PRAG meeting Monday 18th July 9 pm UK time
John Nissen
John Nissen
Re PRAG
meeting tomorrow
We could consider a letter to Sir Patrick Vallance, chief scientific adviser to HMG.
Dear Sir Patrick,
We were pleased to hear of your briefing to MPs about the seriousness of the climate crisis: indeed far more serious than the Covid pandemic because of its long-term impacts.
The reality of the climate crisis is hitting hard with record temperatures in Europe this year and in the US last year, while record flooding events occurred in Europe and China last year. The growth in extremes can only partially be explained by global warming. There is also the influence of a sticking jet stream: with hot weather building up to a heatwave and wet weather building up to massive flooding. This is the central subject of our letter.
The science behind the sticking jet stream is not widely accepted, even among climate scientists and climate modellers. But the science is clear. The Arctic sea ice is rapidly retreating to the point that the Arctic is entering a phase/period with little sea ice at the end of summer. It is more than halfway through the transition or “tipping point”. The Arctic albedo has decreased with the equivalent of as much as 0.5 petawatt heating effect. The Arctic is now warming 3-4 times faster than the global average. This has been reducing the temperature gradient between the Arctic and tropics. The temperature gradient is responsible for the three bands of weather systems, known as Hadley cells, with prevailing winds: easterlies in the sub-tropics; westerlies at mid latitude and easterlies around the polar vortex. As the temperature gradient is reduced, the Rossby waves, which mark the boundaries between the bands, tend to meander more to north and south and also tend to get stuck in “blocking patterns”. We can expect weather extremes to get worse and worse over the coming few years, with nearly all counties being affected and some parts of the world becoming uninhabitable. This is the essence of the current climate crisis.
It would be wonderful if emissions reduction to net zero could halt the retreat of the sea ice; but the positive feedback has built up to such an extent that only the most drastic of cooling interventions can halt this retreat and start refreezing the Arctic.
The campaign for net zero must continue to be supported and supplemented by CO2 removal, so that the atmospheric CO2 level can be brought down towards pre-industrial levels. This is vital for long-term safety and sustainability. But it cannot prevent the Arctic from meltdown on a timescale of years rather than decades. It cannot halt the retreat of the sea ice or the disintegration or the Greenland Ice Sheet or the emissions of methane from permafrost or the disruption of the global system of ocean circulation known as the AMOC.
We plead for the UK government, in collaboration with other G20 nations, to initiate a crash programme of Arctic cooling, deploying techniques which have the necessary availability, safety and power to halt Arctic warming within a few years.
Yours sincerely, etc.
Let's discuss this and letters to other government advisers tomorrow. All are welcome.
Cheers, John
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John Nissen
Hi everyone,
The UK forecast is for 40C today in parts of the country. In a timely Guardian article Bill McGuire says that such temperatures will become normal in summer [1]. McGuire also points out that, with current global temperatures, the sea level is rising 0.5 cm per year and we could have over two metres in the next 80 years. Although he paints a glum future, he urges personal action to help “stop a dangerous future becoming a cataclysmic one”. This is a joke: personal emissions reduction, even scaled globally, would have a zilch effect on future temperature. But he is also defeatist: he fails to point out that governments could authorise and fund the deployment of cooling intervention for a better future.
On the prompting of Doug Grandt, I am reading a report from the “Silver Lining” NGO which advocates research on cooling intervention techniques [2]. This is a step in the right direction.
However, the terrifying truth is that the situation is getting so dangerous so quickly that “last resort” cooling measures need to be applied without further basic research. The Arctic sea ice is a critical tipping point, and a comparison with early Holocene conditions suggests that the tipping is more than half completed, thus putting at risk other tipping points in a domino effect which could lead to a hothouse Earth, see [3].
Fortunately, thanks to researchers in the US, we almost certainly know enough about the effect of stratospheric cooling aerosols to apply them safely north of about 50N in late spring and early summer. No other technique is as ready as SAI for deployment at the necessary scale to reverse tipping processes in the Arctic and reduce the risk of catastrophic climate change and sea level rise.
This is what we need to get across to government advisers.
Cheers, John
[1] Bill McGuire (2022-07-18)
The terrifying truth: Britain’s a hot house but one day 40C will seem cool
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jul/18/britain-hothouse-extreme-weather
[2] Silver Lining report (2019)
Ensuring a safe climate: a National Imperative for Research in Climate Intervention and Earth System Prediction
Warming climate poses enormous risks to people and ecosystems within the next 10 to 30 years, and the world does not have sufficient options available to ensure human safety and protection of critical infrastructure.
[3] Steffen et al (2017)
Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1810141115
John Nissen
Manna Jo Greene
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rob...@rtulip.net
We have started this meeting
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rob...@rtulip.net
I have made a YouTube Video – 16 minutes - https://youtu.be/MzZDDjHYAnk - including the diagrams I recently shared with several meetings.
Comments welcome. Slides attached.
Robert Tulip
The Problem
Cutting emissions and removing greenhouse gases can’t stop climate tipping points
Politics and economics make cutting emissions difficult, expensive and slow.
The world situation is like a canoe headed for a waterfall
Viable cooling technologies lack funds, publicity and political support
The Solution
Reverse the IPCC priority order and put increasing albedo first
A brighter planet can avoid the climate danger zone.
Cooling technologies such as Marine Cloud Brightening are quick, safe and cheap
Fund large scale solar geoengineering research
Governments must cooperate to implement direct cooling measures.
Robert Tulip
Good points Kevin. Shows how very far the IPCC orthodoxy is from a realistic climate strategy. Good policy has to start with action that can actually mitigate climate change - brightening the planet - as a basis to then ramp up CO2 conversion over coming decades. Given your points about the momentum to move as much carbon from the crust to the air as fast as possible, it has to be accepted that the only feasible critical path has SRM and CDR substituting for emission reduction. Robert
From: geoengi...@googlegroups.com <geoengi...@googlegroups.com> On Behalf Of kevin lister
Sent: Thursday, 11 August 2022 1:48 AM
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Subject: RE: [geo] Why increasing albedo is more urgent than cutting emissions
Hi Robert,
I saw it on Facebook and have just watched it.
Yes, Albedo needs to the first priority. Totally agree.
But we cannot lose the focus on cutting CO2 emissions. This is set to substantially increase and be limited only by the maximum rate at we can dig fossil fuels out of the ground. With the exponential growth of energy that it is reasonable to anticipate in the next 20 years, we could double the global warming impact from CO2 in the next 25-30 years. All nations are backing away from CO2 reduction commitments that were made as recently as in the last COP. In the UK we are replacing one prime minister that was hopeless on the issue with another that will be even more hopeless. In an exponentially growing world, what is about to happen is as important as what has happened, and there is nothing on the near short term horizon that suggests anything other than significantly increased emissions as the outcome.
I hope that if we go down the albedo route it is done with the clear caveat that it has a limited time of effectiveness before its will be overwhelmed by continuing CO2 emissions. It will already be difficult enough to get the global temperature rise to within 0.5degC of baseline with current CO2 loading in the atmosphere, and nearly impossible with double this.
It is also important that we consider the SRM approaches must be sustainable for the ultra long term, i.e. at least a hundred thousand years.
I’ll be doing a Zoom talk on the 14th October on “What do we say to the kids” which will explore some of the factors that are driving this prognosis.
Kevin
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