Irreversible

Robert Hunziker and Jeff McMahon relay the warning of James Anderson of Harvard University.

The level of carbon now in the atmosphere hasn't been seen in 12 million years ... and this pollution is rapidly pushing the climate back to its state in the Eocene Epoch, more than 33 million years ago, when there was no ice on either pole.

"The ocean was running almost 10ºC warmer all the way to the bottom than it is today ... and the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere would have meant that storm systems would be violent in the extreme."

People have the misapprehension that we can recover from this state just by reducing carbon emissions .... Recovery is all but impossible ... without a World War II-style transformation of industry.

"The chance that there will be any permanent ice left in the Arctic after 2022 is essentially zero. ... Can we lose 75-80 percent of permanent ice and recover? The answer is no. ... People at this point haven't come to grips with the irreversibility of this sea-level rise problem."

Update:  This warning seems to be backed up by Eric Holthaus' report that global sea ice is at a record low.

Update (February 24):  Passed along by a colleague, the Onion probably gets it about right.

Sighing, Resigned Climate Scientists Say To Just Enjoy Next 20 Years As Much As You Can

Update (February 27):  The North Pole just experienced temperatures 30 degrees Celsius warmer than usual.

Temperatures may have soared as high as 35 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius) at the pole, according to the U.S. Global Forecast System model.

Update (March 2):  Andrew Glikson discusses climate tipping points.

Update (March 3):  "The rich are destroying the Earth."

Update (March 6):  Last month was the warmest February for the arctic in the temperature record. Ruth Mottram:

[W]e’ve actually got open water at the top of Greenland right now, which is incredibly unusual.

Update (March 12):  In an interview with David Wallace-Wells, Wallace Smith Broecker discusses the need to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as well as replace fossil fuels with renewable energy.

[I]t’s hugely expensive to do all that. I’m very optimistic in most things, but not about this. This is a huge problem, and we don’t have a clue how to solve it. It’s got to involve a tax, and the word tax is death to a politician.

[I]f we’re ever going to get this thing solved, we’re going to need an international group that has a lot of authority. It’ll have to be like the Fed, but to manage carbon. That would mean we’d all have to give up a lot of our sovereignty, but I think that’s the only way it would happen. It couldn’t be the U.N., because the U.N. doesn’t have the power. They’d have to be able to penalize, they’d probably have to have an army, because cheating would be very, very lucrative.

I’d say it’s one chance in a thousand. I mean, we may get to that. Maybe China will get so powerful that it can start to dictate. That’s what we need. Our democracy is shot, I think. It just doesn’t work.

Update (March 25):  Melting permafrost creates a positive feedback through the release of carbon. Chris Mooney describes a study published in Nature Climate Change as "suggest[ing] that methane releases could be considerably more prevalent as Arctic permafrost thaws".

Current studies report a minor importance of CH4 production in water-saturated (anoxic) permafrost soils and a stronger permafrost carbon–climate feedback from drained (oxic) soils. Here we show through seven-year laboratory incubations that equal amounts of CO2 and CH4 are formed in thawing permafrost under anoxic conditions after stable CH4-producing microbial communities have established.

Or, as Mooney writes:

The research finds that in waterlogged wetland soils, where oxygen is not prevalent, tiny microorganisms will produce a considerable volume of methane, a gas that doesn’t last in the air much more than a decade but has a warming effect many times that of carbon dioxide over a period of 100 years.

Update (April 22):  Thirty percent of the Great Barrier Reef died in 2016. And, there's an increasing "mismatch" in the availability of food.

A paper by ecologists at the University of Ottawa examined 88 species on four continents, and more than 50 relationships between predator and pray as well as herbivores and the plants they eat, and found that food chain events are taking place earlier in the year than they have in the past, because of the warming climate.

Also, while the administration does its best to destroy environmental protections, Anthony Ingraffea says that if natural gas fracking wells grow in number as expected, the world may cross the 2 degree Celsius warming threshold in 10 to 15 years. This is based on previous research at Cornell University showing that "shale gas" could have a worse climate impact than coal.

Update (May 5):  A battle is brewing over the Colorado River basin.

Update (May 14):  Referring to the water crisis in Cape Town, Robert Hunziker quotes Peter Johnston.

We are careening towards disaster on all fronts — whether it’s agriculture, pollution, soil, water, pesticides. The human race is hell-bent on destruction. It’s a case of looking at the future and saying we’re going to have to get used to using less water on a permanent basis.

Update (June 25):  Rather than "addiction to oil", Lance Olsen quotes John Platt for a different analogy--that climate change is the consequence of a "social trap".

The term refers to situations ... where men or whole societies get themselves started in some direction or some set of relationships that later prove to be unpleasant or lethal and that they see no easy way to back out of or to avoid.

Olsen explains that oil companies used to deny responsibility because consumption, not extraction of oil is what really caused rising carbon dioxide levels. It seems like innovations like agriculture or the internal combustion engine are examples of traps--eminently logical at the time but now nearly inescapable problems.

Update (June 26):  Russian energy interests may be hindering European Union efforts to reduce emissions. And in a possibly another example of a social trap, a U.S. District Court judge dismissed lawsuits against oil companies by California cities saying that the problem of climate change is too big for one person to solve.

Noting that the world has reaped many benefits from fossil fuels since the dawn of the industrial era, the San Francisco-based judge said “questions of how to appropriately balance ... worldwide negatives against the worldwide positives of the energy itself” must be handled by the U.S. government’s executive and legislative branches.

Update (July 5):  A report from the Climate Council warns that bleaching events are likely to become more frequent threatening the survival of the Great Barrier Reef.

Limiting temperature rise above pre-industrial levels to no more than 1.5°C is critical for the survival of at least some reefs worldwide. A global average temperature increase of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels would put 70 percent of coral reefs at risk of long-term degradation by 2100 and a rise of 2°C would put 99 percent of coral reefs at risk.

[G]lobal greenhouse gas emissions must peak by 2020 at the latest and track steeply downwards thereafter, reaching net zero emissions by 2050 at the latest.

Update (July 6):  If there's a lethal heat wave in Canada, then we are truly fucked. And, Quriyat, Oman recorded the hottest daily low temperature of 108.7 degrees Fahrenheit.

Update (July 8):  A study published in Nature Geoscience argues that current predictions for the impact of climate change may be underestimates.

Comparison of palaeo observations with climate model results suggests that, due to the lack of certain feedback processes, model-based climate projections may underestimate long-term warming in response to future radiative forcing by as much as a factor of two, and thus may also underestimate centennial-to-millennial-scale sea-level rise.

Update (July 15):  Of all the consequences for climate change, I don't remember anything about the possibility of a giant iceberg off the coast of a city threatening to cause tsunamis if it breaks apart.

The more than 300-foot-tall iceberg towers over the village of 169 people on the west coast of the country. A video posted on Twitter shows a chunk of ice breaking off the massive block and plunging into the sea, sending large waves curling around shore.

This is Greenland, but could it happen next to a much larger population center?

Update (July 25):  Methane concentrations continue to increase with no clear explanation. Heat waves in the Northern Hemisphere may have pushed Siberia to 90 degrees Fahrenheit. But at least it's a fair fight.

Fossil fuel producers, airlines and electrical utilities outspent environmental groups and the renewable energy industry 10 to 1 on lobbying related to climate change legislation between 2000 and 2016.

Update (July 28):  The Washington Post summarizes events that are becoming all too routine.

“The old records belong to a world that no longer exists,” said Martin Hoerling, a research meteorologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Update (August 24):  Some of the oldest and thickest sea ice is breaking up off the northern coast of Greenland.

Update (December 10):  A study published in Nature Climate Change finds that the Great Barrier Reef tolerated a heat wave in 2017 better than the year before. And yet, half the corals were lost in the two years.

Update (August 18, 2019):  A paper by Robert Howarth finds that the rise in methane emissions since 2006 is associated with fracked shale gas. And 89 percent of that production comes from the U.S.

Update (August 31, 2019):  A report published by the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority downgrades the prospects for the reef from "poor" to "very poor".

The findings directly point to runaway climate change spurred by greenhouse gas emissions as the prime threat to the structure, noting that the time to protect the reef's "long-term future is now".