30/03/2020

The Big Impact Of A Small Number - What 2C Of Warming Actually Looks Like

NEWS.com.au - Stephanie Bedo | Shannon Molloy

This number is pretty insignificant on its own and doesn’t seem like it could do much harm. But it will change every aspect of our lives.

People cover their faces in Batemans Bay, NSW on New Year’s Eve last year. Picture: Mark Graham/Bloomberg via Getty Images

On its own, the number two doesn’t seem overly significant or much to worry about, but in the context of degrees, it could change every aspect of life.

Australia has committed to the Paris Agreement target of limiting climate change to 1.5C, but a growing chorus of experts doubt whether that is achievable with current policies.

The reality is that 2C of warming could occur as soon as 2050 - and that’s significant.

“When it sometimes feels like the weather in Melbourne changes by 20C in the space of a day, a few degrees here and there doesn’t sound like much,” says Sophie Lewis, a senior lecturer in science at University of NSW, Canberra.

“But there’s a big difference in terms of weather and climate, and a world that’s 2C warmer will result in impacts on every aspect of life.”
Our Bodies

In a world that’s 2C warmer, an extra 420 million people will be exposed to extreme heatwaves globally and Australia will cop its fair share.

The impacts will be far more serious than feeling uncomfortable and sweaty.

Professor Emeritus Gerard Fitzgerald from the School of Public Health and Social Work at the Queensland University of Technology said the optimal internal temperature for normal bodily function was around 36.8C.

“The human body generates a certain amount of energy in itself and so it needs suitable environments in order to stay in balance,” Prof Fitzgerald said.

“The body cools itself through evaporation of water, via the breath or sweat.”

As temperatures rise, people sweat more to try to cope and this increases the loss of fluids. If they’re not replaced, dehydration is likely.

In a world that’s 2C warmer, more people will be at increased risk of heat stress in the body.

“If you don’t replace fluid, the human body becomes dry and the place that’s seen is in the bloodstream,” Prof Fitzgerald said.

“Blood becomes thicker and is more likely to clot, raising the risk of heart attack and stroke. At the same time, the body tries to retain water by shutting down the kidneys.”


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Generally speaking, younger and fitter people are well-placed to cope and tend to accommodate by staying in cool places, avoiding exertion at the hottest times and staying hydrated.

But for vulnerable populations - the sick, the elderly and children in some cases - it’s harder to cope with extreme heat, Prof Fitzgerald said.

“The consequences can be serious, from renal failure to heart attack or stroke, to death.

“If the body can’t cool itself enough, human systems can be distressed and that’s associated with respiratory problems, cardiovascular disease, heart attacks but also broader things like mental illness.”

If the internal body temperature hits 40C or above, the consequences can be catastrophic.

“Basically, proteins start breaking down and the body begins dying. Cells break apart. It’s extremely serious.”

Australia will need to adopt an approach to extreme heat that’s similar to what public health and safety authorities elsewhere in the world rely on for blizzards.

“Heat is Australia’s most deadly natural hazard right now,” Dr Lewis said. “There’s likely to be significant health impacts in the future.

“With 2C of warming, the ability to go to work or school will be impacted. It seems unlikely to me that we’ll be able to maintain consistent days of work. People will have to have heat-related absences to stay safe.

“We will need to protect the most vulnerable people in our community - old people, children, pregnant women - and we need to design systematic heat policies like reducing heat exposure at work, play or school.”

Non-essential services and businesses could have to close on extreme heat days in the future, along with schools, she said.

Outdoor activities like sport might become too dangerous over long stretches of the year.

“If we hit 2C, we can’t expect to be living the same lives we’re living now. Going on summer holiday in January, even playing cricket on the beach, isn’t realistic,” Dr Lewis said.



Our Environment

The impact of a warmer world is already starkly evident in one of our most beautiful and environmentally significant assets - the Great Barrier Reef.

Dr David Suggett is a coral reef expert at the University of Technology in Sydney and said in a 2C warmer world, reefs would “quite simply cease to look and function as we know them”.

“At least in the tropics. 2C will push corals closer to their thermal limits for survival along with creating more acid and deoxygenated waters,” Dr Suggett said.

Numerous experiments have demonstrated that such conditions drive many coral species into “metabolic decay”, he said.

“This will all be exacerbated by more routine heatwaves that similarly drive mortality of these same corals through rapid mass bleaching,” Dr Suggett said.

“Fundamentally, these changes will collapse the ecosystems that we almost take for granted these days - reefs primarily provide coastal protection and food, as well as cultural heritage. Corals would likely stop growing at a rate needed to build reefs.”

Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick, senior lecturer and ARC Future Fellow at the Climate Chance Research Centre at UNSW Sydney, said warm water corals - the Reef - would essentially cease to exist as we know them.

“Already, the Great Barrier Reef has lost as much as 50 per cent of its shallow water corals. It provides habitat for one million species, not to mention its contribution to things like tourism.

“The destruction would occur quickly and long-term recovery is extremely unlikely. All up, 99 per cent of corals would be lost.”

A full melting of the Arctic during summer would occur more often as the world gets warmer, says Dale Dominey-Howes, a professor of science at the University of Sydney and an expert in hazards, disasters and risk.

“Under 1.5C, this occurs once a Century. Under 2C, it’s once every decade. The more ice that melts, the more the sea rises.”

Permafrost, or the permanently frozen ground in the Arctic Circle, is already melting, but the rate of thaw will continually accelerate, he said.

“At 2C, an extra 1.2 million square kilometres of it is likely to thaw at a rapid pace. The more it melts, the greater volume of methane that’s released into the atmosphere - it’s 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide.

“Methane only lasts in the atmosphere for a decade or so, but it’s impact is serious and will accelerate climate change. Thawing permafrost also releases carbon dioxide, it should be said.”

Much like heatwaves over land or in the atmosphere, oceans are also subjected to extended periods of extremely hot conditions.

“The number of marine heatwaves has already doubled since the early 1980s and if the world warms by 2C, this number blows out to 23 times more heatwaves days, it’s been projected,” Dr Perkins-Kirkpatrick said.

Marine heatwaves not only result in massive coral bleaching but also the degradation of other sensitive ecosystems such as kelp forest. They also impact fisheries and therefore the livelihoods of many people.

The world’s rainforests have already faced decades of challenges due to logging.

Those that remain will essentially dry out under a 2C scenario, making them more susceptible to bushfires.

“In a warmer world, forests are more prone to drying - if they’re drier they’re more prone to wildfires, an event they’ve never previously experienced which could result in a shift to a completely different ecosystem,” Dr Perkins-Kirkpatrick said.

“A good example of this are the bushfires that destroyed ancient Tasmanian forests a few years ago. This was under a warming of 1C. Events like this will become more common under 2C.”

On top of that, rainforests are home to almost half of all the world’s plants and animals and warmer conditions put those at significant risk.

“Two degrees will reduce the size of the Amazon by 40 per cent within 100 years,” Dr Perkins-Kirkpatrick said.

In Australia, a 2C warmer scenario will see more disasters like what we’ve just witnessed over summer, Professor Robert Hill, director of the Environment Institute at the University of Adelaide, believes.

NASA Earth Observatory map shows active fire detections in South America, including Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Paraguay, Ecuador, Uruguay and northern Argentina last year. Source:AFP

A devastating illustration of this sits in his own background.

More than half of Kangaroo Island was devastated during the worst of the bushfires crisis in January, causing widespread destruction across the pristine and critical environment.

“I’m hearing from people on the ground that’s what happened is the loss of potential regeneration in some areas,” Prof Hill said.

“There are pictures of green sprouts coming out of the burnt landscape, but it’s on the wet margins where there’s water available and the fire wasn’t quite so bad.

“There are big swathes of Flinders Chase where it appears the fire has burnt right down to the mineral soil, smouldering stumps of trees until they’ve killed the tree.”

Fires as intense as what was witnessed in January are rare, but will become more common in a world that’s 2C warmer, he said.

The potential consequences of that is the loss of entire plant and tree species.

“We may have already done so - we won’t know for a while.”

It’s not just the natural landscape that will suffer in a warmer world, but also agricultural and farming land.

There’s evidence that the loss of viable land is already occurring in South Australia, Professor Hill said.

“We have this thing in South Australia called Goyder’s Line and it was mapped a long time ago by someone who understood vegetation very well, who basically drew a line and said, ‘anything south, good for growing crops, north of this line, forget it’.

“He proved to be astonishingly accurate and there were many failed attempts to crop north of the line. There are many abandoned buildings up there to show for it.

“Goyder’s Line is moving south. In some parts of South Australia, it’s moving quite quickly.

“Of course, you don’t have to push south for too long and you run out of land. That’s not something that will happen in a decade, but in some parts of the southeast, the line movement is being measured in kilometres, not metres.

“That’s an example of plants, in this case crop plants, being under pressure from climate change.



Our Wildlife

There’s virtually no doubt that Earth is now within its six mass extinction event, according to Professor Corey Bradshaw, global ecologist at Flinders University.

All species are connected and “this great big ecosystem is constantly interacting”, and so the cascade effects of extinction are serious and dramatic.

“If the predator doesn’t have food, they’re also dying out,” Prof Bradshaw said. “Because of that we’re underestimating the extinction rate from climate change by up to 10 times.”

Under a 2C warmer world, we’re looking at a 10 to 20 per cent extinction rate by the end of the century, just from climate change alone and no other factors.

If you take into account the cascade effects, we’re looking at extinction rates up to 60, 70 and even 80 per cent, Prof Bradshaw said.

Already we’re seeing female sea turtles outnumber males 100 to 1 because the temperature of the sand determines their sex. The hotter the sand, the more likely turtles will hatch as females.

“That will impact the success of their breeding,” says nature campaigner with the Australian Conservation Foundation, Jess Abrahams.

Fruit bats already fall out of trees at 42C - days that will be more likely and more frequent in the future.

A flying fox being cared for at Flying Fox Rescue and Rehab. Source: News Regional Media

In rainforests, animals are already having to migrate to higher ground because of hot conditions, narrowing their habitat reach.

Even our domesticated species are in decline — some 10 per cent of domesticated breeds of mammals have become extinct in human history, with more than 1000 others threatened with extinction.

“All this means that we are now without a doubt well within a sixth mass extinction event,” Prof Bradshaw says.



Our Cities

Already suburbs or communities further away from the coast are hotter than places on the coast.

That’s just part of the climate, but throw in cleared land, inappropriately designed houses with darkened roofs, suburbs with lots of bitumen, no trees and buildings placed close together, and you have the recipe for hotter areas.

That is exacerbating worse consequences of climate change and the extreme temperatures it brings, Dr Perkins-Kirkpatrick said.

“What we’re describing here is the urban heat island effect,” she said. “And many new suburbs amplify increases in temperature because of their design.”

Under 2C warming, Australia will experience four more heatwaves per year, on average, compared to a world without climate change.

In places like India, roads already melt under heatwaves. The tar already goes soft under your feet in Australia, so the design of hard urban surfaces will need to change.

Temperatures that cause road melting are more likely in Australia under 2C warming.

Because roads are black they absorb more heat so they’re much hotter than the actual reading on a thermometer.

A 2C rise in temperature would bring with it a higher number of extreme heat days. Picture: Liam Driver Source: News Corp Australia

Train tracks can also buckle in extreme temperature conditions - it happened in Melbourne in 2019.

That sort of disruption will occur more often. Trains already have to go slower on heatwave days in case tracks in front of them have already buckled.

In 2018, planes were grounded in Phoenix, Arizona in the United States when temperatures reached 49C because of how higher temperatures affect the ability to take off.

“That might be something we need to consider when the world climbs towards 2C warmer,” Dr Perkins-Kirkpatrick said.

Professor Elizabeth Mossop, landscape architect at UTS, said there’s going to be a lot more heat and a lot more heat stress.

“This is incredibly dangerous, especially for vulnerable properties,” Professor Mossop said.

“We need to rethink where we develop, how we develop. There’s no question we need to make changes to how we design and build communities.”

The recent bushfires crisis gave a brief but stark illustration of what a rapidly warming world could mean for everyday life for millions of people who weren’t directly in the firing line, Dr Lewis said.

“It impacted people’s abilities to go on holidays, to move around, to go to work, to breathe clean air,” Dr Lewis said.

“It’s not to say that every aspect of it was 100 per cent climate change, but it’s an indicator of unprecedented extremes under 1C of warming. If you think about another degree, well, you get the picture.”

It’s not just plants and trees in the bush and forests that will be impacted by warmer temperatures, but also those in city environments.

And they serve a greater purpose than an aesthetic one, Prof Hill said.

Green spaces and tree cover help to shade urban spaces and reduce temperatures, as well as provide fresh air, while science has also demonstrated the mental health benefits of parks.

“The problem is that many of the types of trees we have don’t cope well in extreme heat,” Professor Hill said.

“The heat gets to them and so does the lack of water. Trees try to suck water out of a ground that’s dry and they get into trouble. If you’re living in a place that’s in the mid-40s, the last thing you need is for the trees to start dying.”

A 2C rise in temperature would bring with it a higher number of extreme heat days, modelling has shown.

“We’re already seeing that,” he said. “We had a string of days this summer in Adelaide of 45C or above. That’s well outside anything plants have evolved to cope with.”

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Zero Hour: There’s No Stopping Climate Change, But How Bad It Gets Is Still Up To Us

Rolling Stone - 

It is more important than ever that we eliminate fossil fuels and reduce suffering in a warming world
The unincorporated community of Isle de Jean Charles, Louisiana, located at the edge of the earth in southern Terrebonne Parish, is particularly vulnerable to sea-level rise. William Widmer/Redux
When people you love are sick and dying, it’s hard to think about anything else. In the course of just a few short weeks, the coronavirus has upended our daily lives, causing immense suffering and economic chaos around the world. It’s hard to recall (or care, even) that it was 69 degrees Fahrenheit in Antarctica a few weeks ago — T-shirt weather in the coldest, most remote place on Earth. Or that bush fires burned 46 million acres in Australia, and by one count, a billion animals were lost. Or that there was a marine heat wave in the Pacific and devastating floods in Indonesia. But when this terrible pandemic ends, as it surely will, we will be faced once again with a central fact of 21st-century life: The longer we wait to get off fossil fuels, the hotter the world will get, and the faster climate chaos will accelerate.

This is not about saving the planet. For one thing, the planet itself is not at risk — in its 4.5-billion-year history, the Earth has been through much worse than anything we can throw at it. It’s civilization as we know it today that’s in trouble. Second, the whole notion of “saving” anything is a flawed way to think about the crisis we are facing. Yes, it is more important than ever that we eliminate fossil fuels and reduce suffering and loss in a warming world. And, yes, the faster we get off fossil fuels, the better chance we have to make sure we don’t push the climate system past irreversible tipping points, such as the collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which could raise global sea levels by 10 feet.But no matter how fast we act, we are not going to “fix” the climate like a doctor fixes a broken leg.

“The Earth’s climate is not a binary system or a switch that you can toggle on and off,” says Kate Marvel, a climate scientist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. Even if we stopped burning fossil fuels tomorrow and stabilized the Earth’s temperature where it is today, we would still face several feet of sea-level rise in the coming century, as well as collapsing coral reefs and changing rainfall patterns. “The notion that we can avoid climate change is unequivocally false,” says Marvel. “We’re at 1 degree of warming now, and we’re already seeing the impacts of climate change very clearly with wildfires, flooding, and other extreme weather events. But it’s also true that our actions over the next decade very much matter.”

We have already crossed one of the most important thresholds of the climate crisis: We’ve gone from “Is it happening?” to “What are we going to do about it?” In this new world, there are no solutions — only better and worse choices about where we will live, how we will live, who and what will survive, and who and what will be lost. Above all, it’s a world that will be defined by how hard we are willing to fight for our future.

“We might be living in a horror movie right now, but we are the ones writing the script,” says writer Mary Annaïse Heglar. “And we’re the ones who will decide how this movie will end.”


From the earliest days of the climate crisis, scientists have struggled to define the risks of life on a warming planet. “We have understood the basic physics of climate change for more than 120 years,” says Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M. But nobody was too worried at first. The warming of the planet, if it was seen as a threat at all, was viewed as a far-off, distant event, something that would play out over century-long time scales.

The warming is a result of the slow accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which traps heat just like the glass roof of a greenhouse. Unlike other air pollutants, such as the chemicals that cause smog, which vanish as soon as you stop emitting them, a good fraction of CO2 that was emitted while factories forged cannons during the Civil War is still in the atmosphere today, and will remain for centuries into the future. “The climatic impacts of releasing CO2 will last longer than Stonehenge,” wrote climate scientist David Archer. “Longer than time capsules, longer than nuclear waste, far longer than the age of human civilization so far.”

The fingerprints of accumulating CO2 in the atmosphere were also hard to detect, at least in real time. In March 1958, when scientist Ralph Keeling first started measuring it from the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii, the CO2 level in the atmosphere was 315.71 parts per million. A year later, it was 316.71 parts per million. Why would anyone be alarmed by an increase of one part per million of CO2?

But in the atmosphere, small changes over time can add up to big impacts. In 1988, NASA scientist James Hansen testified before the U.S. Senate that the burning of fossil fuels was now altering the Earth’s climate. “Global warming has reached a level such that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause-and-effect relationship between the greenhouse effect and observed warming,” Hansen said. “It is already happening now.’’ He and other scientists understood the implications of this warming — droughts, heat waves, sea-level rise. But they didn’t have a clear timeline for when these impacts would occur or how severe they would be.

A map showing the average temperature rise over the past four years; 2016 and 2019 were the hottest on record. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
Big Oil and Big Coal understood the implications of rising CO2 levels all too well. They immediately began cranking out propaganda arguing that a warmer world was a better world. Groups like the Greening Earth Society argued that more CO2 meant plants would grow faster, agriculture would boom, and we would all enjoy more days at the beach. Companies like Exxon (now ExxonMobil) began spending hundreds of millions of dollars in a well-orchestrated campaign to deny, confuse, and block any understanding of the risks of burning fossil fuels. In the coming years, they organized and funded industry groups with innocuous-sounding names like the Global Climate Coalition, and poured money into conservative think tanks like the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation, where undermining climate science was job one.

In addition, there was a collective-action problem. Even if half the nations of the world decided to slash carbon pollution, if big fossil-fuel burners like the U.S. and China didn’t take action too, the problem wouldn’t be solved. Many leaders saw restrictions on carbon as hobbling their economy and thus jeopardizing their political power. As Dan Dudek, a vice president at the Environmental Defense Fund, puts it, “What president or prime minister is going to restrict fossil fuels if it means he or she will be turned out of office?”

But the biggest issue was simply defining the threat of global warming. With nuclear weapons, the risks were clear: Start a war, and millions of people could die in minutes. The ozone hole was similarly clear-cut: If you let deadly levels of radiation hit the Earth, you get cancer and die. In both cases, global treaties were effective in reducing risk. But with global warming, the threat was not so clear. Nobody was going to die — at least, not directly — from a few more parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere.

In 1988, under the auspices of the U.N., the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was created — an organization of top scientists tasked with issuing periodic reports that assessed the latest knowledge about climate change. The first report, released in 1990, was a weak sketch of the risks, from sea-level rise to drought to increased storm intensity. But it inspired the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, where the issue of climate risk was addressed directly for the first time.

The summit was a big event, with virtually every nation in the world signing a global treaty called the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The goal of the treaty was “to stabilize greenhouse-gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic [human-caused] interference with the climate system.” Nice thought, but as Penn State climate scientist Michael Mann later wrote, “Dangerous to whom?” The risks to an islander living on a low atoll in the Pacific were surely different than the risks to the Mercedes-riding diplomats who crafted the treaty, to say nothing of the outsize risks to future generations.

In 1995, the IPCC followed up with a second report, which was more thorough but still full of cautious, bureaucratic language (“potentially serious changes have been identified”). Nobody but hardcore scientists and activists read it. In 1997, at the climate talks in Kyoto, Japan, UNFCCC members agreed to the Kyoto Protocol, which required that by 2012 developing countries cut total emissions of greenhouse gases by five percent from 1990 levels.

The agreement got a lot of press and inspired high-minded speeches about the importance of reducing the level of CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere. But it didn’t inspire much action. “Part of the problem was that negotiations focused on agreeing on the percentage of tons of carbon-dioxide-emission reductions, which no regular human being has any clue about,” Dudek explains. “How can you build political support around a goal that most people can’t understand, even if they wanted to?”


The Jakobshavn glacier, on the west coast of Greenland, is the fastest-moving glacier in the world. It is flowing into the sea at a rate of about 150 feet per day. If you fly along the face of it in a helicopter, as I did a few years ago, you can watch slabs of blue ice fall into the sea every few minutes. They eventually melt into the North Atlantic, adding almost imperceptibly to the level of water in the ocean, which pushes waves a fraction of an inch higher on beaches around the world — the climate crisis in action.

In the 1990s, Greenland also changed how scientists think about climate change. Until then, most climate scientists believed the Earth’s climate was a fairly steady system — that it might grow warmer or colder, but that changes were gradual, like water heating up in a pot. Wallace Broecker, a brash and colorful geochemist at Columbia University, who died in 2019, hypothesized that changes in the Gulf Stream system about 14,000 years ago, during a period known as the Younger Dryas, had caused dramatic temperature swings in the Northern Hemisphere.

Evidence for this was sketchy until the mid-Nineties, when a team of researchers, including Richard Alley, a paleoclimatologist at Penn State, extracted a two-mile ice core from the Greenland ice sheet. By examining the decay of carbon isotope ratios in air bubbles trapped in the ancient ice, Alley found that at the end of the Younger Dryas, the temperature in Greenland warmed by 15 F in less than a decade. It was a remarkable discovery, which demonstrated that the Earth’s climate tended to lurch from one steady state to another. “You might think of the climate as a drunk,” Alley later explained. “When left alone, it sits. When forced to move, it staggers.”

Alley’s work revolutionized how scientists conceptualized changes that are to come. It also pushed scientists to think about climate risk in terms of temperature changes, not carbon-emission rates. In 2001, the IPCC issued its third report, which was far more pointed and urgent than previous reports. It’s remembered today mostly for a single graphic, known as “the burning embers” diagram. It was a simple chart with five bars that corresponded to five categories of climate risk, from “Risks of Extreme Weather Events” to “Risks of Large Scale Discontinuities” (such as the rapid melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets). The bars were shaded from white to yellow to orange to dark red, depending on the severity of the risk, which were calculated on a scale from zero to 5 C of warming. “The diagram was revolutionary,” says Mann. “For the first time, the risks of climate change were intelligible to someone who didn’t have a degree in physics.”

In 2010, the UNFCCC threw out the old metric of measuring progress by emissions reductions. Instead, they adopted a goal of stabilizing warming at less than 2 C (3.6 F), which quickly became known as the threshold for dangerous climate change. Where did the 2 C target come from? Think of it as a rough balance between what should be done and what can be done. (“I would avoid thinking about these temperature targets as ever being based in science,” says Dessler.) Although a temperature target was much more coherent to most people than a percentage of emissions reductions, it reinforced an artificial notion that climate change was binary: Below 2 C of warming, all was good. Above 2 C, all hell breaks loose. “That is not how the climate system works,” says Dessler. “Is 1.8 C of warming better than 2 C? Yes. Is 2 C better than 2.5 C? Yes. But there is no bright line here.”

Mann’s question, “Dangerous to whom?” continued to haunt negotiations over climate targets. The better that scientists understood the climate system, the clearer it became that even a warming of 2 C put people in low-lying nations like Bangladesh at risk for increased flooding from rising seas, as well as other climate impacts. Was the 2 C target too high? Was it safe only for the privileged? The counterargument, however, was that a climate target needed to be achievable or nobody would take it seriously. Virtually every study showed that hitting the 2 C target would require a Herculean effort by all the industrialized nations of the world.

At the climate talks in Paris in 2015, even the 2 C target was seen as not strong enough. By then, the impacts of climate change were moving out of the modeling world and happening in real time. Greenland and Antarctica are shrinking “100 years ahead of schedule,” Alley said. Leaders of small island states like Tuvalu and the Maldives argued that the 2 C target was essentially dooming their nations. They pushed for an “aspirational goal” of limiting warming to 1.5 C (2.7 F), which eventually became embedded in the language of the Paris Agreement. Thus, 1.5 C became the new de facto threshold for dangerous climate change. But it was clear that the 1.5 C target was more of a desperate dream than a practical reality. As one observer in Paris quipped to me, “They may as well agree that all fairies shall ride unicorns too.”


There may be a climate scientist or energy analyst somewhere in the world who believes that limiting warming to 1.5 C is doable, but I haven’t met him or her. Net emissions would need to fall by half by 2030, and to zero by 2050. “The level of action and coordination necessary to limit global warming to 1.5 C utterly dwarfs anything that has ever happened on any other large-scale problem that humanity has ever faced,” journalist David Roberts wrote on Vox. “The only analogy that has ever come close to capturing what’s necessary is ‘wartime mobilization,’ but it requires imagining the kind of mobilization that the U.S. achieved for less than a decade during WWII happening in every large economy at once, and sustaining itself for the remainder of the century.”

If we blow past the 1.5 C target, as seems likely, where are we headed? Until recently, the IPCC had projected a warming of about 4.5 C by the end of the century if we continue on our current emissions path. That is truly a horrific number, one that would render large swaths of the Earth uninhabitable. But a recent study by Zeke Hausfather of the Breakthrough Institute in California and Justin Richie of the University of British Columbia demonstrated that this estimate was based on unreal projections of coal consumption and other factors. After they reanalyzed the data, they concluded the business-as-usual scenario may be something more like 3 C. Which would still be hellish, but less hellish than 4.5 C.

Even if we achieve the target of holding to 2 C, there will be unfathomable changes to our climate. In 2018, the IPCC published a special report that laid out the differences between a 2 C world and a 1.5 C world. “I was grumpy about the idea of the 1.5 report,” says NASA’s Kate Marvel. “I thought it was just fan fiction. But it had an unexpectedly galvanizing impact on people.” The report showed that, at 2 C, severe heat events would become 2.6 times worse, plant- and vertebrate-species loss two times worse, insect-species loss three times worse, and decline in marine fisheries two times worse. Instead of 70 percent of coral reefs dying, 99 percent will die. Many vulnerable and low-lying regions would become uninhabitable and the flow of refugees would rise dramatically.

Beyond future emissions rates, there are two big uncertainties on how fast the climate will warm. One is climate sensitivity, which is the measure scientists use to calculate how much the climate will warm as CO2 increases. It’s tricky to measure, because as the Earth heats up, it tweaks the climate dynamics in subtle ways, changing cloud cover, wind and rainfall patterns, and ocean circulation, among many other things. And all of this can impact warming.

Hamburg, Iowa: Historic flooding, due to climate change, rocked the Midwest last spring. Photo credit: Scott Olson/Getty Images
According to Hausfather, the real uncertainty lies with clouds, which are notoriously hard to capture in models, and have a big impact on the Earth’s temperature (high thin clouds trap heat, while low thick clouds shade and cool the Earth). Hausfather points out that the latest climate models, which use more-sophisticated cloud-modeling techniques, are showing a higher climate sensitivity, with potential warming of as much as 5 C if we double the CO2 in the atmosphere. These new climate-model runs are still in progress and, thus, inconclusive, but this is definitely not good news.

The other big uncertainty about our climate future has to do with tipping points. The latest research is showing some Earth systems may be more resilient than most people thought. The Gulf Stream system, for example, “has been slowing down in recent decades,” says Gavin Schmidt, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. “But I don’t think anyone is worried about it shutting down anytime soon.”

It’s the same with the melting of the permafrost in the Arctic: The more the permafrost warms, the more methane it releases, the more it warms the atmosphere — but none of the climate scientists I talked to believe there is a point when it runs away with itself. Similarly with the Amazon rainforest: As warming combines with deforestation, parts of it may turn into more of a savannah-like ecosystem. “But it’s not like there is a sudden crash and the entire Amazon disappears,” says Hausfather.

On the other hand, the more scientists learn about what’s happening with the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, the more unstable it looks. Earlier this year, researchers in Antarctica found evidence of warm water directly beneath the glacier, which is not good news for the stability of the system. Eric Rignot, a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and one of the top ice scientists in the world, believes that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is beyond its tipping point and in the midst of an irreversible collapse. As Rignot put it recently, “The fuse has been blown.”


When you look at images of the bush fires in Australia or the cracking ice shelves in Antarctica, it’s easy to think that it’s too late to do anything about the climate crisis — that we are, for all intents and purposes, fucked. And it’s true, it’s too late for 182 people who died from exposure to extreme heat in Phoenix in 2018, or for 1,900 people in northern India who were swept away in extreme floods in 2019, or the 4 million people who die each year around the world from particulate air pollution caused by our dependence on fossil fuels. And the way things are going, it’s probably too late for the glaciers on Mount Kilimanjaro, for large portions of the Great Barrier Reef, and for the city of Miami Beach as we know it.

But the lesson of this is not that we’re fucked, but that we have to fight harder for what is left. Too Late-ism only plays into the hands of Big Oil and Big Coal and all the inactivists who want to drag out the transition to clean energy as long as possible. Too Late-ism also misses the big important truth that, buried deep in the politics and emotion of the climate crisis, you can see the birth of something new emerging. “The climate crisis isn’t an ‘event’ or an ‘issue,’ ” says futurist Alex Steffen, author of Snap Forward, an upcoming book about climate strategy for the real world. “It’s an era, and it’s just beginning.”

This new era might be arriving more quickly than most people think. According to a new poll from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, nearly six in 10 Americans are now “alarmed” or “concerned” about global warming. Political support for the Green New Deal is rising as fast as the price of clean energy is falling. Greta Thunberg and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have inspired a new generation of climate activists who see the crisis as an opportunity to create a fairer, more equitable society.

Germany, the industrial powerhouse of Europe, plans to shut down all coal plants by 2038. In the U.S., the coal industry is in free-fall. Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock, the financial giant that manages about $7 trillion in assets, acknowledged in a letter to shareholders that climate change is now “on the edge of a fundamental reshaping of finance.” Jim Cramer, CNBC’s notoriously cranky Wall Street guru, said in January, “I’m done with fossil fuels. … We’re in the death-knell phase.  .… The world has turned on them. It’s actually kind of happening very quickly.”

“I don’t have any doubt that we will take action on climate,” says Steffen. “But it won’t be the old-fashioned version of social change. It won’t be an orderly transition. It won’t be the climate version of the civil-rights movement. It will be more like the Industrial Revolution — a huge social and cultural and economic transition, which will play out over decades, and with no clear leadership and nobody in control.” In Steffen’s view, climate doomers are as blind as climate deniers. “The apocalyptic is in its very heart a refusal to see past the end of an old worldview, into the new possibilities of the actual world.”

I think Steffen is right. Whenever I feel like we’re fucked, I talk to landscape architects like Susannah Drake, who recently completed a preliminary redesign of the National Mall Tidal Basin in Washington, D.C., that will help restore a more natural ecosystem and embrace the rising waters of the Potomac River. I talk to entrepreneurs like Bill Gross, who has figured out a technology that uses mirrors to concentrate sunlight hot enough to manufacture concrete and steel. I talk to kids on school climate strikes who are determined to hold polluters and politicians accountable for trashing their future. Writer Mary Annaïse Heglar, who grew up in Alabama and Mississippi, sees the climate fight as part of a centuries-long battle for racial and social justice. “I don’t care how bad it gets,” she tweeted recently. “I don’t care how many thresholds we pass. Giving up is immoral.”

Like many people on the front lines of the climate fight, Heglar bristles at lazy questions about what gives her hope. “I think hope is really precious, and the most precious thing about it is that you have to earn it,” she tells me. “So, usually when people are asking me what gives me hope, what they really mean is, ‘Give me hope,’ and I can’t do that for you. No one can do that for you. You have to go out and make your own hope. And so that means I hope you get involved. The type of hope I have is that I hope you get off your ass.”

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Professor Sees Climate Mayhem Lurking Behind Covid-19 Outbreak

Bloomberg - 

Professor Jem Bendell says Coronavirus (COVID-19) ‘feels like a dress rehearsal’ for global warming
Photographer: Marcelo Hernandez/Getty Images

Jem Bendell is a professor of sustainability leadership and founder of the Institute for Leadership and Sustainability (IFLAS) at the University of Cumbria. Professor Bendell is the author of Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy, and has written extensively on monetary economics in response to environmental crises.
Jem Bendell doesn’t shy away from doom and gloom.

The lockdowns and social distancing caused by the coronavirus are giving humanity a taste of the disruptions to daily life that will be caused by climate change, he said.

“In modern industrial societies, the fallout from Covid-19 feels like a dress rehearsal for the kind of collapse that climate change threatens,” Bendell said in an interview. “This crisis reveals how fragile our current way of life has become.”

The University of Cumbria social-science professor is well-known among environmentalists for his theory of “deep adaption.”

In a 2018 paper, Bendell said that time was up for gradual measures to combat global warming. Without an abrupt transformation of society, changes in the planet’s climate would bring starvation, destruction, migration, disease and war -- the collapse of civilization -- within a decade.

Now he’s focusing his scalding assessments on the parallels and links he sees between climate change and the pandemic.

As edgy as people may find him, Bendell shares common ground with some of the world’s most sober-minded financial types, like former Bank of England Governor Mark Carney.

Bendell is a former consultant to the United Nations, has presented papers to the European Commission, co-authored reports for the World Economic Forum and advised Britain’s Labour Party.

He said the first effects of climate change are disasters such as the wildfires in Australia and California, African hurricanes, South Asian typhoons and harvest collapses in the Middle East. Because those factors can disrupt wildlife migration, the second effects of climate change are pandemics, he said.

Carry Diseases
While there’s no direct evidence linking global warming with Covid-19, animals are moving to cooler areas, according to Aaron Bernstein of Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health. That’s brought humans in closer contact with them and the diseases they carry, he said. Epidemiologists say the novel coronavirus originated in bats.

Bendell is more willing to make the connection between coronavirus and climate change. He says that a warmer habitat may have caused the bats to alter their movements, putting them in contact with humans.

Partly because of that connection, Bendell said governments should commit only to “fair and green” bailouts, and shouldn’t save carbon-intensive industries such as airlines, oil, gas, coal or cement. Instead, they should let the companies approach bankruptcy and nationalize one or two of them to get them aligned with national climate policies.

“Keeping the most polluting industries afloat will increase the likelihood of future pandemics,” Bendell said.

A Fantasy
Returning to business as usual is a “fantasy,” Bendell said. Policy makers and business leaders must recognize that climate change will be even more disruptive than the coronavirus, he said.

Not everyone is on board with Bendell’s view of the future and his paper, “Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy.”

The paper wasn’t peer reviewed, and Michael Mann, a distinguished professor of atmospheric science at Pennsylvania State University, said that Bendell “gets the science wrong on just about everything.”

“Bendell’s paper is a classic example of climate doomism, where the science is exaggerated grossly in favor of a doomist narrative,” Mann said in an email.

Bendell, a professor of sustainability leadership, said it was strange that climate scientists are viewed as authorities on predicting climate’s impact on human societies. He said academics in areas such as sociology, economics and politics are better suited for that.

Some authorities echo Bendell’s views. Carney said financial companies could face a “climate Minsky moment,” or a sudden collapse of values, if they didn’t address climate change. Economists at JPMorgan Chase & Co. warned that the most extreme risks of climate change, including the collapse of human civilization, can’t be ruled out. Consulting firm McKinsey & Co. said intensifying climate hazards could put millions of lives at risk, as well as trillions of dollars of economic activity.

Steven Desmyter, co-head of responsible investment at Man Group, one of the world’s largest hedge funds, also agrees with Bendell.

“No one saw Covid-19 coming,” Desmyter said. “With global warming, there’s a catastrophe of equal or greater magnitude on the horizon that we can still do something about.”

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