The Elephant In the Room: Addressing Climate Change Means Rationing

World War II rationing posters. If no one questions the goal, no one will question means like these.

by Thomas Neuburger

I could make this complicated or simple. Let's make it simple. We've dithered so long in addressing climate change, that to address it effectively means not just a radical restructuring of the entire economy, it also means energy rationing.

A few writers are starting to get this fact, and get at it in their work. Some "rationing will be needed" articles are of the "let me prove it to you with data" type. I'd like to take a different approach in this piece. This will be an "if you've got a massive water leak, you're going to get wet" type of piece — an appeal to the obvious, in other words. Either approach will have the same result — it will arrive at the r-word despite (and because) of the reaction that word causes.

After all, it's entirely likely that one of the chief reasons people are not addressing climate change effectively — aside from the political and propaganda power of corporate America — is that once people start thinking about the problem, they quickly conclude what we're about to conclude, that a crash conversion to zero-carbon energy means "goodbye big-screen lifestyle," at least for a while.

Let's look at something written in 2016 by Stan Cox, "If There’s a World War II-Style Climate Mobilization, It has to Go All the Way—and Then Some." His intro, which I won't quote, states the obvious: that the climate is deteriorating at an accelerating pace, and addressing this problem will take a "World War II"-style mobilization.

This is true as far as it goes, but the UN and most climate scientists also say that the rate of decarbonization required is greater than can be achieved with just a simple (and comfortably paced) retrofit of the energy economy.

Consider this contradiction, from the Greenpeace info sheet on the latest IPCC Special Report (quoted here: "IPCC Releases Climate Report — First Thoughts").

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

According to Dr. Michael Mann and others, our business-as-usual behavior will push global atmospheric warming beyond +2 degrees Celsius in the mid 2030s (my own estimate is much more pessimistic), while UN Paris agreement "promises," or targets, have global carbon emissions rising throughout that period.

As a result, the IPCC Special Report calls for global carbon emissions to, in effect, "fall off a cliff" — end, or at least start to end, almost immediately. This, of course, means ending the fossil fuel industry completely and forever.

But let's forget about the unlikelihood of that happening. Let's say we actually tried to do this — that in 2021 a radical, FDR-style president and an awakened and, yes, panicked public committed to an actual crash conversion to 100% renewable energy. What would that mean for the consumer economy? Would that big screen, smart phone lifestyle, the one the energy industry ads say is at risk, actually be at risk?

This is where the answer gets obvious. Of course it will be at risk. If protecting people's ability to spend endlessly on consumer products is society's highest priority, then a crash-course energy conversion will be slowed to whatever speed it must be. But if averting the global climate crisis is the highest priority, of course the consumer economy will take a back seat, to whatever extent it must.

Which is exactly what occurred during World War II.

Stan Cox on what that implies:

The necessity for the consumer economy to get by on a lower input of energy and other resources while achieving sufficiency for all brings us back to the World War II model. If we’re to emulate the “Greatest Generation,” we can’t do a halfway job of it, focusing solely on “green” production; we have to build a fairer economy as well.

So far, I have seen only one effective strategy for doing that: a “Victory Plan” recently drawn up by Ezra Silk, a co-founder of The Climate Mobilization movement. (It can be downloaded here.) The document, radical and at the same time realistic and practical, calls for reworking the government and economy even more thoroughly than during World War II, in order to cut America’s net greenhouse emissions down to zero by 2025 while also reversing degradation of ecosystems and halting the mass extinction of species.

Necessary steps will include phasing out fossil-fuel use within a decade; directing a large share of our energy, materials, and labor toward building a renewable energy sector and a high speed rail network; restoring our forests, grasslands, and croplands so that we are putting more carbon into the soil and less into the atmosphere; deeply cutting meat and dairy consumption; and converting a large portion of the U.S. military into a kind of climate mobilization force.

All of that will require a national reallocation of resources among sectors of production, one that diverts a significant share of a necessarily declining resource budget into building green infrastructure and leaves the consumer economy a lot less to work with.

And the kicker (emphasis added):

We know from wartime experience that with resources diverted away from the consumer economy, shrinking supply will collide with still-high demand, bringing the threat of runaway inflation. Price controls will be essential, but with goods in short supply at reasonable prices, we will have to move quickly to prevent severe shortages, hoarding, and “rationing by queueing.” As in the 1940s, that will require fair-shares rationing.

I'll let you read the article to see the implications of that last sentence.

The bottom line, of course, is that these are indeed the options — comfort for us now, followed by death and misery for all generations to come. Or rationing and planning now, to secure a safer future for our children and grandchildren. This is the choice this generation is facing, and I firmly believe, in the back of their minds, people do know.

This is a profound moment in human history. What we face today is not just a practical, existential choice, but a deeply moral, almost Dantesque one as well. We're on the verge of committing mass murder, this generation. And for what?
  

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
 

2017 Breaks Climate Records Despite No "El Niño Boost"

"Fig. 1. (a) Global surface temperatures relative to 1880-1920 based on GISTEMP data, which employs GHCN.v3 for meteorological stations, NOAA ERSST.v5 for sea surface temperature, and Antarctic research station data[1]." Source: "Global Temperature in 2018" by James Hansen. (Speech bubble annotations mine; click to enlarge.)

by Gaius Publius

This is an update on the coming climate train wreck. The numbers are in for 2017, not just the global temperature itself (see graph above), but also the clearly climate-related damage that was done — the fires, hurricanes and other extreme-weather events. 2017 ranks in the top five hottest years on record, and broke the record for climate-related damage.

About global temperature in 2017, look at the chart above and note three things.

With No El Niño, 2017 Was Still the Second Hottest Year in the Instrumental Record

First, the two most recent "super El Niño" events, in 1997-98 and 2015-16, clearly represented peaks or spikes in global warming, while the intervening years hung close to the 12-month and 132-month running means.

Not so in 2017. Despite the lack of El Niño conditions in 2017, the year still placed second on the list of the hottest years ever recorded. Dr. James Hansen:

Global surface temperature in 2017 was the second highest in the period of instrumental measurements in the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) analysis. Relative to average temperature for 1880-1920, which we take as an appropriate estimate of “pre-industrial” temperature, 2017 was +1.17°C (~2.1°F) warmer than in the 1880-1920 base period. The high 2017 temperature, unlike the record 2016 temperature, was obtained without any boost from tropical El Niño warming.

This should be concerning to everyone, for the reason explained below.

(By the way, note that the statement above covers only "global surface temperature" and not oceanic warming as well, especially deep oceanic warming. The entire planet is being heated by our use of fossil fuel, not just the surface.)

The Rate of Global Warming May Be Accelerating

Second, this data means we may be entering a period of accelerated warming. I think most people assume that global warming and its effects will be linear, will proceed along a roughly straight line that allows us to calculate how much we can delay in dealing with it. Not so.

I've argued for some time that linearity is not guaranteed, is in fact highly unlikely, and that the chief cause of global warming, the injection of CO2 into the atmosphere, seems already to have accelerated. In a piece earlier last year, "Atmospheric CO2 Jumps +4 ppm in June Compared to June 2015", I wrote:

Consider a simple calculation. Most governments that try to show they are interested in ending man-made CO2 emissions have "exit rates" — rates at which humans go to zero emissions — which nonetheless have us increasing emissions as late as 2050. The underlying assumption is that if we start the count at 400 ppm in 2014 (per the monthly chart at the above), then add +2.11 ppm per year, we don't get to 450 ppm for roughly 20-25 years (allowing for modest acceleration in the growth rate). But if atmospheric CO2 growth suddenly zooms to +4 ppm/year starting with this year's 406 ppm, we're at 450 ppm in 11 years.

As I noted then, eleven years from now is 2027, and 450 ppm is game-over — partly because global warming will have shot well past +2°C, producing enough social, political, economic and military chaos to make a global solution impossible; and partly because if we haven't stopped Exxon et al before then, we never will, and the process will go to termination.

Here's what "the process will go to termination" means: Humans won't stop adding atmospheric CO2 and other greenhouse gasses until we're pre-industrial again — or worse.

"Pre-industrial or worse" is not what we want for our species. "We" in the previous sentence includes only the non-sociopaths among us — those of us not in charge of U.S. and global energy policy.

Global Warming Has Already Reached +1.2–1.4 Degrees Above Pre-Industrial, Depending on How "Pre-Industrial" Is Defined

Third, note again Hansen's comment that "Relative to average temperature for 1880-1920, which we take as an appropriate estimate of “pre-industrial” temperature, 2017 was +1.17°C (~2.1°F) warmer than in the 1880-1920 base period." If you look at the chart above, you'll see that the 2015-2016 high was roughly +1.2°C above what Hansen defines as "pre-industrial temperature."

If global warming is accelerating along with global CO2 emissions, and the most recent peak was warming of +1.2°C, the aspirational Paris target of halting global warming at +1.5°C is impossible, despite this bit of (desperate) optimism:

IPCC 1.5°C report: A clarion call for EU action on climate

A leaked draft of the IPCC’s forthcoming report on keeping global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius gives reason to hope that the target is attainable. But only if urgent action is taken immediately, warns Dr Bert Metz.

At this point, all optimism should be desperate, and that desperation should drive emergency action, something I and others have written many time about.

One could argue, in fact, that we're actually much closer to +1.5°C global warming than even Hansen or the IPCC recognizes. It's all a matter of where you measure from in calculating the "pre-industrial" baseline.

• Dr. Hansen puts the baseline as the "average temperature for 1880-1920" and gets present warming of +1.2°C at the 2014-2016 peak.

• The IPCC, according to the link above, puts "global average temperatures" at "just 1 degree Celsius (°C) above pre-industrial levels" — noticeably lower than Hansen's number. 

• Dr. Michael Mann (quoted here), like Dr. Hansen, gets a higher number with what he considers an even more appropriate baseline:

It has been widely reported that 2015 will be the first year where temperatures climbed to 1C above the pre-industrial. That might make it seem like we’ve got quite a ways to go until we breach the 2C limit. But the claim is wrong. We exceeded 1C warming more than a decade ago. The problem is that here, and elsewhere, an inappropriate baseline has been invoked for defining the “pre-industrial.” The warming was measured relative to the average over the latter half of the 19th century (1850-1900). In other words, the base year implicitly used to define “pre-industrial” conditions is 1875, the mid-point of that interval. Yet the industrial revolution and the rise in atmospheric CO2 concentrations associated with it, began more than a century earlier. ...

[U]sing the more appropriate 1750-1850 pre-industrial baseline, we see that the Northern Hemisphere average temperature (gray squiggly curve [in Figure 3 at the link]) has already warmed nearly 1.2C [as of 2013; Figure 3 was published in 2014]. Temperatures have exceeded 1C above pre-industrial levels for most of the past decade. [emphasis added]

Dr. Mann's current warming number, using this baseline, would be +1.3°C or a little higher.

• I took a less cautious look at determining the baseline (here) and found "the global temperature low at about 1900–1910 ... is a good proxy for the pre-industrial temperature low pointed out in the chart [at the link]. We can take the temperature in that later period (1900 or so) to be nearly the same as the "pre-Industrial low."

This gives a present global warming number of approximately +1.4°C.

None of these numbers is good if the health of the many, not profit for the few, is one's primary concern.

A Watershed

However you consider the situation — non-El Niño spikes in temperature; accelerating CO2 emissions and very possibly warming as well; or the uncertain definition of the "pre-industrial baseline" (a somewhat politicized discussion in the case of the hyper-cautious IPCC) — no matter what lens one looks through, we're clearly at a watershed.

Or two watersheds. The first, a watershed of events. The second, a watershed in public awareness of how immediate the consequences are. The first watershed is undeniably in front of us; it's in the data itself.

The second is a prediction. In my estimation, people are much more aware — today — of global warming than any in the corporatized media gives them credit for. That awareness, unreported for now, will come bursting though sooner than expected, with undeniable, and non-linear, consequences.

GP
 

The State of the Climate in 2017: "Truly Uncharted Territory"

Global average temperature during the Holocene. Blue curve: Global temperature reconstruction from proxy data of Marcott et al, Science 2013. Recent instrumental measurements shown in red. Note that the instrument reading (red line) is four years out of date and therefore ends at a lower point than if it reflected today's reading. Graph: Klaus Bitterman. (Source; my annotation; click to enlarge)

by Gaius Publius

Bottom line first — We now have one more source saying that global warming is well above +1°C and headed higher at unanticipated rates. Key quote: We're in "truly uncharted territory." To jump to that news, click here.

Not long ago in these pages I took a look at the actual state of global warming as compared to "pre-Industrial global temperature" — the average global temperature prior to the warming caused by the Industrial Revolution — and discovered that the global warming "headline number" was too low, a fact that's causing a dangerous complacency.

The Industrial Revolution and the Watt Steam Engine

Some context: The Industrial Revolution can be said to have started with the invention of the steam engine, though obviously many other inventions, like the cotton gin, played a big part. The reason for choosing the steam engine, though, should be obvious — its ability to convert carbon emissions into work with much greater efficiency and on a much larger scale than ever before.

Though there were previous versions of a steam engine, some going back a great many years, the one designed by James Watt in 1781 is considered critical:

In 1781 James Watt patented a steam engine that produced continuous rotary motion.^[3] Watt's ten-horsepower engines enabled a wide range of manufacturing machinery to be powered. The engines could be sited anywhere that water and coal or wood fuel could be obtained. By 1883, engines that could provide 10,000 hp had become feasible.^[4] The stationary steam engine was a key component of the Industrial Revolution, allowing factories to locate where water power was unavailable. The atmospheric engines of Newcomen and Watt were large compared to the amount of power they produced, but high-pressure steam engines were light enough to be applied to vehicles such as traction engines and the railway locomotives.

Anthony Anderson wrote in New Scientist that Watt's improvements to the steam engine "converted it from a prime mover of marginal efficiency into the mechanical workhorse of the Industrial Revolution." Wikipedia adds that the "availability of efficient, reliable motive power made whole new classes of industry economically viable, and altered the economies of continents.[47]"

Pre-Industrial Global Temperature and Pre-Industrial Atmospheric CO2

So the question becomes, not what was the global average temperature in 1900 or the mean of the years 1850–1900, as is usually done, with an implied base year of 1875 — but what was it in, say, 1800, or perhaps, in the mean of the years 1750–1850? In my piece, I argued, along with Michael Mann and others, that the baseline for "pre-Industrial global temperature" was set too high.

That actually matters. Put simply, when people read about global warming, they often see headlines that state "global warming is now +0.6°C above the 1950—1980 mean," or "+0.9°C above 'pre-Industrial temperatures" — statements that lend a kind of comfort to the conversation and strip the problem of its urgency. After all, if the U.N. would like to keep warming to less than +2°C above pre-Industrial temperatures, warming numbers like +0.9°C imply we have a way to go. Even the aspirational warming goal of not more than +1.5°C imply quite a bit of headroom.

My earlier piece argued that the mark "pre-Industrial baseline temperature" was set far too high. (That piece is here: "Global Warming Has Reached Nearly +1.5°C Already.") Briefly, my layman's logic put the actual current global warming at about +1.4°C, and Dr. Mann, using similar but not identical logic, put it at a little more than a tenth of a degree lower. Mann (my bolded emphasis):

It has been widely reported that 2015 will be the first year where temperatures climbed to 1C above the pre-industrial. That might make it seem like we’ve got quite a ways to go until we breach the 2C limit. But the claim is wrong. We exceeded 1C warming more than a decade ago. The problem is that here, and elsewhere, an inappropriate baseline has been invoked for defining the “pre-industrial.” The warming was measured relative to the average over the latter half of the 19th century (1850-1900). In other words, the base year implicitly used to define “pre-industrial” conditions is 1875, the mid-point of that interval. Yet the industrial revolution and the rise in atmospheric CO2 concentrations associated with it, began more than a century earlier. ...

[U]sing the more appropriate 1750-1850 pre-industrial baseline, we see that the Northern Hemisphere average temperature (gray squiggly curve [in Figure 3 at the link]) has already warmed nearly 1.2C. Temperatures have exceeded 1C above pre-industrial levels for most of the past decade.

Mann's Figure 1 at the link shows global warming, not just North American warming, to be greater than what was modeled by the IPCC, closer to +1.3°C or more, using his new baseline.

By either measure, though, Dr. Mann's or mine, global warming has blown well past the +1°C mark, never to return below it without heroic, and hopefully, panic-driven efforts (because at this point, it will take panic to drive a real solution). Frankly, I think we'll blow past the +1.5°C warming mark in just a few years, and I suspect Dr. Mann — and quite a few other scientists, if you asked them privately — would agree. That could be "game over," since with +1.5°C warming present on the ground, +2°C or more would certainly be "in the pipeline," with all the social and political chaos it would bring.

As for global pre-Industrial CO2, the answer is more straightforward and agreed upon. Pre-Industrial atmospheric CO2 is widely considered to have been 280 ppm (parts per million by volume), at the low end of the stable Holocene era range.

Pre-Industrial CO2 is the broad flat blue line above at roughly 280 ppm that starts around 10,000 years B.P. (before the present era) and doesn't begin to rise appreciably until about the year 1800, at which point it shoots up (source; click to enlarge).

We've now reached nearly 410 ppm at this year's monthly peak (up-to-date, interactive NOAA chart here). Not good.

"Truly Uncharted Territory"

From Sabrina Shankman at Inside Climate News, we find this confirmation via a new study (my emphasis):

State of the Warming Climate in 2016: 'Truly Uncharted Territory'

World Meteorological Organization reveals extent of global warming's impacts last year, including epic Arctic melting, drought and extreme weather

The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) released its annual State of Global Climate report on Tuesday, noting a year of broken records and extreme weather events—climate change trends that are continuing into 2017.

"This report confirms that the year 2016 was the warmest on record—a remarkable 1.1 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial period," said WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas. That temperature rise marks a 0.06 degrees Celsius increase over the record set in 2015. The Paris climate agreement commits the world's nations to holding the atmospheric temperature increase to below 2 degrees Celsius, to try to stave off potentially catastrophic global warming.

Average atmospheric carbon dioxide levels hit a record high, at 400 parts per million, and projections for 2017 are even higher. The U.K. Met office recently forecast that this year's monthly CO2 level at Mauna Loa could reach nearly 410 parts per million in May, and the 2017 average could be 2-3 parts per million higher than last year.

"The influence of human activities on the climate system has become more and more evident," wrote Taalas in the report's foreword. "This influence is increasingly being demonstrated by attribution studies for some of the most critical weather and climate extremes, in particular extremes related to heat."

David Carlson, the director of the WMO-sponsored World Climate Research Program, adds, "We are now in truly uncharted territory."

But the news is worse than they say. If you click through to the study itself (pdf here), look at Figure 1 (global temperature), and count from the early low (roughly the year 1860) to the present high, the difference is clearly more than 1.3°C, or where Dr. Mann (and yours truly) place it. In other words, they have not adjusted their definition of "pre-Industrial" temperature. Making that adjustment, their measured data confirms our own.

As I said in the first piece I linked to above (here), "The Paris climate agreement had hoped to hold global warming to no more than +1.5°C above the pre-Industrial temperature. This is not going to happen. We're almost at that point now, and we'll breach that goal in just a few years." Global warming of +1.5°C is dead ahead.

Your next bottom line is my oft-repeated one — it's going to take a revolution or a national panic to get us out of this mess. Or both. An odd set of things to hope for, but the alternative is very much worse.

So here's hoping.

GP

Have We Crossed a Tipping Point This Year in the Arctic?

Dr. Michael Mann giving us the latest news about Arctic sea ice (source)

by Gaius Publius

We've covered what's happening in the Arctic before in these pages. For example:

• Arctic Sea Ice Has Lost Two-Thirds of Its Volume Since 1979

•  Melting the Arctic in the Middle of Winter

Now comes climate scientist Dr. Michael Mann to tell us it's much worse, and the changes are coming much faster, than we thought even last year. As Hartmann says in his introduction, temperatures in the Arctic in January were 4°C (more than 7°F) higher than average. It's all in Dr. Mann's interview with Thom Hartmann (above).

A few excerpts:

(1:52) "Even I find myself surprised sometimes at the rate at which some of these changes are taking place — taking place faster than we expected, faster than our models predicted would be the case..."

(2:40) "[This year, winter Arctic sea ice] appears to have come to a peak about a month earlier and at a much lower level than we normally see at [winter] peak. And if it continues on this trajectory, we are afraid we will see levels of [sea ice] retreat this summer unlike anything we've seen before."

(4:10) "With all that warmth in the Arctic escaping into the atmosphere, it changes the pattern of the northern hemisphere jet stream ... [which gives us] some of the unusual weather we've seen in recent winters...."

(5:17) "This El Niño has been a very unusual El Niño, and all bets are off...." (I found this discussion fascinating. This is a most unusual El Niño, and global warming has almost completely removed the "heavy rainfall" effect that places like California were counting on to relieve their drought.)

(7:58) The tipping points discussion starts here. Have we passed a tipping point about ice in the Arctic? What other tipping points should we be concerned about?

Dr. Mann's answer begins, "Tipping points are like land mines. You don't know exactly where they lie, and you certainly don't want to step on one. What we're doing with climate change right now is we are risking stepping on more and more of these land mines."

Mann talks about the tipping point we have passed in the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet that commits us to 10-12 feet of sea level rise.

The good news — if we stop emissions, free ice in the Arctic is restorable, unlike ice in the Greenland or Antarctic ice sheets. (Of course, we do have to stop emissions to do that.)

(10:35) "The climate change deniers often like to complain about how much it will cost to reduce our carbon emissions ... and the sad fact is it's going to cost us a whole lot more simply not having acted on this problem soon enough. And we're already seeing the costs..."

To the final question, why doesn't this get covered more in the press, the answer was enlightening. In part, Mann said that is seems this is a slowly evolving problem.

Me: It's not slowly evolving. If you live another 10 years, you'll see the start of the panic.

By the way, the Arctic is heating because the northern hemisphere is where all the, well, hot air is. Take a look at this NASA animation and note which hemisphere has all the industrialization. You can almost watch it rise and then move north.

Time for a mobilization to actually address this? I think it's long past time.

GP
 

ISIS Update: The World is Halfway to 2°C Warming

Bernie Sanders at the second Democratic debate. Because Debbie Wasserman Schultz scheduled this debate on a Saturday during the run-up to the college football playoffs, close to half of the previous Democratic debate audience missed this exchange.

by Gaius Publius

This is Bernie Sanders at the second Democratic debate:

CBS's John Dickerson, the event's moderator, asked Sanders if he still believes climate change represents the biggest outside threat to U.S. safety one day more than 120 people were killed in terrorist attacks on Paris that the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria has taken credit for.

“Absolutely,” the Vermont senator responded. “Climate change is directly related to the growth of terrorism and if we do not get our act together and listen to what the scientists say, you’re going to see countries all over the world ... struggling over limited amounts of water and land to grow their crops and you’re going to see all kinds of conflict.”

Earlier at the debate, Sanders hit party front-runner Hillary Clinton for voting to authorize the invasion of Iraq, saying the war had led to the rise of ISIS.

While right-wing pundits, many Democrats and some in the debate audience were surprised by this claim, it has been verified in many venues, including the pages of Time magazine. Sanders reiterated this position on "Face the Nation":

“The reason is pretty obvious: If we are going to see an increase in drought and flood and extreme weather disturbances as a result of climate change, what that means is that peoples all over the world are going to be fighting over limited natural resources,” Sanders said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

“If there is not enough water, if there is not enough land to grow your crops, then you’re going to see migrants of people fighting over land that will sustain them, and that will lead to international conflict,” he added.

Notice that Sanders' claim is that climate change is "directly related to" terrorism, not the "sole cause of" it. Even Politifact agrees (my emphasis): "We couldn’t find any evidence of a "direct" relationship between climate change and terrorism, though many reports have noted an indirect link," despite its bottom-line negative rating.

My piece on that is here — "ISIS, Climate Change & Mass Migration of Peoples" — and I'm not the only one making this case. There are peer-reviewed papers (pdf) making the same point. So let's move to the real news, a short peek at the future.

The World is Halfway to 2°C

I called this piece an "ISIS Update" for a reason. If you hated what happened in Paris — which also happened to people you've probably never seen a moment of silence for, the recently murdered, unmourned in the West, dead in Beirut — then you're not going to like this news. While we've been coddling the billionaires and politicians who control and enable the oil and gas industries, global warming has hit another milestone (my emphasis):

The World is Halfway to 2°C

It’s all but certain that 2015 will end up as the hottest year on record. And in setting that mark, the world is on track to finish the year 1°C above pre-industrial levels, a dubious milestone.

That would make 2015 the first year to crack the halfway mark of 2°C warming, the benchmark that’s been targeted as “safe” climate change and what nations are working toward meeting ahead of climate talks in Paris in December. But Monday’s announcement by the U.K. Met Office hints at how difficult achieving that target will be.

Unlike carbon dioxide, which has risen steadily like a drumbeat every year since the Industrial Revolution due to human activities, the temperature is likely to fluctuate annually and could dip slightly in the coming years (though signs already point to 2016 being even hotter). But the 1°C of warming shows how humans are reshaping the climate in the here and now and not some distant future.

The Met Office maintains one of the four major global temperature records. It shows that through September, the planet is running 1.8°F (1.02°C) above normal. El Niño, the warming of waters in the eastern tropical Pacific, is a contributing factor. But it’s being layered on top of a long-term climate change signal, which has seen the world get hotter and hotter since record keeping began in the late 1800s.

Don't be confused about what that means. Not only is the rate of increase in carbon emissions accelerating, but there's a hidden additional number, the amount of warming that's already "in the pipeline," inevitable, no matter what we do.

Add the "In the Pipeline" Warming and We're Half a Degree Away

Halfway to 2°C warming is what we're experiencing at present. But if you touch a very hot stove, your hand continues to "cook" even after you remove it from the heat. There's damage "in the pipeline" even if you remove the cause, even if that hand goes into very cold water immediately.

The same with global warming. If we stopped all carbon emissions now, there's still warming "in the pipeline." According to climate scientist Michael Mann in an interview I did with him last year, even if we stopped this minute — zero carbon dioxide emissions from this second forward — the atmosphere would still heat to +1.5°C from pre-Industrial levels.

If you don't want to translate that warming to sea level rise four decades from now, translate that to stressed populations around the world now. Or as Sanders says, to people suffering from "an increase in drought and flood" and "not enough water ... not enough land to grow your crops" today. Translate it as a force multiplier to what we're seeing this minute, in every growing season, from California to Syria, as water becomes more and more scarce.

We can (falsely) blame only religion for the Middle East blowing up. We can burn through every dollar we can create in a massive military response. But every turn of the climate screw ratchets a pressure that just won't go away — until we stop placing men like Exxon's Rex Tillerson (below) in charge of whether he and his friends stay rich.

 Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson, setting U.S. energy policy for as long as we let him.

Climate change causes global chaos in an increasingly aggressive spiral. That chaos takes many forms, from the mass migrations we're now seeing, to increasing drought, famine and disease — i.e., mass death — to an increasing fight for fewer and fewer resources by more and more desperate and angry people. None of this will be pretty. None will be simply explained. And none will be stoppable until stress factors, including climate-induced factors, are reduced and removed.

How soon is too soon to act against climate stress? Should we stop the deadly climate spiral now? Or should we maybe wait another decade? Your call.

(Blue America has endorsed Bernie Sanders for president. If you like, you can help him here; adjust the split any way you wish at the link.)

GP

Michael Mann On Climate: There's Very Little "Burnable Carbon" In Our "Budget"; Emissions Ramp-down Must Start Now

-by Gaius Publius

One of my hats is as a climate interpreter to the interested lay person. I have something of a science background and can read the papers "in the original." Another hat is as an occasional interviewer for Virtually Speaking. This month the two hats merged on the same head, and I got to interview the "Hockey Stick graph" climate scientist, Dr. Michael Mann.

For this interview I focused on the basics:

• Can humans burn more carbon, create more emissions, and still stay below the IPCC's "safe" +2°C warming target?

• Is the IPCC's +2°C warming target truly "safe" at all?

• We're already experiencing warming of about +1°C above the pre-industrial level. Even if we stop now, how much more is "in the pipeline," guaranteed and unavoidable?

• How do we defeat the Big Money ogre that stands in our way?

And my personal favorite:

• Will the answer to global warming come from the "free market"?

The always-defended, sacred "free market" — as close to a religion as you'll find in modern thought. I'll have more about the nonexistent "free market" (you read that right) shortly. For now I want to present what Dr. Mann has to say. He was surprisingly plain-spoken, understands the urgency, and says so. I found the interview fascinating, and I hope you do as well.

Two general points:

1. There are a number of very strong climate candidates running in the coming election. Among them are Ted Lieu, Paul Clements and Shenna Bellows. Each is worthy of your support. Click the link on their names to contribute. Here's Ted Lieu on the subject of climate:

"Climate change is the single greatest threat to California, our nation's future and our environment.  As a member of Congress, I will champion legislation to reduce carbon pollution in the U.S."

That's blunt enough for me, and he has a record to back it up. Paul Clements is "running against the worst enemy of the planet in the whole U.S. Congress, Boehner's Energy and Commerce Committee Fred Upton". Not to put too fine a point on it, Upton deserves to go down and Clement is the climate champion to send him there. And despite the fact that "progressive" environmental group NRDC is supporting Republican Susan Collins — you read that right — Shenna Bellows is a confirmed and endorsed Climate Hawk. Here she is proving it.

There's not a ton of time, but the game's not over yet. You can support all of these worthies, and they are worthy. Again, to contribute to Lieu or Clements, click here. To contribute to Bellows, click here.

2. Virtually Speaking is broadcast with a studio audience in Second Life. A number of questions came in during the broadcast, some of which are worth repeating. All answers are mine. I hope you find these helpful. Again, I just want to put the basics in your brain — no reason to learn more than needed. Once you master the main ideas, the subject is not hard at all to follow.

[QUESTION] What level of CO2 is reasonable?

[ANSWER] Most still think that 350 ppm (parts per million) CO2 is what's needed to keep us at the upper end of Holocene (era of civilized human culture) temperatures. For contrast, the ice ages averaged about 180 ppm CO2 at the bottom, and pre-industrial (pre-1750) concentrations were about 280 ppm CO2. Pre-industrial temperatures were at the bottom of the Holocene (post–ice age) temperature range, so there's some headroom above that 280 ppm number. How much exactly? No one knows.

It looks like we're headed for a IPCC-"safe" 450 ppm CO2 unless we stop. Not safe, IMO; nor in Dr. Mann's. For starters, this "450 ppm" measures CO2 only, not other GHGs like methane and nitrous oxide. The effective ppm in "CO2 equivalent" with those other added GHGs is higher if only CO2 is at 450.

It's roughly thought that the original ice sheet formations of 35 million years ago, which gave us modern Antarctic, Greenland and Arctic ice, occurred in a cooling environment that crossed below CO2 concentrations in the range of 550-400 ppm or so.

First, that's a wide range. Second, that's no indication of what will happen going the other direction, where the warming tipping points are. Hansen writes, correctly IMO, that real climate sensitivity depends on (a) the starting point (i.e., how near we are to tipping points), and (b) the direction (effect of warming of X amount is not necessarily correlated to the effect of cooling of that same amount).

Nevertheless, the massive uncertainty, plus the world-historical consequences, gives most of us pause. Me, I think 450 ppm CO2 is ultimately a death sentence for civilized humans. Back to life as hunter-gatherers for our third- or fourth-generation descendants. And if worldwide social chaos takes over before we stop, the process could run to conclusion, which, the old IPCC A1FI scenario says, tops out at +7°C warming.

[Q] (What's the ppm) for a 90% chance (of staying below 2°C warming)?

Dr. Mann says 405 ppm CO2 (just above where we are now), assuming we start removing, or failing to add, cooling coal-generated air particles. In other words, we have no carbon headroom for a 90% chance of "success" as defined by the IPCC, say a number of studies. (IPCC is silent, at least in the material I read, on the 90% chance itself. Their Working Group 1 Summary for Policymakers of 2013 discusses only the 33%, 50% and 66% chances. The underlying chapters may be more detailed, but I'm not sure of that.)

[Q] Why are we asking him political questions? ... I like him, and I more-or-less agree with him, but his opinions on politics and economics are not educated opinions. (And this also applies to Hansen, who I am fairly sure is just wrong on important political matters.)

First, he's actually good on the politics, better than most. But second, I wanted to get his thoughts regarding next steps. For me the key, core messages are — Stop Now... Zero Carbon "Budget" ... Free Market Solutions Won't Work. He surprised me in agreeing with the third point, and I hope he carries that message to the public going forward. He was already mainly on board on the first two, but I wanted to hear him say so for the record, since I hadn't encountered his public comment on this.

My suspicion is that, in interviews, most people of Dr. Mann's stature and skill aren't often asked real bottom-line questions. I tried to stay with core issues for that reason.

[Q] But, look, you don't consult a political scientist on the physics of climate change, the reverse ought also be true.

But these things aren't rocket science. I have a good physics background (two years in a top-end Physics program), but not a degree in it. Yet I'm perfectly "consultable" on the physics. No reason that Michael Mann and James Hansen wouldn't be consultable on the politics. People like these can be very reliable sources (and voices) on political solutions. In fact, we really need them to address the politics, since that's where the action is. His voice and Hansen's, giving strong accurate advice, are worth a thousand of mine.

For another example of political writing by a scientist, look at the work of Dr. Naomi Oreskes, another frequent visitor to Virtually Speaking broadcasts. If I recall correctly, her background is in geology, yet her book comparing the tobacco denial war with the climate denial war is as good as there is — Merchants of Doubt.

[Q] The political system also has to change to reinstate progressive tax on income and add one on capital. ... we're fucked, we're so fucked.

Not yet. Popular middle-class rebellion hasn't kicked in, and it will. We have one more shot, unless the public is too apathetic for too long a time. But once property values — or water tables in the Colorado River basin, or insurance and development rates in South Florida, or ... you name it — collapse, a whole lot of people could turn Depression-era urgent and "Government, save us" angry. Even so-called Tea Party voters will beg for government intervention. At that point, things get interesting.

That wake-up moment, still in the future, represents real opportunity, if it happens soon enough. Our job is to teach into it, teach ahead of it — show what a real solution looks like before that moment is co-opted by the carbon-captured media and lost.

[Q] Interesting and informative.

Thanks. That was the goal!

All of the initial questions come from Randolph Azarof, someone very interested in the climate question. A sample of his climate thoughts is here.

For more of my own climate writing, go here. As I said, I'll have more on climate and the "free market" soon. Also, on climate and the NRDC. They and their first cousin, the EDF, badly need a comeuppance. I'm hearing that between them, these two well-funded groups are why Democrats are so hugely methane-fueled these days. Guess who else is hugely methane-fueled? Exxon. Interesting confluence of interests, yes?

GP