Lethal Heating: 02/17/21

17/02/2021

Sea Level Data Confirms Climate Modeling Projections Were Right

University of New South Wales - Lachlan Gilbert

Projections of rising sea levels this century are on the money when tested against satellite and tide-gauge observations, scientists find.

The IPCC says sea levels could rise around 30-60 cm by 2100 even if greenhouse gas emissions are sharply reduced and global warming is limited to well below 2°C, but around 60-110 cm if greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase strongly. Photo: "Rising sea levels" by go_greener_oz is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0

Climate model projections of sea-level rises in the early 21^st century are in good agreement with sea level data recorded in the corresponding period, a recent analysis has found.

And the scientists who crunched the numbers say the finding does not bode well for sea level impacts over coming decades if greenhouse gas emissions are not reined in.

In an article published recently in Nature Communications, the scientists from Chinese and Australian institutions including UNSW Sydney examined the global and regional sea level projections of two reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) and Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate (SROCC).

They compared the reports’ projections with the observed global and coastal sea level data gathered from satellites and a network of 177 tide-gauges from the start of the projections in 2007 up to to 2018.

The scientists found that the trends of the AR5 and SROCC sea level projections under three different scenarios of greenhouse gas emissions “agree well with satellite and tide-gauge observations over the common period 2007–2018, within the 90 per cent confidence level”.

Study co-author and leading sea-level expert, Professor John Church, says while he thought the projections from modelling would be accurate at the global level, he was pleasantly surprised that they were as accurate at the regional and local level.

“Our analysis implies that the models are close to observations and builds confidence in the current projections for the next several decades,” says Prof. Church, who is part of UNSW’s Climate Change Research Centre.

But he adds a caveat that because the available comparison period is short, at just 11 years, he would be hesitant to extend the same degree of confidence over the longer term – from the end of this century and beyond – where acceleration of ice-sheet contribution to sea-level rise is less understood and could lead to larger rises.

“There remains a potential for larger sea level rises, particularly beyond 2100 for high emission scenarios. Therefore, it is urgent that we still try to meet the commitments of the Paris Agreement by significantly reducing emissions,” Prof. Church says.

Study co-author Dr Xuebin Zhang, from CSIRO’s Oceans and Atmosphere Division says this is the first study to compare projections of sea level rises at both a global and regional level with observations over their overlapping periods – no mean feat given the natural variability of climate and vertical land movement from region to region.

“We carefully removed the impacts from natural climate variability, for example El Niño– Southern Oscillation, and corrected vertical land movement, which led to much improved agreement.”

The analysis looked at the three different emissions scenarios in the IPCC’s reports that corresponded to three different climate futures depending on what greenhouse gas mitigation strategies were adopted – known as Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) scenarios.

The lowest scenario (RCP2.6) examined is for strong mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions, about in line with 2^oC of global warming by 2100 but still larger than what is required to meet the Paris Agreement of well below 2^oC.

The middle scenario (RCP4.5) requires stabilisation of radiative forcing in the latter half of this century and results in warming well above the Paris Target.

And the highest scenario (RCP8.5) is for large greenhouse gas emissions resulting in ongoing rapid warming and implies a commitment to large sea level rises.

“The analysis of the recent sea level data indicate the world is tracking between RCP4.5 and the worst case scenario of RCP8.5,” Professor Church says.

“If we continue with large ongoing emissions as we are at present, we will commit the world to metres of sea level rise over coming centuries.”

Next the group will attempt to gain a greater understanding of the processes determining regional sea level rise.

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8 Reasons Why The Political Argument Against Climate Action Is Wrong

Inverse - David Grossman

Fighting climate change is expensive, which makes it controversial. One of the major criticisms of the much-touted push for a Green New Deal has been the cost. Some conservative green-energy activists blanch at what one described as the “home-run giga-packages” included in the Deal. Essentially, liberals have thrown the kitchen sink in the Deal, so the argument goes, trying to shoehorn in far greater — and far more expensive — reforms than necessary.

But here's the thing — this argument is slowly losing power.

Part of that is to do with the balance of power in Washington. The other is to do with the scientific evidence. Climate change action could be a far bigger bargain than critics (not sorry) have bargained for.

What's new — In a recent study published study in the journal AGU Advances, a team of scientists set out the case for eight steps to make the United States a carbon-neutral country by 2050.

Not only that, but the price of achieving this 8-step plan is significantly lower than in past years. Jim Williams is an associate professor at the University of San Francisco and a co-author of the study. He tells Inverse that the cost of a full-scale climate transformation has gone down dramatically — perhaps surprising, given the ever-mounting toll climate change continues to exact as we let things get worse and worse.

In 2015, the cost looked to be “over $300 billion” Williams says. But just six years later, it has shrunk to “less than $150 billion.”

In other words, he says, “it costs half as much to achieve a much more difficult goal.”

Why it matters — Democrats are generally in favor of climate action, but there are serious disagreements within the party on how to move forward. West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, for example, is vehemently against the idea of a carbon tax — a key component of the Green New Deal — and instead called for an energy transition to occur in a “reasonable way.”

Manchin suggested tying climate legislation to infrastructure. He's in luck: according to Williams' study, fighting climate change through massive infrastructure projects is worth every cent.

The cost of doing nothing has remained sky high. According to a September 2020 study written by a task force for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a U.S financial regulator, climate change could wreck havoc on American financial systems. Climate and pollution-related damages could cost anywhere between “$50 trillion to $142 trillion,” and inaction could see $19.5 trillion worth of stranded assets by 2050.

Yet those damages hardly reflect the total cost of climate change. Warming temperatures affect nearly every aspect of society. There are health-related risks, from higher rates of allergies, depression, and cancer. There are the added costs of caring and housing climate-related refugees, whose numbers could rise as high a billion.

Digging into the details — Reaching a net-zero on emissions is a tall order, given the U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates, in 2019, the United States emitted 5.13 billion metric tons of energy-related carbon dioxide.

But Williams and his colleagues say their eight steps, if taken prior to 2030, could help dig us out of this hole.

Here are the eight steps:

Increase solar and wind capacity 3.5 times, to 500 gigawatts
Eliminate most electricity generation from coal
Maintain current natural gas generating capacity
Increase the share of clean vehicle sales to 50 percent
Increase the sale of building heat pumps by 50 percent
Make sure all new buildings and appliances meet strict energy efficiency rules
Serious research into carbon capture sequestration and carbon-neutral fuels
Build utilities infrastructure for carbon dioxide and hydrogen gas to be converted to electricity

Each of the eight steps relate to what the researchers describe as “four pillars of deep decarbonization.”

Energy efficiency
Decarbonized electricity
Electric vehicles (cars like Teslas, for example)
Carbon capture technologies

The authors explicitly link their proposed climate action to economic development, mirroring the jobs and prosperity promise of the Green New Deal. Margaret Torn, one of Williams' co-authors and a scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, said in a press statement accompanying the research:

“The decarbonization of the U.S. energy system is fundamentally an infrastructure transformation.”

An energy-efficient home in Oahu, Hawai. Kenneth Kelly, NREL

The team mapped their pathways to carbon neutral using projected scenarios from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and the U.S Energy Information Administration. These scenarios ranged from a world in which “no fossil fuels or nuclear power allowed by mid‐century,” to slower adoption of low‐carbon technologies.

The cost of these different scenarios varied, ranging from anywhere between 0.2 percent to 1.2 percent of the Gross Domestic Product of the United States. By 2050 this has been estimated to amount to more than $41 trillion.

Where do these lower costs come from?

“The main reason is that the cost of wind and solar power and batteries for electric vehicles have declined faster than expected,” Torn says in a press statement. Indeed, the price of solar energy has drastically dropped in the last decade. And electric vehicles have been taking advantage of cheaper battery prices.

The range accounts for the tradeoffs some of the study's pathways demand, according to the researchers. In a scenario where the entire United States is powered by solar, wind, and bioenergy, expenses would rise because of the cost of buying up all the land needed to build giant clean-energy farms.

The Net Power natural gas plant in La Porte, Texas. The plant captures its own carbon dioxide. Such technology will need to be invested in heavily, researchers say. NET Power

What we don't know — Spencer Nelson, a researcher at conservative energy advocacy group Clear Path, tells Inverse the study does a “good job of showing what is technically possible,” but the “practical feasibility of achieving any one of these pathways is extraordinarily difficult.”

History is, in some ways, on these researchers' side. In 2017, six energy efficiency initiatives resulted in a 20 percent reduction in energy use, according to Resources for the Future, a think-tank. With more carbon capture, biofuels, and electric fuels, the researchers say, the U.S. energy system could get to “net negative” — taking in more carbon dioxide than it puts out, and effectively removing 500 million metric tons of CO2 from the atmosphere each year.

“When you're trying to manage carbon emissions on this scale, you're going to need to have ways to capture carbon from point sources like power plants,” Nelson says.

“You're going to need opportunities to remove carbon from the air, and then you're going to have to have the ability to transport that carbon via pipelines, or even trains. And then you're going to have to have the ability to utilize that carbon for products or services or store it permanently underground.” Or, as some studies have suggested, underwater.

Carbon-capture technology of this kind is an unproven, technological fix for climate change that has many supporters, others have nothing but skepticism.

The “net negative” pathway, the one that removes 500 million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year, relied on carbon capture more than any other. It would have a net cost of 0.6 percent of the U.S. GDP in 2050, according to the study.

Building out solar panels could provide crucial infrastructure jobs. Shutterstock

What's next — The cost of doing anything is not nothing, but it may come with economic gain, these researchers say.

“All that infrastructure build equates to jobs, and potentially jobs in the U.S., as opposed to sending money overseas to buy oil from other countries,” Torn says.

There is an “inherent uncertainty” in these kinds of models, Nelson says. Predicting several years in the future is a difficult task at the best of times, especially during times of massive upheaval, like the Covid-19 pandemic, and political unrest.

The pressure is rising on the Biden Administration to take drastic action on the climate. In early February, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, Earl Blumenauer of Oregon, and Bernie Sanders, proposed a National Climate Emergency Act, which could give the president widespread powers by declaring a climate emergency.

The future is unwritten, but the eight steps outlined in this study offer a clear path forward, Williams says.

“We should make policy to drive the steps that we know are required now, while accelerating R&D and further developing our options for the choices we must make,” he says.

Abstract: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C points to the need for carbon neutrality by mid‐century. Achieving this in the United States in only 30 years will be challenging, and practical pathways detailing the technologies, infrastructure, costs, and tradeoffs involved are needed. Modeling the entire U.S. energy and industrial system with new analysis tools that capture synergies not represented in sector‐specific or integrated assessment models, we created multiple pathways to net zero and net negative CO₂ emissions by 2050. They met all forecast U.S. energy needs at a net cost of 0.2–1.2% of GDP in 2050, using only commercial or near‐commercial technologies, and requiring no early retirement of existing infrastructure. Pathways with constraints on consumer behavior, land use, biomass use, and technology choices (e.g., no nuclear) met the target but at higher cost. All pathways employed four basic strategies: energy efficiency, decarbonized electricity, electrification, and carbon capture. Least‐cost pathways were based on >80% wind and solar electricity plus thermal generation for reliability. A 100% renewable primary energy system was feasible but had higher cost and land use. We found multiple feasible options for supplying low‐carbon fuels for non‐electrifiable end uses in industry, freight, and aviation, which were not required in bulk until after 2035. In the next decade, the actions required in all pathways were similar: expand renewable capacity 3.5 fold, retire coal, maintain existing gas generating capacity, and increase electric vehicle and heat pump sales to >50% of market share. This study provides a playbook for carbon neutrality policy with concrete near‐term priorities.

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Climate Denialism, ‘Doom Porn’, Deflection And The New Climate War

The Age - Nick O'Malley

At the heart of the new book by one of the world’s most famous climate scientists, Michael Mann, is the assertion that climate change denialism is now a spent force and, instead, action is being hampered by distraction and what he calls “doom porn”.

Professor Mann asserts in The New Climate War that, with the impacts of climate change now obvious to those living through it, those fighting effective action are determined to deflect and delay rather than deny.

Michael Mann, distinguished professor of atmospheric science at Penn State University, speaks at the climate change science panel held by the Sydney Environmental Institute last year.

Proponents of deflection, he argues, range from the fossil fuel industry and their allies in the media across the political spectrum to purveyors of what he calls “doom porn”, who, in defiance of good science, preach that a climate cataclysm is inevitable and imminent.

Professor Mann, the distinguished professor of atmospheric science at Penn State University, began writing the book after a sabbatical spent in Sydney as the nation burnt.

Tony Abbott's climate denial prompted Barack Obama's Brisbane barbs

“Spending that time in Australia, I sort of started to feel like I was, you know, one of you. I really enjoyed my time there, and really bonded with people, I think in part, because we were all collectively experiencing these twin crises,” he says.

That sense lingered with him as he came to write the book over the coming months. “There were a lot of things that people could point to if you’re looking for reasons for pessimism, but, I actually saw reasons for cautious optimism.”

By midyear, Professor Mann believed that former US president Donald Trump would not win a second term, and that, in his absence, nations drawn to “waffling and recalcitrance” over climate change would lose an ally and an excuse. He says renewed climate action in China and a change of tone in Australia are evidence of this.

In Australia, he says he saw a nation abandon those who would argue against climate science, and he believes the new language of the Morrison government — that its preference is to hit net zero emissions by mid-century — to be evidence of that.

Since the US election, he says he has been happily surprised by the determination of the Biden administration to act on climate.

“I didn’t think that he would be quite as bold as he’s been. He’s really made climate one of the central issues that he’s focusing on in the first 100 days of his presidency at a time when we’re still fighting a global pandemic and dealing with issues of racial injustice.

“I underestimated the passion that Biden would embrace climate action going into the first year of his presidency.”

Professor Mann believes that the world has been subject to a deliberate misinformation campaign over climate change, exacerbated by an alliance in the US between the corporate right and the religious right that helped make climate an issue of the culture war rather than science.

He argues that Saudi Arabia and Russia have had an interest in fending off action on climate change and that this interest might have played into Russian support for both Brexit and the Trump election.

Denialism, he says, has been aided by conservative media.

“With Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, the Murdoch [media empire] has almost single-handedly prevented legislative action on climate in [the US] through massive disinformation campaigns,” he says.

Professor Mann has never been one to maintain an academic distance from the political fights of his field.

Source: Third Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

He was one of the authors of the “hockey stick graph”, that so bluntly demonstrated abrupt modern global warming, in the pages of an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report in 2001, prompting savage political blowback. Later, during the so-called Climategate controversy, his emails were among those hacked and selectively republished to support the disproved allegations that climate scientists were colluding to falsify their findings.

Today, Professor Mann argues, “inactivism” has become central to opposition to climate action. Inactivism can be seen both in doomism and deflection — the argument that individuals must take action rather than corporations or governments.

Despite this, given global youth activism, the will for change he perceived in Australia, the energy of Biden, the renewed action in China and the surprising determination of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson to have the upcoming Glasgow UN climate meeting succeed, Professor Mann writes that he remains “neither Pollyannaish, nor dour, but objectively hopeful” about the prospects for tacking the climate crisis.

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