Climate Change Isn't Going Away
By Bill Henderson
29 March, 2011
Countercurrents.org
My March 26 message to BC's enviro listserves
I can't help but notice that there is far less comment and feedback from my climate change postings recently. Part of this I'm guessing is my inimitable personality and the heretical nature of my personal understanding of climate change and paths to effective mitigation. I'm sure many just delete my posts without reading, esp those who are climate professionals where my criticism is just painful distraction.
And part of the reason is that those who benefit from fossil fuel business as usual have successfully pushed climate change out of the news and in the present political and economic 'climate' those ENGOs that speak for us on climate change have mostly retreated to focusing on renewables.
Climate change isn't going away - it's just been pushed out of the news. If anything the developing science suggests our predicament is getting more dire - here's Joe Romm's summation of climate change science in 2010
http://climateprogress.org/2010/11/15/year-in-climate-science-climategate/
It's just not on the front page or on CNN right now although it certainly should be because climate change is just going to continue to get worse. With carbon cycle time lags we are currently experiencing the consequences of greenhouse gases up to around 1980 and GHG emissions have increased substantially since way back then.
So if your concern is salmon, bears, bogs or forests or your grandchildren or the wonderful complexity of culture passed down, I'm messaging to say that we need significant emission reduction immediately and nothing less or else salmon, bears, bogs, forests and us are probably... probably what - history? endangered? at severe risk? tits up? There is hardly a powerful enough phrase to properly describe the dangers.
Adaption? Yes, we should be intensifying our planning for people, salmon, bears, etc, but adaption planning without significant emission reduction is just more denial. If we can reduce emissions at a scale needed then adaption becomes a possibility.
Climate change isn't going away - it's just not in the news right now.
I have argued before that our emission reduction target has to be (something like or in the ball park of) 100% by 2020. I'll paste my short hand reasoning (which I'm sure you are bored with) at the bottom.
If we are still trying to shoehorn climate change into political and economic BAU - like the in-depth Climatewire look at BC's carbon tax posted yesterday that was very good at analyzing the effects on business but poor at informing about actual emission reduction - then 100% by 2020 isn't even worth discussing. Not possible, next subject.
But if due diligence to future generations is your climate change framework and you care about salmon, bears, and kids, then why the fuck aren't we debating and inquiring deeper at the highest levels whether the three different lines of science reasoning behind my 100% by 2020 ballpark target don't make climate change an emergency dwarfing Libya and Japan (the end of cheap oil and the end of techno-optimism?), or Charlie Sheen's latest career move.
Climate change isn't going away - in fact it will get worse. There is sound science strongly suggesting that we have a limited time, maybe a last chance, to effectively mitigate climate change before latent feedbacks kick in and if not there is only an extinction future for everything we love including most of the species we share creation with on this small blue planet.
What can you do? Wake up - read up - debate up (quickly) and then put the utmost pressure you possibly can on every level of government and every organization, esp the ENGOs that speak for us, to get out of denial - Stop trying to shoehorn climate change into BAU! - and take action commensurate with the risk to future generations from our fossil fuel use today.
Otherwise, just turn off the lights.
http://www.countercurrents.org/henderson110710.htm
Consider: Is 100% emission reduction possible by 2020?
http://www.eci.ox.ac.uk/4degrees/programme.php
Shellnhuber's graph describes the 100% by 2020 reduction needed by countries like the US and Canada with 20 tonne plus per capita annual emissions. The 100% emission reduction by 2020 is part of a global budget needed to have a 60-70% chance of staying below 2C, the presently agreed upon precautionary ceiling to protect against dangerous, uncontrollable, runaway warming.
This is not just his opinion but the product of several key papers on a global carbon budget published over the past couple of years: Meinshausen, Allen, the WGBU (Shellnhuber) paper, and the Anderson-Bows paper commenting upon what we've learned about carbon budgets.
If you have high per-capita emissions (plus 20 tonnes) and the global per-capita emission rate over the next century to stay below 450 ppm / 2 C is somewhere below 2 tonnes annually then you are using a decades worth of your 21st century budget each year of present emissions. Countries like the US, Canada and Australia will, at present emission rates, use up their whole carbon budget for the next century in just the next decade. Deep, immediate cuts are necessary.
The Bali target of 25% by 2020 is today regarded as a big stretch, laughable now in these post-Copenhagen, Climategate times, but the actual science, the reality, is that to have only a 70% chance of staying under 450 ppm / 2C the bottom line is 100% by 2020....
But the Arctic is melting and with the possibility of potent latent positive feedbacks in a climate history where even small forcings have whipsawed climate in our past, there is a substantive scientific case that getting below 350 ppm fast - not just staying below 450 ppm - has to be our new precautionary bottom line. Climate change isn't a slow, long term threat but tipping points that we are passing over today. Climate change is an emergency requiring urgent action.
So at least 100% by 2020. Impossible or not, that's the bottom line.
There is also another line of reasoning for such Draconian action:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/08/070831211647.htm
Leemans and Eickhout (2004) found that adaptive capacity decreases rapidly with an increasing rate of climate change. Their study finds that five percent of all ecosystems cannot adapt more quickly than 0.1 °C per decade over time.
Forests will be among the ecosystems to experience problems first because their ability to migrate to stay within the climate zone they are adapted to is limited. If the rate is 0.3 °C per decade, 15 percent of ecosystems will not be able to adapt. If the rate should exceed 0.4 °C per decade, all ecosystems will be quickly destroyed, opportunistic species will dominate, and the breakdown of biological material will lead to even greater emissions of CO2. This will in turn increase the rate of warming.
According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the global average temperature today is increasing by 0.2 °C per decade.
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