Scary news

Yesterday, I received two links that suggest that global warming is a lot more frightening even than I had imagined, suggesting that at this point not only is it imperative to stop burning carbon, but that human survival may depend on the much more difficult job of actually removing it from our atmosphere and putting it back in the ground.

Here’s a Toronto Star article sent to me by Paul Oxley.  It’s entitled “Climate Woes Threaten Human Survival: UN“:

Here are some quotes:

Earth’s environment has tumbled downhill to the point where “humanity’s very survival” is at stake, a branch of the United Nations said today.

“We appear to be living in an era in which the severity of environmental problems is increasing faster than our policy responses,” it states. “To avoid the threat of catastrophic consequences in the future, we need new policy approaches.”

The basic aim must be to move environmental concerns from the edge to the centre of decision-making. As well, instead of trying to cope with the impacts of environmental damage, the focus should be on reducing the causes, including economic and population growth, resource consumption and social values.

That can be done through measures such as “green” taxes and economic measures that take into account the value of Earth’s resources and the cost of pollution and other damage.

“Determined action now is cheaper than waiting for better solutions to emerge,” the report states.

The good news is that the Green Party would move environmental concerns from the edge to the centre of decision-making, just as the UN paper suggests.

The other paper, here, was written in response to observed melting of arctic ice, which is happening much, much faster than scientists predicted.  Since a lot of the “worst case” scenarios involved flooding of coastal cities, where many of the world’s inhabitants live, faster arctic melting means that a lot of these disastrous scenarios will be happening a lot sooner than we expected.  This adds to a growing list of situations where cautious scientists, attempting not to overstate the case, have instead consistently underestimated the severity of the threat.  Still the conclusions are very stark.  The most fearsome ones to me are just below.  The emphasis is mine:

• A doubling of climate sensitivity would mean we passed the widely accepted 2°C threshold of
“dangerous anthropogenic interference” with the climate four decades ago, and would require us to find the means to engineer a rapid drawdown of current atmospheric greenhouse gas.
• Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are now growing more rapidly than “business-as-usual”, the most
pessimistic of the IPCC scenarios.
• The 2°C warming cap is a political compromise; with the speed of change now in the climate system
and the positive feedbacks that 2°C will trigger, it looms for perhaps billions of people and millions of
species as a death sentence.
• The IPCC suffers from a scientific reticence and in many key areas the IPCC process has been so
deficient as to be an unreliable and dangerously misleading basis for policy-making.

If the IPCC report turns out to be a rosy misrepresentation of the horrifying reality, we are really in trouble.  Here’s the whole list of conclusions.

• Climate change impacts are happening at lower temperature increases and more quickly than
projected.
• The Arctic’s floating sea ice is headed towards rapid summer disintegration as early as 2013, a
century ahead of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projections.
• The rapid loss of Arctic sea ice will speed up the disintegration of the Greenland ice sheet, and a rise
in sea levels by even as much as 5 metres by the turn of this century is possible.
• The Antarctic ice shelf reacts far more sensitively to warming temperatures than previously
believed.
• Long-term climate sensitivity (including “slow” feedbacks such as carbon cycle feedbacks which are
starting to operate) may be double the IPCC standard.
• A doubling of climate sensitivity would mean we passed the widely accepted 2°C threshold of
“dangerous anthropogenic interference” with the climate four decades ago, and would require us to
find the means to engineer a rapid drawdown of current atmospheric greenhouse gas.
• Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are now growing more rapidly than “business-as-usual”, the most
pessimistic of the IPCC scenarios.
• Temperatures are now within ≈1°C of the maximum temperature of the past million years.
• We must choose targets and take actions that can actually solve the problem in a timely manner.
• The object of policy-relevant advice must be to avoid unacceptable outcomes and seemingly
extreme or alarming possibilities, not to determine just the apparently most likely outcome.
• The 2°C warming cap is a political compromise; with the speed of change now in the climate system
and the positive feedbacks that 2°C will trigger, it looms for perhaps billions of people and millions of
species as a death sentence.
• To allow the reestablishment and long-term security of the Arctic summer sea ice it is likely to be
necessary to bring global warming back to a level at or below 0.5°C (a long-term precautionary
warming cap) and for the level of atmospheric greenhouse gases at equilibrium to be brought down
to or below a long-term precautionary cap of 320 ppm CO2e.
• The IPCC suffers from a scientific reticence and in many key areas the IPCC process has been so
deficient as to be an unreliable and dangerously misleading basis for policy-making.

I also found some of the body of the article interesting.  It referred to a problem I’d never heard of before, but is clearly an important threat to be wary of:

Long before the rising seas inundate the land, acquifers will be contaminated. The 2006 Conference of the International Association of Hydrogeologists heard that rising sea levels will also lead to the inundation by salt water of the aquifers used by cities such as Shanghai, Manila, Jakarta, Bangkok, Kolkata, Mumbai, Karachi, Lagos, Buenos Aires and Lima. “The water supplies of dozens of major cities around the world are at risk from a previously ignored aspect of global warming.

It concludes:

The simple imperative is for us to very rapidly decarbonise the world economy and to put in place the means to draw down the existing excess CO2 levels. We must choose targets and take actions that can actually solve the problem in a timely way. It is too late not to be honest with ourselves and our fellow citizens.

My friend Jeff Berg likes to talk about the necessity of bridging the gulf between what is politically possible and what is scientifically necessary.  The gulf now appears even more vast than it did.  But the report is absolutely correct.  We must be honest about what’s at stake.  We urgently need voices in government that express this fundamental threat we are facing.