What does a 4 degrees Celsius increase look like?
Harry Hope
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kenny-ausubel/value-change-for-survival_b_324714.html
October 17, 2009
By Kenny Ausubel
Value Change For Survival: 2020 or Bust
..............................................................................................................
What does 4 degrees Celsius look like?
Author Mark Lynas tried to answer that question in his book Six
Degrees.
He pored over tens of thousands of scientific papers that used
advanced computer modeling, as well as studies of the fossil and
geologic records - because it has all happened before.
After a talk about his book, Lynas overheard an audience member
apologizing for dragging a companion to so depressing a lecture.
"Depressing?" wondered Lynas.
The thought had not occurred to him.
Yes, he knew the impacts he presents are terrifying.
"But," he wrote, "they are also, in the main, still avoidable. Getting
depressed about the situation now is like sitting inert in your living
room and watching the kitchen catch fire and then getting more and
more miserable as the fire spreads throughout the house - rather than
grabbing an extinguisher and dousing the flames."
Consider some of what Lynas found.
...........................................................................................................
Once upon a time by mid-century, when it's hotter by 4 degrees
Celsius, Earth is becoming unrecognizable.
With seas three to four feet higher and rising faster, parts of
low-lying coastal cities worldwide are periodically under water,
including Boston, New York and the emerging archipelago of islands
formerly known as the United Kingdom.
Capital markets have collapsed, and rebuilding cities twice or three
times has given way to mass migrations.
The major project in the U.S. is moving 150 million coastal city
dwellers inland, but interior cities are balking at the unbearable
strain of millions more climate refugees.
It's all happening too fast.
Adaptation takes time - for people and species.
With climate change, speed kills.
It's the savage temperatures that dominate, hotter than anything in
our species' evolutionary history.
The temperate Mediterranean climate has turned North African at 113
degrees Fahrenheit on a summer day.
Summer is the dreaded season, haunted by perennial fires and scalding
heat waves.
Food production is crashing worldwide and water shortages are chronic.
The 60 percent of the world's population whose crops depended on the
failing Asian summer monsoon are starving and thirsting.
Climate chaos has put nuclear-armed India, Pakistan and China on a
hair trigger.
The thawing permafrost in Alaska, Canada and Siberia is unleashing
mammoth stores of methane.
This greenhouse gas, 20 times more potent than CO2, will double the
rate of emissions.
The ecosystems that create and mediate a climate favorable to life are
so radically damaged they can no longer regulate the climate.
The world is unraveling.
Megadroughts.
New Category 6 hurricanes called "hypercanes."
Mass starvation. Cascading economic crises.
Failed states.
Tropical diseases migrating north.
Entire populations fleeing the tropics toward the northern climates.
Stretched beyond adaptation, it's a civilization in fast-forward
collapse.
Anger and blame spike with climate chaos.
Virulent ideologies take aim at the rich nations whose fossil-fueled
industrial juggernaut caused the cataclysm, then despite their wealth,
failed to deal with it in time.
But really the deal was sealed when the climate crossed the bright
line of 2 degrees Celsius and self-reinforcing positive feedback loops
triggered runaway climate change.
By 3 degrees Celsius the Amazonian rain forest dried up and burned to
ashen desert, sending the world's weather haywire.
Biodiversity plummeted into freefall.
As biologist E.O. Wilson had forewarned, we fell upon "The Age of
Loneliness."
Three degrees inexorably triggered four, then five and six.
At 6 degrees Celsius or 10.6 degrees Fahrenheit, Earth resembled the
"Mother of All Disasters" that occurred 250 million years ago.
It's known as the time when "life nearly died."
Fireballs of methane dwarfing nuclear explosions engulfed hellish
skies.
Monsoons carrying deadly sulfuric acid annihilated most remaining
vegetation and creatures living above ground.
Ninety-five percent of all terrestrial and marine species went
extinct.
The only large terrestrial vertebrate that we know survived was
Lystrosaurus, a pig-like animal that may have wandered the planet
alone for a few million years.
Life's diversity did regenerate to prior levels.
It took 50 million years.
This is what six degrees of separation looks like.
Terrifying.
As Mark Lynas wrote, "If we had wanted to destroy as much of life on
Earth as possible, there would have been no better way of doing it
than to dig up and burn as much fossil hydrocarbons as we possibly
could."
Time to grab for the fire extinguishers.
The daunting global imperative is to arrest the temperature rise below
2 degrees Celsius or face the certainty of runaway climate
destabilization.
If we're really lucky, we may have the next ten years to make a
dramatic shift.
But make no mistake:
the 2 degrees Celsius we've virtually assured is plenty bad enough,
and we're buying time to adapt to a radically altered world.
In August in Brazil, something remarkable happened.
The State of the World Forum convened a historic gathering of
Brazilian and U.S. leaders to launch a global Climate Leadership
Campaign.
Its goal is 80 percent CO2 reductions by 2020, not 2050.
We can do it with existing technologies without using nuclear energy
or biofuels, as advanced by Lester Brown, the esteemed environmental
policy analyst.
Amory Lovins and many other blue-chip experts agree:
We can do it with state-of-the-shelf technologies and wise policies.
State of the World Forum President Jim Garrison reports that an
unprecedented mobilization is taking hold in Brazil.
Joining the campaign are three federal ministries, three of the
largest states, cities including Rio de Janeiro, industrial
federations and several national associations.
The Brazilian media giant Globo TV, the world's 4th largest media
company, has initiated an ongoing nationwide prime-time ad campaign to
make climate leadership a presidential election issue in 2010, stop
the deforestation of the Amazon, and educate and mobilize the
Brazilian public.
Fueled by Brazil's breakthrough leadership, the State of the World
Forum is organizing the 2020 Climate Leadership campaign worldwide.
One strategy is a Fund to develop Rapid Response Teams, eco-SWAT teams
that can immediately support cities, states and nations with the plans
and practical means to meet the goal.
Bioneers is participating in the campaign and its U.S. launch in
Washington D.C. in February 2010.
We all need to build a global movement to put solutions into action.
It's 2020 or Bust.
Can we do it?
On the technological plane, yes we can.
Energy efficiency improvements alone can reduce emissions by as much
as 50 percent by 2030 with no net cost.
Solar energy is about to become price-competitive with coal, despite
fossil subsidies.
Numerous game-changing technological breakthroughs are almost ready
for prime time, including biomimicry innovations.
But the problem is it's not fundamentally a technological problem.
As David Orr points out, climate change represents the biggest
political failure in the history of civilization.
It's a crisis of governance and leadership.
Can we rapidly realign our policies, politics and economy at a large
enough scale to stabilize the climate?
One sterling energy success story is California.
As the world's sixth largest economy, the Golden State instituted a
succession of policy innovations such that it now emits about half as
much carbon per dollar of economic activity as the rest of the
country.
It's first among the states in promoting energy efficiency.
The result is savings of $56 billion for customers, while obviating
the need for 24 new large-scale power plants.
The gains are so impressive that its rules have been adopted by other
states and into federal standards.
Next came building codes, which several other nations have adopted.
California also generates considerably more electricity from
renewables.
It registers more clean energy patents than any other state and
attracts about 60 percent of all U.S. clean tech venture capital.
California is now issuing the first-ever tailpipe regulation of CO2
and greenhouse gases, in tandem with other states and Canadian
provinces.
California is proving that a lower-carbon, more energy-efficient
economy is supportive of the economy.
According to George Soros, "There is no better potential driver that
pervades all aspects of our economy than a new energy economy."
There are plenty of livelihoods and profits to be had, including the
labor-intensive enterprise of rebuilding our decrepit infrastructures.
Financial investment in solar and wind creates 50 percent more jobs
than the same amount in coal, and generates four times as many jobs as
the equivalent in the oil industry.
The current market for the restoration of ecosystems and the built
environment is already at $2 trillion, with a potential market of $100
trillion.
Big business seems ready to act. Of the $250 billion global investors
spent on new power capacity in 2008, for the first time the majority
went to renewables.
The world's biggest global investors, who collectively manage over $13
trillion in assets, recently called for "long, loud and legal signals
from governments."
China aims to become the green energy global superpower.
The Pentagon has embraced climate change as a top national and global
security issue.
Its outsized budget could radically advance clean energy security and
market competitiveness.
Because climate change is not one issue but the result of an entire
way of living, it requires a comprehensive re-design of our
civilization.
We need what Buckminster Fuller called for in 1961: a World Design
Science Decade.
The design would align with what Janine Benyus calls Life's
Principles.
Nature runs on current sunlight.
Nature banks on diversity.
Nature rewards cooperation.
Nature builds from the bottom up.
Nature recycles everything.
Life creates conditions conducive to life.
Design goals include a far greater localization of our basic needs,
from local distributed energy to more localized foodsheds and
bioregional watershed management.
So what stands in the way?
When NASA's chief climatologist James Hansen first testified before
Congress in 1988 as the Paul Revere of global warming, his goal was to
provoke a national response.
He did, but it came mainly from Exxon and the oil, coal and gas
industries, which waged the most expensive disinformation campaign in
history.
It was a catastrophic success.
Vested interests will continue to promote "inertiatives" to delay real
change.
At the same time, as we witness the biggest bank robbery in history -
by the banks - the notorious revolving door between big business and
government has morphed into the interlocking directorate of a
corporate state.
In the words of reporter Matt Taibbi,
"The reality is that the worldwide economic meltdown and the bailout
that followed were together a kind of revolution, a coup d'etat...:
the gradual takeover of the government by a small class of connected
insiders, who used money to control elections, buy influence and
systematically weaken financial regulations."
The next giant bubble rising from the swamp of Wall
Street-on-Washington is the cap-and-trade carbon offsets market that
will rapidly hit $1 trillion.
Taibbi observes that the pending regulation virtually written by Wall
Street is "a ground-breaking new commodities bubble, disguised as an
'environmental plan.'... Cap-and-trade is really just a carbon tax
structured so that private interests collect the revenues."
If enacted, this model would strip the government of public revenues
essential for financing a genuine transition to renewables, and,
worse, it would delay dramatic carbon reductions.
Now that our government owns a large portion of several big distressed
banks, the compelling question is:
Why not re-structure them as public banks that fund clean technology,
infrastructure and transportation?
Professor Gerald Epstein of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst,
proposes a "Green Bank of America" and "Green Citi Bank."
That would be a real pubic option.
Inherent in our current bind is also the paradox of scale.
Although a colossal transformation needs to occur, huge centralized
systems concentrate the risk of catastrophic failure, while further
concentrating wealth and power.
These systems are too big not to fail.
Resilience comes from having many smaller-scale decentralized systems.
Distributed energy systems provide much greater efficiency as well as
security.
The leading model is Denmark where by 2005 distributed networks
generated half the country's electricity and cut carbon emissions by
nearly half from 1990 levels.
Local systems can also operate as publicly owned nonprofit utilities
that provide revenues and jobs for cities and states, with rates up to
30% cheaper.
Instead of corporate mega-grids, we can build a decentralized, local
energy economy for about the same costs.
What else can we do?
Turn education into action.
Climate leadership by our schools and universities is already
mobilizing clean energy initiatives and green development in their
institutions and communities.
Project-based learning enables students, teachers and institutions to
solve problems while studying them.
Create a green Civilian Conservation Corps national service program.
De-subsidize fossil fuels and nuclear energy.
_____________________________________________
Harry
Sid9
"Harry Hope" <riv...@ix.netcom.com> wrote in message
news:41cmd5lva92fs4nj4...@4ax.com...
Four degrees Celsius doesn't mean much to Americans.
Try 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit.....
We're still in the dark ages of feet, pounds, inches and degrees
Celsius.
Neolibertarian
Harry Hope <riv...@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kenny-ausubel/value-change-for-survival_b_324714
> .html
>
> October 17, 2009
>
> By Kenny Ausubel
>
> Value Change For Survival: 2020 or Bust
>
> ..............................................................................
> ................................
>
> What does 4 degrees Celsius look like?
>
> Author Mark Lynas tried to answer that question in his book Six
> Degrees.
>
> He pored over tens of thousands of scientific papers that used
> advanced computer modeling, as well as studies of the fossil and
> geologic records - because it has all happened before.
>
> After a talk about his book, Lynas overheard an audience member
> apologizing for dragging a companion to so depressing a lecture.
>
> "Depressing?" wondered Lynas.
>
> The thought had not occurred to him.
>
> Yes, he knew the impacts he presents are terrifying.
None of the models are predictive. The International Panel on Climate
Change admits in all its Working Group Summaries that none of the models
can even account for conditions as they're known today.
No explanation has been given for a prediction of a 4C increase. Because
there is no explanation for a prediction of a 4C increase.
Two and a half centuries of man's mighty industrial age has produced
this alarming increase in temperatures (the graph is in one degree C
increments):
--------------------------------------------------->
1750 1800 1850 1900 1950 2000
The Carbon Dioxide, Amen, has increased to a disastrous 0.04% by volume
in the earth's troposphere. Before 1750, it was a much more reasonable,
stable and temperate 0.03%.
If we double it, which is the "Big Fear," it will approach 0.07%.
We're told that at the "tipping point" of 0.07%, cannibalism will occur.
True or not, there's no doubt whatsoever that if the averaged surface
temperatures DROPPED 1C, famine and crop failures would be triggered.
If any of us had a choice (which we don't, since the climate is not
being driven by effects produced by mankind) we'd chose an increase over
a decrease of 1C.
If the averaged temperatures fell 1C, we couldn't create enough Carbon
Dioxide, Amen, to counter the disaster.
Alas.
--
Neolibertarian
"The American Republic will endure until the day Congress
discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money."
---Alexis de Tocqueville
whofan
Then again - turn on CBS right now and check out the Patriots game in
Foxboro, MA - the snow is blowing sideways right now :^D
You "global warming" kooks are hilarious. ROTFLMMFAO!!!!!!
Adam Whyte-Settlar
"Gogarty" <Gog...@Clongowes.edu.ie> wrote in message
news:20091018-1...@Gogarty.news.bway.net...
> In article <hbfdng$aha$1...@news.eternal-september.org>, si...@belsouth.net
> says...
>>
>>Try 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit.....
>>
>>We're still in the dark ages of feet, pounds, inches and degrees
>>Celsius.
>>
> just
> not enforced. I still find it odd to drive down a road in England or
> Ireland
> and see street signs in metric alongside older ones in fps that noone has
> bothered to remove.
Drives me crazy that after nearly FIFTY YEARS the UK still hasn't completed
the switch to metric.
Try working in UK horticulture even today.
I used to have to mix up specialised composts for various families of plant
species with different compost requirements.
The 'recipes' would read something like:
2 bushells of peat.
half a cup of phospate.
125 grams of nitrogen
2 lbs of lime
etc.
I'm exagerating a bit - but, honestly, not by much.
Then we would have rolls of plastic mulch.
50m long and 4ft 6" wide. I kid you not.
Here in Australia is just as bad.
They still sell sheets of plywood that are '1.83M long'
1.83M is, of course, six feet!
r wiley
Again, "Harry" we see your computer runs all the time.
Where does your electricity come from?
rw