how many people are basically drones. People who will endlessly moan and play Ain't It Awful and If It Weren't For Them without ever feeling the need to *DO* anything substantive.
Over the years, and especially on the inet, I've run across a number of such drones. More than anyone could ever use, really. They're very often soi-disant socialists, and tend to award themselves the title of 'intellectual' and claim it's their role to inform the masses rather then bestir their personal asses.
To them, their endless bloviation and debate *is* work. Or so they claim (I keep waiting to catch them smirking ahint their hand).
So in asking my question, I'm trying to get a grip on the percentage of real people vs drones on the internet. If someone's reading CD who's just before organising a Save The World party, it'd be quite important, I should think, for them to know whether to bother trying to organise people on the net or simply write them off as drones and go for the non-'netizens' who do real things like voter drives, food pantries, et lengthy cetera.
So how about it? Would you, personally, feel the need to do what folk did during Civil Rights Days? Live on too little sleep, not much food, and in constant danger from the elite scum while trying to organise a resistance movement to save the world?
Well?
Honestly, this is a timeless question of the left. It's in constant discussion amongst activists in "the streets" if you will, including radical groups such as the anarchists that organized the G20 resistance (they, like the RNC 08 organizers, broke new ground and built bonds with not-so-radical leftist groups). I don't want to address the actual topic of how we create a mass movement, but wanted to let you know its a relevant and oft-posed in activist circles. The groups are out there, talking, but a whole new generation of activists are just getting their feet went in resistance. The liberal anti-war years of holding signs and asking for permission are (hopefully) coming to an end. We need to real movements not co-opted by liberals with an agenda and ties to the ruling class. Very few people stay engaged in such circumstances. We need to build networks and organize around the principles we want a future society to employ: directly democratic and inclusive.
But is anyone talking about resistance in the context of *building* rather than *opposing*? Most of what I've seen has been resistance in the sense of resist-the-ruling-class rather than replace-the-ruling-class. 'Smash the windows' (no, not the fiddle tune) rather than 'build a new world'.
I'm feeling increasingly bummed. Every time I ask this question, I get one or maybe two responses from people like you, zmann, dk2012, etc. But mostly I get nothing. It's gradually eroding my faith that the people at places like CD are non-drones.
In TMIAHM, Heinlein portrays the real work as being done by ordinary people, while the drones are shunted off into glossy positions in the formal parliament where they can talk to their hearts content without getting in the way of those doing the real work.
It's increasingly hard not to feel he had a handle on CD and similar, too.
Mairead October 15th, 2009 11:02 am -- If I understand you (some of your words aren't in my dictionary yet), you're thinking CD ought to be a working organization instead of an organ for intellectual exchange, which is what I see it as. I participate mainly to learn through give and take with other commenters, and secondarily, through reading the articles. Other organizations, like VotersForPeace.US, Velvet Revolution, ACLU, Center for Constitutional Rights, Democratic and Republican parties, and millions of others are more for committed individuals wanting to do "real work."
I belong to some of these, but (at 66 with a doctor of jurisprudence degree) I consider learning at least as important as "real work." Right now, CD is the principal group I relate to for that.
Some words aren't in your dictionary? You'll have to explain that, I'm afraid. I'm sure I don't use many uncommon words, so I can't imagine what you might mean.
And I'm sorry to have given the impression that I think CD ought to be a working organisation. I don't. It offers no framework on which to construct any such thing, so it would be a sort of underwater-sand-castle exercise to try.
What I *am* hoping for...or was...or something --I really don't know what tense to use, now-- is that there'd be some intimation of how much do-or-die support there is for keeping things going. That some large percentage of the CD population would metaphorically raise their hands and make clear that they'd given a lot of thought to understanding the problems involved, had rehearsed their own potential role in building a new and better society, had come to firmly embrace the probability that major personal sacrifice would be needed in order to avert the extinction catastrophe that corporate greedyarseholeism, religions, and plain ignorance is bringing down on our heads.
I've been looking for a serious, cold-blooded, emotionally-committed show of hands, in other words. This is a worldwide fight for our very lives, and I've been trying hard to size our army. Or even just determine whether we potentially *have* an army.
So far it don't look so good for our side.
Let's brace.
I spent a couple of days driving through the California desert this weekend. On the outskirts of the old communities stand many new developments, about the worst kinds of buildings that could be imagined for the California desert.
In the vast space of the desert they stand side by side, 2 stories, 3 and 4 bedrooms, square sides thrown up with no regard for placement of windows and walls towards or away from the sun.
The houses have virtually no insulation. They're built almost entirely above ground, so the ground offers no insulation, and they are exposed to all the desert's heat.
Am I to believe the future residents will not use air conditioners?
No jobs are available in these communities. Each is just a rectangle of large boxes outside of town - outside of towns where very few jobs exist.
Am I to believe that future residents will not drive to San Bernadino and other points closer to the California coast?
Perhaps I should hope the California economy continues to fall.
Yet the US government continues benighted efforts to monopolise hydrocarbons in the Middle East and invests in riot-control armaments rather than green housing or transport.
40%? 2020?
Friends, let's brace ourselves and each other.
Let us get serious.
This German study is not definitive and far too conservative. Accordingly, I state firmly that the headline Climate Roulette should read Russian Roulette. It is not a matter of stopping any increase in CO2. We have to reduce the gasses already in the atmosphere to pre-industrial revolution levels. This is not rocket science. It does not require specialists. Any person with common sense can see the truth in this.
Consider:
It is technologically possible to dispense with all fossil fuels.
It is economically possible and even monetarily profitable to do so. Hard work, determination and generosity is all that is needed.
The Reality:
It is now very possible, even probable that the current level of CO2 is sufficient to permanently burn life out of the world because of a process we can call 'feed back', which is a process rather like starting a fire where one supplies energy until the fire itself supplies enough and it 'catches'. Then the flame invades all areas not yet burning and the fire blazes: the recent speedy injection of CO2 to current levels has already provided enough heat to start a methane invasion of our atmosphere. Methane has begun to come out of the vast stores in the earth's crust; has been observed coming off the surface of the vast stores in the deep permafrost of the Tundra. The surfaces of shallow seas in the north are beginning to bubble in places like carbonated water, but the gas in this case is methane not CO2.
Virtual Blazes of Methane:
Methane has been captured in the earth's crust over the millions of years of life on earth. There is a great deal of it escaping now, there is much more that is ready to escape at present temperatures and untold huge, deeply buried quantities are being readied as we write.
The gas is short lived but 20 times (at least) more effective than CO2 as a greenhouse agent. The heat it causes will in turn ensure increasing rates of methane escape from deeper and deeper in the Tundra, the ice of the poles and Greenland, the waters of the seas and the aeons of slush at the bottom of the seas. The world is very possibly on virtual fire already; virtual in that it is beginning to smoulder methane instead of smoke and flame.
We cannot just stop at present levels. The increasing call to stop all production of greenhouse gasses and reduce the quantity of these gasses already in the atmosphere to pre-industrial revolution levels is not alarmist. It is simple sense. Only a child will miss the point. We are not talking about something where second best can be tolerated. There is no second best. The present probability (increasingly less remote) of annihilation leaves no space for bargaining: when faced with even remotely probable annihilation it is crassly stupid to take chances and even immoral to do so. When this probability is continually measured to be growing it is criminally insane to do so. At 60 yrs old it is not my body I am worried about. It is my ultimate honour and validity, my sanity, in that the bodies threatened by this warming are those of my and all other people's children.
The Fearsomely Near Future:
We have to consider this. We must also watch for those who have a stupid, myopic bunker mentality; who will store the food, air and even the cool areas for their select few at the expense of all others. Such if they exist must be defeated. Unfortunately, if anyone does not believe that many Americans are capable of this they are stupid. They join the stupid too because those who sacrifice the world to save themselves will die in the end anyway. The Americans have already given us full warning of their intentions. It is enshrined in Ayn Rand's phrase 'the virtue of selfishness'. Alan Greenspan, Dick Cheney, George Bush Barack Obama, millions of Americans and others in the world believe in it. It may even explain the contortions in the mind of those responsible for the present wars. Recent history of the US/Israeli bloc nonetheless shows the term criminally insane is relevant.
Remember all pirates are capable of destroying others to save themselves and they will not tell their victims until it is too late. They will smile, sweet talk and justify like Barack even to the point of recalling all past crimes against them like the Israelis, while preparing a slaughter that makes the two World Wars look like a couple of dog fights.
I cannot believe that the scientific fraternity of the USA are so stupid as to deny global warming and the validity of the common sense argument above.
So what is up?
US foreign policy appears consistent with the "bunker mentality" you describe.
If one allows oneself to be painfully cynical, the mystery in this seems to vanish.
Let us brace ourselves and divest.
Barring a "Pearl Harbor-like" event (borrowing from PNAC), nothing will be done before we reach a tipping point.
It may be that earth doesn't care too much about how much heat and CO2 is around when the time comes to flip, she will just flip.
You see, I think the tripping point is seismic---triggered by the change in tectonic plate forces due to the change in location of water mass. It's simple, works like a clock-mechanical, and explains the sharp breaks that climate charts show at the main transition points, glacial to interglacial and back.
Sure, it's a tiny change compared to everything else, but then, who would think that the short, fast movement of a tiny firing pin could result in a giant elephant falling to the ground, dead. (harsh analogy...sorry)
Quakes give us undersea volcanism which gives heat and Tsunamis which give us disturbed ocean floor (marine methane hydrates), and soggy shorelines give moisture to the air gives energy for big storms...
Just a thought...
Suppose that there is a possibility that the scientists are correct. Then the prudent choice is to reduce the carbon emissions into the atmosphere.
Suppose that there is a possibility that the scientists have erred and the temperature rise is due to causes other than (or more likely in addition to) the carbon emissions into the atmosphere. If this is true then with this scenario there is a second reason to reduce the carbon emissions into the atmosphere. The second reason to reduce the carbon emissions into the atmosphere would be that mankind will likely at some time face a future where the causes of the rise in temperature are reversed and the Earth's atmosphere cools and when that happens our descendents might very well want to add carbon emissions into the atmosphere so as to mitigate the effects of the cooling. Thus if the global warming theory is wrong then it would be prudent to save the cleanest and easiest to obtain carbon sources for a time of global cooling so that our descendents would have them to burn to keep the Earth warmer than it might otherwise be.
Hopefully by then people will have figured out how to build stable democratic and economic systems that represent and serve the people, that make use of the people's potential to analyse and solve problems and work together, and that are highly difficult to corrupt.
This is the first time I've seen that insight, and yet it seems obvious now that you say it. Thank you!
the "Oh, shit" moment for me was realizing that this new report doesn't talk, at all, about reducing population and consumerism. Their main solutions are mainly focused on technological pipedreams. That is just too little, too late !
Oh, shit, Oh, shit, we are truly screwed !
by the way, this WBGU report is called "Solving the Climate Dilemma". If you want to read it is here: http://www.wbgu.de/wbgu_sn2009_en.html
Too true. And thanks for the link.
It is "fossil carbon" emissions that must be brought to zero, yesterday.
Your next "Oh, shit!" moment is going to be when the full implications become clear and you will realize that nobody will do a thing about climate change.
Oh shit!
He's just talking about the climate.
Throw in the entire environment and what do you have?
The Earth will adapt and find equilibrium.
We just wont be here to see it.
Parasites prosper. Host adapts. Parasite lost.
Let's hear it for the Lost Folks.
"The Earth will adapt and find equilibrium."
People make statements like this all the time.
THERE IS NO SUCH CERTAINTY.
Earth's disease may in fact prove fatal. Sometimes parasites kill their host.
"Based on my experience with a variety of living planets undergoing various forms of degradation and destabilization, i can state with certainty that..."
This is a form of "comforting thought" - "Oh shit! Humans may / will extinct millions of species including ourselves! But oh well - life will re-stabilize and re-evolve into the astonishing complexity i love, as it has after catastrophic destabilizations in the past."
It ain't necessarily so.
Not to assert the opposite, that we are certainly killing the Earth. But complex self-stabilizing systems CAN be destabilized beyond recovery.