16/08/2016

Climate Urgency: We've Locked In More Global Warming Than People Realize

The Guardian - 

Today's carbon pollution will have climate consequences for centuries to come. We're in the midst of a critical decade
An Adelie penguin standing atop a block of melting ice in East Antarctica. Slowly-melting ice is a 'feedback' through which today's carbon pollution will heat the planet for centuries to come. Photograph: Reuters
While most people accept the reality of human-caused global warming, we tend not to view it as an urgent issue or high priority. That lack of immediate concern may in part stem from a lack of understanding that today's pollution will heat the planet for centuries to come, as explained in this Denial101x lecture:

Denial101x carbon cycle lecture by Gavin Cawley.

 So far humans have caused about 1°C warming of global surface temperatures, but if we were to freeze the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide at today's levels, the planet would continue warming. Over the coming decades, we'd see about another 0.5°C warming, largely due to what's called the "thermal inertia" of the oceans (think of the long amount of time it takes to boil a kettle of water). The Earth's surface would keep warming about another 1.5°C over the ensuing centuries as ice continued to melt, decreasing the planet's reflectivity.
To put this in context, the international community agreed in last year's Paris climate accords that we should limit climate change risks by keeping global warming below 2°C, and preferably closer to 1.5°C. Yet from the carbon pollution we've already put into the atmosphere, we're committed to 1.5–3°C warming over the coming decades and centuries, and we continue to pump out over 30 billion tons of carbon dioxide every year.

The importance of reaching zero or negative emissions
We can solve this problem if, rather than holding the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide steady, it falls over time. As discussed in the above video, Earth naturally absorbs more carbon than it releases, so if we reduce human emissions to zero, the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide will slowly decline. Humans can also help the process by finding ways to pull carbon out of the atmosphere and sequester it. Scientists are researching various technologies to accomplish this, but we've already put over 500 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Pulling a significant amount of that carbon out of the atmosphere and storing it safely will be a tremendous challenge, and we won't be able to reduce the amount in the atmosphere until we first get our emissions close to zero.
There are an infinite number of potential carbon emissions pathways, but the 2014 IPCC report considered four possible paths that they called RCPs. In one of these (called RCP 2.6 or RCP3-PD), we take immediate, aggressive, global action to cut carbon pollution, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels peak at 443 ppm in 2050, and by 2100 they've fallen back down to today's level of 400 ppm. In two others (RCPs 4.5 and 6.0) we act more slowly, and atmospheric levels don't peak until the year 2150, then they remain steady, and in the last (RCP8.5) carbon dioxide levels keep rising until 2250.
Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels in the four IPCC RCP scenarios. Illustration: Dana Nuccitelli
As the figure below shows, in the first scenario, global warming peaks at 2°C and then temperatures start to fall toward the 1.5°C level, meeting our Paris climate targets. In the other scenarios, temperatures keep rising centuries into the future.
Global annual mean surface air temperature anomalies (relative to 1986–2005) from CMIP5 climate model runs. Discontinuities at 2100 are due to different numbers of models performing the extension runs beyond the 21st century and have no physical meaning. No ranges are given for the RCP6.0 projections beyond 2100, as only two models are available. Illustration: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
This is the critical decade
We don't know what technologies will be available in the future, but we do know that the more carbon pollution we pump into the atmosphere today, the longer it will take and more difficult it will be to reach zero emissions and stabilize the climate. We'll also have to pull that much more carbon out of the atmosphere.
It's possible that as in three of the IPCC scenarios, we'll never get all the way down to zero or negative carbon emissions, in which case today's pollution will keep heating the planet for centuries to come. Today's carbon pollution will leave a legacy of climate change consequences that future generations may struggle with for the next thousand years.
Five years ago, the Australian government established a Climate Commission, which published a report discussing why we're in the midst of the 'critical decade' on climate change:
The risks of future climate change – to our economy, society and environment – are serious, and grow rapidly with each degree of further temperature rise. Minimising these risks requires rapid, deep and ongoing reductions to global greenhouse gas emissions. We must begin now if we are to decarbonise our economy and move to clean energy sources by 2050. This decade is the critical decade.
Our is the first generation to understand the problems our carbon pollution is causing, and the last that can take the necessary action to prevent them from causing a climate destabilization. In addition to the Australian Climate Commission, 31 major scientific organizations recently warned policymakers that:
To reduce the risk of the most severe impacts of climate change, greenhouse gas emissions must be substantially reduced.
We have no excuse for inaction or complacency; the experts have clearly warned us. If we refuse to urgently act on this information, future generations will suffer the consequences of our failures today.

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Malcolm Roberts Leaves NASA 'Flummoxed' With Q&A Climate Claims

Fairfax - Peter Hannam

It probably takes a lot to faze Gavin Schmidt, the head of NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies, but the outlandish views of Malcolm Roberts, the newly elected One Nation senator, can do it from half a world away.
On Monday night's Q&A program on the ABC, Roberts was venting his now well-worn view that there was no empirical evidence of climate change.
Q&A: Malcolm Roberts v science: The debate turned to Climate Change on Q&A and even physicist Brian Cox was dumbfounded by One Nation sentator-elect Malcolm Roberts' arguments.

 Among those exasperated was fellow panelist, Brian Cox, the physicist and rock star science communicator of this generation, who told Roberts: "I could sit here and read out figures until I'm blue in the face".
Indeed, how much data do you want?
Richard Muller, a former prominent sceptic US scientist, re-examined 14 million temperature observations from 44,455 sites across the world going back to 1753. The results prompted a "total turnaround" in his views, as my colleague Ben Cubby wrote in 2012.
"Our results show that the average temperature of the earth's land has risen by 2½ degrees fahrenheit over the past 250 years, including an increase of 1½ degrees over the most recent 50 years. Moreover, it appears likely that essentially all of this increase results from the human emission of greenhouse gases," Professor Muller wrote.
Roberts, a former coal engineer, and then manager of the Galileo Movement, was unimpressed.
"We've based our views on empirical science, and there's nothing in the Muller study to undercut that," Roberts told Cubby at the time. Climate change science had been captured by "some of the major banking families in the world" who form a "tight-knit cabal", he insisted.
Record global temperatures are being set at an unprecedented rate. Photo: Iwan van Hagen
That sense of capture - if not the sinister anti-semitic hints that prompted even fellow denier commentator Andrew Bolt to distance himself from Roberts - remains four years on.
Anyway, when Cox pulled out some charts on Q&A from US space agency NASA showing a clear upward trend in global temperatures, Roberts readily dismissed the data as "corrupted" and "manipulated".
Former coal miner and now One Nation senator Malcolm Roberts says NASA data on climate change is 'corrupted'. Photo: Robert Shakespeare
Roberts' argument, apparently, is that the world was hotter in the 1930s but NASA had altered the figures to make the current era look warmer. (According to one take, the issue is whether the continental US was warmer in 1934 than in the hot years of 1998 or 2006 - but 2012 then blew away all previous records.)

Record heat - again
Roberts wasn't to know it but NASA's regular monthly readings on global temperature were just hours from being released.
A glance at the chart below released overnight suggests herculean efforts would be needed to make the 1930s look warmer than any recent decade, let alone the current one. Note, too, the prediction for this year.
Meanwhile, Schmidt, the climate modeller who is also the director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, was clearly following the live Australian debate on Q&A.
In rapid succession, Schmidt fired out a dozen tweets, bemused by the claims of manipulation.
His world-renowned centre had been estimating global temperature changes since 1981, and the data has been available to the public since 2007, Schmidt said.

Spot the 'pause'
Mind you, the NASA data is scary enough to concern anyone paying attention.
Since July is typically the hottest month of the year given the preponderance of land in the northern hemisphere now in summer, a record hot July also means we just posted the warmest for any month on record.
For more than a year, each month has set records for heat, according to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
However, Roberts and his friends routinely claim the world hasn't warmed in the past two decades - the senator plucked out 1995 as the beginning of the "pause" on Monday.
Usually the starting point is 1998 when a record large El Nino made for a temperature spike that took some years of background warming to eclipse.
But now we have 2005, 2010, 2014 and 2015 all exceeding 1998, with 2016 a 99 per cent chance of being yet hotter, Schmidt says. (NOAA in 2015 ruled out any slowdown in global warming.)
Here's how this year is tracking, courtesy of Schmidt again:
July 2016 was the hottest month since the instrumental records began.
Japan 'corrupted' too
Other data out on Monday from the Japan Meteorological Agency - no doubt corrupted too, in Roberts' musings - echoed NASA's results.
According to JMA, last month was the hottest July in records going back to 1891.
It was 0.44 degrees above the 1981-2010 base that it uses, and narrowly above the previous record set just a year earlier.
Last month's temperature anomaly was also 0.14 degrees above the July that came at the end of that huge 1997-98 El Nino.
(See chart below with the black line indicating surface temperature anomaly, the blue line showing the five-year running mean and the red line showing the long-term linear trend.)

Roberts, of course, won't be moved.

'It does sound outlandish'
For Roberts to be right, at least 80 science academies around the world have to be wrong, as would almost 100 per cent of the scientists publishing work in the field.
John Cook, a climate communications research fellow at the University of Queensland, is part of a crew offering a free lecture series  "Making Sense of Climate Science Denial" to help explain why "empirical science" will never sate Roberts or sceptics like him.
As Cook notes, the onus really should sit with Roberts to explain why so many changes predicted by climate science are being observed - such as cooling in the upper atmosphere as less heat escapes to space because of the additional greenhouse gases accumulating in the biosphere.
But Roberts and One Nation find an easier target in the messengers.
The party wants "a Royal Commission (or similar) into the corruption of climate science and identify whether any individual or organisation has misled government to effect climate and energy policy".
One Nation also demands a "review the Bureau of Meteorology to ensure independence and accountability for weather and climate records including public justification of persistent upward adjustments to historical climate records", while the CSIRO must also be investigated.
If Monday night's QandA was any guide, Roberts now will be granted a regular perch to air his nonsense, serving a useful purpose for those wanting to delay or reverse action to curb consumption of coal, oil and gas.
"It does sound outlandish," Roberts told Cubby in 2012. "I, like you, was reluctant to believe it [but] there are significant things going on in Australia that people are waking up to".
For Australian voters, the nightmare of electing Roberts and One Nation to the senate has just begun.

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The Australian Government Just Gave Millions Of Dollars To An Overseas Coal Mining Company

Junkee - Osman Faruqi

The federal Coalition government has been crying poor when it comes to investing in science and innovation. They've slashed more than $100 million and hundreds of jobs from the CSIRO, and wound back a number of climate change focused programs. Which is a smart thing to do when sea levels are rising and ice caps are melting, right? But despite cutting environmental programs and research, the government has managed to find $24 million to fund so called "clean coal" technologies.
Last week the Minister for Resources, Senator Matt Canavan, announced the details of seven grants worth nearly $24 million funded through the "Carbon Capture and Storage Research Development and Demonstration Fund". The largest grant, worth nearly $9 million, was handed over to Swiss company Glencore. The government also handed over $700,000 to multi-national oil firm Shell, and gave millions to the CSIRO — but only to test carbon dioxide storage programs.
So what are carbon dioxide storage programs, why are we funding them and do they work?

What Is Carbon Capture And Storage?
Coal is the biggest contributor to global climate change. The burning of fossil fuels like coal leads to the release of carbon dioxide, which then enters our atmosphere and leads to global warming through the greenhouse effect. Scientists are telling us that we need to stop burning coal and rapidly invest in clean, renewable energy technologies that are less harmful to the environment if we want to avoid runaway climate change.
But because this is Australia and our politicians love ignoring the advice of scientists, we've managed to avoid the shift to renewable energy, and are still obsessed with mining and burning coal. That's where carbon capture comes in. The idea is to physically capture the carbon dioxide released from the burning of coal and bury it somewhere underground so it doesn't enter the atmosphere. Sounds like a crazy plan cooked up by a Bond villain? That's because it basically is.
The problem with carbon capture and storage is that it doesn't work. And trying to make it work will cost a lot of money. Money that would be better spent on building proven alternatives to coal like solar and wind power. The UK government this year scrapped its $1.7 billion carbon capture and storage program and will instead look at alternative ways of reducing emissions.
Last week's announcement shows that our government is still committed to carbon capture and storage. They've slashed $100 million from the CSIRO, much of it from climate change mitigation and adaptation programs, and spent $24 million on an unproven, expensive technology.

Subsidising Massive Coal Companies Doesn't Make Any Sense
Glencore is a massive, multinational commodities company that made a $10.5 billion profit last year. So why exactly are Australian taxpayers giving them millions of dollars to experiment with carbon capture and storage? The grant will be used to test whether or not it's viable to inject carbon dioxide emissions from a nearby coal fired power plant deep underground. The Group Executive for Glencore's global coal business, who also happens to be Chairman of the World Coal Association, is absolutely stoked.
"The Project highlights the important role Australia is playing in developing innovative, practicable and scientifically sound solutions" he said in a press release. Though when you think about it there's nothing particularly innovative, practical or scientifically sound about spending millions of dollars trying to bury carbon dioxide underground.
Regardless of the wider context, spending tens of millions of dollars on an unproven technology would be a very silly thing to do. But in the face of massive funding cuts to the CSIRO and environment programs more generally, it's particularly dumb and reckless. We know how to reduce emissions: we need to invest in renewable energy. Australia is the sunniest country on Earth but solar power only makes up 2.4 percent of our energy mix.
This latest announcement makes the government's priorities perfectly clear. Despite all of Malcolm Turnbull's talk about innovation and creating jobs in new industries, he's choosing to cut the CSIRO, the organisation that gave us Wi-Fi, in order to fund an old industry like coal. The rest of the world is making the switch to renewables. We desperately need to catch up before we get left behind, and we can't do that if we're paying companies like Glencore and Shell to literally bury our emissions underground.

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