Another Lowest Arctic Maximum

This year's maximum sea ice extent in the Arctic was 14.52 million square kilometers, just edging out last year's record.

Also, Joe Romm notes the ten year anniversary of Time Magazine's special report on global warming: "Be Worried. Be Very Worried."

False War

Dan Baum argues that the "war on drugs" should end by legalizing all drugs. In a 1994 interview, he asked Nixon advisor John Ehrlichman about the origin of drug prohibition.

You want to know what this was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.

Update (March 25):  Other members of the Nixon administration dispute Ehrlichman's intent.

He was . . . known for using biting sarcasm to dismiss those with whom he disagreed, and it is possible the reporter misread his tone.

Two Degrees is Dangerous

A study by James Hansen et al published in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics takes issue with the conventional two degree Celsius limit on warming:

The modeling, paleoclimate evidence, and ongoing observations together imply that 2 °C global warming above the preindustrial level could be dangerous. Continued high fossil fuel emissions this century are predicted to yield (1) cooling of the Southern Ocean, especially in the Western Hemisphere; (2) slowing of the Southern Ocean overturning circulation, warming of the ice shelves, and growing ice sheet mass loss; (3) slowdown and eventual shutdown of the Atlantic overturning circulation with cooling of the North Atlantic region; (4) increasingly powerful storms; and (5) nonlinearly growing sea level rise, reaching several meters over a timescale of 50–150 years.

Update:  Another study, published in Nature Geoscience, finds that current human carbon dioxide emissions are as much as ten times that of the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum of 55 million years ago. Also, Joe Romm explains how carbon dioxide concentration can go up even if emissions level out.

Update (March 23):  Joe Romm notes the muted warning of Hansen's paper--switched from "highly dangerous" in the draft to "could be dangerous". But there are previous studies indicating that “[t]he natural state of the Earth with present carbon dioxide levels is one with sea levels about 70 feet higher than now.” Romm says that what's new is the understanding of how fast sea levels could rise.

Since there are a growing number of experts who consider that 10 feet of sea level rise this century is a possibility, it would be unwise to ignore the warning. That said, on our current emissions path we already appear to be headed toward the ballpark of four to six feet of sea level rise in 2100 — with seas rising up to one foot per decade after that. That should be more than enough of a “beyond adaptation” catastrophe to warrant strong action ASAP.

Update (March 30):  A study published in Nature supports the idea that sea levels could rise 3 feet by 2100 and 45 feet by 2500 just from the contributions of the Antarctic ice sheet.

Update (April 2):  More reporting on the Nature study.

Update (September 2, 2019):  A study published in Nature gives evidence that when Earth was two to three degrees Celsius warmer, sea levels were about 50 feet higher.

[The] study found that during [the mid Piacenzian Warm Period -- some 3.264 to 3.025 million years ago], global mean sea level was as high as 16.2 meters (with an uncertainty range of 5.6 to 19.2 meters) above present. This means that even if atmospheric CO2 stabilizes around current levels, the global mean sea level would still likely rise at least that high, if not higher.

Race and Inequality

From Demos, an explanation on how sowing racial resentment empowers the top one percent.

Fear People of Color → Hate Government → Trust the Market and the 1%

Two Degrees

Bill McKibben reports the most overlooked story from last Thursday.

Across the northern hemisphere, the temperature, if only for a few hours, apparently crossed a line: it was more than two degrees Celsius above “normal” for the first time in recorded history and likely for the first time in the course of human civilization.