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Climate Change

Pope Francis and climate change: why Catholic skeptics are so alarmed
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Societ...e-why-Catholic-skeptics-are-so-alarmed-video#

The pope has already prepared a major encyclical – or moral guide for the globe’s 1.2 billion Catholics – which later this year will stress the imperative of addressing human-caused global warming.


Heartland Institute takes climate foolishness to a Biblical level
http://www.theguardian.com/environm...takes-climate-foolishness-to-a-biblical-level



 
G20: fossil fuel fears could hammer global financial system
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/...n-bubble-risk-to-global-financial-system.html

The G20 powers have launched a joint probe into global financial risks posed by fossil fuel companies investing in costly ventures that clash with international climate goals and may never be viable.

World leaders are increasingly concerned that a $6 trillion wave of investment into the nexus of oil, gas, and coal since 2007 is based on false assumptions, leaving companies with an overhang of debt and "stranded assets" that cannot easily be burned under CO2 emission limits.

The G20 has asked the Financial Stability Board in Basel to convene a public-private inquiry into the fall-out faced by the financial sector as climate rules become much stricter. All member countries have agreed to co-operate or carry out internal probes, including the United States, China, India, Russia, Australia, and Saudi Arabia.

Diplomatic sources have told The Telegraph that the investigation is being pushed by France and is modelled on a review launched by the Bank of England last year.

Governor Mark Carney told Parliament that officials are probing whether "the majority of proven coal, oil, and gas reserves may be considered 'unburnable' if global temperature increases are to be limited to 2 degree celsius". The 2 degree target is the level above pre-industrial levels at the end of this century.

 
The lukewarmers don’t deny climate change. But they say the outlook’s fine
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/may/03/climate-change-scepticism-denial-lukewarmers

Unless you’re knee deep in the mud of the climate debate, as I am, you might not know that so-called “climate denial” is actually not that common in the UK. Not that I call people deniers anyway: it antagonises, partly because it is thrown around indiscriminately. There are still people who are unconvinced that carbon dioxide has any greenhouse warming effect, particularly in the US and Australia. But by far the most common kind of non-mainstream, contrarian view I see in the UK – particularly in politicians, journalists and bloggers – is the self-described “lukewarmer”.

Lukewarmers have much more mainstream views than the easy stereotype of the denier. They agree carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, that the world is warming, and that a significant fraction of this is down to humans. In terms of policy, they typically support adaptation to climate change. But they differ from mainstream views because they’re not convinced there’s a substantial risk that future warming could be large or its impacts severe, or that strong mitigation policies are desirable.
 
The End of California?
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/03/opinion/sunday/the-end-of-california.html

Of course, there is nothing normal about the fourth year of the great drought: According to climate scientists, it may be the worst arid spell in 1,200 years. For all the fields that will go fallow, all the forests that will catch fire, all the wells that will come up dry, the lasting impact of this drought for the ages will be remembered, in the most exported term of California start-ups, as a disrupter.

“We are embarked upon an experiment that no one has ever tried,” said Gov. Jerry Brown in early April, in ordering the first mandatory statewide water rationing for cities.

Surprising, perhaps even disappointing to those with schadenfreude for the nearly 39 million people living in year-round sunshine, California will survive. It’s not going to blow away. The economy, now on a robust rebound, is not going to collapse. There won’t be a Tom Joad load of S.U.V.s headed north. Rains, and snow to the high Sierra, will eventually return.

But California, from this drought onward, will be a state transformed. The Dust Bowl of the 1930s was human-caused, after the grasslands of the Great Plains were ripped up, and the land thrown to the wind. It never fully recovered. The California drought of today is mostly nature’s hand, diminishing an Eden created by man. The Golden State may recover, but it won’t be the same place.
 
Climate Change – Too Late To Halt?
http://www.countercurrents.org/ghotge040515.htm

For climate scientists, the earth system consists of five interacting components – the lithosphere ( the land system), the hydrosphere ( the water system, both freshwater and oceans), the cryosphere ( the frozen parts of the earth including both polar regions and all the glaciers), the biosphere ( all life forms on land and sea) and the atmosphere. As the Australian scientist Tim Flannery has put it, if the Earth were the size of an onion, the atmosphere would be equal to the thickness of the onion skin. This characterization is accurate because the operative part of the atmosphere is about 10 km thick, containing over 90% of the air on earth. It is this rather thin envelope of air that gets heated up due to the increasing concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. As the atmosphere starts heating up, the heat is transferred, by conduction and convection , to the other four systems indicated above. The consequences of this transference of heat have been worked out by different scientific disciplines dealing with the different fields of study involved. The major conclusion , across disciplines, is that the climate system is full of “positive feedbacks”. This innocuous, rather bland statement, should have set the alarm bells ringing amongst the policy elites of the world, if they had the intelligence and moral courage to understand what this statement really means.

The concept of feedback arises from the science of cybernetics, a new form of algebra created by Norbert Wiener around the mid 20th century. Briefly, a system could logically have 3 types of in-built feedback: zero, negative or positive. Of these, the case of zero feedback is trivial because it implies no feedback i.e. it is not a feedback system at all. Negative feedback can be analyzed to show that it is a self-correcting or self regulating system i.e. it tends to restore the system back towards balance as at the initial point. Positive feedback is the exact opposite i.e.it pushes the system further along the direction of initial disturbance. Two everyday examples from common experience can be used to illustrate negative and positive feedback. The steering mechanism of most automobiles is designed for achieving negative feedback, which is why when the steering wheel is released after executing a turn, it straightens the automobile and brings the vehicle automatically out of the turn. On the other hand, an example of positive feedback occurs when the hand-held microphone is accidentally placed in front of the “ speakers” in an auditorium. The sound emerging from the speaker is carried to the microphone, is then magnified and carried to the speaker and thence again to the mike and further amplification and so on. This happens very rapidly in electronic systems and is the familiar irritating screech in the auditorium, which drives everyone crazy. A positive feedback loop, if unattended rapidly, can drive a system to damage or destruction.

Unfortunately, the feedbacks in the climate system are all positive feedbacks –increasing water vapour in the atmosphere increases the greenhouse effect; longer periods of less ice at the poles and glaciers increases radiant heat absorption rather than reflection; heating of permafrost releases stores of methane which is a potent GHG; increasing ocean surface temperatures reduces CO2 solubility; drying of land increases forest and grassland fires; the eventual release of methane by clathrates (unstable methane crystals formed on ocean floors over millions of years by a combination of high pressure and low temperatures) once the surface heat penetrates to the ocean floors ; all of these are examples of positive feedbacks in the climate system. Their knowledge of the highly unstable nature of the climate system had made the climate scientists draw the red line at 2 deg C of atmospheric heating, though even there several scientists had differed, holding that 2 deg C was too high a threshold for such an unstable system, in fact that the safe threshold should be even lower. Whatever the case may be, the clear signal was that above 2 deg C, the positive feedbacks would kick-in and the atmosphere would continue heating due to releases of stored carbon in the different components i.e. stored carbon in soils and in oceans.

C. Roughly speaking, we are on course to reach 2 deg C by 2050, 4 deg C by 2100 and 6 deg C by 2150. A few years this way or that will hardly matter or disprove the basic science.

Another set of statements emanating recently from IPCC sources seem to claim that there is as yet a global “carbon budget” available before the 2 deg C threshold is breached. As the above table indicates clearly, this is simply incorrect in terms of the current knowledge and position taken by IPCC itself in 2007.The above table indicates that the carbon budget is now effectively zero; all that IPCC seems to be doing is buying time for the power elites of the world ,by keeping alive false hopes. This is not expected of an inter-governmental body set up under UN auspices, whose first priority should have been to speak out the truth, without fear or favour. Instead of doing this, they have stopped being faithful to the science and are instead dancing to their master's tunes, whatever those may be. The acceptance of a zero carbon budget from this point of time onwards means that natural gas stops being a clean fuel ( since it will still add carbon to the atmosphere), the world's vehicular fleet can no longer continue to run on petroleum, we cannot continue to manufacture cement, steel and several other economically important products as we have in the past. Obviously, the world's economic, political and military elites are neither competent to implement nor desirous of the rapid changes that will be demanded, hence IPCC puts out the story that a global carbon budget is still available. This buys time for the elites.The rapid changes needed would include not merely phasing out of all carbon emitting technologies but phasing in of zero carbon emitting energy technologies such as solar, wind, geothermal, tidal and wave, electricity based transportation systems ( with the electricity being generated from non-fossil fuel sources ) and hydrogen as a fuel – in short, technologies that are not based on hydrocarbon or carbon combustion.

Due to the entrenched power of the climate deniers, we have refrained from bringing this role of the IPCC to the notice earlier of concerned scholars around the world. That time is now past. It is completely irrelevant what is discussed and agreed upon in Paris at the end of this year. The combined power of the world's elites, and the governments they control, cannot change the laws of physics and the consequences that flow from those laws. In the public domain, we really need to pose the question: why do we continue to owe any allegiance, even civility, to governing elites of the world, whether they represent governments that are plutocratic, monarchic, pseudo-democratic, fascist, military dictatorships, socialist or communist. I do not have an answer to this question but I believe that there has been a massive failure of all forms of governance because of their fundamental failure to perform a basic duty of any government, which is to protect its people from harm. All that I see are the political elites from around the world genuflecting to the economic elites of the world, their real masters, in conferences like Davos every year. Do we really believe that the participants at Davos really care for the future of the world , its peoples and diverse life-forms?

One final comment deserves to be added before closure. This is to the effect that it is possible for concerned scholars to build a simplified toolkit to track the build-up of GHGs in the atmosphere in future. Both IPCC 2001 and IPCC 2007, in appropriate tables, had estimated the annual carbon absorption capacity of the earth system at 3.1-3.2 billion tonnes of atmospheric carbon per annum. Any carbon emissions, on an annual basis , above this level results in the accumulation of carbon ( as CO2 ) in the atmosphere. IPCC 2001 had split the components as 1.7 btC absorbed by the oceans and 1.4 btC absorbed by land systems. IPCC 2007 had revised these figures to 2.2 btC by oceans and 0.9 btC by land. These absorption capacities are fundamental to understanding the science, as they do not change in the short run. However, beyond 2 deg C , the land component reverses and the land becomes a net emitter of CO2. Moreover, what changes from year to year are the total quantities of carbon based fuels that the worldwide economy burns. The annual addition of carbon to the atmosphere may be roughly estimated based on the global production of coal, crude oil and natural gas in the global economy, the annual figures being published by the International Energy Agency. In 2012, the global economy produced about 5.5 billion tonnes of coal, 30 billion barrels of crude oil equal to about 4.2 billion tonnes of crude and 3.2 trillion cubic metres of gas. Converted to carbon content, the global economy added to the atmosphere around 4.1 btC via coal combustion, about 3.4 btC via oil combustion and 1.6 btC via gas combustion, totaling about 9.1 btC of global emissions. Since the earth systems absorbed 3.2 btC, the balance 5.9 btC was added to the atmosphere, equaling about 2.5-3ppm CO2. (Researchers at Princeton, I think Socolow and Pacala, had calculated that 2.1 btC of carbon equals 1 ppm CO2 in the atmosphere). This crude methodology frees us from the use of computers and datasets to track in future what is happening to the global atmosphere. At the current level of fossil fuel consumption, we are adding between 2 and 3 ppm of CO2 every year. Researchers also add 22-25% to the existing concentrations of atmospheric CO2 to derive the CO2 equivalent, which is the figure that matters where global warming is concerned. Scholars may note that quantitative emissions above 3.2 btC per annum will continue increasing the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, it is only when global emissions reduce below 3.2 btC that the absorption will exceed emissions and the concentration start reducing. However, this does not mean that cooling will start because the heating is proportional to the atmospheric concentration of CO2 equivalent, merely that the rate of heating will start reducing. Cooling will begin only when CO2 concentrations are held well below 3.2 btC per annum; simple calculations based on the climate science can show that this process will take centuries.
 
Obama’s Catastrophic Climate-Change Denial
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/13/opinion/obamas-catastrophic-climate-change-denial.html

MIDDLEBURY, Vt. — THE Obama administration’s decision to give Shell Oil the go-ahead to drill in the Arctic shows why we may never win the fight against climate change. Even in this most extreme circumstance, no one seems able to stand up to the power of the fossil fuel industry. No one ever says no.
 
The awful truth about climate change no one wants to admit
http://www.vox.com/2015/5/15/8612113/truth-climate-change

There has always been an odd tenor to discussions among climate scientists, policy wonks, and politicians, a passive-aggressive quality, and I think it can be traced to the fact that everyone involved has to dance around the obvious truth, at risk of losing their status and influence.

The obvious truth about global warming is this: barring miracles, humanity is in for some awful shit.
 
The Case for the 2 C Warming Limit
http://www.koomey.com/post/99486095923

The warming limit approach is the most powerful analytical way of thinking about the climate problem that the climate science and policy community has yet devised. So the answer is not to “ditch the 2 C limit”, but to use it to show (in Victor and Kennel’s words) that “politicians …pretend that they are organizing for action when, in fact, most have done little.”

The warming limit framing makes it abundantly clear that emissions reductions efforts to date are inadequate to meet the stated goal (see the discussion of “stranded assets” by McKibben [13] and Gore [14] for concrete evidence of this reality). However, this failing is not the fault of the 2 C limit or the mode of analysis it enables, as Victor and Kennel imply. Instead, it is the fault of those who allow this charade to continue. The answer is therefore not to abandon this way of thinking about the climate problem, but to use it to argue for rapid and measurable reductions, starting now, and to expose as charlatans those who claim to be concerned about climate disruption but are unwilling to do what it takes to avoid it. There is nothing better than the 2 C limit for making that case.

The Victor and Kennel article assumes that the 2 C limit is the cause of global inaction on emissions reductions, and that developing a new framework and associated metrics can somehow break the logjam. I suggest instead that the lack of progress is in spite of the power of the warming limit framing, and that it owes more to the challenge of global elites confronting powerful corporations and countries who face the prospect of trillions of dollars in stranded assets and are fighting like hell to avoid that outcome.

The alternative to facing this difficult political challenge is allowing emissions trends to continue that will make the orderly development of human civilization as we have known it all but impossible by the end of this century. A stark choice, but we will either reduce our emissions rapidly (which will require big changes in how society operates) or our current path will force upon us bigger (and far less manageable) changes. That’s the reality that the warming limit framing makes clear, and ditching the warming limit won’t change that reality.
 
Fuss S, Canadell JG, Peters GP, Tavoni M, Andrew RM, et al. Betting on negative emissions. Nature Clim Change. 2015;4(10):850-3. http://sites.biology.duke.edu/jackson/ncc2014.pdf

Bioenergy with carbon capture and storage could be used to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. However, its credibility as a climate change mitigation option is unproven and its widespread deployment in climate stabilization scenarios might become a dangerous distraction.
 
Lethal Seas - A deadly recipe is brewing that threatens the survival of countless creatures throughout Earth’s oceans. For years, we’ve known that the oceans absorb about a quarter of the carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. But with high carbon emissions worldwide, this silent killer is entering our seas at a staggering rate, raising the ocean’s acidity. It’s eating away at the skeletons and shells of marine creatures that are the foundation of the web of life. NOVA follows the scientists making breakthrough discoveries and seeking solutions. Visit a unique coral garden in Papua New Guinea that offers a glimpse of what the seas could be like a half-century from now. Can our experts crack the code of a rapidly changing ocean before it’s too late? http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/earth/lethal-seas.html
 
Fossil fuels subsidised by $10m a minute, says IMF
http://www.theguardian.com/environm...es-getting-10m-a-minute-in-subsidies-says-imf

Fossil fuel companies are benefitting from global subsidies of $5.3tn (£3.4tn) a year, equivalent to $10m a minute every day, according to a startling new estimate by the International Monetary Fund.

The IMF calls the revelation “shocking” and says the figure is an “extremely robust” estimate of the true cost of fossil fuels. The $5.3tn subsidy estimated for 2015 is greater than the total health spending of all the world’s governments.

The vast sum is largely due to polluters not paying the costs imposed on governments by the burning of coal, oil and gas. These include the harm caused to local populations by air pollution as well as to people across the globe affected by the floods, droughts and storms being driven by climate change.
 
The greatest hoax? Not by a long shot: Climate denial school takes on the conspiracy theorists
http://www.salon.com/2015/05/20/the...ial_school_takes_on_the_conspiracy_theorists/

Wouldn’t it be great if global warming were just some natural phenomenon we didn’t have to feel responsible for — or, better yet, if the whole thing were just some giant hoax dreamed up by nefarious scientists? I’ve caught myself wishing as much from time to time. But spend a few hours taking virtual classes at Denial101x, and you’ll be forced to accept that that’s just not the case.
 
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