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An Existential Threat

There is a good paper floating about the internet warning that society could collapse due to climate change-related disasters and conflict in the next 20 years or so. Not good. Furthermore, according to the authors, such a collapse has been deemed not just possible, but quite plausible should nations of the world fail to take meaningful action.

This policy paper, titled “Existential climate-related security risk: A scenario approach,” paints a scenario in which global social order breaks down after people fail to band together and address the causes and effects of climate change. And soon, like within the next twenty years. Food shortages emerge as supplies run low, financial systems buckle causing economies to collapse, sickness and disease kill people by the millions, and natural disasters ravage the land. Mass migrations of refugees from broken countries and ruined environments strain even the more resilient nations to the breaking point. Trade breaks down, nations stop co-operating with each other, and conflicts eventually break out, plunging the world into war, and possibly into darkness.

The authors, David Spratt and Ian Dunlop write, “This scenario provides a glimpse into a world of ‘outright chaos’ on a path to the end of human civilization and modern society as we have known it, in which the challenges to global security are simply overwhelming and political panic becomes the norm.” I highly recommend giving it a read using the above link to the PDF.

They present this scenario, carefully outlined in the paper, as a potential outcome for the world in the near future should things continue as they have been. They are hoping that such a dire prediction will prompt governments around the world to treat the climate crisis as a national security issue, one that represents a clear existential threat to humanity…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Fuel Poverty, the Cost of Living Crisis, and Climate Change: A Data Blog

February 9, 2022

Fuel Poverty, the Cost of Living Crisis, and Climate Change: A Data Blog

Finding solutions to immediate problems and our future needs requires some difficult decisions, and if not thought-out, short-term thinking might create contradictory responses.

Though often depoliticised by compartmentalising different problems, across society decisions on energy and the environment are innately tied to lifestyle and consumption. In looking at how we adapt to energy crises, or climate change, we have to focus on what relatively creates the greatest impact – nationally and globally.

There’s a big fuss at the moment about a ‘cost of living crisis’¹, and with it the expanding spectre of fuel poverty². It’s not possible to talk about either without connecting to energy and climate change. More importantly, this debate has traditionally ignored the ‘injustice’ behind the thoroughly unequal levels of consumption in Britain, and the world, and the deep connections this that has to both poverty and climate change.

Champagne, anyone?

There’s a graph I love to throw at people – called the ’Champagne Glass Graph’. It was first outlined in the United Nation’s Human Development Report³ in 1992. That work was updated in 2015 by Oxfam, as part of their ‘Extreme Carbon Inequality’⁴ report.

The United Nations, because it is made-up of nation states, is fixated by the ‘nation state’. But if you get rid of national boundaries, and just look at the lifestyle consumption of individuals, a clear trend emerges: Half of the carbon dioxide emissions are caused by just ten percent of the global population; and the bottom fifty percent of the global population only emit ten percent of the emissions.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Climate change will damage energy infrastructure, costing trillions

February 7, 2022

Climate change will damage energy infrastructure, costing trillions

Preface. Climate change and extreme weather will harm oil and gas exploration and production, electric power generation and increase energy demand due to sea level rise, heat, drought, floods, more storms, and blackouts. Extreme heat and drought will force electric power plants to shut down from lack of cooling water. Our continuing exponentially growing population will increase demand on our falling apart energy infrastructure. This report says that climate caused disasters are already costing billions of dollars, and in the future, trillions.

Climate change will makes blackouts and brownouts more common. It already is: Rising heat in the West has driven a steep increase in demand for air conditioning, bringing the electric grid down at times. As have wildfires. And as a preventive measure, utilities in California take the grid down for days if high winds are forecast, leaving millions in the dark. In Texas, an ice storm nearly blacked out the electric grid for months (Douglas 2021).

***

USDOE. July 2013. U.S. Energy Sector Vulnerabilities to Climate Change and Extreme Weather. U. S. Department of Energy.

Summary. Natural disasters and climate change are already affecting our ability to produce and deliver energy from oil, natural gas, coal. Climate change will make matters worse:

Energy infrastructure is at or past its lifetime yet expected to operate in ranges it wasn’t designed for.
Heat, drought, and floods reduce power output for both fossil fuel and renewable energy generation. Heat increases wildfires, which reduce power output
Energy infrastructure along the coast is at risk from sea level rise, increasing intensity of storms, and higher storm surge and flooding, potentially disrupting oil and gas production, refining, and distribution, as well as electricity generation and distribution. Sea level rise will flood roads and rail lines, halting receipt or delivery from ships at ports.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Scientists Conclude Dire Climate Change Models Were Wrong, Now What?

February 7, 2022

Scientists Conclude Dire Climate Change Models Were Wrong, Now What?

Scientists admit they did not model clouds accurately and that they need a supercomputer 1000 times more powerful to accurately do that.

Bryce Canyon National Park, Utah, image by Mish, quote by Judy Collins

Climate Change Modeling Meets Limits of Science

The Wall Street Journal reports Climate Scientists Encounter Limits of Computer Models, Bedeviling Policy.

That is a non-paywalled, free-to-read link courtesy of the WSJ.

It’s lengthy but an excellent read. I encourage everyone to take a look.

The dire predictions went out the window, seemingly unanimously. But there is plenty in the article for the fearmongers and the sceptics to both say “I told you so”.

Italic emphasis in the snips below is mine.

Introduction

For almost five years, an international consortium of scientists was chasing clouds, determined to solve a problem that bedeviled climate-change forecasts for a generation: How do these wisps of water vapor affect global warming?

They reworked 2.1 million lines of supercomputer code used to explore the future of climate change, adding more-intricate equations for clouds and hundreds of other improvements. They tested the equations, debugged them and tested again.

The scientists would find that even the best tools at hand can’t model climates with the sureness the world needs as rising temperatures impact almost every region.

Dire Forecasts Wrong

When they ran the updated simulation in 2018, the conclusion jolted them: Earth’s atmosphere was much more sensitive to greenhouse gases than decades of previous models had predicted, and future temperatures could be much higher than feared—perhaps even beyond hope of practical remedy.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Fact-Check: is more than 1.5°C of global warming already locked in?

February 4, 2022

Fact-Check: is more than 1.5°C of global warming already locked in?

Claim: The lag between CO₂ emissions and warming means ~0.7°C of warming is yet to come, and aerosols are masking another ~0.7°C, meaning warming of much more than 1.5°C or even 2°C is already locked in even if we stopped all emissions right now.

Reality: If emissions stopped, falling carbon dioxide levels due to natural carbon sinks would counteract the climate lag. Immediately stopping aerosol emissions would cause a warming boost of ~0.2-0.4°C, but a slower partial phase-out can reduce this and can be more than countered by also reducing methane emissions. This means that the responsibility for future warming lies with current rather than past actions.

This is the sixth post in a new climatetippingoints.info series fact-checking claims that various climate tipping points have been crossed, and that sudden catastrophic warming is now inevitable. See the Introduction post for an overview.

It is sometimes claimed (e.g. 1,2,3,4,5,6) that more than 1.5°C or even 2°C of global warming is already geophysically locked-in even if we immediately stopped all greenhouse gas emissions, and that this has been ignored or covered up by scientists.

This is often based on two assumptions: firstly, that the lag between when emissions happen and when warming catches up means ~0.7°C of warming is in the pipeline already; secondly, that another ~0.6-0.7°C masked by cooling aerosols will emerge as emissions fall.

On top of a high estimate of ~1.3-1.4°C of current warming it’s therefore been stated that ~2.7°C of warming is already locked in (and some claim even more), breaching the Paris Targets already and risking triggering extra catastrophic feedbacks.

It’s also sometimes claimed that the planet is already beyond a specific threshold in CO₂ concentrations (e.g. 450–500 ppm CO₂e) beyond which more than 2°C of warming becomes inevitable.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How Bad is Pollution Loading?

February 3, 2022

How Bad is Pollution Loading?

Many people tend to forget about pollution loading as a predicament. After all, the primary focus often has more to do with more immediate concerns such as climate change, energy and resource decline (the REAL reason behind supply chain woes), disease, and other issues seen as being more important. However, when one takes into consideration how pollution loading affects the ability of animals to reproduce and the diseases they will suffer, one begins to see a more clear threat. Up until just recently, pollution loading (labeled Novel Entities on the nine-category planetary boundary scale) was not actually one of the boundaries which had been breached as it remained unquantified, but this month that changed. This leaves two unquantified sections; one part of Biosphere Integrity and Atmospheric Aerosol Loading. This article goes into the details and this study is what it is based upon.

As one can clearly see from the Pollution Loading file (link above in first sentence of article), we’ve been in dangerous territory for a considerably long time. Science has finally caught up to the reality.

There are some people who think that as energy and resource decline continues, pollution loading will be reduced. They might be correct – eventually – although this is debatable. The lag effect means that pollution loading (like climate change and many other predicaments caused by ecological overshoot such as population growth) will not be reduced for quite some time after manufacturing and/or economic growth begins to seriously be reduced. Wood burning is actually more polluting than burning coal in many respects, and wildfires and burning homes and other buildings is set to increase. As fewer people will be able to afford fossil fuels, they will resort to burning whatever is available for warmth and cooking and for making water potable by boiling…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Fossil fuels vs climate action: A not-so-hidden dilemma

February 3, 2022

Fossil fuels vs climate action: A not-so-hidden dilemma

When crossing the ocean by sea or by air small differences in the direction you take will result in huge differences in your ultimate destination. Back in the middle of the last century, human society might have made relatively minor adjustments in its trajectory, say, in the growth of consumption of resources including energy, even perhaps deciding that these must level off at some point in the future.

We humans made no such adjustments and so we now find ourselves faced with only draconian choices. But we do not seem to understand that we’ve arrived at a destination far from the one we imagined in 1950. An example is the celebration in the environmental community of a recent federal court decision to invalidate oil and gas leases offered by the U.S. government on 80 million acres of the Gulf of Mexico. (It turns out that oil and gas companies only bid on 1.7 million of those acres.)

The ostensible reason for invalidating the leases was that the government did not adequately consider the effect of the leases on climate change. The government could do another evaluation and try selling the leases again. But environmental organizations would likely challenge the leases in court again.

While the effects of climate change are already severe and likely to become even more so, global human society is utterly dependent on uninterrupted flows of fossil fuels to function. And, while climate change activists continue to champion a so-called energy transition to green energy sources such as solar and wind, what they might not understand is that so far, these alternatives have been used to augment human energy consumption. They have not displaced fossil fuels at all. Nor are they likely to in any time frame that matters.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Scientists warn of widespread drought in the 21st century

February 1, 2022

Scientists warn of widespread drought in the 21st century

Scientists sound alarm over widespread drought in the 21st century — Frequency changes (%) of different drought metrics from 1970–99 to 2070–99 under the (left) SSP2-4.5 and (right) SSP5-8.5 scenarios projected by CMIP6 multimodel ensemble mean. Credit: IAP

Drought is among the most damaging natural hazards in the world, often causing severe losses to agriculture, ecosystems and human societies.

Historical records of precipitation, streamflow and observation-derived drought indices all show increased aridity since 1950s over several hotspot regions, including Africa, southern Europe, East Asia, eastern Australia, Northwest Canada, and southern Brazil.

“Climate model projections also suggest that drought may become more severe and widespread as the greenhouse gas-induced global warming continues in the 21st century,” said Prof. Zhao Tianbao from the Institute of Atmospheric Physics (IAP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Recently, Zhao and Prof. Dai Aiguo from University at Albany, State University of New York, further investigated hydroclimatic and drought changes in the latest projections from 25 models of the Phase Six of the Coupled Model Inetercomparison Project (CMIP6).

Their results were published in the Journal of Climate on Jan. 5.

The study suggests that the latest projections from CMIP6 models reaffirm the widespread drying and increases in agricultural drought by up to 200 percent over most of the Americas (including the Amazon), Europe and the Mediterranean region, southern Africa, Southeast Asia, and Australia under moderate-high emissions scenarios in the 21st century.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, the drought is also expected to last longer and spread wider in the late 21st century (2070–99), Zhao noted.

The model results suggest a decrease in the mean and flattening of the probability distribution functions of drought metrics, despite large uncertainties in individual projections partly due to internal variability.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

‘Fuel Poverty, the Cost of Living Crisis, and Climate Change’ – A Data Blog

February 1, 2022

‘Fuel Poverty, the Cost of Living Crisis, and Climate Change’ – A Data Blog

Finding solutions to immediate problems and our future needs requires some difficult decisions, and if not thought-out, short-term thinking might create contradictory responses.

This is a film of my latest ‘data blog’: Ripping apart the statistics on energy, carbon emissions, and consumption, and finding that there’s a fundamental problem with the may politics and the media are debating both energy prices, and tackling climate change.

In this analysis, using recent research and statistics on consumption in the UK, I show how those most directly responsible for climate change are the most affluent 10% or so – both globally, but even on the most affluent nations consumption there is still dominated by the top 10% of the most affluent consumers.

While politics and the media refuse to engage with this reality – and dare I say, many environmentalists who represent a far more affluent demographic than average – then there will be no solution to climate change. For without a core of global and national equity and solidarity, where those which the biggest footprint take the largest reductions, we will not be able to create the conditions where the majority of the population can have confidence that the ‘costs’ of climate adaptation are being borne equally by all.

To view the text/download the data blog, as well as the audio podcast, go to the web page for this post:http://www.fraw.org.uk/blog/posts/019…

It would really help to promote this work if you could follow, subscribe, or like my social media presence — which can be accessed from the link above. In today’s digital analytics popularity contest, all that button-pressing means something in this messed-up world.

#ClimateCrisis #FuelPrices #poverty

Climate Change Is Pushing Greenland Over the Edge

January 31, 2022

Detail of the Jakobshavn Glacier also knows as Ilulissat glacier in Greenland

Whether the ice cap in western Greenland grows or shrinks depends on a balance between snow accumulation and melting. In the past, warm periods increased snowfall which caused it to grow. Today, melting is winning. Photo by Ruben Ramos/Alamy Stock Photo

Climate Change Is Pushing Greenland Over the Edge

New data from Greenland shows that modern warming is outpacing even historically warm eras like the Medieval Warm Period.

Matthew Osman stands atop an ice cap in western Greenland looking out over the Nuussuaq Peninsula. In the distance and more than 2,000 meters below, the village of Ilulissat is a tiny speck in the vast expanse of snow and ice. As Osman steps into the snow, he sinks into a crevasse up to his thigh. Carefully easing his way out, he’s reminded of the hazards of working on ice. Like others who have ventured to drill into Greenland’s ice, Osman and his colleagues are braving the dangers to search for clues as to how the climate has changed in the past, and, by extension, how it may change in the future. What they’ve found is an unexpected sign of just how acute ongoing climate change really is.

The research team led by Osman, a geoscientist at the University of Arizona, came to Greenland to extract a 140-meter-long ice core. This core stretches nearly to bedrock and, in the gases and chemicals housed within, holds evidence of climate change over the past 2,000 years. Their analysis of the core shows that in this place during the Medieval Warm Period, a roughly 400-year phase of higher global temperatures around 1,000 years ago, the ice was growing thicker and advancing—the opposite of what it’s doing today.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Degrowth economy: The climate solution no one is talking about

January 31, 2022

Degrowth economy: The climate solution no one is talking about

For all the talk of renewable energy, electric vehicles and plant-based diets, there’s a gaping hole in the way we’re trying to solve accelerating climate change. We will not stay below 2°C of warming while pursuing economic growth — yet barely anyone talks about it.

Since the end of World War II, Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth has been the metric of human prosperity in Western nations, the idea being that if the productivity of the economy increases so will the wellbeing of the people within that economy. And for a while, that was the case. But since the 1970s, increases in GDP have, on average, failed to translate into increases in wellbeing and happiness.

It is not surprising. Research has shown that once a certain GDP threshold, or level of wellbeing, has been met people gain little from consuming more “stuff” — a necessary requirement for continuous GDP growth.

Robert F Kennedy eloquently summed up the inadequacy of GDP as a metric of wellbeing at a speech he gave in 1968:

…the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

West accused of ‘climate hypocrisy’ as emissions dwarf those of poor countries

January 30, 2022

West accused of ‘climate hypocrisy’ as emissions dwarf those of poor countries

Average Briton produces more carbon in two days than Congolese person does in entire year, study finds

The Democratic Republic of Congo and London, UK. The Center for Global Development study highlights the energy inequality between rich and poor countries. Photograph: Getty/AFP

In the first two days of January, the average Briton was already responsible for more carbon dioxide emissions than someone from the Democratic Republic of the Congo would produce in an entire year, according to analysis by the Center for Global Development (CGD).

The study, which highlights the “vast energy inequality” between rich and poor countries, found that each Briton produces 200 times the climate emissions of the average Congolese person, with people in the US producing 585 times as much. By the end of January, the carbon emitted by someone living in the UK will surpass the annual emissions of citizens of 30 low- and middle-income countries, it found.

Euan Ritchie, a policy analyst at CGD Europe, said his work was prompted by the “climate hypocrisy” of western countries, including the UK and the US, that have pledged to stop aid funding to fossil fuel projects in developing states.

“At Cop26 there was lots of hand-wringing by rich countries about the extent to which aid and other development finance should finance fossil fuels in poorer countries,” said Ritchie. “The hypocrisy of this caught my attention.”

“Our analysis shows that in just a few days, the average person in the UK produces more climate emissions than people in many low-income countries do in an entire year. It would be a cruel irony if the countries that have least contributed to this problem won’t be able to have access to energy infrastructure.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Callling a Super Bubble: Front Row With Jeremy Grantham

January 30, 2022

Callling a Super Bubble: Front Row With Jeremy Grantham

The Demise of Hopium

January 30, 2022

The Demise of Hopium

Hopium (n)

Irrational or unwarranted optimism. [YourDictionary.Com]
That deranged condition in which a person is deluded into thinking humanity will survive omnicide. [DoomforDummies.blogspot.com]

I am not here to re-litigate the inevitability of the near-term collapse of global industrial civilization and the obvious consequence that billions of humans will suffer terribly as a result. Collapse is the endpoint of overshoot and overpopulation and it has already begun. While the speed of this collapse may be altered by various projects, plans and efforts, the end result will not change. Exponential growth on a finite planet is unsustainable, period. (If you need a reminder of what’s coming, review this article.)

Hopium pervades the climate change and environmental movements. It festers in every green industry, boils in the rhetorical language of world bodies like the UN and IPCC, is demanded in academic journal articles and grants, and lands like a heavy-handed thud as a tool of suppression by the media and popular authors. Hopium is a psychoactive medication, an addiction, a coping mechanism and a group therapy session. Hopium offers escape from the nightmarish reality the planet is plummeting towards. Hopium is a delusional distraction, fostered by mass media, politicians and academics. And hopium is harming us by creating more suffering and restricting free choice.

The rhetorical catalog for hopium includes the use of a phrase like “we need to …” or “we must …” or “if we don’t …”. These phrases divide humanity into “we” (good) and “others” (bad). The point is to identify a goal or policy that if achieved will mitigate collapse, a group who are willing to pursue the goal and a group who are obstructing the goal. Implicit in all such rhetoric is the belief that mitigating collapse is possible…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Reply to Fthenakis et al. Comment on “Seibert, M.K.; Rees, W.E. Through the Eye of a Needle: An Eco-Heterodox Perspective on the Renewable Energy Transition. Energies 2021, 14, 4508”

January 29, 2022

Reply to Fthenakis et al. Comment on “Seibert, M.K.; Rees, W.E. Through the Eye of a Needle: An Eco-Heterodox Perspective on the Renewable Energy Transition. Energies 2021, 14, 4508”

As many of the criticisms in this rebuttal echo those in the earlier Diesendorf rebuttal, to which we thoroughly responded, we direct Fthenakis et al., to that lengthy response.

That said, we do feel compelled to make a few additional comments on specific faults in this rebuttal.

To begin with, Fthenakis et al., do not seem to have read our paper. Most importantly, they ignore our opening argument that the climate/energy debate must be framed within the real-world context of ecological overshoot [1]. Overshoot means that modern techno-industrial (MTI) society is on a fatal course driven by overconsumption and overpopulation (Figure 1). The authors simply restate the case—which we called out as flawed—for 100% so-called renewable energy (RE) as a means of sustaining the unsustainable status quo. This runs the debate right off the rails.

In their defense of so-called RE, Fthenakis et al., accuse us of unscientifically cherry-picking data to support our “opinion”, of citing “known climate change deniers”, of citing sources while not agreeing with the conclusions of their authors, of not being critical of fossil fuels (FF), and, worst of all, of being unethical. Of course we refer mainly to studies that refute many of our critics’ assertions and support our perspective. Is this not the same approach they and others in the modern renewables camp also use? Our critics’ base resort to ad hominem attacks is regrettable. Not only that, but some of these attacks are flat-out untruths. Ozzie Zehner cannot, by any stretch of the imagination, be construed as a climate denier…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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