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A Little Hope on Climate: Part 1 Politics /By 29 May 2024
Interviewing one hundred climate scientists – proper in-depth interviews, two cameras, lights, the lot – is a crash course in coping strategies. Most of these men and women are suffering from quiet desperation, because they know what’s going to happen and they can’t seem to change it. They feel obliged to sound optimistic, but give them a half-hour to talk about it and the sadness and despair start to show. It was all in service of a book on how to survive global warming (now out) and a video series on the same topic (yet to come), and there were many moments when I shared their despair. Yet after all those interviews I have come away with some hope for the future. Don’t get carried away by that notion. We’re still in the deepest trouble imaginable. But it has got a bit better: five years ago everybody was still pretending that we were going to fix all this just by cutting our greenhouse gas emissions. It was a complete fantasy. Global emissions have not fallen in one single year since scientists first sounded the alarm in 1988, but the climate orthodoxy insisted that we could hold the warming down below +1.5 degrees C until the end of the century by emissions cuts alone. (That’s a natural cycle that dumps some extra heat into the system around once every three to seven years.) But the El Niño peaked last December and is now almost finished, yet the northern hemisphere is having an even hotter spring than last year (the hottest on record). Even more worrisome is the fact that the average sea surface temperature (SST) worldwide has been up by at least one entire degree Celsius for all of the past year, an unprecedented jump. In some parts of the oceans the marine heat waves are up to two or three degrees higher than normal. This could mean that the ocean currents have reorganised so that they are returning to the surface some of the heat that they previously absorbed. If so we are in deep trouble, because the oceans have buried 90% of the extra heat produced by human activities in their depths. The climate is chaotic, so this could still be a false alarm: both the air and ocean temperatures might yet return to the ‘new normal’. But that new ‘normal’ was already very high, so our normal emissions will drive us back up to +1.5° for good by 2030 even if the ocean anomaly disappears. So what can we do now?...read on..... https://gwynnedyer.com/2024/
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The year it got (really) hot Gwynne Dyer OPINION: This year (2023) has probably been the hottest in the past 10,000 years – but everybody agrees that 2024 will be even hotter. That’s because we are now entering El Niño, the part of a seven-yearly oceanic cycle that heaps extra heat on whatever is already occurring.El Niño is not part of climate change, but in 2024 it will get piled on top of a lot of climate warming that has happened over the past seven years, so it’s certain to break all previous records. The question is by how much. Jim Hansen says a lot. “The 1.5 degree limit is deader than a doornail,” Hansen told me last month, “and the scenarios you would need to stay under two degrees are just imaginary.”‘No more than 1.5°C’ was the limit we were told to aim for to avoid big jumps in the average global temperature. ‘Never more than 2.0°C’ was the absolute limit, because after that ‘runaway’ would become likely. Both gone, he says. The world crossed the threshold into +1.2° about two years ago, and the general assumption was that we would stay in that zone for at least the next five years. But 2023 ended up at around +1.4°, with huge wildfires, massive floods and storms, killer heat waves – and Hansen says 2024, with the El Niño boost, will be much worse. “I argue that within the next year or two (2024-25) we will go up to 1.6°, 1.7°C warming. Then after the El Niño finishes, it will drop back – but it’s not going to drop all the way back to 1.2°. “It may go down to 1.4° or so, but because the planet is so far out of equilibrium it’s not going to drop much. So we’re already at sort of the 1.5° warming limit, and we’ve got plus two degrees C in the pipeline by some time in the middle to late 2030s is my estimate.” On the other hand, all scientists get things wrong on the way to getting them right – that’s how science works – and Hansen is challenging an official scientific consensus, embodied in the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), that has endured for around 15 years now. That doesn’t mean he’s wrong, but it also doesn’t mean he’s right. In this particular case, it would be comforting if Hansen turned out to be wrong, because the implications of his being right are pretty horrific. The man leading the charge against Hansen is Michael Mann, a scientist of comparable stature who had a significant role in creating the current consensus. That is, the consensus that says we still have a chance of staying below +1.5°C until 2035, and could conceivably still be there when we arrive at ‘net zero emissions’ in 2050......read on https://www.stuff.co.nz/
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Heat Waves and Tipping Points 17 July 2023 By Gwynne Dyer
“What we’re seeing is climate impacts that scientists thought would accompany certain temperatures happening far more rapidly, with far more devastating effects than had been forecast,” said Dr. Simon Nicholson of the Forum for Climate Engineering Assessment at American University. “We didn’t think that the Arctic would crash by now, and yet it’s almost gone. We didn’t think we’d be seeing these wildfires in Australia and the United States and elsewhere with the frequency and severity that they’re being seen. “Given that we’re at about one degree Celsius [+1.1°C, actually], we thought those were far-distant prospects. So 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming above pre-industrial averages could turn out to be far more devastating than had been imagined when that target was set as the threshold for international action.” Last month was the planet’s hottest June on record, and probably the hottest in about 12,000 years. This month is shaping up to be the hottest July, and there’s a good chance that August will also break the record, because the relentless upward creep of global heating is being supercharged by the return of the cyclical El Niño phenomenon in the eastern Pacific. It’s not just very high temperatures – more than one-third of the US population is now under extreme heat warnings, and the city of Phoenix is having its 18th successive day over 110°F (43.3°C) – but the heat lasts into the night, too. Southern Europe is the same from Spain to Turkey, with daytime temperatures in the low forties Celsius and little relief at night. Europe, which keeps better records on this than the United States, counted 61,000 heat-related deaths last year. This year will be much higher. South and Southeast Asia had their heat waves in April and May (45°C and up in India and Thailand), and now it’s time for torrential rain and landslides in Japan, Korea and China. (That’s really due to the heat, too: high temperatures mean higher evaporation, which means much more rain.) All quiet in the southern hemisphere, where it’s still winter, but El Niño probably means record bushfires in Australia by December. https://gwynnedyer.com/2023/
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Grim surprises on the climate front. Hurricanes are starting to come back for a second hit and an urgent search is underway to determine how imminent the threat of accelerated sea level rise is, Gwynne Dyer writes. Two new things on the climate front this week, both bad news. Hurricanes used to be like drive-by shootings: one pass, one hit and then gone. Now they’re starting to come back for a second hit. And until now scientists only worried about the West Antarctic ice-shelf sliding into the sea (which would add three or four metres to sea-level). But they have just discovered that the main ice-sheet that covers Eastern Antarctica, 10 times bigger, is also in motion (potentially 52 metres of sea-level rise). Why do we keep being ambushed by bad news like this? "Thirty years of climate science has given us so much understanding, and what I now see very clearly as a red thread during that entire journey is that the more we learn about the Earth System, the more reason for concern we have,” Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, told me three years ago. “People think we raise the alarm because human pressures are increasing, but that’s not the case at all. It’s just that we are learning how the planet works, and the more we learn the more vulnerable she is. https://www.thespec.com/opinion/contributors/2023/03/16/grim-surprises-on-the-climate-front.html
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GWYNNE DYER: What goes ‘moo’ and then explodes? Humans need to rethink agriculture fast 'At least half the current agricultural land on the planet, more likely two-thirds of it, has to be rewilded in order to restore the world’s principal carbon sink and to preserve the biodiversity on which the entire ecosystem depends'. Earlier this month (April 10/2023), an industrial-scale dairy farm in Texas had a barn explosion that killed 18,000 cows. Cows belch methane as they digest their fodder and, above a concentration of five per cent, methane becomes explosive. Apparently, nobody explained to the folks at the South Fork Dairy (near Dimmit, Texas) that proper ventilation will prevent methane from building up like that. However, explosions are the least of our cow problems. There are at least one billion cows in the world and the average cow produces a hundred kilos of methane per year. That’s most unfortunate because methane is a powerful greenhouse gas, responsible for between a quarter and a third of the warming that is playing havoc with our climate today. Moreover, more than half the agricultural land on the planet is used to feed not people, but all those cattle. Early farmers domesticated cattle at least 8,000 years ago and even that had an impact on the planet. Over a few thousand years, the extra methane emitted by the relatively small number of tame cattle those farmers kept — probably only a few million — was enough to turn the climate trend completely around. The normal pattern since long before human beings appeared on the planet has been a hundred thousand years of deep freeze, then a 10,000-year inter-glacial Read more....... Texas dairy farm explosion kills 18,000 cows https://www.saltwire.com/cape-breton/opinion/gwynne-dyer-what-goes-moo-and-then-explodes-humans-need-to-rethink-agriculture-fast-100845149/
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