How Bad Is Global Warming?

[fruhmenschen]

http://www.weather.com/news/weather-hur ... s-20141105

[Luther Blissett]

I didn't see this posted anywhere; it's from last week.

U.N. Panel Issues Its Starkest Warning Yet on Global Warming

COPENHAGEN — The gathering risks of climate change are so profound that they could stall or even reverse generations of progress against poverty and hunger if greenhouse emissions continue at a runaway pace, according to a major new United Nations report.

Despite growing efforts in many countries to tackle the problem, the global situation is becoming more acute as developing countries join the West in burning huge amounts of fossil fuels, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said here on Sunday.

Failure to reduce emissions, the group of scientists and other experts found, could threaten society with food shortages, refugee crises, the flooding of major cities and entire island nations, mass extinction of plants and animals, and a climate so drastically altered it might become dangerous for people to work or play outside during the hottest times of the year.

“Continued emission of greenhouse gases will cause further warming and long-lasting changes in all components of the climate system, increasing the likelihood of severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts for people and ecosystems,” the report found.

In the starkest language it has ever used, the expert panel made clear how far society remains from having any serious policy to limit global warming.

Doing so would require leaving the vast majority of the world’s reserves of fossil fuels in the ground or, alternatively, developing methods to capture and bury the emissions resulting from their use, the group said.

If governments are to meet their own stated goal of limiting the warming of the planet to no more than 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, or 2 degrees Celsius, above the preindustrial level, they must restrict emissions from additional fossil-fuel burning to about 1 trillion tons of carbon dioxide, the panel said. At current growth rates, that budget is likely to be exhausted in something like 30 years, possibly less.

Yet energy companies have booked coal and petroleum reserves equal to several times that amount, and they are spending some $600 billion a year to find more. Utilities and oil companies continue to build coal-fired power plants and refineries, and governments are spending another $600 billion or so directly subsidizing the consumption of fossil fuels.

By contrast, the report found, less than $400 billion a year is being spent around the world to reduce emissions or otherwise cope with climate change. That is a small fraction of the revenue spent on fossil fuels — it is less, for example, than the revenue of a single American oil company, ExxonMobil.

The new report comes just a month before international delegates convene in Lima, Peru, to devise a new global agreement to limit emissions, and it makes clear the urgency of their task.

Appearing Sunday morning at a news conference in Copenhagen to unveil the report, the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, appealed for strong action in Lima.

“Science has spoken. There is no ambiguity in their message,” Mr. Ban said. “Leaders must act. Time is not on our side.”

Yet there has been no sign that national leaders are willing to discuss allocating the trillion-ton emissions budget among countries, an approach that would confront the problem head-on, but also raise deep questions of fairness. To the contrary, they are moving toward a relatively weak agreement that would essentially let each country decide for itself how much effort to put into limiting global warming, and even that document would not take effect until 2020.

“If they choose not to talk about the carbon budget, they’re choosing not to address the problem of climate change,” said Myles R. Allen, a climate scientist at Oxford University in Britain who helped write the new report. “They might as well not bother to turn up for these meetings.”

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is a scientific body appointed by the world’s governments to advise them on the causes and effects of global warming, and potential solutions. The group, along with Al Gore, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 for its efforts to call attention to the climate crisis.

The new report is a 175-page synopsis of a much longer series of reports that the panel has issued over the past year. It is the final step in a five-year effort by the body to analyze a vast archive of published climate research.

It is the fifth such report from the group since 1990, each finding greater certainty that the climate is warming and that human activities are the primary cause.

“Human influence has been detected in warming of the atmosphere and the ocean, in changes in the global water cycle, in reductions in snow and ice, and in global mean sea-level rise; and it is extremely likely to have been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century,” the report said.

A core finding of the new report is that climate change is no longer a distant threat, but is being felt all over the world. “It’s here and now,” Rajendra K. Pachauri, the chairman of the panel, said in an interview. “It’s not something in the future.”

The group cited mass die-offs of forests, such as those killed by heat-loving beetles in the American West; the melting of land ice virtually everywhere in the world; an accelerating rise of the seas that is leading to increased coastal flooding; and heat waves that have devastated crops and killed tens of thousands of people.

The report contained the group’s most explicit warning yet about the food supply, saying that climate change had already become a small drag on overall global production, and could become a far larger one if emissions continued unchecked.

A related finding is that climate change poses serious risks to basic human progress, in areas such as alleviating poverty. Under the worst-case scenarios, factors like high food prices and intensified weather disasters would most likely leave poor people worse off. In fact, the report said, that has already happened to a degree.

In Washington, the Obama administration welcomed the report, with the president’s science adviser, John P. Holdren, calling it “yet another wake-up call to the global community that we must act together swiftly and aggressively in order to stem climate change and avoid its worst impacts.”

The administration is pushing for new limits on emissions from American power plants, but faces stiff resistance in Congress and some states.

Michael Oppenheimer, a climate scientist at Princeton University and a principal author of the new report, said that a continuation of the political paralysis on emissions would leave society depending largely on luck.

If the level of greenhouse gases were to continue rising at a rapid pace over the coming decades, severe effects would be avoided only if the climate turned out to be far less sensitive to those gases than most scientists think likely, he said.

“We’ve seen many governments delay and delay and delay on implementing comprehensive emissions cuts,” Dr. Oppenheimer said. “So the need for a lot of luck looms larger and larger. Personally, I think it’s a slim reed to lean on for the fate of the planet.”

edited for emphasis

[Luther Blissett]

Just 90 companies caused two-thirds of man-made global warming emissions
Chevron, Exxon and BP among companies most responsible for climate change since dawn of industrial age, figures show

The climate crisis of the 21st century has been caused largely by just 90 companies, which between them produced nearly two-thirds of the greenhouse gas emissions generated since the dawning of the industrial age, new research suggests.

The companies range from investor-owned firms – household names such as Chevron, Exxon and BP – to state-owned and government-run firms.

The analysis, which was welcomed by the former vice-president Al Gore as a "crucial step forward" found that the vast majority of the firms were in the business of producing oil, gas or coal, found the analysis, which has been published in the journal Climatic Change.

"There are thousands of oil, gas and coal producers in the world," climate researcher and author Richard Heede at the Climate Accountability Institute in Colorado said. "But the decision makers, the CEOs, or the ministers of coal and oil if you narrow it down to just one person, they could all fit on a Greyhound bus or two."

Half of the estimated emissions were produced just in the past 25 years – well past the date when governments and corporations became aware that rising greenhouse gas emissions from the burning of coal and oil were causing dangerous climate change.

Climate change experts said the data set was the most ambitious effort so far to hold individual carbon producers, rather than governments, to account.

The United Nations climate change panel, the IPCC, warned in September that at current rates the world stood within 30 years of exhausting its "carbon budget" – the amount of carbon dioxide it could emit without going into the danger zone above 2C warming. The former US vice-president and environmental champion, Al Gore, said the new carbon accounting could re-set the debate about allocating blame for the climate crisis.

Leaders meeting in Warsaw for the UN climate talks this week clashed repeatedly over which countries bore the burden for solving the climate crisis – historic emitters such as America or Europe or the rising economies of India and China.

Gore in his comments said the analysis underlined that it should not fall to governments alone to act on climate change.

"This study is a crucial step forward in our understanding of the evolution of the climate crisis. The public and private sectors alike must do what is necessary to stop global warming," Gore told the Guardian. "Those who are historically responsible for polluting our atmosphere have a clear obligation to be part of the solution."

Between them, the 90 companies on the list of top emitters produced 63% of the cumulative global emissions of industrial carbon dioxide and methane between 1751 to 2010, amounting to about 914 gigatonne CO2 emissions, according to the research. All but seven of the 90 were energy companies producing oil, gas and coal. The remaining seven were cement manufacturers.

The list of 90 companies included 50 investor-owned firms – mainly oil companies with widely recognised names such as Chevron, Exxon, BP, and Royal Dutch Shell and coal producers such as British Coal Corp, Peabody Energy and BHP Billiton.

Some 31 of the companies that made the list were state-owned companies such as Saudi Arabia's Saudi Aramco, Russia's Gazprom and Norway's Statoil.

Nine were government run industries, producing mainly coal in countries such as China, the former Soviet Union, North Korea and Poland, the host of this week's talks.

Experts familiar with Heede's research and the politics of climate change said they hoped the analysis could help break the deadlock in international climate talks.

"It seemed like maybe this could break the logjam," said Naomi Oreskes, professor of the history of science at Harvard. "There are all kinds of countries that have produced a tremendous amount of historical emissions that we do not normally talk about. We do not normally talk about Mexico or Poland or Venezuela. So then it's not just rich v poor, it is also producers v consumers, and resource rich v resource poor."

Michael Mann, the climate scientist, said he hoped the list would bring greater scrutiny to oil and coal companies' deployment of their remaining reserves. "What I think could be a game changer here is the potential for clearly fingerprinting the sources of those future emissions," he said. "It increases the accountability for fossil fuel burning. You can't burn fossil fuels without the rest of the world knowing about it."

Others were less optimistic that a more comprehensive accounting of the sources of greenhouse gas emissions would make it easier to achieve the emissions reductions needed to avoid catastrophic climate change.

John Ashton, who served as UK's chief climate change negotiator for six years, suggested that the findings reaffirmed the central role of fossil fuel producing entities in the economy.

"The challenge we face is to move in the space of not much more than a generation from a carbon-intensive energy system to a carbonneutral energy system. If we don't do that we stand no chance of keeping climate change within the 2C threshold," Ashton said.

"By highlighting the way in which a relatively small number of large companies are at the heart of the current carbon-intensive growth model, this report highlights that fundamental challenge."

Meanwhile, Oreskes, who has written extensively about corporate-funded climate denial, noted that several of the top companies on the list had funded the climate denial movement.

"For me one of the most interesting things to think about was the overlap of large scale producers and the funding of disinformation campaigns, and how that has delayed action," she said.

The data represents eight years of exhaustive research into carbon emissions over time, as well as the ownership history of the major emitters.

The companies' operations spanned the globe, with company headquarters in 43 different countries. "These entities extract resources from every oil, natural gas and coal province in the world, and process the fuels into marketable products that are sold to consumers on every nation on Earth," Heede writes in the paper.

The largest of the investor-owned companies were responsible for an outsized share of emissions. Nearly 30% of emissions were produced just by the top 20 companies, the research found.

By Heede's calculation, government-run oil and coal companies in the former Soviet Union produced more greenhouse gas emissions than any other entity – just under 8.9% of the total produced over time. China came a close second with its government-run entities accounting for 8.6% of total global emissions.

ChevronTexaco was the leading emitter among investor-owned companies, causing 3.5% of greenhouse gas emissions to date, with Exxon not far behind at 3.2%. In third place, BP caused 2.5% of global emissions to date.

The historic emissions record was constructed using public records and data from the US department of energy's Carbon Dioxide Information and Analysis Centre, and took account of emissions all along the supply chain.

The centre put global industrial emissions since 1751 at 1,450 gigatonnes.

[fruhmenschen]

http://www.dailyclimate.org/tdc-newsroo ... orestation

[Iamwhomiam]

[Ben D]

I didn't see this posted anywhere; it's from last week.

U.N. Panel Issues Its Starkest Warning Yet on Global Warming

Michael Oppenheimer, a climate scientist at Princeton University and a principal author of the new report, said that a continuation of the political paralysis on emissions would leave society depending largely on luck.

If the level of greenhouse gases were to continue rising at a rapid pace over the coming decades, severe effects would be avoided only if the climate turned out to be far less sensitive to those gases than most scientists think likely, he said.

“We’ve seen many governments delay and delay and delay on implementing comprehensive emissions cuts,” Dr. Oppenheimer said. “So the need for a lot of luck looms larger and larger. Personally, I think it’s a slim reed to lean on for the fate of the planet.”

So the lead author of the report is not sure if CO2 GHG forcing is as sensitive as the IPCC climate scientists think. That implies they don't actually know for sure yet!

He thinks the future state of climate will depend on lucK! Wow...shows there is a big hole in the present state of the science!

Why would the governments (tax payers really) of the world want to spend $trillions on AGW mitigation if luck is a factor and climate scientists are not yet able to say what the sensitivity of CO2 is wrt warming is?

[stillrobertpaulsen]

Why would the governments (tax payers really) of the world want to spend $trillions on AGW mitigation if luck is a factor and climate scientists are not yet able to say what the sensitivity of CO2 is wrt warming is?

At the risk of compromising my own tenuous grasp of an abstract concept most people call reality, I have an answer to your question: To increase the odds in their favor regarding all the other factors listed in the report besides luck.

Or were you asking a rhetorical question?

[Iamwhomiam]

Why would the governments (tax payers really) of the world want to spend $trillions on AGW mitigation if luck is a factor and climate scientists are not yet able to say what the sensitivity of CO2 is wrt warming is?

Sea levels are rising and will flood our highly populated coastal areas, many will die and many more will be displaced. Food for survivors will be scant and chaos will reign. Agriculture will be disrupted and existing infrastructure necessary for commerce will all but collapse. This process has begun. We are at its early stages.

How about you stop calling it mitigation and begin calling it what it is, survival.

Maybe we should take all AGW cold-hearted bastards denialists up to the Arctic and throw 'em in the ocean. Maybe all together their ice cold souls will refreeze the sea. How's that for mitigation!

On edit: Removed typo from end of first word after quote.
Edited to add 'h' to 'as' in 1st paragraph, 2nd to last sentence

[Ben D]

Why would the governments (tax payers really) of the world want to spend $trillions on AGW mitigation if luck is a factor and climate scientists are not yet able to say what the sensitivity of CO2 is wrt warming is?

Seal levels are rising and will flood our highly populated coastal areas, many will die and many more will be displaced. Food for survivors will be scant and chaos will reign. Agriculture will be disrupted and existing infrastructure necessary for commerce will all but collapse. This process as begun. We are at its early stages.

How about you stop calling it mitigation and begin calling it what it is, survival.

Maybe we should take all AGW cold-hearted bastards denialists up to the Arctic and throw 'em in the ocean. Maybe all together their ice cold souls will refreeze the sea. How's that for mitigation!

Iam. you ignore what the lead author of the report said about the unknown value of CO2 sensitivity and the state of future climate in the 21st century. If the IPCC climate scientists admit that CO2 climate sensitivity is unknown, and natural variability also unknown...then it follows that the anthropogenic factor wrt global warming is also questionable.

Truth is Iam, the talk of a 'survival' scenario does not even arise when the nominal IPCC predictions are considered, therefore 'mitigation' is the appropriate term. What's more, if ongoing climate research shows that the CO2 sensitivity has been over estimated by the IPCC, then even mitigation is of no use as the global warming experienced in the late 20th century will have been shown to be due to natural variability and not human derived CO2.

[Iamwhomiam]

Thanks for posting the articles, Luther. I downloaded the reports Thursday morning. Here's a link: http://www.ipcc.ch/

Ben, I suggest you read at least the Summary for Policymakers. You've misunderstood the fellow's usage of "Luck" and seem to not realize that we still do not fully understand the CO2 equivalency of all 85,000 chemicals in commercial use nor of the 500 to 1,000 new ones introduced each year.

Generally, most educated estimates have been conservative. After gathering new data the impacts were found to have been grossly underestimated. For example, like that for Methane, first set at 18 to 20 times that of CO2 over 100 years than raised to 25x and now at between 31 and 34x. Similarly, over the 20 year period, values also increased for methane's warming potential, from 72x to 105x to 83x, I believe.

Truth is Iam, the talk of a 'survival' scenario does not even arise when the nominal IPCC predictions are considered, therefore 'mitigation' is the appropriate term. What's more, if ongoing climate research shows that the CO2 sensitivity has been over estimated by the IPCC, then even mitigation is of no use as the global warming experienced in the late 20th century will have been shown to be due to natural variability and not human derived CO2.

An Island nation is currently being swallowed by rising seas. Do you suggest we idly stand by watching it drown or shall we spend some money to hire a boat and save the populace?

This is real. Their country will disappear.

Please explain how this situation could possibly be mitigated.

Ben, please read the report before commenting upon it.

You're beginning to remind me of a drunk who misread his lottery ticket and are the only one in the bar who thinks you've won the big prize.

You keep dreaming.

Ice Age, Maunder Minimum, No Warming and now it's Warming due to "Natural" Warming.

[Iamwhomiam]

The White House

Office of the Press Secretary
For Immediate Release
July 29, 2014
White House Report:
The Cost of Delaying Action to Stem Climate Change

With our country already experiencing the effects of climate change, the President has taken action to cut carbon pollution by moving to cleaner sources of energy and improving the energy efficiency of our cars, trucks and buildings. But further steps are urgently needed to ensure that we leave our children a planet that’s not polluted or damaged.

The White House today released a new report from the Council of Economic Advisers that examines the economic consequences of delaying action to stem climate change. The report finds that delaying policy actions by a decade increases total mitigation costs by approximately 40 percent, and failing to take any action would risk substantial economic damage. These findings emphasize the need for policy action today.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/07/29/white-house-report-cost-delaying-action-stem-climate-change

[Ben D]

Ben, I suggest you read at least the Summary for Policymakers. You've misunderstood the fellow's usage of "Luck" and seem to not realize that we still do not fully understand the CO2 equivalency of all 85,000 chemicals in commercial use nor of the 500 to 1,000 new ones introduced each year.

Generally, most educated estimates have been conservative. After gathering new data the impacts were found to have been grossly underestimated. For example, like that for Methane, first set at 18 to 20 times that of CO2 over 100 years than raised to 25x and now at between 31 and 34x. Similarly, over the 20 year period, values also increased for methane's warming potential, from 72x to 105x to 83x, I believe.

An Island nation is currently being swallowed by rising seas. Do you suggest we idly stand by watching it drown or shall we spend some money to hire a boat and save the populace?

This is real. Their country will disappear.

Please explain how this situation could possibly be mitigated.

Ben, please read the report before commenting upon it.

You're beginning to remind me of a drunk who misread his lottery ticket and are the only one in the bar who thinks you've won the big prize.

You keep dreaming.

Ice Age, Maunder Minimum, No Warming and now it's Warming due to "Natural" Warming.

Iam...the ad hominem and strawman stuff about CO2 equivalency to so many chemicals in commercial use, underestimation of methane, etc., does not address my post. The lead scientist of the report said what I said he said....CO2 climate sensitivity is still unknown and they can not say for sure if the IPCC predictions eventuate. It is the human CO2 emissions that is essential to putting the blame on humans for global warming.

Now there has been a pause in global atmospheric warming for about 18 years, in that time the CO2 levels have been steadily increasing....so it appears that increased CO2 forcing is not as great as theorized. But the IPCC exists solely on the basis that late 20th century warming of the planet has been predominately caused by human CO2 emissions....but the 18 year pause is causing doubt to creep in about the validity of present AGW CO2 forcing theory....and some climate scientists are beginning to revisit the science.....so AGW science is not settled by a long shot.

Remember Iam...scientific truth is not determined by appeal to authority and spamming, but by demonstration of theory matching outcome. The IPCC climate models are not performing well in this regard...hence climate science is not settled...perhaps human derived CO2 is NOT the predominate cause of GW...

[Ben D]

Why would the governments (tax payers really) of the world want to spend $trillions on AGW mitigation if luck is a factor and climate scientists are not yet able to say what the sensitivity of CO2 is wrt warming is?

At the risk of compromising my own tenuous grasp of an abstract concept most people call reality, I have an answer to your question: To increase the odds in their favor regarding all the other factors listed in the report besides luck.

But this report implies that CO2 climate sensitivity is still an unknown quantity, the possibility has to be considered that humans are not the predominate cause of climate change!

If so, it follows then that all the billions/trillions of dollars to be spent on mitigation of human emissions would make no real difference.

Remember, I accept the reality that the planet has warmed by 0.7C over the last century, but I am not convinced that humans are the predominate cause. There has been no warming in the 21st century to date while human derived CO2 emissions have increased considerably during the same period....someone has to ask the question why have the temperatures steadied at this time of ever increasing human CO2 emissions. And it has...the IPCC climate models are not performing as they had expected...many scientists now suspect it is CO2 sensitivity that has been overestimated. If so, the human contribution may be at a level which removes it as the primary cause of global warming and natural climate variability then takes the rap!

[Iamwhomiam]

Sorry for the break. My computer crashed and I had to switch over to another. I had just about completed this and was about to submit it just after midnight:

Yes, Ben I did address your post most directly and without any strawman or ad hominem attacks. You misunderstood his intended meaning of his use of the word luck. He was using it to demonstrate some hope luck will spare their locale the harms projected to come.

The reason for stating we don't know everything about every substance we've introduced into out environment should be obvious to any idiot - we don't. We don't even know all the lifeforms present on earth. And we have little understanding of how many of these chemical compounds interact with our human biological system or the ecosystems that provide us our food and water.

If you've researched well to EU Well To Wheel or Well To Tank reports which were compiled to determine Carbon "Footprints," you should realize there's always room for improvement. When similar studies were undertaken in the USA, many were found to be erroneously underestimated.

For example, Natural Gas has now been determined to have just as 'dirty' a Carbon Footprint as Coal, some say it's worse. Methane and other hydrocarbon gases leaking gas pipelines and wellheads had not previously been accounted for. Read this.

For God's sake man, read the damned report and criticize it if you will, but please leave the out of context comments reported in a news article alone if you cannot understand what is being said. Do you not realize that any chemical in our atmosphere not yet inventoried will only add more heat-gathering compounds to it once they are?

Read the report and stop grasping at straws. Find something material in it to argue about, if you can. You've been long informed the deep seas were believed to be absorbing the "missing" heat.

Anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions have increased since the pre-industrial era, driven largely by economic and population growth, and are now higher than ever. This has led to atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide that are unprecedented in at least the last 800,000 years. Their effects, together with those of other anthropogenic drivers, have been detected throughout the climate system and are extremely likely to have been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century. {1.2, 1.3.1}

And to go completely off-topic, read this, another pursuit I've been involved in that's working specifically to find as effective but less toxic, safer alternative chemicals to those now in use that consumers are most likely to be exposed to.



Just like with unconventional mining practices, the closer you look, all the more is revealed.

[Iamwhomiam]

But this report implies that CO2 climate sensitivity is still an unknown quantity...

This is a patently false statement. The science community has come to consensus derived at after years of study of scientifically gathered data, especially the peer reviewed reports accompanying and explaining the data, that human activity has continued to warm our climate beyond any thing ever before experienced (in 800,000 years of records), while at the same time these activities have acidified our oceans, threatening our seafood stocks and other creatures necessary to our fisheries well-being and the oceanic ecosystem in general. (Aside the fact that rare cancers becoming more frequent, as are genetic, mitochondrial diseases and neurological disorders.)

Ben, forget about warming for a moment...

...Should we continue wanton, unregulated polluting of our land, air and waters, our babies bodies, with toxic chemicals?
What's the fix?
Is the cost worth it?

You are unequipped to argue any point the report contains because you have not read any. If you do decide to read the report's summaries, please rejoin the conversation. Until then - butt-out. You're woefully uninformed.

But first, please answer the 3 questions.
I've noted you've avoided answering the others I've asked you, Ben.



one edit: Introduced comma into second sentence.