Michael Mann: We're Already On Our Way to "Blowing Past" 1.5 Degrees Global Warming

Atmospheric CO2 is currently well above 400 ppm (horizontal dotted line; right scale). This chart, going back to the Cambrian Period, shows how unusual the current situation is. The last time CO2 was greater than 400 ppm was when the Indian subcontinent slammed into Asia from the south (note the rise and fall in CO2 around 50 million years ago). What we're doing to the atmosphere in two years took tens of million years last time. The dark red path on the far right, labeled "RCP8.5," is the path we're on today, thanks to billionaire control of our political system. (Chart from "Past and Future CO2" at Skeptical Science.)

by Gaius Publius

This is the second in a short series on the new IPCC report, "Global Warming of 1.5°C." I want to reiterate a single point here, one that's been made before in this space, but one that's easily missed.

That point: We're already far closer to global warming of +1.5°C "above the pre-industrial baseline" than most are acknowledging. The reason is simple; most people, including the scientists at the IPCC, set the pre-industrial baseline too high, which obscures how much global warming humans have already caused.

Of course, in the world we are experiencing quite a lot of global warming and its effects, regardless of what the numbers say, but it's the numbers that drive conversations in the halls of power, not the world outside, where people without power reside. Positioning those numbers lower allows the current generation of policymakers to take their time — and continue to take fossil fuel money from the donor class as they do it. (More on that below.)

1.5°C Global Warming Is Almost Upon Us

To see how close we are to 1.5°C global warming, let's look at this interview at the Real News Network with Dr. Michael Mann, one of the most prominent voices in the climate science community. Dr. Mann had argued in 2015 that pre-industrial global warming can be observed to start around 1800 (thanks to the Watt steam engine of 1781), far earlier than the baseline year, roughly 1870, assigned to it by the IPCC. In Dr. Mann's words, "It is evident that ... roughly 0.2C warming [had already taken place] by 1870," the implied IPCC baseline.

Dr. Mann concludes from this, "We exceeded 1C warming more than a decade ago."

Here are a few selections from the RNN interview. First, a reaffirmation of how close we already are to global warming of +1.5°C (emphasis mine throughout):

DHARNA NOOR: You mentioned that you thought that these IPCC scientists might have been too conservative in their estimates. And in coverage of this report of this IPCC report several outlets — the New York Times, Business Insider — are saying that we’re on track to reach 1.5 degrees by 2040, not 2030. So we’re seeing even more conservative estimates from the coverage of the report than is in the report itself. Can you talk about this a little bit?

MICHAEL MANN: Yeah. I think it’s sort of a bad game of telephone where, you know, parts of the report have been translated for the purpose of the summary for policymakers [he's being polite; more on that here]. And then there are press releases that have been sent out. And there’s been a lot of nuance that has been lost in translation, as it were.

I also pointed out that the IPCC made a number of extremely conservative- I would argue overly conservative- decisions in how they measure the warming that has already happened. And by doing that they underestimate how close we are to these 1.5 degree Celsius and 2 degrees Celsius thresholds. And they overestimate how much carbon we have left to burn.

If you look, for example, at the Northern Hemisphere, which is where most of us live, and you ask the question when do we cross the 2 degree warming — 2 degree Celsius warming — threshold for the Northern Hemisphere if we continue with business as usual burning of fossil fuels?

I showed in an article several years ago in Scientific American [here] we cross that threshold before 2040, in the late 2030s. So we are on the way, on our way to blowing past the 1.5 degree Celsius mark and crossing the 2 degrees Celsius threshold in a matter of, you know, depending on how you define it, it really doesn’t matter. Is it two decades, is it three decades, it hardly matters.

He thinks we'll "blow past" warming of +2 degrees in the 2030s, which means that warming of +1.5 degrees is ... very close indeed.

About the Paris agreement and the various national emissions targets:

MICHAEL MANN: ... [T]he Paris agreement alone doesn’t stabilise warming below those dangerous levels of warming, below 2 degrees Celsius. There are credible estimates that have been done that if you tally up all of the commitments under the Paris accord- and keep in mind that many countries, including Europe and the U.S., are not quite meeting their targets at this point- but assuming every country meets its target, that only gets us halfway from where we would be headed, which would be towards 4 to 5 degrees Celsius warming of the planet; a catastrophic warming of the planet by the end of the century. The Paris agreement only gets us halfway down to the 2 degrees Celsius mark, and nowhere near that 1.5 degrees Celsius mark.

And finally, Dr. Mann's prescription for success in this fight:

The reality is that there is still time to reduce our emissions by the amount necessary to avert the worst impacts of climate change, but not if we continue to vote in climate change deniers and fuel lobbyists like we have in the form of the current administration and the congressional Republicans who are enabling their agenda.

From this he pivots to the current elections and the need to vote out Republicans.

What Form Should Political Action Take?

This leads to a second point: Dr. Mann is right that there's time to reduce emissions "by the amount necessary to avert the worst impacts" of global warming. Note: he said "the worst impacts," not all impacts.

But even by conservative IPCC estimates, the rate of reduction must be greater than the rate at which we've been proceeding under both political parties. As Dharna Noor puts it, according to the IPCC report "we must reduce global emissions by 45 per cent from 2010 levels by 2030, and altogether by 2050."

Which means — and I think this is more than obvious, though rarely said — we'll have to remove from power any political leader dedicated to keeping the current financial-energy system in place if there's to be any hope of even Dr. Mann's modest goal of averting "the worst impacts." Otherwise, we won't avert any impacts at all.

For example:

BP throws in another $3 million, big oil now spending over $25 million dollars to ensure Washington doesn't act on climate change #waelex https://t.co/ra6cFWTsnv via @seattlepi

— Jamal 👻 10 YRS LEFT TO FIGHT CLIMATE CHANGE Raad (@jamalraad) October 22, 2018

This does, in fact, require a kind of revolution — in its mildest form, the kind of revolution that a WWII-style demand-directed economy represents.

Achieving that degree of change is not an impossible job, by the way, just an improbable one. The key to an orderly revolution of this type will be the 2020 presidential primary in the Democratic Party. To understand why, ask yourself this: What would the U.S. be doing about climate change today if Bernie Sanders, no fan of rule by "the billionaires," were in the White House?

Sanders was sincere about the threat of global warming. Had he governed like he spoke, the result would have been revolutionary.

GP
 

IPCC Releases Climate Report — First Thoughts

by Gaius Publius

I'm just delving into the new IPCC special report on the effects of limiting, or not limiting, global warming of 1.5°C (full report here), and there are a number of bottom lines coming out of it, including this one, which we reported earlier: "IPCC Manipulating Climate Report Summary to Favor Wealthy Nations."

The reference to manipulation refers to the executive summary part of the report (titled "Summary for Policymakers"), which national representatives are allowed to edit line by line. The rest of the report is written by climate scientists, but written by consensus, which causes it to "lean conservative" in its prognostication and prescriptions.

On that last point, Climate Central wrote in 2012:

Across two decades and thousands of pages of reports, the world's most authoritative voice on climate science has consistently understated the rate and intensity of climate change and the danger those impacts represent, say a growing number of studies on the topic.

This conservative bias, say some scientists, could have significant political implications, as reports from the group – the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – influence policy and planning decisions worldwide, from national governments down to local town councils. ...

A comparison of past IPCC predictions against 22 years of weather data and the latest climate science find that the IPCC has consistently underplayed the intensity of global warming in each of its four major reports released since 1990.

The drastic decline of summer Arctic sea ice is one recent example: In the 2007 report [here], the IPCC concluded the Arctic would not lose its summer ice before 2070 at the earliest. But the ice pack has shrunk far faster than any scenario scientists felt policymakers should consider; now researchers say the region could see nearly ice-free summers within 20 years.

Sea ice predictions that are way off the mark are just the first of the prognostication failures the article lists.

Yet taking all that into account, the bulk of which will strike most people as obvious, I still want to write several pieces about this publication, starting with this one. Greenpeace bottom-lines the report as follows:

Key takeaways

• 2°C is much more dangerous than thought when the Paris deal was signed. We are closer to critical tipping points and other key risks than we thought. Four out of the five main Reasons for Concern have been revised to signal substantially higher risks with lower levels of warming for humans, species and economies.

• Limiting warming to 1.5°C instead of 2°C would make a huge difference for the life in oceans and land. It would protect hundreds of millions of people from frequent extreme heatwaves, halve the proportion of additional populations suffering water scarcity and help achieve sustainable development and poverty eradication goals.

• Limiting warming to 1.5°C or below is challenging but still achievable, if we are fast, bold and lucky, and accelerate action on all fronts now.

• Solutions exist that could enable halving global carbon emissions by 2030 in ways that support development goals, build climate resilience and deliver us healthier and more prosperous societies.

• The next few years are critical for the world to embark on a transformational path to reduce its carbon emissions and increase its forests to bring emissions to net zero by mid century the latest. With countries’ current climate targets for 2030, we would have no chance. So they must be improved.

• We need to think big, at all levels, with everyone on board. The challenge is unprecedented and it won’t be solved by technology or economics alone. We need better governance and deeper understanding of system transformations, agency and motivation for change. And we need to prepare for the impacts and losses that can no longer be avoided, meeting the needs of people at risk.

Greenpeace has other takeaways with more detail; the short info-sheet is worth reading in its entirety. Two that caught my eye are this one:

• With countries’ current climate targets we are heading for well above 3°C. ...

and this one:

• To get below 1.5°C global CO2 emissions would need to be halved by 2030 and reach net zero by mid-century at the latest, with substantial reductions in other gases.

Greenpeace is doing its best to be equally alarming and encouraging, as is, I suspect, the IPCC (though we'll find out more after reading the full report). Since no one really knows the future (an obvious statement that's still only partly true), there may be a chance to avoid the worst of the climate outcomes by stopping our emissions "now" — meaning ASAP, on an WWII-style emergency timeline.

The problem, of course, is that even though everyone, including the average Fox News drone, believes the worst is on the way, no one among the masses believes a real solution is possible. Thus, nothing meaningful will be done, since no one thinks a meaningful thing can be done. A circular checkmate, to mix metaphors.

Climate Change and Confederate Flags

More on the last point later, but I do want to show you a recent Saturday Night Live take on the IPCC report, which restates the above problem in a novel and comic way. This is from their "Weekend Update" segment. After talking about Kanye West's bizarre appearance in the Oval Office, the hosts pivot to the climate report (emphasis added):

Colin Jost: This [Kanye West's pro-Trump pronouncement] was pretty crazy. But look, it’s not the end of the world, O.K., because this is the end of the world. That’s right. Scientists basically published an obituary for the earth this week and people were like, yeah, but like what does Taylor Swift think?

We don’t really worry about climate change because it’s too overwhelming and we’re already in too deep. It’s like if you owe your bookie $1,000, you’re like, oh yeah, I gotta pay this dude back. But if you owe your bookie $1 million, you’re like, I guess I’m just gonna die.

Michael Che: This story has been stressing me out all week. I just keep asking myself, why don’t I care about this? Don’t get me wrong: I 100-percent believe in climate change. Yet, I’m willing to do absolutely nothing about it.

I mean, we’re all going to lose the planet. We should be sad, right? This whole episode should be like a telethon or something, but it’s not. I think it’s because they keep telling us we’re going to lose everything and nobody cares about everything.

People only care about some things. Like, if Fox News reported that climate change is going to take away all the flags and Confederate statues? Oh, there’d be recycling bins outside of every Cracker Barrel and Dick’s Sporting Goods.

Nice double use of "cracker" and two good points. First, disaster freezes action (until it doesn't). And second, most people don't care about the planet or "humanity" in the abstract nearly as much as they care about their kin, their immediate friends, and their tribe. So what will make the TV-watching masses care enough to act?

I've often thought, for example, that something as non-lethal as the permanent inability to play college football anywhere on the East Coast from October 1 through November 30 — eight solid weeks — due to constant hurricanes and torrential rainstorms might do the trick.

After all, imagine: no home games for two entire months in much of the ACC or SEC, none in Florida, the Carolinas or Georgia, ever again. Would that get the Fox News and Fox Sports fanboys' attention, enough for them to act? I think it might, and with a lot less loss of life than something much more drastic.

GP
 

IPCC Manipulating Climate Report Summary to Favor Wealthy Nations

Global warming projections taken from an earlier IPCC special report, Emissions Scenarios, published in 2000 (graph reproduced here). We're still on the red path.

by Gaius Publius

From time to time, the IPCC (the UN Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change) issues special reports along with its more general, every-five-years-or-so Assessment Reports. (The latest assessment report is AR5 from November 2014. It can be accessed here.)

These special reports cover subjects ranging from Safeguarding the Ozone Layer and the Global Climate System, published in 2005, to Renewable Energy Sources and Climate Change Mitigation, published in 2012. (The full list is here.)

They're about to release a new special report, Global Warming of 1.5 °C, that details the risks if global warming rises above 1.5°C (but stays below the official target of 2°C) "in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change, sustainable development and efforts to eradicate poverty." This is in response to concern expressed at the Paris meeting by especially vulnerable nations that two degrees warming is still too much.

Note that many of the (initially) most vulnerable nations are also among the poorest — small island nations like Kiribatu, the countries of sub-Saharan Africa and Bangladesh, to name just a few. Of course, every nation will ultimately be vulnerable. Florida, for example, is one Typhoon Haiyan away from a panicked collapse in all real estate prices and mass exodus.

Thus this conflict isn't just about how much fossil fuel its owners get to turn into wealth (a lower warming limit means significantly lower fossil fuel sales); it's also about what wealthy nations must do to help the poorer ones, if anything. It is in this context that nations at the Paris climate conference discussed which global warming limit they should target. About that discussion, climate writer KC Golden said this:

Climate justice advocates, led by the world’s most vulnerable nations, are pushing in Paris to move the target to 1.5 degrees C. Science, sanity, and moral responsibility are with them, but rarely are those enough to win the day. Sober COP-watchers gave the drive for 1.5 little chance to prevail, as Big Fossil continues to box the negotiators.

("COP" means "conference of the parties," meetings at which representatives of nations that are part of the UN's climate mitigation efforts make decisions.)

So keep this in mind as you read on: there are two issues here, justice and money, not just the obvious one, money.

Controlling the Summary Means Controlling Global Response

A final note. Most of the IPCC's publications contain literally volumes of data, and each publication contains a "Summary for Policymakers," a 20-or-so-page executive summary for politicians who will determine climate policy for their governments. The Summary for Policymakers is the "here's what you need to know" explanation for non-scientific decision-makers.

As a result, no one in power reads the reports themselves. Instead, people with actual policy control rely on the Summary only to tell them what to think. This makes control of the summary critical to controlling what actually gets done. If the underlying report contains data that screams, "Warning; extreme danger!" and the Summary says, "There could be a problem sometime, but no one knows when or for sure," only the Summary will be acted on. The Summary could also simply exclude (be silent about) important findings in the scientific parts of the report.

Apply that idea — that manipulating these Summaries matters to people who want to manipulate the world's response to climate change — to the especially sensitive special report that's coming and you will learn a lot about the critical issues emerging around global warming. Again, the issues are justice and money, not just money.

Wealthy Nations Are Manipulating the Latest IPCC Report Summary

Let's start with the money issue. This is from the Guardian, which has obtained comments about what appears to be manipulation of the Summary for Policymakers being added to the report on 1.5°C global warming:

Climate study ‘pulls punches’ to keep polluters on board
‘True risks’ of warming played down to placate fossil-fuel nations

Warnings about the dangers of global warming are being watered down in the final version of a key climate report for a major international meeting next month, according to reviewers who have studied earlier versions of the report and its summary.

They say scientists working on the final draft of the summary are censoring their own warnings and “pulling their punches” to make policy recommendations seem more palatable to countries – such as the US, Saudi Arabia and Australia – that are reluctant to cut fossil-fuel emissions, a key cause of global warming. “Downplaying the worst impacts of climate change has led the scientific authors to omit crucial information from the summary for policymakers,” said one reviewer, Bob Ward, policy director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment.

The article identifies much of the missing information.

Cuts made to the final draft of the summary include:

• Any mention that temperature rises of above 1.5C could lead to increased migrations and conflict;

• All discussion of the danger of the Gulf Stream being disrupted by cold water flowing from the Arctic where more and more sea-ice is melting;

• Warnings about the dangers that 1.5–2C temperature rises could trigger irreversible loss of the Greenland ice sheet and raise sea levels by 1–2 metres over the next two centuries.

Other cuts from the summary include the sentence: “Poverty and disadvantage have increased with recent warming (about 1C) and are expected to increase in many populations as average global temperatures increase from 1C to 1.5C and beyond.”

The original summary also stated “at 2C warming, there is a potential for significant population displacement concentrated in the tropics”. Again this is not mentioned in the report for policymakers.

The clear implication of the Guardian article is that fossil fuel countries and companies want to water down the Summary because of the financial benefit: they get to sell more coal, oil and methane ("natural gas").

Economic Justice and Climate Reparations

The second reason wealthy nations are suppressing the worst information in the upcoming Summary relates to economic justice, climate reparations and the future economic development of poor and developing nations.

Global warming has economic impacts as well. Excised from the latest draft of the Summary is the observation that "poverty and disadvantage have increased" as global warming progresses. This increasing division pits wealthy nations against poor nations on a global scale, an idea also suggested by excised warnings about "significant population displacement." In other words, explicit in the report, and implicit in what's being omitted from the Summary, is recognition that not just the acquisition of wealth divides rich nations from poor ones, but also vast difference in climate consequences, at least initially.

This is a justice issue, which almost exactly parallels the national divisions caused by increasing U.S. wealth inequality, one consequence of which was the 2016 voter rebellion that ultimately brought Donald Trump to the White House (and almost put Bernie Sanders there instead). Imagine that disruption on a global scale. As the rich get richer, the poor get angry.

About reparations for climate damage, I wrote at the time the Paris conference concluded: "In a just world, who should pay when California loses its agriculture industry, when south Florida returns to the sea and real estate values collapse, when storms and floods make increasing millions homeless and vulnerable to disease, starvation and chaos? How is the answer not Exxon, the Kochs (Koch Industries is privately owned), Chevron, Total and Shell Oil, the sheikhs of Saudi Arabia, and all the rest?"

Consider also future economic development from a climate justice perspective. Almost all of the wealth created by two centuries of fossil fuel exploitation was captured by nations that burned and benefited from it — primarily the U.S. and Western Europe. Earth's atmosphere is now flooded with greenhouse gases, so much so that there's no room for even more emissions without dire consequences for us all.

Yet the rich nations, who've already pulled themselves into "first world" status thanks to previous and extensive fossil fuel burning, want to (a) deny the same path — fossil fuel use — to poor, non-industrialized and emerging nations "for the good of the world"; (b) deny that they should share some of the wealth acquired from fossil fuel use to aid in other nation's development; and (c) deny any reparations at all to vulnerable nations when the crisis caused by first world fossil fuel use hits them early and hard. Poor nations see this stance quite clearly for what it is.

(For the U.S.'s shameful attempt to blackmail poor and vulnerable nations at the Paris talks to give up their justice claims, read "U.S. Offers Vulnerable Nations a Deal, But They Can Never Ask for Climate Money Again.")

This building conflict between rich and poor nations, which may never be resolved, is a prescription for global war. But it won't be one with armies fighting armies. This war will look like a global insurgency instead, not city-wide or nation-wide, but planet-wide, with armies of some countries fighting populations in others. In fact, it will look very much like what's happening between the Israeli army and the people of occupied Palestine, but with much more chaos because the battle space, instead of being greatly constrained, will encompass literally all the world.

GP