ABC news: journalists and scientists increasingly see climate change as existential threat to civilization

"Apocalypse," by Albert Goodwin, 1903.

 
From ABC reporter Bill Blakemore:

Global warming’s “risk to the collective civilization” (meaning global civilization) has been continually spoken of in secret or unofficial or private conversations among engaged climate scientists and government and policy leaders around the world.

Such terms — catastrophe, threat to civilization itself — have been commonplace in carefully worded private discussions among peer-reviewed experts that this reporter and other journalists have often experienced and sometimes engaged in.

Careful not to prompt destructive panic, nor to lose credibility, responsible experts have been careful to temper their public depictions of what the world’s climate science has been revealing about the worst effects — if humanity does not handle the problem immediately — of the rapid climatic and oceanic changes already under way.

But clearly, with so enormous and inclusive a truth as this one, the proven details of which are widely available to anyone with access to the Internet, “the truth will out, we see it day by day,” as English poet Geoffrey Chaucer wrote long ago.

And so, inevitably, experts and leaders around the world are beginning to be more open about the frightening prospects.

However, in doing so, they are also beginning to demonstrate how to hug this monster — to embrace the fear it instills. They need to have done so to speak with credibility...

As a growing number of professional journalists around the world are finding, the story of manmade global warming (and the other evil twin of excess carbon emissions, the rapid acidification of the oceans) is unprecedented in its scale, almost “too big to cover,” and frightening.

But there are now signs that, little by little, voices and personalities are beginning to emerge around the world who are starting to hug this monster, manage the fear, and turning the emotions it causes into action.

NSF study: biodiversity loss drives plant destruction

Wildfire near Los Alamos, New Mexico, June 28, 2011
Courtesy of Washington Post.

From a National Science Foundation press release on an NSF-supported study published in Nature:

"This analysis establishes that reduced biodiversity affects ecosystems at levels comparable to those of global warming and air pollution," said Henry Gholz, program director in the National Science Foundation's Division of Environmental Biology, which funded the research directly and through the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis. 

"Some people have assumed that biodiversity effects are relatively minor compared to other environmental stressors," said biologist David Hooper of Western Washington University, the lead author of the paper. 

"Our results show that future loss of species has the potential to reduce plant production just as much as global warming and pollution." 

Studies over the last two decades demonstrated that more biologically diverse ecosystems are more productive.

As a result, there has been growing concern that the very high rates of modern extinctions--due to habitat loss, overharvesting and other human-caused environmental changes--could reduce nature's ability to provide goods and services such as food, clean water and a stable climate...

"Loss of biological diversity due to species extinctions is going to have major effects on our planet, and we need to prepare ourselves to deal with them," said ecologist Bradley Cardinale of the University of Michigan, one of the paper's co-authors. "These extinctions may well rank as one of the top five drivers of global change."

Global cooling by realpolitik: what effective international climate action would look like

Crack in Pine Island glacier, West Antarctic Ice Sheet, October  26, 2011
From Wikimedia Commons

From Paul Gilding, green business leader and former CEO of Greenpeace, and Jorgen Rogers, co-author of the 1972 Club of Rome report The Limits to Growth, we have a 2009 paper entitled "The One Degree War Plan." It describes in some detail what kind of action would be necessary to hold global temperature rise to one degree Celsius above pre-industrial levels by 2100.

PDF download is available here. An excerpt:

Clearly agreement to a One Degree War Plan is hard to imagine in today’s world. However in both WWII and the current financial crisis, there are clear examples of how
fast things can change and how strong opposition and resistance can quickly evaporate. In the case of WWII the speed of response by the US was quite extraordinary. For example, whereas in 1940, defence spending was just 1.6% of the economy (measured as GDP), within three years it had increased to 32%, and by 1945 to 37%. But the GDP increased itself by 75% in that time, making the observed increases even more extraordinary. The war effort demonstrated a tenfold increase in (inflation adjusted) dollars spent in just the 4 years from 1941 and 1945. Similarly extraordinary political decisions were made to take control of the economy. For example just 4 days after the bombing of Pearl Harbour, the auto industry was ordered to cease production of civilian vehicles. 

So it can be done, if we ever decide to act. But how will it be done? It is unlikely that the One Degree War will result from a universal global agreement. More likely a small
number of powerful countries, a kind of “Coalition of the Cooling”, will decide to act and then others will follow. Some will follow in order to align with the major powers, and some under military, economic and diplomatic pressure. In a technical sense this process is quite easy. A full 50 % of global climate gas emissions will be covered if 3 “countries” (China, US and EU-27) agree to act. If we add another 4 countries (Russia, India, Japan, and Brazil) the coalition will control 67 % of global emissions.

So the issue is not humanity’s capacity to act, but the conditions being such that humanity decides to act. This will be when it is broadly accepted that the threat posed by not acting is greater than the threats posed by strongly acting.

Core to our argument therefore, is that the physical momentum for change in the climate system is now so strong that it is inevitable the public view will change. This is because physical reality will overcome the current and proposed attempts at adaptationand mitigation, which are, relative to the problem, feeble and certain to create little impact. When the dominant view becomes that climate change threatens the viability of civilisation and the collapse of the global economy, a crisis response will rapidly follow. Then society’s framework will change from “what is politically possible” to Churchill’s “what is necessary”. 

While we contend this transition is inevitable, the timing is certainly debatable. It is our view that these conditions will emerge before 2020. For planning purposes, we are assuming 2018. 

Citizens Climate Lobby

Last night, I attended an interesting talk by Mark Reynolds, executive director of a group called the Citizens Climate Lobby. The Eugene/Springfield Solidarity Network, an alliance of labor unions and community groups, is trying to get a chapter of that group started here in the Eug.

The CCL is a lobbying group, with an interesting take on the process; rather than fund-raise to pay professional lobbyists to campaign for climate change action on the Hill, they train citizens to lobby members of congress from their own states and districts. The idea is that, by putting organized and coordinated pressure on politicians, directly from members of their constituencies, it is possible to go toe-to-toe with the sort of immense monetary resources fossil fuel lobbies can throw into the fight. I'm dubious about that, since I'm infinitely cynical about how congresspersons are bought and paid for, but the CCL has won some encouraging victories in state level battles.

Currently, they are advocating for H.R. 3242, the "Save Our Climate Act," introduced to the House by Pete Stark (D-CA) last October. The act would initiate a "carbon fee and dividend" mechanism, whereby producers or importers of fossil fuels pay a flat fee per ton of potential green house gasses that fuel would emit when burned (in terms of CO2 equivalents); 100% of the proceeds from this fee, initially proposed to be $15 per ton CO2 equivalent, would be passed on to US citizens as a dividend. This will supposedly offset the increase in energy costs for about 2/3 of US families, and will reduce the consumption of fossil fuels by making alternative sources more competitive. It's an interesting approach, less likely to be abused by the tertiary economy than "cap and trade" systems that SCREAM for speculation. It still does nothing to directly force the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, though, and the CCL bases their alternative power scenarios on a study by Marc Jacobson of Stanford University that they claim shows that alternative power sources can fully replace fossil fuels in the modern industrial economy. I think that is entirely too optimistic, but I'm not familiar with Jacobson's work. Expect an analysis of that study in another post soon!

Regardless of my reservations, the CCL is a rapidly growing, grass-roots climate initiative that refuses to give up on a governmental intervention on the climate change predicament. And most impressive to me is this quote from their website:

Most impressive is the work of the Citizens Climate Lobby, a relatively new, fastgrowing, nonpartisan, nonprofit group with 46 chapters across the United States and Canada. If you want to join the fight to save the planet, to save creation for your grandchildren, there is no more effective step you could take than becoming an active member of this group. - Dr. James Hansen

Dr. Hansen is arguably the foremost world expert on the science of climate change, and he has been fighting out fight for over 25 years. If his praise for the Citizens Climate Lobby is that luminescent, I'll be paying attention to them, and I recommend that you do so as well!

Field reports from a catastrophe, continuing

Arctic Ocean, 2008.
From http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Arct0279_-_Flickr_-_NOAA_Photo_Library.jpg

A non-random sampling of recent scientific findings on climate change.


* * * * *


1) New evidence of methane outgassing from the Arctic Ocean, apparently from supersaturated methane in the surface waters being freed by ice breakup. See E.A. Kort, et al, "Atmospheric observations of Arctic Ocean methane emissions up to 82° north, " Nature Geoscience (April 22, 2012). The article is behind a subscription wall, but see this summary in Scientific American. Methane traps far greater quantities of heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide, making it a more potent greenhouse gas. It falls out of the atmosphere more quickly. But there is a vast storehouse of it in the Arctic Ocean and permafrost. 


2) Evidence is accumulating of possible methane emissions from the Arctic Ocean floor, as opposed to the supersaturated methane near the surface. Large sea floor methane releases appear to be underway, but whether they are a recent event caused by human activity or a natural phenomenon has not been established. Scientists involved in the research believe an abrupt, massive release of Arctic methane on the order of 50 gigatons is possible in our lifetime. This would represent an approximately 12-fold increase in total atmospheric methane levels, virtually guaranteeing a dramatic escalation of global temperature increase. 


3) New evidence of accelerating melt of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, driven by warming ocean temperatures resulting from anthropogenic climate change. See H.D. Pritchard et al, "Antarctic ice sheet loss driven by basal melting of ice shelves, " Nature (April 25, 2012). Commentary on the implications from the Center for American Progress. The eventual breakup of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet will commit the planet to a long term sea level rise of about 10 feet. The collapse of the Greenland Ice Sheet, also under stress, will add another 10. 


4) Barring that eventuality, research by NASA indicates that global sea levels are currently on pace to rise about one foot by 2050. See E Rignot, et al., "Acceleration of the contributions of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets to sea level rise," Geophysical Research Letters (March 4, 2011). 


5) The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency cites research by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, estimating that a one foot rise in sea level will cause an annual increase in storm damage to U.S. coastal areas of 36-58 percent. 


6) A new suite of multi-model climate projections sees a near certainty that global temperatures will increase by a minimum of one degree Celsius by 2050, with a much higher than anticipated 15% chance that global temperatures by 2050 will rise three degrees Celsius. See I. Held, "Climate science: constraints on the high end," Nature (March 25, 2012). Two degrees Celsius is currently regarded as extremely dangerous, creating high probabilities of widespread ecosystem disruption, extreme weather, ice sheet breakup, food shortages, fresh water depletion, and climate-driven disease outbreaks.