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With 1.5°C Goal ‘Currently Not Plausible,’ Study Calls for Focus on Deep Social Change

February 9, 2023

Scientists at the University of Hamburg in Germany argued Wednesday that meeting the 2015 Paris climate agreement’s goal of limiting planetary heating to 1.5°C is “currently not plausible”—but warned that despairing over climate “tipping points” risks taking attention away from “the best hope for shaping a positive climate future… the ability of society to make fundamental changes.”

The Hamburg Climate Futures Outlook assessed the planetary impacts of several “physical processes that are frequently discussed as tipping points.” These include the melting of sea ice in the Arctic and glaciers at the North and South Poles; the weakening of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), the system of ocean currents that carries warm water upward into the North Atlantic; and “dieback” in the Amazon rainforest, in which rising temperatures would dry out trees and eventually change the forest landscape into a savanna, releasing billions of tons of stored carbon.

Those scenarios “are serious developments,” said researchers at the university, but the melting of ice “will have very little influence on the global temperature until 2050.” The weakening of AMOC and Amazon dieback will have a “moderately” greater influence on global temperatures.

“Human agency has a large potential to shape the way climate futures will evolve.”

“By extrapolating current trends,” reads the study, “permafrost thaw and Amazon Forest dieback are expected to release somewhat more than one year’s worth of today’s anthropogenic CO2 emissions between now and 2050. Thus, the contributions of these two processes to the remaining carbon budget are small…

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Social tipping points of the 2020s

May 26, 2022

Social tipping points of the 2020s

Anyone who reads the news and walks the earth with open eyes sees that in this day and age “all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.” But we are only at the beginning of epochal changes. Our ecosystem and socio-economic system are already flickering and it’s not hard to see that the 2020s are going to be a rough ride.

In the following I wand to look at some social tipping points that are likely to trigger societal change in the years to come. I do not use the term social tipping point here in a scientific-mathematical way, but as a conceptual metaphor for a point that triggers a rapid qualitative regime shift in a socioeconomic system, such as a shift from democracy to authoritarian rule. Of course, it is impossible to predict the future, but I see four social tipping points for developing and developed countries as a plausible unfolding of events in the coming years. The four social tipping points are: climate protests, food riots, fuel riots, and inflation unrest.

Climate protests

For many, climate protests that cause social tipping points are the only hope to generate sufficient political mobilization to avert catastrophic climate change. Research on critical mass for social change has shown that the opinion of the majority can be tipped by a committed minority of about 25%. Since the launch of Fridays for Future in 2018, a number of climate protest movements have emerged, including Scientist Rebellion, Extinction Rebellion and Last Generation (Letzte Generation – a German-Austrian movement). For the time being these movements are mainly a Western phenomenon and are still far from reaching a critical threshold of 25% of the national population, let alone the world population…

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

Have tipping points already been passed for critical climate systems? (5) Coral Reefs: A death spiral

January 29, 2022

Have tipping points already been passed for critical climate systems? (5) Coral Reefs: A death spiral

Great Barrier Reef bleaching 2016

Ecosystems, including coral reefs, mangroves and kelp forests in Australia, are degrading fast as the world’s sixth mass extinction gathers pace.Coral polyps are invertebrates similar to minute jellyfish, which build limestone structures, and live in a symbiotic relationship with algae-like unicellular zooxanthellae that reside within the coral structure, and give it colour. The coral provides the algae with a protected environment and compounds they need for photosynthesis. In return, zooxanthellae supply the coral with oxygen, glucose, glycerol, and amino acids, which are the products of photosynthesis.

Corals survive within a narrow water temperature band, and suffer heat stress and expel zooxanthellae if the ocean temperature gets too high. Bleaching events vary in intensity; in the extreme case, all zooxanthellae are expelled and the living colony will appear totally white (hence “bleaching”). As elevated sea temperatures persist, coral mortality rates increase: corals may recover, if there are any zooxanthellae left in their tissues, but if not death appears to be inevitable.

The bottom line: If severe bleaching events occur regularly at shorter than 10–15 year intervals, then reefs face a death spiral of coral mortality followed by inadequate recovery periods. And that is what is happening now. Along Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, the frequency of mass bleaching is increasing, with events occurring in 1998, 2002, 2016, 2017 and 2020. The 2016-17 events severely bleached half the reef, whose extent has been reduced by three-quarters over the last 40 years. Coral reproduction on the Great Barrier Reef has fallen 89% after repeated recent bleachings.

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

Climate tipping points: The Arctic is a Bellwether for Irreversible Change

December 7, 2021

Climate tipping points: The Arctic is a Bellwether for Irreversible Change

“The Arctic is iconic for maintaining year-round ice and snow, but in the last decade, it has begun to transition to wetlands and open ocean. Emblematic of this change, in July 2020, the last intact ice shelf in the Canadian Arctic fell into the sea. Since first analyzed in 1902, the Milne ice sheet already lost 43 percent of its previous mass. Canada’s Ellesmere Island ice caps were also lost in the summer of 2020, as the ice deposited during the Little Ice Age (1600 to 1850) melted completely. Glacier melt, thawing permafrost and wetland expansion create a new landscape, changing ecosystems as well as altering the global atmosphere and ocean circulation.”

“The term “tipping point” is often applied to a moment of critical change in human history. In ecology, tipping points describe small changes that, over time, force an irreversible change. Yearly lows of sea ice and a startling increase in permafrost thaw in a warming climate signal that the tipping point has already been crossed. We have already lost the frozen Arctic.”
Small tipping points expand through ecosystems

“As ice and snow are lost, the warming climate makes it difficult to recover. Sea ice that is only a few months old covers gaps in the Arctic Ocean, with yearly loss of old ice greater than the annual gain. In 2019, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reported that just 1 percent of the Arctic Ocean ice older than four years old remained. A warming atmosphere and sea prevent ice growth, leading to an ice-free Arctic Ocean.”
Climate tipping points: The Arctic is a bellwether for irreversible change

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

Cognitive Dissonance and Outright Lies at the Edge of Extinction

August 22, 2021

Cognitive Dissonance and Outright Lies at the Edge of Extinction

In recent weeks and months I have been amazed at the general public and most scientists ability to ignore the blatant evidence that we are in early stage, non-linear runaway warming. From individual activists, to the donation soaked and addicted corporate NGO’s, who are literally dependent on “Business as Usual” to maintain their cash flows, they ignore the elephant in the room, squandering vital time to prepare for the already unfolding collapse.
On an individual basis the decision to deny the severity of the situation is up to each persons conscience and/or courage to accept the predicament we find ourselves in but when it comes to research universities and their tenured scientists, governments and the large NGO’s it’s a ‘Dereliction of Duty’ for them not to be ‘completely frank’. That for me is abject dishonesty, especially toward the youth. I’ve previously singled out Dr Michael E Mann, the corporate media’s ‘Go To Mann’, for this dishonesty.

Below I will lay out just a few examples showing that we are in the runaway phase of this extinction event.
This fire season alone, “Australia’s wildfires have destroyed more than a fifth of the country’s forests, making the blazes “globally unprecedented” following a years-long drought linked to climate change, researchers said Monday.” Bushfires burned a fifth of Australia’s forest: Bushfires burned a fifth of Australia’s forest: study Remember this is not an El Nino year, the next El Nino, if we have one, will be brutal and will put this event on steroids. The double feedback from these fires is that the forests were formerly carbon sinks so that has been lost and all the carbon that has ben released will accentuate the predicament.

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

How to Save the World in 15 YearsPart One

August 12, 2021

How to Save the World in 15 Years Part One

Smoke spumes out of a power station chimney. Photo: Stephen Foster/Alamy

As the IPCC issues its direst warnings yet about an inevitable rise in global warming into the 1.5C danger zone, Nafeez Ahmed proposes a better way out of its dystopian vision

All five scenarios in the new report by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), published this month, show the planet on track to breach the 1.5 degrees Celsius ‘safe limit’ for global warming within the next 20 years. Only one scenario, involving ambitious reductions of carbon emissions to net zero as well as a further withdrawal of the carbon already in the atmosphere, would see global average temperatures eventually dropping back down to 1.4C by the end of the century.

This is the direst warning ever received from an IPCC report, agreed by 195 countries, and it suggests that, on our current course, the climate danger zone is now unavoidable.

Even with the most dramatic emissions reductions possible, the Earth is about to enter a 1.5C world and set to stay within a 1.5-1.4C range for much of the century. Our best hope, in this scenario, is to be in a position to cool the planet while we are in the danger zone.

This suggests that the Paris Agreement, premised on the goal of reducing carbon emissions to net zero by 2050 to avoid dangerous climate change, is too little, too late. Further underlying the IPCC’s scenarios is the assumption that 1.4C will be significantly different to 1.5C. But there is mounting evidence that, due to the complexities of the Earth’s system, 1.4C will not be meaningfully safer.

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

Earth tipping points could destabilize each other in domino effect: Study

June 29, 2021

Earth tipping points could destabilize each other in domino effect: Study

A new risk analysis has found that the tipping points of five of Earth’s subsystems — the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, the Greenland Ice Sheet, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and the Amazon rainforest — could interact with each other in a destabilizing manner.
It suggests that these changes could occur even before temperatures reach 2°C (3.6°F) above pre-industrial levels, which is the upper limit of the Paris Agreement.
The interactions between the different tipping elements could also lower critical temperature thresholds, essentially allowing tipping cascades to occur earlier than expected, according to the research.
Experts not involved in the study say the findings are a significant contribution to the field, but do not adequately address the timescales over which these changes could occur.

When the first tile in a line of dominoes tips forward, it affects everything in front of it. One after another, lined-up dominoes knock into each other and topple. This is essentially what could happen to ice sheets, ocean currents and even the Amazon biome if critical tipping points are crossed, according to a new risk analysis. The destabilization of one element could impact the others, creating a domino effect of drastic changes that could move the Earth into an unfamiliar state — one potentially dangerous to the future of humanity and nature as we know it.

The study, published this month in Earth System Dynamics, examines the interactions between five subsystems that are known to have vital thresholds, or tipping points, that could trigger irreversible changes. They include the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, the Greenland Ice Sheet, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and the Amazon Rainforest.

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

The Anthropocene

June 28, 2021

The Anthropocene

Is Earth’s climate about to pass the tipping point?

May 9, 2021

Is Earth’s climate about to pass the tipping point?

Ed. note: This article first appeared in Spanish here. This is an interview with an expert (Ferran Puig Vilar) and award-winning author of a climate blog on tipping points. Photo credit: Ferran Puig Vilar. CEDIDA POR EL ENTREVISTADO

The straw that breaks the camel’s back. The last time the axe hits the tree before it falls. The last profitable barrel to be extracted from an oil well. There are many examples of Tipping points (TP). Although tipping points and points of no return are the buzzwords of our times, we should probably be using them more than we are.

A range of studies have long indicated that attention should be paid to the effects of climate change on subsystems such as the Amazon, Greenland ice or permafrost. These effects have been debated for more than 20 years. Since then, thousands of pages have been written describing their interrelationships, warning of a coming disaster. As in this article published in Nature by key figures in climate science, or this article published in National Geographic. However, despite the seriousness of the issue, mainstream media silence remains thunderous. We can even hear climate change deniers on prime time TV.

We ask engineer and climate journalist Ferran Puig Vilar, who is publishing a special report on tipping points, and has been doing amazing work on climate education in his prestigious, prize-winning blog for more than a decade:

What is a climate tipping point?

It is an inflection point in the equilibrium of a significant element or subsystem (permafrost, Amazon, thermohaline current, Greenland) whose overshoot destabilizes it and generates a phase change, bringing the system to a new state that may – or may not – be one of equilibrium. There are 15 specified, 9 of which are in the degradation phase or have already been passed. They interrelate with each other causing knock-on effects.

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

Abrupt Impacts of Climate Change

May 25, 2020

Abrupt Impacts of Climate Change

Preface. This is a summary of the National Research Council 2013 study of abrupt changes of climate change.

Related:

2019-12-6. Research reveals past rapid Antarctic ice loss due to ocean warming. “…the sensitive West Antarctic Ice Sheet collapsed during a warming period just over a million years ago when atmospheric carbon dioxide levels were lower than today.”

2015-8-5. The Point of No Return: Climate Change Nightmares Are Already Here. The worst predicted impacts of climate change are starting to happen — and much faster than climate scientists expected. Rolling Stone.

***

NRC. 2013. Abrupt Impacts of Climate Change: Anticipating surprises. National Research Council, National Academies of Sciences press.

“Abrupt climate change is generally defined as occurring when some part of the climate system passes a threshold or tipping point resulting in a rapid change that produces a new state lasting decades or longer (Alley et al., 2003). In this case “rapid” refers to timelines of a few years to decades.

“Abrupt climate change can occur on a regional, continental, hemispheric, or even global basis. Even a gradual forcing of a system with naturally occurring and chaotic variability can cause some part of the system to cross a threshold, triggering an abrupt change. Therefore, it is likely that gradual or monotonic forcings increase the probability of an abrupt change occurring.

Climate is changing, forced out of the range of the last million years by levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases not seen in Earth’s atmosphere for a very long time.

It is clear that the planet will be warmer, sea level will rise, and patterns of rainfall will change. But the future is also partly uncertain—there is considerable uncertainty about how we will arrive at that different climate.

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

Climate Crisis is Upon Us

October 15, 2018

Climate Crisis is Upon Us

One of the more useful allusions hidden in plain sight in the recent IPCC / UN report on climate crisis is the distinction between the pre-industrial and industrial ages that defines the era of climate crisis. Industrial capitalism, a/k/a capitalism, is the cause of climate crisis. Plenty of pseudo-scientific rubbish about human caused and Anthropocene can be found in the report’s text. But industry— the integration of science and technology in capitalist production, is identified as the cause. No longer are goat herders in Turkmenistan as responsible as the executives of Exxon-Mobil for the unfolding debacle.

The report is striking in its urgency. Feedback loops and tipping points contradict any straight-line assurances of an orderly and knowable path forward. Behind pages of stark calculations can be found Gaia, the unknowable relations of Mother Earth that make a mockery of scientific certainty beyond the understanding that the environment of the planet is being destroyed and needs to be fixed. Missing is any semblance of a political program to move resolution forward. But also missing is the usual subtext of technocrats meeting in swank hotels to eat four-star meals, swap resumes and network. The stakes are now apparently too high.

Identification of the industrial age— capitalism, as the cause of climate crisis brings with it a host of related revelations. Capitalist wealth becomes a crude measure of its reciprocal in environmental devastation. The relation of wealth to political power makes timely and / or peaceful resolution improbable. Capitalist accumulation will hereafter be a measure of informed socio-pathology. The writing is on the wall. The American political ‘choice’ between the wealthy or their technocratic servants is a formula for environmental annihilation. The system crisis is a metaphor for the political crisis that makes resolution so intractable.

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

‘Tipping Point’: These Charts Show Some of The Worst Currencies Of 2018

September 1, 2018

‘Tipping Point’: These Charts Show Some of The Worst Currencies Of 2018

Foreign currencies – especially the Emerging Markets – are having one of their worst years on record.

And investor anxieties aren’t easing up. . .

I wrote two weeks ago about the strong dollar and the chaos it’s creating for the Emerging Markets. But many don’t realize just how bad things have gotten. And it’s all thanks to the Federal Reserve’s tightening and quantitative tightening.

For starters, let’s just take a look at some of the worse performing currencies this year. . .

First – The Turkish Lira

I wrote a very bearish assessment of Turkey and their currency – the Lira – back in early March.

And since then, the crisis in Turkey has dominated the news stream.

A big reason for Turkey’s currency crisis stems from the fact that their external debt burden has soared over the last few years. This means that Turkey borrowed significant amounts of U.S. dollar denominated debts (and euros).

Remember: when the dollar gets stronger – and when the Federal Reserve raises rates – the external debt burden gets harder to service.

And because the country has had a plaguing inflation problem over the last couple of years – this caused the Lira to slowly depreciate on foreign exchange markets.

But due to the U.S. dollar’s shocking rally since March 2018, the Lira really started to collapse. For instance, more than a third of its value got wiped out in just the last 30 days.

Making matters worse – the Turkish Central Bank Deputy Governor is rumored to resign. And Moody’s just downgraded the credit ratings of 20 Turkish financial institutions – such as banks.

Turkey’s increasingly fragile economy and currency signals that things are still far from over. . .

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

Trump’s Trade Tantrum: On Tipping Points and Authoritarian Peril

June 29, 2018

Trump’s Trade Tantrum: On Tipping Points and Authoritarian Peril

Photo by Graham C99 | CC BY 2.0

The Tangerine Tosser’s triple trade tiff – with China, the European Union, and the United States’ NAFTA partners (Canada and Mexico) – has the potential to spark an American and global economic meltdown. Classic signs of a coming collapse have been evident for some time: wage stagnation for the many alongside skyrocketing wealth for the ever more absurdly opulent few (three of whom now possessbetween them the same net worth as the poorest half of the U.S. populace); colossal accumulated corporate, government, student loan, and credit card debt; rampant surplus and “fictitious” capital devoted to speculative rather than productive investment; capitalist profits far beyond real economic growth; wildly unsustainable stock market values (artificially buoyed by debt and corporate buybacks); the deregulation of financial markets and institutions.

As the astute Goldman Sachs veteran and financial commentator Nomi Prins noted last January, “There will be a tipping point – when money coming in to furnish that debt, or available to borrow, simply won’t cover the interest payments. Then debt bubbles will pop, beginning with higher yielding bonds. Leverage is a patient enemy.”

The next financial “correction” could cut deeper than the last one, “the Great Recession.” That’s because, as Prins argues in her latest book Collusion: How Central Bankers Rigged the World, “there is no Plan B” this time. Interest rates can’t fall any further.

Collusionwas written before Trump started making good on his protectionist promises, which could tighten the noose. The more immediate economic blowbacks are clear: the withering of foreign markets for U.S. agricultural exports (thanks to retaliatory foreign tariffs); rising prices (thanks to U.S. tariffs) for capital goods and intermediate inputs that U.S. producers purchase from foreign countries (China especially); the loss of U.S. jobs as corporations that make goods in the U.S. seek to circumvent retaliatory tariffs abroad by shifting production to foreign countries (Harley Davidson recently announced that it has decided to do precisely that).

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

The Current Onset of Climate Tipping Points

March 7, 2018

The Current Onset of Climate Tipping Points

As is well known to students of the history of the climate, once a temperature threshold is breached, abrupt weather events ensue amplified by feedbacks such as decreased reflectivity of the Earth surface and enhanced release of greenhouse gases, often within short time frames.

Figure 1. 1880-2018 annual mean temperatures and 5-years smoothing.

Such abrupt changes are occurring at present. As mean global temperature has exceeded 1.2 degrees Celsius above 1880 temperatures (Figure 1), sharp reductions occur in Arctic sea ice from 45 percent in 1985 to 21 percent in 2017[i], when the ice cover was 8.5 percent lower than the average of 1981-2010[ii].

As the ice melts the near-total reflection (high albedo) of solar radiation from the ice is replaced by absorption of infrared radiation by open water; The flow of ice-melt water from the Greenland glaciers creates a large pool of cold water in the North Atlantic Ocean. The cold water region south of Greenland slows-down to aborts northward flow of the thermohaline Atlantic Meridional Ocean Circulation (AMOC), leading to cooling of the North Atlantic and adjacent North America and Europe[iii].

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

The Tale of Two America’s…Urban Rise, Rural Demise, Rationale to Hyper-Monetize

October 9, 2017

The Tale of Two America’s…Urban Rise, Rural Demise, Rationale to Hyper-Monetize

(The following was written as an outline for a potential book. To this point no publisher has shown interest and time and funds have run out.)

America is in the midst of an ongoing and accelerating shift in demographics and population growth. These trends, long in place, are at a tipping point that are simultaneously driving urban economic growth (plus associated asset bubbles) and rural economic declines (plus associated asset collapses). The spin up and spin down are mutually interconnected, the result of movement in a zero sum game. But for select regions (and rural America in general), there is a surging quantity of sellers and a dwindling quantity and quality of buyers that will result in the primary asset of most Americans, their home, transitioning from an asset to an outright liability.

Many will point to record stock market valuations as an indicator of positive economic and/or business activity to refute my claims. Instead, I argue it is the Federal Reserve and federal government policies, in place as a quasi “life support” for the negatively affected regions and rural America at large, that are driving the asset valuation explosions of equities (chart below, representing all stocks publicly traded in the US) and urban housing. I will outline why the situation in the affected regions will only get worse and thus the Fed believes its hands are tied. Why any amount of normalization will only induce localized collapses across much of the nation. The total market capitalization ($ value) of the Wilshire has nearly doubled the acknowledged “bubbles” of 2000 and 2008 and is likely to continue rising further, precisely due to the worsening issues I detail below.

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

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