Limiting Climate Change to 2°C Will Still Be Highly Dangerous

Posted on July 20, 2015 by Planet First Clothing

A new report has found that limiting climate change to 2°C is not going to protect us from devastating sea level rise. According to the research, freshwater from land-based ice sheets melting into the oceans is inducing feedback that is accelerating the melting of ice shelves — a loop that indicates sea level rise will continue and could be devastating at much lower temperature changes than previously thought.

The study, authored by climate scientist James Hansen and 16 other researchers, will be published in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics this week. The research explains that there is an “amplifying feedback” as polar ice melts, because as more freshwater enters the ocean, it traps warmer sea water, which melts more ice. The effect is not take account in the current climate change modeling but “extensive data indicate [it] is already occurring,” according to the report.

“We are underestimating the speed at which these things are beginning to happen,” said Hansen, head of the Climate Science, Awareness and Solutions Program at Columbia University’s Earth Institute. This feedback loop is separate from other accepted science, such as the ice-albedo feedback loop, in which dark-colored water and exposed ground absorb more heat than the white, reflective ice and snow they have replaced.

The implications of this feedback loop are significant, Hansen said “This is substantially more persuasive than anything previously published about just how dangerous 2°C will be”.

The study has not been peer-reviewed. Instead, it is being published in a discussion journal, which means will be published in full and made available to the public. Peer review and revisions will be made publicly. The scientific community is sure to express an opinion.

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Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University, told ThinkProgress that he was “skeptical about some of the specifics” of the paper — for instance, the ocean current modeling and meltwater assumptions. But, overall, Mann supported the discussion the article will prompt.

“Hansen and colleagues make a plausible case that even 2°C planetary warming could indeed be very bad,” Mann wrote in an email. He pointed to the predicted collapse of the west Antarctic ice sheet and the substantial rise in sea level that would result.

“On that basis alone, the article serves as a sobering wake-up call to those who still dispute the threat posed by our ongoing burning of fossil fuels,” Mann wrote.

In fact, Hansen said “it’s the urgency of the issue that prompted him to submit the study to a discussion journal, rather than undergoing peer review, which might have taken too long.”

Instead, the study is appearing months in advance of the United Nations’ climate talks in Paris at the end of the year. Governments have already begun outlining their potential commitments to carbon emissions reductions, but Hansen suggested that current goals may not be sufficient to adequately address sea level rise. Other scientists have also criticized the 2°C limit, saying that it will not be sufficient to avoid catastrophic drought, flooding, and other climate impacts.

According to the authors the stakes could not be higher “High emissions will make multi-meter sea level rise practically unavoidable and likely to occur this century,” they write. “It is not difficult to imagine that conflicts arising from forced migrations and economic collapse might make the planet ungovernable, threatening the fabric of civilization.”

Three-quarters of large cities worldwide are located on the coast, making sea level rise a significant climate change risk. In order to prevent this process, we need to curb carbon emissions by 3 percent a year and increase carbon capture through agricultural and forestry practices. Hansen said “Putting a price on carbon is the most effective, and likely only effective way to address climate change and sea level rise”.

“The situation is more urgent than many politicians seem to realize,” he said. “What is really needed to happen requires that the major power decide we want to do this and we want to solve the problem and not just fiddle around the edges.”

At a meeting last month, leaders of the Group of Seven, a coalition of the world’s largest economies, agreed to limit warming to 2°C, but they did not announce a plan or mechanism for reducing emissions. China recently pledged to cut its carbon intensity i.e. its greenhouse gas emissions per unit of GDP, by 60-65 percent from 2005 levels by 2030.

The negotiations of the Conference of Parties (COP) in Paris later this year are broadly structured around an attempt to limit global warming to 2°C through voluntary, agreed-upon carbon emission reductions. Hansen and his colleagues believe that goal is a chimera.

The report authors conclude that “2°C global warming above the preindustrial level, instead of being a safe ‘guardrail’, is highly dangerous”.

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BP – Greater Transparency On Climate Change Issues

Posted on April 18, 2015 by Planet First Clothing

Shareholders at the Oil and gas giant BP annual meeting last Thursday passed a motion to provide more information about its “preparation for the low carbon transition.”

While it may be historic that a major fossil fuel company has passed a climate change resolution, the decision is less about addressing the causes and effects of climate change than it is about navigating the new green economy to maximize the company’s profits.

Investors are now asking for more information about BP’s “Alternative Energy” business, research and development in low carbon sources, and future plans “including any for carbon capture and storage.” The resolution came just one day before a group of investors petitioned the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to raise reporting requirements on oil and gas businesses.

BP has already been advocating a transition from coal to natural gas. Coal accounts for three-quarters of the carbon emissions from the electricity sector, and natural gas makes up 50 percent of BP’s portfolio, the company reported.

“At BP we have consistently advocated for stronger government action and have been open and transparent about our environmental impact,” group chief officer Bob Dudley told shareholders. “The challenge ahead is to make the case for the necessary role of fossil fuels, and further transparency supports that case.”

Accepting the science of climate change has become a popular demand by investors. On Friday, a group of 62 investors representing nearly $2 trillion in assets, sent a letter to the SEC asking for higher disclosure standards for oil and gas companies.

“By failing to hold the fossil fuel industry to the same disclosure standards as other industries, the SEC is allowing the sector to hide its true level of risk and impeding investment capital from flowing to the low-carbon projects we desperately need,” Mindy Lubber, president of Ceres, the group that organized the letter, said in a statement. “This is unfortunate in a world where an additional trillion dollars per year — a Clean Trillion — is needed in order to curb carbon pollution to prevent the worst impacts of climate change.”

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Reframing Climate Change – It’s Our Future Together

Posted on April 12, 2015 by Planet First Clothing

There have been many approaches tested to framing climate change in recent years to a largely indifferent public. The major environmental organisations have tried to call our attention to the spoilage of nature, emphasizing everything from the threat to polar bears to the loss of coral reefs from acidification of the oceans. Others have highlighted the potential to create “green jobs.” In America, for example, the Pentagon and intelligence community are now describing climate change as an immediate national security threat. Some commentators have even tried to get the public to care by pointing out that climate change could mean the end of coffee and red wine. And of course, the scientists have also been trying to let us know that it could also mean the end of human civilization.

Regrettably, none of these have really worked: we are still on track to go past the agreed goal of limiting warming to 2 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial temperatures. However, there are signs that policy-shapers might finally have hit on a winning way to frame the threat-come-opportunity posed by the pollution-driven phenomenon of climate change i.e that it is an urgent public health crisis.

New regulations will require shifts to cleaner-burning technologies and fuels, which will cut down on the amount of dangerous co-emitted pollutants like sulphur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and particulate matter streaming out of smokestacks. Thousands of premature deaths and asthma attacks will be avoided

The wide a range of present-day health risks linked to global warming fuelled by carbon pollution, from vector-borne diseases like malaria and dengue fever to dangerous heat waves and extreme weather events. The children in the asthma ward whose symptoms are exacerbated by today’s co-emitted pollutants (such as zone precursor gases and fine soot particulate matter) will, as adults, be much more likely to suffer the consequences of all that carbon dioxide.

There’s also plenty of science suggesting that humans aren’t cognitively wired to deal with a seemingly spatially and temporally distant threat like climate change. Conversely, recent research suggests that appealing to immediate health risks and benefits speaks much more urgently to our primal fears and hopes. Matthew Nisbet and Edward Maibach published a study in 2012, in the journal Climatic Change Letters, which found that, compared to framing climate change as a national security or an environmental threat, “depicting climate change as an issue of public health was the most likely to generate feelings of hope and the least likely to generate feelings of anger.” “Results show that across audience segments,” they wrote, “the public health focus was the most likely to elicit emotional reactions consistent with support for climate change mitigation and adaptation.”

To date, the dominant framing of climate action, from D.C. to Delhi, has been on the economic hair-shirts that must be donned. The commitments made last year in Lima weren’t binding largely because the whole process has been perceived as an arms-race in reverse: who wants to be the first to sacrifice their economic growth? But what if the $5 trillion in health benefits (80 percent of them to be realized in Asia) by 2030 resulting from reductions of methane and black carbon figured more largely in climate mitigation discussions, instead? The same case can be made for the immediate health benefits of ramping down carbon dioxide emissions: a recent modelling study of a potential carbon tax in China concluded that “a policy which reduces carbon emissions by 5% every year from our base case will also reduce premature deaths by some 3.5 to 4.5%.”

Meanwhile, a study released last month by researchers from the University of Chicago, Yale and Harvard concluded that 660 million Indians lose an average of 3.2 years of life due to exposure to air pollution. As reports like these keep rolling in – reinforcing the anecdotal but unmistakable evidence of the smog that stings their eyes and throats – elites in New Delhi are finding the air quality crisis increasingly difficult to turn away from.

The problem is global in scope: worldwide, household and outdoor air pollution combine to kill over seven million people every year. The latest science shows that the challenge of averting the coming catastrophe of an overheated planet aligns neatly with the fight against the daily catastrophe of this air pollution. Focusing on these concrete benefits might just be a winning message for political leaders and climate hawks alike as the negotiations in Paris approach: “You know that old saying, ‘Well at least you have your health’? Well, you may not even have that, unless governments take strong, rapid action to reduce climate-warming pollution.”

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Three Minutes to Midnight

Posted on January 25, 2015 by Planet First Clothing

Three minutes to midnight. That’s the grim outlook from board members of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, frustrated with a lack of international action to address climate change and shrink nuclear arsenals, they decided on Thursday, Jan. 22, to push the minute hand of their iconic “Doomsday Clock” to 11:57 p.m.

It’s the first time the clock hands have moved in three years; since 2012, the clock had been fixed at 5 minutes to symbolic doom, midnight. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists doesn’t use the clock to make any real doomsday predictions. Rather, the clock is a visual metaphor to warn the public about how close the world is to a potentially civilization-ending catastrophe. Each year, the magazine’s board analyzes threats to humanity’s survival to decide where the Doomsday Clock’s hands should be set.

Experts on the board said they felt a sense of urgency this year because of the world’s ongoing addiction to fossil fuels, procrastination with enacting laws to cut greenhouse gas emissions and slow efforts to get rid of nuclear weapons.

“We are not saying it is too late to take action but the window for action is closing rapidly,” Kennette Benedict, executive director of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, said in a news conference this morning in Washington, D.C. “We move the clock hand today to inspire action.”

For instance, if nothing is done to reduce the amount of heat-trapping gasses, such as carbon dioxide, in the atmosphere, Earth could be 5 to 15 degrees Fahrenheit (3 to 8 degrees Celsius) warmer by the end of century, said Sivan Kartha, a senior scientist at the Stockholm Environment Institute.

Some people might not feel alarmed when they see those numbers; they might normally experience that kind of temperature swing in the course of a single day, Kartha said. But, he said a temperature increase of that magnitude was enough to bring the world out of the last ice age, and it will be enough to “radically transform” the Earth’s surface in the future.

Sharon Squassoni, another board member and director of the Proliferation Prevention Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said nuclear disarmament efforts have “ground to a halt” and many nations are expanding, not scaling back, their nuclear capabilities. Russia is upgrading its nuclear program, India plans to expand its nuclear submarine fleet, and Pakistan has reportedly started operating a third plutonium reactor, Squassoni said.

She said the United States has good rhetoric on nuclear nonproliferation, but at the same time is in the midst of a $335 billion overhaul of its nuclear program. “The risk from nuclear weapons is not that someone is going to press the button, but the existence of these weapons costs a lot of time, effort and money to keep them secure,” Squassoni said, adding that there have been troubling safety discrepancies reported in recent years at power plants.

In summary the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists said we must:

Cap greenhouse gas emissions at levels that would keep global warming below 2C (3.6F)
Dramatically cut spending on nuclear weapons modernisation
Reinvigorate the nuclear disarmament process
Deal with the problem of nuclear waste.

The Bulletin was founded in 1945 by scientists who created the atomic bomb as part of the Manhattan Project and wanted to raise awareness about the dangers of nuclear technology. The Doomsday Clock first appeared on a cover of the magazine in 1947, with its hands set at 11:53 p.m.

The clock’s hands have shifted quite a bit over the following seven decades. They were closest to midnight in 1953, set at 11:58 p.m., after both the United States and the Soviet Union conducted their first tests of the hydrogen bomb. The clock’s hands were pushed all the way back to 11:43 p.m., 17 minutes to midnight, in December 1991, after the world’s superpowers signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, which at the time, seemed like a promising move toward nuclear disarmament.

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Climate Change – Expect a Dirty Fight in 2015

Posted on December 27, 2014 by Planet First Clothing

In this blog, we review the main achievements in the fight against climate change during 2014 and highlight the prospects for further progress in 2015?

The biggest news of 2014 was the bilateral agreement between China and the USA, in which the US committed to reducing its greenhouse gas emissions by 26-28% below its 2005 levels by 2025, and in return China agreed to peak its own CO2 emissions by 2030 and increase the proportion of its non-fossil energy to 20%. However, the details merit a lot of careful consideration. Has the US really made a significant new offer, or just recycled their existing direction of travel into a vague commitment? Should we praise China for committing to build more clean energy than any other nation, or condemn it for allowing emissions to keep rising for another decade?

The week after that agreement was announced, there was a theatrical display of political symbolism at the G20 summit in Australia as world leaders lined up to give Australian prime minister Tony Abbott’s government a slap on the wrist for its anti-science obstructionism. Meanwhile Europe, despite its own troubles, has managed to maintain a climate leadership role with new 2030 targets which, though flawed, keep the continent just ahead of the game on cutting carbon.

As we head into 2015 things are finally starting to move forward. The contribution made by on-going advances in solar photovoltaics and other clean technologies, heavily backed by China and Germany, should be applauded.

Aligned with this are progressive moves from some major figures in the worlds of business and local and regional government, who are making commitments to 100% renewable energy. They are making the slow pace of international political negotiations look more and more out of step with what’s happening on the ground.

The main reason for all this climate change related activity is, of course, Paris 2015. Is it possible that by this time next year climate change will finally have been addressed with the sort of urgency and seriousness it deserves?

The climate denial lobby and its fossil fuel funders will be even more focused in the coming months. However, once the world starts setting hard limits on emissions, all the business plans of all the oil majors in the world become obsolete, wishful thinking and the global economy starts adjusting to a low-carbon future in earnest. From that day forward fossil fuels go into permanent retreat. So expect to see a last-ditch defence of the fossil fuel economy, with climate science under greater attack than ever before. With trillions of dollars at stake, we can expect a dirty fight.

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World Leaders Must Commit To Action On Climate Change

Posted on September 19, 2014 by Planet First Clothing

In the City of New York next week, over 125 World Leaders will convene to consider what actions they are prepared to take to address climate change. They will have the opportunity to show that they are prepared to take the bold steps necessary to leave our children and grandchildren with a world that avoids the worst impacts of climate change.

We believe that world leaders must:

Listen to the people on the street. Record numbers of people will be on the streets in New York, and other major world cities, to demand action on climate change.

Provide details of their plans to meet current commitments. In Copenhagen, countries accounting for over 80 percent of the world’s carbon pollution made specific commitments to curb their pollution. Since then most countries have been implementing new laws and policies to reduce their pollution. In the US, President Obama is a year into implementing his Climate Action Plan and his Administration is beginning to implement key measures to put the US on track to meet its commitment to cut emissions 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020. In China, they have been investing in renewable energy for several years and are seriously considering capping coal consumption. Countries like India are pushing solar energy deployment and leading states like Andhra Pradesh and Telangana are implementing mandatory building codes to curb the energy use from their fast expanding building stock. Countries all around the world are proving that they can address climate change and create economic opportunities for their citizens. As the recent report from the New Climate Economy initiative summarized: “countries at all levels of income now have the opportunity to build lasting economic growth at the same time as reducing the immense risks of climate change”.

Commit to work with others to deliver actions on the ground. This meeting will also be a chance for major companies, financial institutions, governments, and others to show that they are prepared to act on things right now that are within their direct control. They don’t have to wait for new agreements to know that they should no longer use commodities in their supply-chain that are driving deforestation, they can act now to reduce “super greenhouse” gases called hydrofluorcarbons, and that their dollars should no longer drive the wrong investments.

Show that they are serious about securing a strong international agreement next year. World leaders must focus on the key decisions they will have to commit to next year if the Paris 2015 agreement is going to seriously combat climate change. They will need to outline in their speeches that they are preparing for real action in Paris, that they will set aside their differences and find common ways to work together to address climate change.

We need a commitment for action on climate change going into next year. History will not look back favorably on our leaders if they do not rise to the challenge of climate change now.

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Category Archives: Climate Change

Limiting Climate Change to 2°C Will Still Be Highly Dangerous

BP – Greater Transparency On Climate Change Issues

Reframing Climate Change – It’s Our Future Together

Three Minutes to Midnight

Climate Change – Expect a Dirty Fight in 2015

World Leaders Must Commit To Action On Climate Change