Interesting, especially Schnellenburger's comments on the Ganopolski et al
paper, which were somehow tacked on to the end of the Hunt/Anderson discussion.
In my view this paper is so revelatory this it deserves a new thread. Stand
by.Greg
From: Andrew Lockley <[email protected]>
To: geoengineering <[email protected]>
Sent: Friday, January 29, 2016 3:16 AM
Subject: [geo] Discussion: Professor Kevin Anderson & Dr. Hugh Hunt
http://envisionation.co.uk/index.php/blogs/nick-breeze-blogs/169-hunt-anderson-cop21Climate
Justice? “Let them eat cake!” Discussion: Professor Kevin Anderson & Dr. Hugh
HuntNick Breeze
20 December 2015In this spontaneous conversation between two of Britain’s most
vocal scientists on climate change and engineering, we see a frank analysis of
the details that bely inconvenient truths for each one us.Our current carbon
pollution rate is taking us towards a planet that is on average 4ºC warmer than
today with regional variations far exceeding this and changes to the natural
world that will be so profound that it is fair to say, this will not be the
same planet.Cognitive dissonanceAs Dr. Hunt points out, reducing the billions
of tonnes of carbon pollution we emit each year requires a huge behavioural
change for all of us. Professor Anderson points to the fact that the majority
of emissions come from 10% of the world’s richest people. In this respect,
perhaps tackling the severe effects of climate change means just asking this
wealthy 10% to change their lifestyles? That would be easier if it was the 10%
themselves who were the most exposed to impact risk. Unfortunately, the people
who are suffering and dying the most are also often those in the poorest
regions of the world, who have not emitted anywhere near as much carbon as the
world’s richest. Education has a role in engaging the public but much of the
framing of this issue usually comes across as a curbing of middle class
aspirations. That is a harder sell to anyone. We may agree that causing
suffering to others is a terrible thing but when asked if we are prepared to
take the action required to stop it, we struggle to feel the urgency necessary
to make a difference.Thus we know what we are doing and make noises about
action and “climate justice”, yet we ignore the fact that, as Dr. Hunt says,
“everything we do is written in CO2 ink”. It is this cognitive dissonance that
make this issue so complex. We tend to think of it as a science problem but
much of the science is settled, the real problems now have moved to the social
and political sphere.Carbon sequestering technologiesAnderson: “Carbon
sequestration works at very small levels. Whether you could scale it up to 35
billion tonnes… this is where you suck the CO2 either out of the atmosphere or
out of chimneys from power stations and then you store this as liquid CO2
somewhere for the next thousand plus years. To store this quantity of CO2, this
is a huge challenge. Yet, this is normalised in almost all of the models that
are advising policymakers… every single scenario that has been discussed, at
this event in Paris that I have heard, assumes, without actually mentioning it
up front, that this technology works. It is highly speculative!”Carbon
BudgetOne of the big omissions from the Paris Accord is the mention of the
carbon budget. Anderson discusses why this is so important. The remaining 900
billion tonnes that analysts say we can burn before exceeding the carbon budget
for safe climate change (a figure that should not be taken as absolute fact,
but rather, based on ‘scenarios’ that are themselves dependent on carbon
negative technologies, that currently do not exist, and emissions reductions
that should have started years ago) is meant to be divided up in a fair and
equitable way, placing emphasis on the world’s poor to give them a better
quality of life and resilience to climate changes in their region.By taking out
the mention of the carbon budget in the early stages of the Paris negotiations,
the implication is that the conversation over who burns what can be sidestepped
and the wealthy nations do not have to tackle this central issue straight on.
It is worth adding to this that achieving 1.5ºC as a safe limit of global mean
temperature rise to ensure the safety of exposed regions (such as low lying
lands and small island states), is only possible with aggressive and immediate
decarbonisation over the next ten years. Thus, the number is only being treated
as “aspirational” and not realistic. Anderson: “The problem with carbon, it is
in the dyes in my shirt. It is in the ship that brought my shirt here, it’s how
we got to this event, it keeps the lights on, it’s keeping your computer
running. Carbon is completely pervasive.”The +2ºC worldAnderson: “It is highly
unlikely that we will hold to 2º Centigrade. It is a choice. We know how to do
this today but it does require this social and political change in the
short-term.”The reality of the issue is that we are losing the window of
opportunity to stay below 2ºC. As we start looking to a 2-4ºC world, we are
looking at planet that is likely to be wrought with famine, conflict,
overwhelming migration and huge degradation of natural systems.There are
worrying feedbacks to warming the planet that should concern us all. One
example is the collapse of global forests. A scientific study has shown that at
2.5ºC increase in temperature many of the worlds forests will collapse. These
are huge carbon sinks and sources of oxygen. The world without trees is certain
to be challenging. Of course, we can add in all kinds of other impacts such as
the collapse of ice sheets, melting permafrost, dying off of oceans, and they
are all severely bad for life on Earth.Social values and climate justice?Hunt:
“So, why is the mood here quite optimistic? It seems to me we may well have
passed some tipping points. Time will tell in the next few decades.”Anderson:
“Part of the optimism comes from rich people in the northern hemisphere who
think we can buy our way out of it…. you hear people use this kind of language…
what this means is, ‘we’ll muddle through because we are rich enough to buy our
way out of it, and the poor will die!’ If you look at the language we use and
peel away the layers, and look beneath it, what we are saying is fairly
savage!”Hunt: “This is the modern version of ‘Let them eat cake’. We seem to be
accepting that our lifestyles will not change very much. Somehow we have to put
in a political framework, a legal framework, a governance framework to solve
the problem, without affecting our lifestyles.”“Geoengineering” the
climateAnderson: “Personally, my view on this is that we should do the research
on these techniques and we should do the research on the techniques for sucking
the CO2 out of the air, but all of our policy framing should assume they don’t
work. So it is an insurance policy that has a very high probability of never
paying out. So we should do the research and assume that they will never work.
The problem is that we are not doing very much research and we are assuming
that they work.”Hunt: “The research that I have been involved in on the SPICE
project (Stratospheric Particle Injection for Climate Engineering), a small
test that we want to do, had to be stopped because of the concerns about the
perception of what we were doing. It was not because of the concerns about what
we were actually doing, but about the perception of what we were doing.”“I
think that this is a bit worry that the perception of what we are doing in
pumping 35 billion tonnes of CO2 in the atmosphere seems not to be of any great
concern, but the perception of research we might do into climate engineering is
of great concern. I’m not saying that it is not a great concern but let’s get a
balance.”Anderson: “I take the view that we can actually make a big difference
by making social changes now. We can still just make the 2ºC but it needs rapid
and deep reductions by this relatively small set of big emitters. Because we
are saying we’re not prepared to do that, therefor we have to think about the
other sets of issues. I think we do need to reinvigorate the debate about
social change in the short to medium term, whilst we put the low carbon energy
supply in place.”“All these other techniques are contentious and they may not
work. If we could reduce our energy consumption today, that is not everybody on
the planet but just a relatively small number of us. Then that definitely would
have an impact on our carbon emissions very quickly.”Optimism?Hunt: “We are
coming into a period of great stress. I think that our young kids at school now
are going to be our new generation of inspirational people. I am not just
relying on them rather hopefully. I just believe that the world we are going
into will be very stressful and that people will rise to the challenge and
great things will happen.”Anderson: “I think we have all the tools we need to
resolve this problem, pretty much at our fingertips, but we are not prepared to
use them now. And the two I have mentioned are: Very significant social change
for the few in the short to medium term, and engineers doing what engineers
have been very good at doing for decades, if not centuries, and that is
changing our infrastructure towards a very low carbon future going forward.”“If
you put those two together I think that 2ºC is still a viable goal for our
society.”Welcome to the Anthropocene - era of human driven climateSchellnhuber:
“The emissions so far already suffice to suppress the next ice ages.”Earlier
this week I was in Potsdam to interview Professor John Schellnhuber, the
founding Director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK).
The interview coincided with the release of a new iconic paper in the
scientific journal, Nature, titled, ‘Critical insolation - CO2 relation for
diagnosing past and future glacial inception’ that finalises the assertion that
we are in a new geological epoch called the “Athropocene”.Man made
climateSchellnhuber says with restrained poignancy: “Humankind is a stronger
force on Earth now than, you know, the orbital forces and all things like that.
It is fascinating but also very scary!”By looking at ice core data covering the
last 800,000 years, the research shows how scientists can determine the
function that causes periods of “glacial inceptions”, or more commonly known as
ice ages.Although there has been much speculation around the longer lasting
role of increased levels of greenhouse gases, this paper confirms that “the
timing of glacial inceptions can be explained by the CO2 concentration and the
-CO2 relation.” This is essentially warming or cooling of the planet based on
the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere.The importance of the evidence that
humans are now driving, climate led Schellnhuber to state: “I think it is a
fascinating paper; one of the best I was involved with.”Did we call off an
ice-age 200 years ago?The paper says: “Ice core data shows that at every
previous glaciation period, CO2 in the atmosphere was lower, usually around 240
parts per million (ppm).” Before the industrial revolution atmospheric carbon
was at around 280ppm, thus 40ppm above the level needed to trigger an ice age.
There is a lot of speculation and uncertainty as to whether changes in land use
by humans prior to the industrial revolution caused the increase from 240ppm to
280ppm. If this were to be the case then it would show that human action
literally called off an ice age.Predicting future ice agesSchellnhuber makes it
very clear: “Actually the next two natural ice ages would happen in eighty and
ninety thousand years, but they are called off… by human interference. The
emissions so far already suffice to suppress the next ice ages.”It is precisely
this human interference from burning fossil fuels that caused the initial
speculation that we might be altering the Earth’s climate, leading Nobel Prize
winning scientist, Paul Crutzen, to label it the
“anthropocene”“Scary”?Worsening impacts of climate change are taking effect
around the world. Having evidence that the next ice ages will be delayed adds a
layer of concern regarding the geophysical changes that occurring on Earth due
to human activity.We maybe the drivers of global climate but we appear to be
asleep at the wheel, as the evidence for anthropogenic global warming has been
around for decade. Only now are politicians, the public and big business
starting to take the risks posed more seriously.On the positive side we can
sigh with relief that we have called off the next two ice ages that would
represent a very difficult challenge for human civilisation. However, temper
that relief with the growing likelihood that if we don’t wake up to climate
change, it is unlikely that humanity will exist on Earth in anything like fifty
thousand years!Tel: 02071934844 | Email: [email protected] | Site by
Artgal Media | --
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