Fwd: [CDR] James Hansen's Recent Paper: Global Warming in the Pipeline
Andrew Lockley
From: Bruce Melton -- Austin, Texas <bme...@earthlink.net>
Date: Sat, 24 Dec 2022, 17:06
Subject: Re: [CDR] James Hansen's Recent Paper: Global Warming in the Pipeline
To: Dan Miller <d...@rodagroup.com>
Cc: <CarbonDiox...@googlegroups.com>
Pretty amazing he is calling for SRM. One thing to remember about
SRM when folks say it doesn't reduce emissions - it absolutely
does reduce natural feedback emissions and accumulation because
feedbacks increase with increasing temperature. Keith
2017 says reduced 100Gt C with RCP 8.5 at 2100.
Still haven't jumped into Hansen's draft yet - annual end of year
report is due and thawing neighbor's pipes out... you know, normal
climate change things in Texas. It is supposed to be 70s in Austin
by Wednesday. Yesterday 14 to 30. The Valentines Week 2021 Winter
Storm Uri ice bomb with 144 hours below freezing and statewide
grid failure smokes any cold event we have ever seen for duration,
tho a few single clear calm nights have been a few degrees colder.
This current event by absolute metrics was #3 behind 1989 but
ahead of the old #3 in 2011, but this was the earliest ever for
such an extreme event.
Happy Holidays All!
B
Director, Climate Change Now Initiative, 501c3
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People will be shocked by Hansen’s next paper that will say the AMOC could shut down around 2050. That causes all kinds of havoc around the world, including lowering precipitation/agriculture productivity throughout the Northern Hemisphere and causes “multi-meter” (10+ feet) of sea level rise by 2100 (plus lots of other nasty surprises like “Storms of my grandchildren”). And this is a one-way switch for quite a while (centuries). No overshoot then come back. That’s why Hansen is calling for CDR & SRM.
Dan
On Dec 22, 2022, at 9:23 AM, Bruce Melton -- Austin, Texas <bme...@earthlink.net> wrote:
Dan,
Thank you for this pre-pub review and I eagerly await reading Hansen's usually voluminous findings. That we are increasing GHG's 20x faster than the PETM is extremely meaningful. I hope this makes it into the final version.
I have spoken of Hansen et al's findings in establishing Sierra Club climate policy before, but let me repeat this story of how I convinced Sierra Club to lower their warming target from 350 ppm CO2 and 1.5 C to "350 and less than 1 C" as it may be helpful to some of you...
Hansen's 2008 "Target Atmospheric CO2: Where should humanity aim?" was responsible for the Club (and many others) adopting a 350 ppm CO2 warming target. The basis of these 2008 findings is that 350 ppm CO2 was the safe level because this is the maximum concentration of CO2 in our atmosphere where our Earth systems are stable, or the boundaries where our current Earth systems evolved, and that levels of CO2 greater than 350 ppm risked irreversible Earth systems collapse and loss and or reversal of environmental services resulting in very large feedback emissions, where some time period of overshoot was allowable as long as we rapidly restored Earth's energy imbalance by lowering CO2 (and other GHGs) back to within evolutionary boundaries of Earth's systems.
In 2017 Hansen et al published "Young people's burden: requirement of negative CO2 emissions" which for the first time modeled a 350 ppm CO2 world at 2100. Hansen's four scenarios with and without negative emissions to 2200 were: +2% annual emissions (business as usual BAU), constant CO2 concentration, -3% emissions (about net zero 2050) and -6% emissions (about net zero 2040). Results were 560 to 4,660 Gt CO2 removal plus net zero to achieve a temperature less than 1 C at 350 ppm CO2 in 2100 (1.5 C with BAU at 4,660 Gt).
Sierra Club had adopted both 350 ppm and a 1.5 C target like many others. When "Young people's burden..." was published it became obvious to some (not the Club yet) that there was a conflict. By late 2019 when the policy team was wrapping up our work that was published in March 2020. A simple explanation to the policy team was all it took to get the Club to adopt a new target of 1 C, as the only possible safe future was one where Earth's temperature was within the evolutionary boundaries of its systems.
Cheers,
Bruce
Bruce Melton PE
Director, Climate Change Now Initiative, 501c3
President, Melton Engineering Services Austin
8103 Kirkham Drive
Austin, Texas 78736
(512)799-7998
ClimateDiscovery.org
ClimateChangePhoto.org
MeltonEngineering.com
Face...@Bruce.Melton.395
Inst...@Bruce.C.Melton
The Band Climate Change
Twitter - BruceCMelton1
On 12/21/2022 8:04 PM, Dan Miller wrote:
--James Hansen and 14 co-authors recently released a preprint (not yet peer reviewed) paper titled “Global Warming in the Pipeline.”
This is an important paper that makes a number of key points, but the bottom line is we must act immediately to address the climate crisis. Hansen uses the framing "human-made geoengineering of Earth’s climate must be rapidly phased out” to call for emissions elimination, CDR and SRM.
Hansen Newsletter Summary:
Full paper PDF:
Here is a summary of some of the key points of this quite long (48 page) paper:
1. The Earth Climate Sensitivity (ECS) — the Earth’s short-term response to a CO2 doubling — is higher than previously assumed. Most scientists said it was ~3ºC, but Hansen et al now say it is 4ºC or more based on paleoclimate data. This means there is more warming “in the pipeline” than previously assumed.
2. While humans have increased atmospheric CO2 by 50% since the industrial revolution, the actual climate forcing from all the added greenhouse gases is now ~4W/m^2, which is equivalent to a doubling of CO2 (i.e., CO2e (including all greenhouse gases, not just CO2) is about 560 ppm).
3. Part of the current warming has been hidden by human-made particulate air pollution (aerosols), mainly sulfur. When North America and Europe started to reduce emissions after the introduction of clean air acts in the 1970's, regional and global warming became more pronounced. In the past decades China and global shipping slashed sulfur emissions through cleaner fuels and sulfur filter systems ('scrubbers'). There are clear signals from ground, ocean and satellite based observations that the rate of global warming has recently doubled, which needs to be taken into account in risk assessments.
4. Assuming today’s forcing (4 W/m^2) stabilizes and human-made aerosols are eliminated, when all feedbacks — including “long-term” feedbacks — play out, we are on track for about 10ºC warming and 6~7ºC if aerosols stay at today’s levels. This is a “scenario” and we still control our future, though we are on track to increase climate forcing from today’s 4 W/m^2.
5. If greenhouse gas forcings keeps growing at the current rate, it could match the level PETM mass extinction within a century. We are increasing climate forcing 20X faster than in the PETM so “long-term” feedbacks won’t take as long as in the paleo record (though some feedbacks will still be much longer than a human lifetime).
6. The paper concludes that we must: (a) implement a carbon fee and border duty (Fee and Dividend); (b) "human-made geoengineering of Earth’s climate must be rapidly phased out,” i.e., we must stop emitting greenhouse gases, remove CO2 from the atmosphere, and research and implement safe solar radiation management to counter the massive geoengineering experiment we are currently running; and (c) we must improve international cooperation to allow the developing world to grow using clean energy.
7. A companion paper will be coming out that addresses the near-term shutdown of the AMOC and associated “multi-meter” sea level rise on a century timescale.
I did a Clubhouse podcast on this paper that you can listen to in your browser. Leon Simons, a co-author of the paper, was my guest. It’s a long podcast (2.5 hours)!
<MKVLW5Wx.png>
Let me know if you have any questions.
Best,Dan
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Andrew Lockley
"The present decade may be the last opportunity to develop the knowledge, technical capability, and political will for the actions that are needed to save global coastal regions from long-term inundation.”HOW NOT TO INCREASE THE RATE OF SEA LEVEL RISE:Using SAI will, without a doubt, warm the polar regions as sulfur creates heat trapping polar stratospheric clouds. Relying upon SAI to contribute to stopping or even slowing down sea level rise is not a reliable plan on the face it. Those two dots do not connect.Moreover, increased CH4 emissions, as we are now seeing, will also increase PSCs. If the affects on the polar regions from of SAI and increased CH4 emissions are combined, polar ice loss will likely go into overdrive. Past abundance of PSCs likely triggered an equitable atmosphere and, in turn, an AMOC collapse along with massive polar ice loss.Furthermore, grossly eroding the polar 03 layer, an expected byproduct of SAI deployment, over the most biologically productive regions of our ocean would clearly drive many marine species into a rapid extenction spiral and reduce primary production on a global scale. There are a number of other serious biogeochemical and socio-political concerns with SAI as many know.Marine Cloud Brightening, on the other hand, does not carry these risks and MCB can be started today with few biogeochemical risk factors and few international policy risk factors. Most importantly, the deployment of SAI has the greatest risk of igniting a war of any mitigation option due to the trans-border nature of SAI. Again, MCB carries no such extream, if not existential, risk factors.This entire field of climate disruption mitigation is centered upon the concept of risk reduction, deployment of the one mitigation option that clearly has, by far, the maximum risk factors seems to be counter to the end goal of global risk reduction especially in view of the SRM MCB option that carries no such risks. SAI is not fundamentally needed for SRM as MCB is availablr, SAI will more than likely be highly distructive to the environment on many levels as well as short-term and likely long-term international relations. Why go there?Hanson et al. make no attempt to justify the call for SAI over MCB. Why?On Sat, Dec 24, 2022, 1:03 PM Robert Chris <robert...@gmail.com> wrote:I'm not sure why Hansen et al would use the word 'geoengineering' in this way. It was clearly defined as a response to climate change more than a decade ago by The Royal Society, David Keith and others, and an essential part of that definition was that the intervention in the climate system was deliberate and intended to ameliorate the effects of climate change. The word should probably now be allowed to Rest in Peace as the discourse has moved on and it has been superseded.
My own thoughts on this paper are below. In brief, it is much like the curate's egg - good in parts.
Comments on Global warming in the pipeline (Hansen et al 2022)
The core message is that both the magnitude and response times of human causes of climate change and responses to it have been seriously misrepresented by the scientific community. This has been due largely to inadequacy in the manner in which climate models have handled uncertainties relating to both the warming effect of a doubling of atmospheric greenhouse gases, and the impact of human generated aerosols. They argue that making ‘much of the planet inhospitable for humanity and [causing] the loss of coastal cities to sea level rise … can still be avoided via a reasoned policy response’. They prescribe three policies: a) a universal escalating carbon price; b) rapid and deep emissions reductions supported by greenhouse gas removal from the atmosphere, and the possible short-term deployment of albedo enhancement (increasing the amount of sunlight reflected back to outer space); and c) effective global cooperation.
The bulk of this lengthy paper is devoted to a detailed analysis of the history of model-derived estimates of the warming effect of a doubling of atmospheric greenhouse gases, technically referred to as the Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity (ECS) and the cooling effect of aerosols (pollution associated with the burning of fossil fuels). They consider ECS to be closer to 5oC than the generally accepted 3oC. They further explain their preferred metric of Earth System Sensitivity (ESS) that includes a wider range of climate factors than ECS and therefore more accurately reflects the likely warming impact of increased atmospheric greenhouse gases (GHGs). They assess ESS to be about 10oC before accounting for aerosols.
The lack of reliable data about aerosols, both historical and current, and considerable uncertainty about their complex interactions with clouds, are, they explain, the reason that their climatic effect has been underestimated in climate models. From a variety of sources, they estimate that aerosol cooling might reduce GHG warming by about 3oC, producing a net latent warming of about 7oC.
The climatic effect of these revised values is much greater warming locked in from historical emissions than previously anticipated. They estimate that by 2050 surface temperature will have increased by 2oC and the remainder of the 10oC would occur within a century assuming current levels of emissions are maintained and the aerosols continue to be reduced and are largely eliminated as part of global public health programmes.
The paper repeatedly refers to lack of data and uncertainties about various climatic effects and response times and makes a number of suggestions for further research. However, notwithstanding these shortcomings, the authors provide a cogent argument to support their claim that as these knowledge gaps succumb to scientific progress, the extent and rate of climate change will be shown to have been grossly underestimated.
For all the erudition evident in their analysis of climate change, their policy prescription seems disturbingly confused, and perhaps even naïve. The first two policy proposals are climate focussed, seeking to reduce the atmospheric burden of GHGs by reducing emissions and removal of already emitted GHGs still resident in the atmosphere, and to the extent that these don’t reduce surface temperature fast enough, consideration of albedo enhancement (AE). They do not explore the different cooling dynamics of reducing atmospheric GHGs and AE but do use five short sentences to highlight the risks associated with AE without any assessment of the risks of not undertaking AE. The implication is that although reducing atmospheric GHGs may not be sufficient to avert the climate disasters they refer to, AE should only be deployed if it has an acceptable risk profile. The possibility, even the likelihood, that the risks associated with AE might be considerably less than the risks of not deploying it, is not considered. This is not a balanced approach to risk analysis.
Their third policy, that the nations of the world collaborate effectively to reduce emissions, must be seen in the context of more than three decades of international negotiations under the aegis of the UNFCCC. This policy prescription appears to be a case of hope triumphing over experience. If experience is taken as a more secure guide for future action, it seems unlikely that there will be a radical realignment of geopolitical forces on a timescale short enough to enable the political collaboration necessary to deliver the practical and climatically effective deployments at scale envisaged by these authors.
The rapid climate change now underway may have been accelerated by human behaviour but it has its own momentum that does not respect the political machinations of humans. The time has long passed when we needed more science, more research, more understanding, to know that climate change poses an existential threat, and that the necessary response was at least to stop exacerbating the situation by allowing our emissions to grow unconstrained. While these authors have done a great service in highlighting shortcomings in our earlier understanding about the scale and imminence of a climate catastrophe, the policy prescriptions remain the same as they were in 1990 and before, namely, to change our behaviour so as to eliminate the earth’s energy imbalance (EEI). This task has become more challenging, more costly and considerably more risky as a result of three decades of relative inaction. While the policy rhetoric may be more compelling today, its practical realisation remains as elusive as ever. The unanswered question is whether that can change soon enough. That’s a political rather than scientific question. My personal view, for what it's worth, is that we are probably at or close to the point where the risks of effective action overwhelm the political appetite for taking them.
Robert Chris
On 24/12/2022 17:56, Mike Biddle wrote:
Great framing Dan. You beat me to the punch and with a much better reply.
Best regards,
Dr. Mike Biddle
Partner | Evok Innovations
San Francisco Bay Area Office
c: 925-393-9129
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From: carbondiox...@googlegroups.com <carbondiox...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Dan Miller <d...@rodagroup.com>
Sent: Saturday, December 24, 2022 12:19:37 AM
To: Greg Rau <gh...@sbcglobal.net>
Cc: Clive Elsworth <cl...@endorphinsoftware.co.uk>; carbondiox...@googlegroups.com <carbondiox...@googlegroups.com>; Jim Hansen <jimeh...@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [CDR] James Hansen's Recent Paper: Global Warming in the Pipeline
Jim is reframing the term “Geoengineering.” Geoengineering is currently thought of the intentional interference on the climate to counter global warming. But global warming itself is massive geoengineering on its own and will have devastating consequences. When viewed this way, CDR & SRM are used to counter the geoenginnering we have done and are doing to the Earth.
People today worry that SRM will have negative consequences — as if emitting 2.4 trillion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere doesn’t??? SRM is child’s play compared to what we are doing and we will soon reach “points of no return.”
I like to compare SRM to cancer treatment. If a doctor told you they would irradiate you with dangerous rays and inject you with poison, you would think they were crazy and you would refuse. But if she explains that you will die without the treatment, then those “dangerous” treatments seem a lot more palatable. It’s the cancer that is the main problem, not the treatment.
Dan
On Dec 23, 2022, at 9:35 PM, Greg Rau <gh...@sbcglobal.net> wrote:
“"human-made geoengineering of Earth’s climate must be rapidly phased out,” i.e., we must stop emitting greenhouse gases, remove CO2 from the atmosphere, and research and implement safe solar radiation management to counter the massive geoengineering experiment we are currently running”
I’m confused, rapidly phase out bad geoengineering (emissions), rapidly phase in good geoengineering (CDR, SRM)? Geoengineering: Villain and/or savior?Greg
Sent from my iPhone
On Dec 21, 2022, at 7:52 PM, Clive Elsworth <cl...@endorphinsoftware.co.uk> wrote:
Excellent summary, thanks Dan.Clive
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RegardsRobert
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Daniele Visioni
On 25 Dec 2022, at 04:40, Andrew Lockley <andrew....@gmail.com> wrote:
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