Climate Change 102
We're addicted to more. We've craved and acquired more and more, in terms of things, that our social and spiritual needs are second fiddle to our physical acquisitions. Yet we are complacent in seeing that this global acuisition of more is rapidly turning our Earth against us. Words like sustainability and climate disruption bounce off us with little personal impact in changing our negative consumption actions.
One paper cites, “It is claimed that, even if a person’s economic circumstances improve dramatically, he/she will rapidly adapt (habituate) and raise expectations of future circumstances, so that no gain in happiness occurs. One much cited study showed this to be true even of lottery winners (Brickman et al, 1978). This result has led to the conclusion that we are all on a hedonic treadmill; apparent improvements in life situation yield no subjective benefits.
At a societal level it appears to be the case that huge increases in material living standards in the past fifty years have produced no gains in average happiness levels in developed countries (Easterlin, 1995; Diener & Biswas-Diener, 2002), although the same is not true of poorer countries.”[CC2-1]
And, "... apparently major events in people’s lives often seem to have weak and even statistically non-significant effects on satisfaction levels. The usual explanation involves invoking adaptation theory – the pleasure treadmill idea that people rapidly adapt to new circumstances by changing their expectations for the future, so that their satisfaction levels, having risen or fallen for a brief time, soon revert to previous baseline levels - an unsatiated appetite for pleasure.
There is no reason to doubt that some adaptation occurs in reaction to all or most life events. However, adaptation is not always rapid and not always complete.
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Speigleman, Errica. Rewired: A Bold New Approach To Addiction and Recovery. Hatherleigh Press, 2015 - [CC2-6]
Why is Climate Change harmful?
Broad-sweeping harmful planetary changes are taking place and are likely to further accelerate without imminent action to moderate greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs).
Food Production
Globally, food production accounts for about a third of all GHG emissions.[CC2-3] You betcha, we're in a bind. We need to reduce those emissions without reducing the ability to feed the world! Globally, grains are about 40% of the human diet and when you add soybeans and corn, you get nearly two-thirds of all human caloric intake. The tropics today are already too hot to productively grow grains and 4 degrees of warming would reduce corn yields in the USA by about 50%. In the next 3 biggest producers, China, Argentina and Brazil, 4 degrees would reduce productivity yield by 20%. Climate Change would also increase flooding, insects and disease, further decreasing productivity.
Drought may be a bigger problem for food production than heat, by turning some of the world's most arable lands into desert. At just 2 degrees of warming the Mediterranean and India would be hard hit, and food production around the world will suffer as sorghum and corn supply dwindles.[CC2-4] At 3 degrees, Southern Europe would be in permanent drought, Central America would have droughts lasting 19 months longer, while the Carribean drought would last 21 months longer. North Africa would experience droughts of up to 5 years longer. This, at a time with more mouths to feed as global population continues to grow.
Developed nations derived many benefits from fossil fuel use, and some of those benefits were extended to underdeveloped nations. Yet these are the very benefits that will enable harm through GHG emissions to impoverished nations - hitting them more severely. The haves will be less harmed than the have-nots.
Air Pollution
One 2018 paper, in Nature Climate Change, estimated that by a global warming to 2 degrees rather than just 1.5 degrees another 150 million people would die from air pollution. (Schurer et al 2017)
Heat Waves
Since 1980, a fiftyfold increase in heat waves has occurred, with more to come. These heat waves will likely take an intolerable toll on human life, even if one estimate from 2017 should come to pass with 700,000 air conditioning units added globally by 2030. Another conundrum is created with about 10% of the global electricity now used for air conditioning, if a significant portion of that new electricity demand is created by fossil fuel burning.
Cities are now accommodating more than half of the world's population with a United Nations estimate that two thirds of the population likely to be urban dwellers by 2050, an increase of 2.5 billion. "Currently, there are 354 major cities with a maximum summer temperature of 95 degrees Farenheit or higher. By 2050, the list could grow to 970, and the number of people living in those cities and exposed to that deadly heat could grow eightfold, to 1.6 billion." [CC2-5]
Have extreme events changed over the last 50 to 100 years? The observational record that is sufficient for determining long-term changes in temperature and precipitation extremes in the United States is now more than 120 years long. This record documents changes in extremes of temperature, precipitation, and in some instances in storms including hurricanes. Cold extremes in the United States have become less frequent over the past century, while long-term changes in warm extremes, such as heatwaves, are more nuanced owing to the lingering influence of the Dust Bowl of the 1930s on long-term trends. However, since the 1930s there have been many more record high temperatures as compared to record low temperatures in the United States. Globally, there is a clear increase in heatwaves and extreme high temperatures over much of the globe, over land, and in the form of marine heatwaves. Average temperatures and atmospheric moisture have increased in the United States and globally. Consistent with the increased atmospheric moisture, extreme precipitation events have also increased in the United States and over much of global land regions where there are sufficient data to support analysis.
The extent of human influence on extremes varies with the type of weather event. At a global scale, human-induced climate change has very likely (>90% chance) led to an increase in the number of extreme warm days and nights, and likely (>66% chance) lengthened the duration of heat waves. Impacts vary regionally and depend on the type of extreme event considered. A warmer climate has led to increases in the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere and has very likely resulted in more extreme rainfall (amount and intensity) in many regions. For other types of extreme events, like hurricanes and tornadoes, there is no clearly detectable human influence to date, apart from sea level rise exacerbating hurricane surge-related coastal flooding. However, based on models and scientific theory, scientists anticipate that there will be future attributable human influences on the most extreme hurricanes and associated precipitation.
In the future, climate change is expected to exert a stronger influence on extreme events. Some types of extreme events are expected to increase in intensity and frequency during the 21st century due to climate change (see USGCRP 2017 for details). Changes in the near term may be small compared to natural variability, but cumulative change over time are expected to be transformative in some areas.
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Further, how natural cycles— such as the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (the cycle responsible for ElNiño and La Niña events)—change in the future will also impact extremes. It is virtually certain (99–100% chance) that the frequency and intensity of daily heat extremes will increase and that there will be fewer cold extremes. It is very likely that the frequency of heavy precipitation events will increase over many regions, but there is uncertainty around effects on flooding in specific areas. A recent assessment concludes that tropical cyclone wind intensities and precipitation rates are projected to increase (with medium to high confidence) by roughly 5% and 14%, respectively, for a 2°C global warming scenario (Knutson et al. 2020). In contrast, global tropical cyclone frequency is projected to stay the same or decrease, although with somewhat less confidence. For other extreme events, like tornadoes, the influence of human-caused climate change remains very uncertain, and further observations and research are needed. [CC2-8]
14 things that every politician needs to know about climate emergency
(1) Current science tells us that a global temperature rise of 2°C looks very risky but 1.5°C much less so. The Paris Agreement said this. Every significant country in the world agreed. Since then Trump has rowed back, but everyone else has held firm.
(2) The temperature rise we experience will be proportional to the amount of carbon we have ever burned. This gives us a 'cumulative carbon budge' most of which we have already spent.
(3) Emissions of carbon dioxide, the most important green house gas, have grown exponentially for over 160 years. There are always ups and downs between individual years, and there was a bit of a dent for the Great Depression and the World Wars, followed by bounce back that can be explained in various ways. But these are just noise against a remarkably steady long-term trend of 1.8% growth per year.
(4) We have not yet dented that carbon curve. Even taking the most recent data into account, there is little or no evidence that the carbon curve has even twitched in response to any ofthe talk and action on climate change so far. Gulp! (Facing this reality gives us a much better chance of dealing with the problem. This stark observation tells us a lot about the nature of the solution that we need to put into place.)
(5) At the current rate of carbon emissions the remaining viable carbon budget for both 1.5 and 2 oc is dwindling quickly — despite some recent good news from the carbon modellers. As things stand. we look set to overshoot the 1.5 oc budget sometime between 2030 and 2040.
(6) It takes a long time to put the brakes on. The temperature won't stop rising until net emissions
(7) Almost all the fuel that gets dug up gets burned — so it has to stay in the ground.
(8) Because of rebound effects, which are often ignored, glossed over or not fully understood, some of the key actions that many people assume will help us haven't helped at all — and on their own, they never will. This includes just about every new technology and efficiency improvement.
(9) Growing renewables. while essential. won't be enough to deal with the climate emergency. Precisely because of rebound effects and the permanent human appetite for more energy.
(10) So, we urgently need a working global agreement to leave the fuel in the ground. Piecemeal actions get absorbed at the global system level by companies pushing emissions down the supply chains, countries off-shoring their carbon, and the myriad of ways in which the emissions simply migrate to elsewhere in the global system.
(11) We need to manage other greenhouse gases too
(12) Extracting and burning fossil fuel has to become too expensive, illegal or both unless you can think of another possibility for a global constraint.
(13) Such a deal will need to work for everyone. In theory it might be possible to force some stakeholders to put up with an arrangement that sends them into poverty, but on the whole the whole world will have to sign up and help make it work. It doesn't matter how hard that seems, facing the challenge is an essential first step in meeting it.
(14) We will also need to take carbon back out of the atmosphere — even though it is unclear whether we yet properly know how to. This is quite simply because we are exposed to so much risk already through our failure to take effective action so far. [CC2-2]
Carbon Footprint
A carbon footprint measures the total greenhouse gas emissions caused directly and indirectly by a person, organisation, event or product.
Humanity has exceeded its Earthly resource limit. The data indicates that carbon emissions combined with all other human demands on the biosphere consume more than 175% of what the Earth replenishes—in effect, we now use nearly two planets.
How can we all live well and live within the means of one planet? This is the research question of the 21st century. If we are serious about sustainable development, there is no way around this question. It begs us to design for a liveable world and to know what our personal impact is and how to keep within sustainable limits.
"The IPCC 1.5°C special report (October 2018) confirms unequivocally that the only option is to transition to regenerative economies that live off, rather than liquidate, our natural capital. Natural resource production can be infinite if we maintain that capital. In contrast, business as usual is eroding our ability to thrive. Living within the means of our planet does not mean that people have to live with discomfort and without human dignity. Thriving is possible if we put our heads, hearts and hands to it." [CC2-7]
A carbon footprint is an easy phrase to remember, yet it is overly simplistic for the complexity it represents in terms of overusing global resources and excessive GHG emissions. Hence, the Global Footprint Network addresses this Earth sustainability science question in a broader concept of Ecological Footprint.. There are several online Carbon Footprint calulators. You can use your browser to search for them or try this one: Nature Conservatory carbon footprint calculator.
Is sea level rising?
Just as the surface of the Earth is not flat, the surface of the ocean is also not flat and it is not rising at the same rate either. ‘Relative’ sea level rise at specific locations may be more or less than the global average due to factors like changes in regional ocean currents or the land height itself. Global sea level has been rising since the last ice age, but the rate in the last century has been the fastest in the last 3000 years. [CC2-9] Global sea level rise and the rate of change along the US coast specifically are both accelerating. Global sea level has risen about 6-8 inches in the last 100 years (1920-2020), whereas relative sea level along the U.S coast has risen about 10-12 inches on average. Regional variation exists. Over the last 30 years, relative sea levels have risen about 5 inches nationally on average, with higher amounts along the Atlantic and eastern Gulf Coasts (6 in) and even higher (9 in) along the western Gulf Coast, but less (3-4 in) along the Hawaiian and Caribbean Coasts and (2-3 in) along the West Coast.[CC-10]
To estimate how much of the observed sea level rise (SLR) is due to thermal expansion, scientists measure sea surface temperature using moored and drifting buoys, satellites, and water samples collected by ships. Temperatures in the upper half of the ocean are measured by a global fleet of aquatic robots. Deeper temperatures are measured by instruments lowered from oceanographic research ships.
To estimate how much of the increase in sea level is due to actual mass transfer—the movement of water from land to ocean—scientists rely on a combination of direct measurements of melt rate and glacier elevation made during field surveys, and satellite-based measurements of tiny shifts in Earth’s gravity field. When water shifts from land to ocean, the increase in mass increases the strength of gravity over oceans by a small amount. From these gravity shifts, scientists estimate the amount of added water.
The IPCC Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate [CC2-12] suggests of SLR threats, "Rising mean and increasingly extreme sea level threaten coastal zones through a range of coastal hazards including (i) the permanent submergence of land by higher mean sea levels or mean high tides; (ii) more frequent or intense coastal flooding; (iii) enhanced coastal erosion; (iv) loss and change of coastal ecosystems; (v) salinisation of soils, ground and surface water; and (vi) impeded drainage. At the century scale and without adaptation, the vast majority of low-lying islands, coasts and communities face substantial risk from these coastal hazards, whether they are urban or rural, continental or island, at any latitude, and irrespective of their level of development. ... Greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation envisioned in low-emission scenarios (e.g., RCP2.6) is expected to sharply reduce but not eliminate risk to low-lying coasts and islands from SLR and ESL (extreme sea level) events. Low-emission scenarios lead to slower rates of SLR and allow for a wider range of adaptation options. For the first half of the 21st century differences in ESL events among the scenarios are small, facilitating adaptation planning."
Sustainability Illustrated Point of No Return ! CT News Junkie USA Today
The cartoons above illustrate some of the thoughts, or perhaps reservations, we may have about Climate Change. The following thoughts by a renowned climate scientist will shed some light on the history and current status of conflicting views or more moderate observations on the subject.
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When the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report was published in 2007, climate scientist Judith Curry joined the consensus in supporting this document as authoritative; convinced by the rigors of the process. With the November 2009 hacking and unauthorized release of emails from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, Judith's perspective changed. For her, these Climategate emails confirmed concerns and suspicions she had been developing about politics and personal agendas encroaching on the IPCC assessment process. Subsequent events led her to feelings that she had somehow been duped into substituting the judgments of the IPCC for her own in her public statements on climate change. She broadened her academic network to include numerous fields including physics, economics, social psychology, engineering and AI. She resigned her tenured faculty position in 2017 feeling cloistered within its disciplinary compartmentalization, culture of climate consensus enforcement, and freedom of speech issues.
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Now, as President of Climate Forecast Applications Network (CFAN), Curry relishes her less restrictive research and, in her own words, "Simply put, I have 'skin in the game' in terms of my predictions and assessments of risk; I lose clients and damage the reputation of my company if I issue an overconfident prediction that turns out to be wrong." In her 2023 book, Uncertainty and Risk [CC2-23], Curry describes her objective, "to stimulate new ideas and broader thinking about the climate change challenge and its solutions."
As such, Curry would not consider herself as a Climate Change denier, more so perhaps as moderate carefully weighing the natural and human influences on climate with the political, economic, social and other influences on climate science research.
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Judith Curry writes:
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Here are the incontrovertible facts about global warming:
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Average global surface temperatures have overall increased since about 1860.
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C02 has infrared emission spectra, and thus acts to warm the planet.
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Humans have been adding CO2 to the atmosphere via emissions from burning fossil fuels.
The above facts are strongly supported by scientific evidence, and there is no significant disagreement in the scientific community on these points. However, these three facts, either individually or collectively, do not tell us much about the most consequential issues associated with climate change:
1. Whether and to what extent C02 and other human-caused emissions have dominated over natural climate variability as the cause of the recent warming.
2. How much the climate can be expected to change over the twenty-first century.
3. Whether warming is dangerous.
4. Whether radically reducing CO2, emissions will improve human well-being in the twenty-first century.
The first two points are in the realm of science, requiring logical arguments, model simulations, and expert judgment to assess "whether" and "how much." The issue of "dangerous" is an issue of societal values, about which science has little to say. Whether reducing C02 emissions will improve human well-being is an issue of economics and technology, as well as being contingent on the relative importance of natural climate variability versus human-caused global warming for the twenty-first century.
In the 1970s, an international conference in Stockholm
assessed the main scientific problems to be solved before reliable climate forecasting could be possible. [CC2-13]
The wide differences among climate model simulations of clouds
and ocean circulations continue to be primary sources of uncertainties in the current generation of climate models.
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From the perspective of 2021 and many more recent investigations, I would add the following:
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Earth's carbon budget and carbon cycle
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Ice sheet dynamics
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Geothermal heat transfer under the oceans and ice sheets
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The 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change Treaty states as its objective:
"stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.”[CC2-14]
Actions to reduce emissions and otherwise mitigate global warming presuppose that warming is dangerous. However, there is no truly objective determination of the level at which climate change becomes dangerous, or how we should compare this risk with others. How we perceive and evaluate risks and dangers from global warming is a complex issue…
Public support or opposition to climate policies (e.g., treaties, regulations, taxes, subsidies) is greatly influenced by perceptions of the risks and dangers posed by global warming. The time horizon for "danger" matters greatly—now, versus 30 years from now, versus the twenty-second century.
The Goldilocks principle states that something desirable must fall within certain margins, as opposed to reaching extremes.[CC2-15]
When it comes to planet Earth, we have adopted a much narrower definition of the Goldilocks zone for climate."[CC2-16] The IPCC and UNFCCC have implicitly adopted the premise that our climate was "just right" prior to human interference, measuring dangerous warming as the temperature change since preindustrial times. Preindustrial is generally regarded as prior to 1750 and the start of the industrial revolution.[CC2-17]
So, which climate do we want? Few would choose the preindustrial climate of the eighteenth century, which occurred during the Little Ice Age and was one of the coldest centuries of the last millennia.[CC2-18] The Little Ice Age was associated with viciously cold winters in North America, Europe, and China.
Defining dangerous relative to a baseline during the cold Little Ice Age does not relate well to people's weather preferences. America's domestic migration patterns reflect an appreciation of warm winters, and that the effects of climate change since the 1970s are perceived overall to have been an improvement.[CC2-19] Analysis of the change in weather preferences in China from 1971 to 2013 showed that China's weather conditions were perceived to have improved during this period.[CC2-20]
“In 2010, governments agreed that emissions need to be reduced so that global temperature increases are limited to below two degrees Celsius.[CC2-21] (relative to pre-industrial temperatures) The 2°C is used politically to motivate the urgency of action to reduce CO2 emissions.[CC2-22]
To avoid making value judgements, the IPCC does not define Climate Change in the context of dangerous; the IPCC Assessment Reports refer to "reasons for concern."
There is no actual large-scale threshold (or tipping point) in the climate that has been clearly linked to global warming. Global average warming is not the only kind of climate change that is potentially dangerous, and greenhouse gases such as CO2 are not the only cause of dangerous climate change.
Among the greatest concerns about climate change are its impacts on extreme events such as floods, droughts, wildfires, and hurricanes. However, there is little evidence that the recent warming has worsened such events (see Chapters Seven and Nine for a more thorough discussion).[Curry, 2023] The first half of the twentieth century had more extreme weather than the second half, when human-caused global warming is claimed to have been mainly responsible for observed climate change." The disconnect between historical data for the past 100 years and climate model-based projections of worsening extreme weather events presents a real conundrum regarding the appropriate basis on which to assess risk and make policies when theory and historical data are in such disagreement. Catastrophes are major large-scale events that produce great and sudden harm. Extreme events such as landfalling major hurricanes, floods, wildfires, heat waves, and droughts can have catastrophic impacts. While such events are not unexpected, their frequency or severity may increase in the future, and they are a surprise to the individual locations that are impacted by a specific event. Natural events become catastrophes when the population is large and unprepared, infrastructure is exposed, and humans have tampered with ecosystems that provide a natural safety barrier (i.e. deforestation, draining wetlands, destroying coastal mangroves).[CC-23]
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Footnotes
[CC2-1] Wooden, Mark & Headey, Bruce & Muffels, Ruud. (2008). Money Does Not Buy Happiness: Or Does It? A Reassessment Based on the Combined Effects of Wealth, Income and Consumption. Social Indicators Research. 87. 65-82. 10.1007/s11205-007-9146-y.
[CC2-2] Berners-Lee, Mike. There Is No Planet B: A Handbook for the Make or Break Years , Updated Edition. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 2021
[CC2-3] Gilbert, Natasha. "One-Third of our Greenhouse Gas Emissions Come from Agriculture." Nature, October 31, 2012. www.nature.com
[CC2-4] Lynas, Mark. Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet. (Washington, DC,: National Geographic Society.), p. 84
[CC2-5] Urban Climate Change Research Network. The Future We Don't Want: How Climate Change Could Impact the World's Greatest Cities. (New York, February 2018) p.6
[CC2-6] Perhaps we are not aware of our addiction to consumption - it appears to be the norm. Some introspection might help us to consider being 'Rewired"
[CC2-7] https://www.footprintnetwork.org/about-us/our-history/
[CC2-8] National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). How Changing Climate Affects Extreme Events. March 2021. FINAL SoS Fact Sheet How Changing Climate Affects Extreme Events 04.14.2021.pdf (noaa.gov)
[CC2-9] USGCRP. (2017). Climate Science Special Report: Fourth National Climate Assessment, Volume I: U.S. Global Climate Research Program. Washington, DC.
[CC2-10] Sweet, W.V., B. Hamlington, R. Kopp, C. Weaver, P. Barnard, et al. (2022). Global and Regional Sea Level Rise Scenarios for the United States: Updated Mean Projections and Extreme Water Level Probabilities Along U.S. Coastlines. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Ocean Service, Silver Spring, MD
[CC2-11] http://www.cmar.csiro.au/sealevel/sl_data_cmar.html and https://www.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/socd/lsa/SeaLevelRise/LSA_SLR_timeseries_global.php
[CC2-12] IPCC, 2019: IPCC Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK and New York, NY, USA, 755 pp. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009157964.
[CC2-13] Unit Nations, "Report of the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment" (New York: United Nations, 1973), https://www.un.org/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=A/CONF.48/14/REV.1
[CC2-14] United Nations, “United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change,” 4.\
[CC2-15] Brian Dunbar, "The Goldilocks Zone," NASA (NASA, October 7, 2003), https://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/living-things /microbes_goldilocks.html.
[CC2-16] Peter J. Webster, "The Role of Hydrological Processes in Ocean-Atmosphere Interactions," Reviews of Geophysics 32, no. 4 (1994): 427, https://doi.org/10.1029/94rg01873.
[CC2-17] Andrew P. Schurer et al., "Importance of the Pre-Industrial Baseline for Likelihood of Exceeding Paris Goals," Nature Climate Change 7, no. 8 (2017):563-567, https://doi.org/IO.1038/nclimate3345.
[CC2-18] Philipp Blom, Nature's Mutiny: HMV the Little Ice Age of the Long Seventeenth Century Transformed the West and Shaped the Present (New York, NY: Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of W.W. Norton & Company, 2020).
[CC2-19] Patrick J. Egan and Megan Mullin, Recent Improvement and Projected Worsening of Weather in the United States," Nature 532, no. 7599 (2016):357-360, https://doi.org/10.1038/nature17441.
[CC2-20] Zihang Fang et al., "Will Climate Change Make Chinese people More Comfortable? A Scenario Analysis Based on the Weather Index," Environmental Research Letters 15, no. 8 (July 2020): 084028, https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ab9965.
[CC2-21] "The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)," environnet, July 13, 2016, http://www.environnet.in.th/en/archives/1678.
[CC2-22] "Two Degree.: The History of Climate Change's Speed Limit," Carbon Brief, December 8, 2014
[CC2-23] Curry, Judith, Climate Uncertainty and Risk: Rethinking Our Response, Anthem Press. 2023. New York, NY