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the great climate change wars [1]
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Date: 2023-07-26
Hi folks, I’m 82 this week, thank you, thank you. I could tell everyone about the glorious days growing up in SoCal with sun, surf, hotrods, and girls, with no climate threat but I won’t because 1. Old guys should not reminisce unless invited, and 2. You youngsters probably wouldn’t even believe me.
Anyway, I am now more threatened by the Climate Catastrophe than my age.
Research on the effect of CO2 on the climate began in 1824! when Joseph Fourier inferred the existence of the atmospheric "greenhouse effect". In 1860, John Tyndall quantified the effects of greenhouse gases on absorption of infrared radiation. Svante Arrhenius in 1896 showed that coal burning could cause global warming, and in 1938 Guy Stewart Callendar found it already happening to some extent. Research advanced rapidly after 1940; from 1957, Roger Revelle alerted the public to risks that fossil fuel burning was "a grandiose scientific experiment" on climate. NASA and NOAA took on research.
The 1979 Charney Report concluded that substantial warming was already on the way, and "A wait-and-see policy may mean waiting until it is too late ."
So the Climate Disaster isn’t news, it’s been coming for us for more than 200 years after the problem was first recognized, and there have been many very clear warnings along the way. It is sad to claim government malfeasance, except that is exactly what happened across many administrations.
In testimony to the US Senate in 1988, the scientist James Hansen explained the coming danger of global warming.
18 years later in 2006, Al Gore again warned of the coming Climate Catastrophe in the “Inconvenient Truth” documentary. Since then, the climate has dutifully followed Gore’s hockey stick trajectory until recently, earning another warning from scientist James Hansen.
So why didn’t we move to solve it? From the beginning, big oil, coal, electric, and others didn’t want to forego profit and lobbied Congress against any climate action.
Here, let Elizabeth explain…
The fossil fuel industry wants to keep us arguing about light bulbs and cheeseburgers while 70% of pollution comes from just three industries. We need to focus on creating big, structural change to tackle this climate crisis and the Washington corruption head-on. #ClimateTownHall
x The fossil fuel industry wants to keep us arguing about light bulbs and cheeseburgers while 70% of pollution comes from just three industries. We need to focus on creating big, structural change to tackle this climate crisis and the Washington corruption head-on. #ClimateTownHall pic.twitter.com/HwdYmcE6T0 — Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) September 5, 2019
Since his Congressional testimony rattled Washington, D.C. a generation ago, Hansen’s climate warnings have grown more urgent, but they have been mostly unheeded. When he was head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, both George W. Bush’s and Clinton’s administrations tried to stop him from speaking publicly about the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Despite the scientific consensus on the cause and urgency of the issue, the fossil fuel industry has used disinformation and delay tactics to slow down the enactment of climate policies, resulting in our current reality, where increases in global average temperatures are rapidly approaching 1.5 degrees C. 1.5 degrees C is terrifying because it signifies that decisionmakers are more concerned about profits and power than human rights, and the very real environmental justice issues communities are facing.
The oil and gas industry has employed a number of well-known tactics to prevent climate action, including deliberately spreading disinformation. Using well-funded PR campaigns, think tanks, and lobbyists, Big Oil has worked hard to promote climate denialism and false promises, spurring confusion, while allowing the industry to continue with business as usual. L. Delta Merner, Lead Scientist, Union of Concerned Scientists
For Example:
ExxonMobil, the largest investor-owned oil company in the world claims to support a federal carbon tax and the Paris climate agreement.
But the company’s recently released grantmaking report shows that it has not ended its two-decade-long campaign to stymie government efforts to address climate change. By ExxonMobil’s own accounting, it gave $690,000 to eight climate science denier groups in 2019, a 10 percent drop from 2018. In addition, it continued to fund federal lawmakers who oppose a carbon tax, despite its supposed longtime support for the idea. Forty percent of the nearly $1 million it has contributed so far to congressional incumbent campaigns during the 2019-20 election cycle has gone to 115 of the 150 climate science deniers still in office. Union of Concerned Scientists 10/22/2020
Geoffrey Supran, lead author and former research fellow in the History of Science at Harvard. “What we found is that between 1977 and 2003, excellent scientists within Exxon modeled and predicted global warming with, frankly, shocking skill and accuracy only for the company to then spend the next couple of decades denying that very climate science.” Harvard Gazette
More than 90% of papers that are skeptical on climate change originate from right-wing think tanks.[23] Climate change denial is undermining the efforts to act on or adapt to climate change, and exerts a powerful influence on politics of global warming and the manufactured global warming controversy. Wikipedia - climate change denial
And,
The climate legislation President Joe Biden introduced became law without the approval of a single Republican in Congress
So now, in 2023, the latest Climate Catastrophe news has become actually terrifying, even for the scientists:
Mr. Hansen, in a recent statement with other scientists, observes that fluctuations in the climate trend seem to accelerate the change rate for the worse, causing the world to move towards a “new climate frontier” with temperatures higher than at any point over the past million years, bringing impacts such as stronger storms, heatwaves, and droughts.”
After a 10,000-year journey, human civilisation has reached a climate crossroads: what we do in the next few years will determine our fate for millennia.
That choice is laid bare in the landmark report published on Monday by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), assembled by the world’s foremost climate experts and approved by all the world’s governments. The next update will be around 2030 – by that time the most critical choices will have been made.
The report is clear about what is at stake – everything: “There is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all.”
“The choices and actions implemented in this decade [ie by 2030] will have impacts now and for thousands of years,” it says. The climate crisis is already taking away lives and livelihoods across the world, and the report says the future effects will be even worse than was thought: “For any given future warming level, many climate-related risks are higher than [previously] assessed.”
“Continued emissions will further affect all major climate system components, and many changes will be irreversible on centennial to millennial time scales,” it says. To follow the path of least suffering – limiting global temperature rise to 1.5C – greenhouse gas emissions must peak “at the latest before 2025”, the report says, followed by “deep global reductions”. Yet in 2022, global emissions rose again to set a new record.
The 1.5C goal appears virtually out of reach, the IPCC says: “In the near-term, global warming is more likely than not to reach 1.5C even under a very low emission scenario.” A huge ramping up of work to protect people will therefore be needed. For example, “extreme sea level events” expected once a century today will strike at least once a year by 2100 in half of all monitored locations.
And more…
A report by leading climate scientists in March endorsed by the world’s governments, said: “There is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a livable and sustainable future for all.”
James Hansen, the climate scientist who shook Washington 33 years ago that human emissions of greenhouse gases were cooking the planet, is now warning that he expects the rate of global warming to double in the next 20 years.
For a long time we were in the range of normal, but now we’re not says Allegra LeGrande, a physical research scientist at Columbia University.
The Earth may have left a ‘safe’ climate state beyond 1°C global warming. If so, some effects are likely to happen sooner than expected. Armstrong McKay in Science.
"I'm not aware of a similar period when all parts of the climate system were in record-breaking or abnormal territory," Thomas Smith, an environmental geographer at London School of Economics.
"The Earth is in uncharted territory now due to global warming from burning fossil fuels, as well as heat from the first El Niño - a warming natural weather system - since 2018”, says Imperial College London climate science lecturer Dr Paulo Ceppi.
It is extreme heat in the North Atlantic Ocean that is particularly alarming scientists. "We've never ever had a marine heatwave in this part of Atlantic. I had not expected this," says Daniela Schmidt, Prof of Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol.
“Sea ice is 10% lower than the previous low, which is a huge change,” says Dr Caroline Holmes at the British Antarctic Survey.” She emphasizes it is not just a record being broken - it is being smashed by a long way, she calls it "another sign that we don't really understand the pace of change".
A growing number of climate scientists now believe we may be careening toward so-called tipping points, where incremental steps along the same trajectory could push Earth’s systems into abrupt or irreversible change – leading to transformations that cannot be stopped even if emissions were suddenly halted. On the whole, however, we really don’t know when or how fast things will fall apart. The Atlantic, 7/20/23
Because greenhouse gases leave the atmosphere slowly, the climate is projected to continue to warm through 2050 no matter what we do.
Wonderful, scientists ruin everything.
What to do, what to do? Well, it’s pretty clear that now, becoming a vegan and buying a Prius isn’t going to solve the problem, even if everyone does it, which I do recommend because it makes us feel better and engaged. It also builds solidarity if worse comes to worse, as for example, if Republicans somehow prevail in the next election, then I think mass, street-level demonstrations might be required to change minds on this.
In the climate red zone, the US and EU are considering urgent interventions
Brown skies over Europe and North America from Canadian wildfires and record “hot” North Atlantic seas are signs that we have reached a new level of climate risk — one that threatens the well-being of nearly everyone on Earth. Threats described in stark terms by the United Nations and by scientific and foreign affairs experts were underscored by global average surface temperatures briefly passing 1.5 degrees Celsius , a threshold for intensified danger, in early June.
In this context, both the European Union and the United States recently released official publications on the need for research on climate interventions with the potential to reduce global warming rapidly. This does not change imperatives and commitments for reducing emissions but is recognition from governments that evaluating options for improving climate safety is now too important to ignore.
The E.U. and U.S. publications both highlight the approach that scientists have identified as the most promising way to reduce substantial climate warming quickly, increasing the reflection of sunlight from clouds and particles in the atmosphere, or Solar Radiation Modification (SRM). SRM is based on a natural process that is also caused by particulates in pollution that act as a reflective shield. As renowned climate scientist Jim Hansen and others have called attention to recently , the climate could warm quickly as we clean up pollution and lose this shield.
James Hansen was a Nasa climate scientist when he first warned lawmakers of growing global heating and has since taken part in protests alongside activists to decry the lack of action to reduce planet-heating emissions in the decades since.
Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian
James Hansen: ‘There’s a lot more in the pipeline, unless we reduce the greenhouse gas amounts.’ He said the record heatwaves that have roiled the US, Europe, China and elsewhere in recent weeks have heightened “a sense of disappointment that we scientists did not communicate more clearly and that we did not elect leaders capable of a more intelligent response”.
Hear, Hear
So, in the great American tradition, tech, and science might just save our ass, although waaay past the last minute this time. …might
I haven’t read of an alternative to SRM, but they’re working on it. Still, we’ll be living in a minimum 1.5C+ climate.
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