Why are so many climate scientists so scared and so angry?
Maybe it's because they know better than most of us how bad our situation today truly is, and how horribly we've been betrayed by our so-called leaders.
Here's an excerpt from an excellent piece on this subject by Alan Urban...
Even if the planet stopped getting warmer right now, we would still be in big trouble. The ice caps would keep melting and sea levels would keep rising.
Look at what’s happening at a mere 1.2°C of warming. We’re already seeing some of the worst heat waves in human history, not to mention record-breaking floods, droughts, wildfires, and water shortages.
But of course, warming isn’t going to stop at 1.2°C. Because of the heat we’ve already trapped in the atmosphere, and because we continue to emit huge amounts of greenhouse gases every year, the climate is warming exponentially.
All of these climate-related crises are stretching farms to the limit, yet this is just the beginning. As crop yields decline and the population grows, we will see food insecurity get worse and worse until we’re in a global famine.
And that right there is why climate scientists are scared. They understand that human civilization was born during the Holocene, when global temperatures were very stable and stayed within a range of about 1°C.
As we push the planet out of that range and raise the temperature about 50 times faster than would occur naturally, it will become harder and harder to produce enough food to feed everyone, and this will lead to social instability, political upheaval, the worst migration crisis ever, and wars over resources.
Disasters that weren’t supposed to happen until we reached 1.5°C are happening now, so we can only imagine what will happen when we hit 2° or 3°C.
This is why top scientists from around the world are warning us that we face a ghastly future filled with untold suffering. They’ve been telling us over and over, year after year, summit after summit, that we have to stop burning fossil fuels as quickly as possible. But as you can see [below], the world keeps ignoring them.
For those who haven’t seen it before, here is my review of The Climate Book, by Greta Thunberg…
I've read dozens of books about climate change, and this one is easily the best. It's packed with information, written to be accessible for anyone from high school (or a bright middle school student) on up, and most importantly it does NOT shy away from the true severity of our situation and the imperative need not only for individual action but for system change.
It's stunning to me that a young woman who just turned twenty years old was able to pull together such a massive project — coordinating the submissions of more than a hundred scientists, activists, and educators — while also writing a large part of the content herself. A truly amazing accomplishment.
This essential work should be in every school library and in every home. It will remain relevant for years to come, I believe, because although there certainly is plenty of data, mostly it's about ideas which will never age.
Scientists are now saying we are “out of time” to keep global heating at under 1.5°C. It’s simply too late. We’ve delayed any action far too long.
All our talk and meetings and phony “Net Zero” pledges don’t mean anything to an overstressed climate system that is rapidly breaking down.
You can’t fool Mother Nature.
The target of keeping long-term global warming within 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) is moving out of reach, climate experts say, with nations failing to set more ambitious goals despite months of record-breaking heat on land and sea.
“We’ve run out of time because change takes time,” said Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick, a climatologist at Australia’s University of New South Wales.
As climate envoys from the two biggest greenhouse gas emitters prepare to meet next month, temperatures broke June records in the Chinese capital Beijing, and extreme heat waves have hit the United States.
Parts of North America were some 10C (18F) above the seasonal average this month, and smoke from forest fires blanketed Canada and the US East Coast in a hazardous haze, with carbon emissions estimated at a record 160 million tons.
In India, one of the most climate-vulnerable regions, deaths spiked as a result of sustained high temperatures, and extreme heat has been recorded in Spain, Iran, and Vietnam, raising fears that last year’s deadly summer could become routine.
Countries agreed in Paris in 2015 to try to keep long-term average temperature rises within 1.5C, but there is now a 66% likelihood the annual mean will cross the 1.5C threshold for at least one whole year between now and 2027, the World Meteorological Organization predicted in May.
"We have long known that dragging heavy fishing nets—some as large as ten 747 jets—across the ocean floor destroys sea life and habitats.
Only recently, we have discovered that #BottomTrawling also unleashes plumes of carbon, which otherwise would be safely stored for millennia in the ocean floor. "
"The amount of carbon dioxide released into the ocean from bottom trawling is on the same order of magnitude as annual carbon dioxide #emissions from global aviation."
"In 2019, the richest 1% were responsible for 16% of global carbon emissions, the same as the emissions of the poorest 66% of humanity (5 billion people)."
"If global warming reaches or exceeds 2C by 2100, [scientists say] it is likely that mainly richer humans will be responsible for the death of roughly one billion mainly poorer humans over the next century.
The peer-reviewed literature on the human mortality costs of carbon #emissions converged on the "1,000-ton rule," an estimate that one future premature death is caused for 1,000 tons of fossil carbon burned. "
Looks like global CO2 emissions finally peaked. Good. But no time to lose: onwards to a rapid descent!
From BloombergNEF via Justin Guay. #co2#emissions#ClimateChange
Elizabeth Kolbert (@elizkolbert), author of "The Sixth Extinction," says:
"When I started reporting on climate change, the prediction was the Arctic could be sea-ice-free in summer by the 2070s. Now? By the 2030s."
She is not the only one highly alarmed by what we are seeing. Look at what the researchers are saying in this piece from Common Dreams...
Scientists on Tuesday warned that the planet is rapidly headed toward the consequences of the climate crisis they have been warning about for decades as researchers published a new study showing that a complete loss of Arctic sea ice in the summer months is now unavoidable.
The scientists found that even in a low-emissions scenario, summer ice in the Arctic will be gone by the 2050s.
In an intermediate- or high-emissions scenario — which is far more likely, considering that the United States, the largest historic source of fossil fuel emissions, has recently moved to approve massive projects such as the Willow oil drilling project and the Mountain Valley Pipeline — the Arctic will be ice-free in the summer months starting in the 2030s.
"Unfortunately it has become too late to save Arctic summer sea ice," said Dirk Notz, a climatologist at the University of Hamburg and co-author of the study. "As scientists, we've been warning about the loss of Arctic summer sea ice for decades. This is now the first major component of the Earth system that we are going to lose because of global warming. People didn't listen to our warnings."
The planet is already experiencing the effects of increased open water in the Arctic during the summer months, lead author Seung-Ki Min of Pohang University in South Korea noted, and policymakers must now prepare communities to adapt to those impacts, including extreme weather events.
"The most important impact for human society will be the increase in weather extremes that we are experiencing now, such as heatwaves, wildfires, and floods," said Min. "We need to reduce CO2 emissions more ambitiously and also prepare to adapt to this faster Arctic warming and its impacts on human society and ecosystems."
The loss of summer sea ice would trigger a feedback loop known as "Arctic amplification," with the dark ocean absorbing more solar heat and causing additional planetary warming.
"We need to prepare ourselves for a world with warmer Arctic very soon," said Min. "The earlier onset of an ice-free Arctic also implies that we will be experiencing extreme events faster than predicted."
They don’t need to have a majority, or anything even close to a plurality. All it takes is a few thousand sociopathic billionaires — the population of a village — to take full control of everything and then completely ruin our livable biosphere while further enriching themselves.
The scale on the image below is NOT exaggerated. In less than two centuries, and especially just within the last 30 years, capitalist oligarchs have burned so much coal, oil, and gas that our climate system simply can’t handle it.
It’s almost out of control now. But the people who are to blame have names and addresses.
"Oil Giant Shell Knew About Climate Impacts Even Earlier"
Following explosive revelations about what ExxonMobil knew about fossil fuels driving global heating, investigations in 2017 and 2018 uncovered that Shell Oil's scientists privately warned about the impact of its products in the 1980s.
However, newly unveiled records show that "Shell began collecting knowledge about climate change in the 1960s. The company not only kept well abreast of climate science, but also funded research. As a result, Shell already knew in the 1970s that burning fossil fuels could lead to alarming climate change."
Faced with a global oil crisis, rather than using its climate information to publicly sound the alarm and shift to cleaner practices, the company "focused instead on a nonsustainable profit model."
The following year, a study Shell was involved with warned that "increases in the CO2 content of the atmosphere could lead to the so-called greenhouse effect... which would be enough to induce major climatic changes." Three years later, another report warned that "the continued burning of fossil fuels will lead to a manifold increase in the atmospheric CO2 concentration."
Duncan Meisel, executive director of the campaign Clean Creatives, which targets advertising and public relations firms that work for fossil fuel companies, declared Monday that "what these new documents show is incredibly disturbing."
"In the 1980s, Shell scientists laid out two pathways for the planet: one where energy companies undertook a smooth transition to clean energy and one where fossil fuel demand continued to rise, creating 'more storms, more droughts, more deluges,'" he summarized. "Since the publication of that forecast, Shell has pushed at every turn to create more fossil fuel demand, creating exactly the devastating outcomes they predicted."
The Center for Climate Integrity said the records provide the world "more damning evidence" that the company knew its business model was having disastrous impacts on the world and its people. As the group put it: "They knew. They lied. They need to pay."
"I don't want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act."
The opinion piece below from Bloomberg/WaPo seems to agree with her...
"Global Heat Records Are Falling. A Little Panic Might Be in Order."
The planet could easily set a record-high average temperature in 2023, especially with an El Niño weather pattern kicking in later this year. We have already suffered through the hottest early June on record, with global land temperatures briefly touching 1.5C above the pre-industrial average. Ocean temperatures this spring have been the hottest ever at this time of year, in records going back 174 years.
Many people, including myself, have warned against panicking about such stunning new highs, given the temporary nature of El Niño’s boost. Even if we temporarily hit 1.5C of warming this year, it will still be theoretically possible to avoid long-term warming beyond that level and all the catastrophic consequences that would come with it.
But first we must kick our fossil-fuel addiction and stop spewing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. And judging by how little the world’s policymakers seem to be interested in taking such steps, perhaps just a smidgen of panic might be helpful.
Scientists agree the world must zero out its emissions by 2050 in order to keep warming to 1.5C, a target set at the Paris climate accords in 2015. And so far 95 countries have made "net-zero" pledges.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that the vast majority of those pledges aren’t credible. Current policies and practices have the world on pace to hit nearly 3C of warming by the end of the century. Even the most dependable net-zero pledges would still lead to close to 2.5C of warming, a recent study found.
One big problem is that significant numbers of "net-zero" countries have zero plans to stop burning oil, gas, and coal, according to a new study from the Stockholm Environment Institute. Of the 95 pledging countries, 45 talk about "continuing or expanding fossil-fuel production" right there in their net-zero pledges, according to the study. Only 5 of the 95 countries, in contrast, discuss transitioning out of fossil-fuel production as part of their net-zero pledges.
Since then, greedy capitalists and the governments they own have doubled down, completely wrecking our climate and environment, placing not only humans but thousands of other plant and animal species in grave danger of extinction.
It's not complicated. Anyone can understand that when forests burn, it's a LOSE-LOSE proposition for the climate and the environment.
We lose trees and grasslands and sometimes also peat that have been storing carbon, AND we send that previously stored carbon into the atmosphere, thereby sharply increasing CO2 emissions, which then push temperatures up even higher, drying out more of the forests and raising the risk of lightning storms which will ignite more fires — a massively destructive vicious cycle.
It's almost impossible to imagine anything worse than burning boreal forests, but that's what is happening, both in Canada and in Siberia. And STILL we keep on drilling for more oil in Alaska, mining the tar sands in Alberta, and fracking the hell out of everywhere else. Why? Because capitalism! 💰💰💰
MORE ON BOREAL FORESTS --
"Two of the countries at greatest risk are Russia and Canada, and not coincidentally, these are two places where the fossil fuel industry is making bad conditions even worse." https://climatejustice.social/@breadandcircuses/110423387240605334
It is not about 'eating the rich', but about the disparity between our effect on climate change.
There’s a lesson here: Hugely disproportionate per capita #emissions get people angry. And they should. When billionaires squander our shared supply of resources on yachts or private jets, it shortens the time available for the rest of us before the effects of warming become truly devastating.
In this light, Billionaires start to more like theft."
The wildfires raging through Canada’s boreal forests have torched about 45 million acres so far this year (an area larger than 104 of the world’s 195 countries) and have released staggering amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
To put this into context, take a look at the graphs below.
The first shows Canada's cumulative daily wildfire carbon emissions (in metric tons). As you can see, the level for 2023 is almost literally off the chart, about 400% higher than in any previously recorded year.
The second shows greenhouse gas emissions from Canadian wildfires (CO2 equivalent), comparing 2023's amount to Canada's TOTAL national emissions for the previous 20 years. Those gray bars you see are not from wildfires, but from ALL human-produced emissions. And the contrast is mind-boggling.
The last image is simply a sad photo of a burned boreal forest in Canada. 😢
So he spent £6000 instead of £30 by taking a helicopter instead of the train, but he also generated ~1100 kg of CO2 instead of ~10kg per person for the train. (No idea how many people were in the helicopter)
If you take all the energy buried deep in the earth and under the oceans via photosynthesis and animal metabolism, energy from the sun that was packed away over a span of 500 million years as coal, oil, and gas… and then burn through that fuel in the brief period of about 200 years, what will happen?
Think about it.
We’re igniting all of the stored energy from half a billion years of life activity in only two centuries. That’s a ratio of 2.5 million to one — which means we are using this energy two and half million times faster than it was created and stored.
We can either have a society that tolerates millionaires and billionaires polluting the planet and destroying the biosphere. Or we can have a planet with a healthy biosphere but with fewer millionaires and no billionaires at all.
This is from a recently published peer-reviewed scientific paper titled “Millionaire Spending Incompatible with 1.5 C Ambitions”...
Much evidence suggests that the wealthiest individuals contribute disproportionately to climate change. Here we study the implications of a continued growth in the number of millionaires for emissions, and its impact on the depletion of the remaining carbon budget to limit global warming to 1.5°C.
Our findings suggest that the share of millionaires in the world population will grow from 0.7% today to 3.3% in 2050, and cause accumulated emissions equivalent to 72% of the remaining carbon budget. This significantly reduces the chance of stabilizing climate change at 1.5°C.
The concentration of wealth at the top means that a significant share of the remaining carbon budget to 1.5°C is depleted by a very small share of humanity. This comparably small group is also likely to invest its wealth in ways that further increase emissions.
Continued growth in emissions at the top makes a low-carbon transition less likely, as the acceleration of energy consumption by the wealthiest is likely beyond the system's capacity to decarbonize. To this end, we question whether policy designs such as progressive taxes targeting the high emitters will be sufficient.
Like I said, we can have one thing or the other — but not both.
Below is an excerpt from a long and beautifully photographed report in Nature about changes occurring in the Amazon rainforest, changes that are happening "sooner than predicted."
TITLE: Trouble in the Amazon
SUBTITLE: The rainforest is starting to release its carbon. Is it heading towards a tipping point?
Luciana Gatti, a climate scientist at the National Institute for Space Research in Brazil, is part of a broad group of researchers attempting to forecast the future of the Amazon rainforest. The land ecosystems of the world together absorb about 30% of the carbon dioxide released by burning fossil fuels; scientists think that most of this takes place in forests, and the Amazon is by far the world’s largest contiguous forest.
Since 2010, Gatti has collected air samples over the Amazon to monitor how much CO2 the forest absorbs. In 2021, she reported data that showed that the Amazon forest’s uptake — its carbon sink — is weak over most of its area. In the southeastern Amazon, the forest has become a source of CO2.
The finding gained headlines around the world and surprised many scientists, who expected the Amazon to be a much stronger carbon sink. For Carlos Nobre, a climate scientist at the University of São Paulo Institute of Advanced Studies in Brazil, the change was happening much too soon. In 2016, using climate models, he and his colleagues predicted that the combination of unchecked deforestation and global climate change would eventually push the Amazon forest past a “tipping point”, transforming the climate across a vast swathe of the Amazon. Then, the conditions that support a lush, closed-canopy forest would no longer exist.
Gatti’s observations seem to show the early signs of what Nobre had forecast. “What we were predicting to happen perhaps in two or three decades is already taking place,” says Nobre.
The large-scale deforestation seen from the air is the most visible threat to the Amazon. But the forest is suffering in other, less-obvious ways. Erika Berenguer, an ecologist at the University of Oxford and Lancaster University, UK, has found that even intact forest is no longer as healthy as it once was, because of forces such as climate change and the impacts of agriculture that spill beyond farm borders.
Gatti first visited Santarém in the late 1990s, when most of the farming in this part of the Amazon was practiced by smallholders for subsistence purposes. Now, she’s astounded by the scale of destruction that has ravaged the jungle. While passing over one huge, newly razed parcel of Amazon forest, Gatti’s voice crackles over the plane’s intercom. “They are killing the forest to transform everything into soy beans.”
"The #cement industry alone accounts for nearly eight percent of human-caused CO2 #emissions.
The Cambridge researchers approached the problem by looking at an industry that was already well established—steel recycling, which uses electric-powered furnaces to produce the alloy.
Instead of waste being produced, the end result was recycled cement ready for use in #concrete, bypassing the emissions-heavy process of superheating limestone in kilns."