Lethal Heating: 08/09/20

09/08/2020

80-Year-Old Physicist Credits 17-Year-Old Activist With Shifting Intergenerational Accountability

Forbes - Jeff McMahon

Greta Thunberg speaks at the United Nations (U.N.) where world leaders held a summit on climate change on September 23, 2019 in New York City. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

The climate-change conversation focused on responsibility to future generations until Greta Thunberg refocused it on present generations, said a renowned theoretical physicist. And that has implications for our coronavirus response.

Princeton University Emeritus Professor Robert Socolow has focused his career on the interaction between humans and their natural environment.

“Greta Thunberg startled many of us with a fresh message. ‘How dare you,’ she said. ‘How dare you use up our common atmosphere,’” Socolow said, referencing Thunberg’s message last year to the United Nations climate summit in New York (video below).

“Her ‘you’ are the older people alive today,” Socolow added, “and she is speaking on behalf of the younger people. She is reformulating the climate-change conversation. Instead of future generations, she was making us consider consider current generations: I should not take that plane trip for the benefit of my own grandchildren.”

COVID-19 has similar age implications, Socolow said in a Princeton webinar, although most fatalities occur among the elderly.

Early in the pandemic, health experts urged young people to take precautions not only to protect themselves from coronavirus, but to protect older adults they may encounter and infect.

Comparisons have been drawn between fatalities from coronavirus and fatalities from war, which kills mostly young people.

Socolow said he finds it “astonishing” that those comparisons relate the numbers one-to-one, instead of accounting for years of life lost, a statistic commonly used in public health that puts a greater emphasis on deaths of young people. Instead, comparisons have relied on medical ethics, which consider all lives equal.

Robert Socolow, a theoretical physicist and emeritus professor at Princeton University, in a file photo. (Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images)

By emphasizing effects on the living, the coronavirus pandemic will probably make it more difficult to consider climate change’s impacts on future generations, Socolow said, adding importance to Thunberg’s rhetorical shift.

“Regarding the long time horizon of climate change, will it be easier or harder to get the world to pay attention to those not yet born?” Socolow asked.

“I think more difficult. We've had a bout of attention to those alive, and it will shadow arguments about the future, the deep future, for some time. But we can focus on the future for a different and probably more compelling reason: attending to climate change is about our children and grandchildren.”

The youngest panelist at the webinar—hosted by Princeton’s Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment—was 35-year-old engineering professor Jesse D. Jenkins.

“As one of the newer cohort of researchers tackling the climate challenge, the impacts feel for me far less distant and intergenerational than it may for the generation currently occupying leadership positions in government, industry, and other sectors,” Jenkins said.

“The timeline for climate change impacts and our remaining time to mitigate the worst effects might feel far off, on the one hand, yet as parents are fond of saying, the days feel long, but the years feel short. And for me at least, the time is short to act to prevent the worst impacts of climate change not just for future generations but for my own and for my son's.”

Greta Thunberg at the UN

Greta Thunberg to World Leaders: 'How Dare You!'

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Covid-19 Lockdown Will Have 'Negligible' Impact On Climate Crisis – Study

The Guardian - Damian Carrington

Drop in emissions was a blip, say scientists, and a green recovery is vital to halt global heating

The study found economy-wide changes are needed for a transformation to reach the zero-emissions goal. Photograph: Peter Byrne/PA

The draconian coronavirus lockdowns across the world have led to sharp drops in carbon emissions, but this will have “negligible” impact on the climate crisis, with global heating cut by just 0.01C by 2030, a study has found.

But the analysis also shows that putting the huge sums of post-Covid-19 government funding into a green recovery and shunning fossil fuels will give the world a good chance of keeping the rise in global temperatures below 1.5C. The scientists said we are now at a “make or break” moment in keeping under the limit – as compared with pre-industrial levels – agreed by the world’s governments to avoid the worst effects of global heating.

The research is primarily based on newly available Google and Apple mobility data. This gives near-real-time information on travel and work patterns and therefore gives an idea of the level of emissions. The data covered 123 countries that together are responsible for 99% of fossil fuel emissions. The researchers found that global CO₂ emissions dropped by more than 25% in April 2020, and nitrogen oxides (NO_x) by 30%.

These falls show that rapid changes in people’s behaviour can make big differences to emissions in the short term, but the scientists said such lockdowns are impossible to maintain. Therefore, economy-wide changes are needed for a transformation to a zero-emissions economy, such as greening transport, buildings and industry with renewable energy, hydrogen or by capturing and burying CO₂.

“The direct effect of the pandemic-driven [lockdown] will be negligible,” said the researchers, whose analysis was led by Prof Piers Forster at the University of Leeds. “In contrast, with an economic recovery tilted towards green stimulus and reductions in fossil fuel investments, it is possible to avoid future warming of 0.3C by 2050.”

The global average temperature in 2019 was 1.1C above the long-term average and even with current emissions-cutting pledges a further rise of 0.6C is expected by 2050. “It is now make or break for the 1.5C target,” said Forster. “This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to really change the direction of society. We do not have to go back to where we were, because times of crisis are also the time to change.”

Prof Keith Shine, at the University of Reading and not part of the study team, said: “It is deeply impressive to get such a near-real-time analysis of the climate impact [of the lockdowns].”

Shine said a green recovery from the pandemic is essential to meet the Paris climate agreement target: “The study shows that, because CO₂ is so persistent in the atmosphere, short-term emission reductions resulting directly from the pandemic lockdowns lead to undetectable reductions in warming. It is only via sustained and radical changes in the way we use fossil fuels that we can hope to meet the Paris [climate agreement] target.”

The analysis, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, used mobility data from Google and Apple that tracks the location of individuals. This was used to assess changes in levels of transport and office and factory working, and then the emissions of 10 different greenhouse gases and air pollutants.

These estimates matched the measurements available for some gases, such as nitrogen oxides, pollutants mostly emitted by diesel vehicles. The team assumed that significant restrictions on activity caused by Covid-19 remained in place until the end of 2021. However, using computer models, the team showed this would only produce a tiny reduction in long-term global heating.

The scientists also examined recovery scenarios. If the recovery mirrors the investments made after the 2008 financial crisis – which included major support for fossil fuels – the global temperature will rise by more than 1.5C by 2050, which scientists say will cause widespread damage across the world.

However, a strong green recovery that invests 1.2% of global GDP in low-carbon technologies – more than $1tn (£760bn) – and does not support bailouts for fossil fuel companies is likely to cut warming by 0.3C, the scientists found.

Forster said the recovery investments being made today are backing both green technologies and fossil fuels. “It is still going both ways. But every bit of warming is important to try to avoid, so if we don’t keep the rise to 1.5C, it is still worth getting to zero carbon as fast as possible.”

Dr Jaise Kuriakose, at the University of Manchester and not involved in the study, said people’s activities had changed in previously unthinkable ways, with a stop to flying and a shift to virtual meetings.

“These suggest there is a public willingness for behavioural changes to a more sustainable and low-carbon lifestyle,” he said. “[But] to take advantage of this, structural changes and new policies are essential. Without a green recovery, it is even challenging to meet the UK government’s legislated net-zero target by 2050, let alone the ambitious Paris agreement.”

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A Glacier’s Pace: A Haunting Meditation On Climate Change In Iceland

The Economist

“On Time and Water” is part memoir and part scientific analysis

On Time and Water

By
Andri Snaer Magnason

IN AUGUST 2019 an extraordinary plaque was unveiled at Borgarfjordur, in western Iceland. It commemorates Okjökull, the first of the country’s glaciers to be completely lost to climate change.

Okjökull was declared “dead” in 2014, when it was no longer thick enough to flow across the landscape, as it had done for centuries.

Framed as “A letter to the future”, the plaque reads (in Icelandic and English):

In the next 200 years all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path. This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it.

Along with the date, the memorial carries the words “415ppm CO₂”: last summer, atmospheric carbon dioxide was measured at 415 parts per million, higher than at any point since humans have lived on Earth.

The text was written by Andri Snaer Magnason, an Icelandic author. As he notes in his haunting new book, “On Time and Water”, the amount of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere has soared at shocking speed. At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the ratio was about 280ppm; by 1958 it stood at 315ppm. It is now rising by about two to three parts per million every year.

The author’s aim is to give readers a proper sense of geological time, so that they grasp, at a visceral level, how human activity is damaging the planet. He calls the current transformation “mythological”, affecting “the roots of everything we think, choose, produce and believe. It affects everyone we know, everyone we love.”

These high-speed changes, including the rise of the world’s waters, will alter life irrevocably within a more familiar time frame: “All this will happen during the lifetime of a child who is born today and lives to be my grandmother’s age, 95.”

There are plenty of books about the climate crisis. But Mr Andri Snaer Magnason’s perspective on his country’s environment is unique and compelling. His earlier book, “Dreamland: A Self-Help Manual for a Frightened Nation”, was a hymn to Iceland’s highlands and a critique of the government’s decision to build dams to provide power for aluminium smelting. Now he traces his family’s links to the landscape, notably those of his grandparents Hulda and Arni.

They were early stalwarts of the Icelandic Glaciological Society, and spent their honeymoon in 1956 investigating the frozen world of Vatnajökull, an ice cap of 8,000 square kilometres—for now, at least—which was almost entirely unexplored in the mid-20th century. In old age Hulda recalls the indescribable smell of the glacier. “When you’re up on Vatnajökull,” she tells her grandson, “everything disappears; you forget everything. An infinite vastness. An absolute dream.”

“On Time and Water” is part family memoir, part scientific analysis, part meditation on subjects as wide-ranging as the “Poetic Edda”—Iceland’s medieval literary treasury—and the role of the Dalai Lama in 21st-century climate politics.

The author tries to understand, and tries to make the reader understand, why the climate crisis is not widely perceived as a distinct, transformative event in the manner of, say, the fall of the Berlin Wall or the attacks of September 11th 2001.

The fundamental problem, as this book elucidates, is time. Climate change is a disaster in slow motion, and yet “slow” is a great deal faster than many people seem able to comprehend.

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