If You're Pouring Gasoline On the Fire, Don't Pretend You're Fighting the Flames.

It's funny, with the October elections nearing, how concerned the Conservatives and Liberals are becoming about climate change or, at least, the flooding that has ravaged eastern Canada and the maritimes.  Oh they're all eco-warriors now. So precious.

It might be inspirational if they weren't such petro-pimps, eager to flood world markets with high-carbon, high-cost, low-value sludge bitumen. It doesn't matter where that garbage is burned. It's all going up into our shared atmosphere and it's our warming and more moisture-laden atmosphere that's delivering all those floods.

Hell, even PostMedia's Montreal Gazette is getting wise. Today the paper warns that this flooding could be Quebec's "new normal." Not really. Give it another ten years, twenty to be sure, and Quebeckers might be remembering this as the good old days. This is just "early onset" stuff. There's no stasis. The climate is worsening. There'll be plenty of new normal to come, sort of like the "oldest person on Earth" contest.

In today's Globe, Ibbitson writes that even the Tories are now getting onside about climate change. Why does Greenwash smell so much like horse shit? Ibbitson begins with the mandatory disclaimer that no weather event can absolutely be linked to global warming and then follows up with this whopper:

Although the United States, China and India are far more responsible for climate change than Canada, that does does not relieve this country of its moral obligation to do its part.

We're really not the problem. Until you consider that Canada consistently ranks in the Top Ten countries for overall emissions and an impressive Top Three standing for per capita emissions.  And that's before we get an honest accounting for the emissions from Alberta and Saskatchewan's bitumen producers (don't hold your breath waiting).

There may not be another issue that has prompted so much blatant dishonest from governments as climate change. Pity it's also an existential threat, the gravest in the history of human civilization. Scheer is about to pull some sort of eco-bunny out of his backside. Singh will go tut-tut, tut-tut. Trudeau will fill a sandbag, maybe flash his abs.

Who to trust, who to believe? The one that produces a convincing policy to meet the immediate baseline requirement for averting catastrophic, runaway global warming - a 50 per cent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 leading to a near total decarbonization by 2050.

You'll know they're lying if they don't identify how they'll fund such a Herculean effort. Where's the money coming from? What will we have to sacrifice? Who loses so that we all might survive? Something has to give. What'll it be? How about those billions in subsidies and benefits you're lavishing on the Oil Patch? That would be a start.

No rush. The Three Stooges might just get solutions from the motion Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party will table in Britain's HoC this Wednesday.  Harnessing the energy of the Extinction Rebellion and the Greta Thunberg-inspired student climate strikers, Corbyn will demand that the government declare a national climate emergency. It's expected that part of that deal will require a firm commitment to meet the 50 per cent by 2030 and near total elimination of GHG emissions by 2050, something our government hasn't even acknowledged much less accepted.

Monbiot's "Hail Mary" Pass - Let's Re-Wild

Guardian enviro-scribe, George Monbiot, argues we must recruit nature to help thwart climate change. He notes what we all by now grasp - that 1.5 C "do not exceed" cap, that's gone already. We are in very dangerous territory now. Here's what he thinks might help.

To prevent a full-spectrum catastrophe, we need not only to decarbonise our economy in the shortest possible time, but also to draw down carbon dioxide that has already been released. 

But how? The best-known proposal is called bio-energy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS). This means growing wood or straw in plantations, burning it in power stations to produce electricity, capturing the carbon dioxide from the exhaust gases and burying it in geological formations. Yet, if deployed at scale, it is likely to trigger either an ecological or a humanitarian disaster. 

One BECCS proposal, favoured by certain governments, would cover an area three times the size of India with plantations. This involves converting agricultural land, in which case BECCS would cause mass starvation, or converting wild land, in which case almost lifeless plantations would replace 50% of the world’s remaining natural forests. Even so, it might not be effective, as any carbon savings would be counteracted by the use of nitrogen fertiliser and the release of greenhouse gases from the soil as it’s churned up for planting. BECCS can lead only to catastrophe, and should be immediately abandoned.

Another option is direct air capture: extracting carbon dioxide with machines. Aside from the expense, which is likely to be massive, the amount of steel and concrete required to build these machines could help to push the world beyond certain climate tipping points before the positive effects are felt.

None of this is necessary, however, because there is a much better and cheaper way of drawing carbon from the air. Natural climate solutions do it through the restoration of living systems. The greatest potential identified so far – as so much land can be used this way – is in protecting and restoring natural forests and allowing native trees to repopulate deforested land. The greatest drawdown potential per hectare (though the total area is smaller) is the restoration of coastal habitats such as mangroves, salt marsh and seagrass beds. They stash carbon 40 times faster than tropical forests can. Peaty soils are also vital carbon stores. They are currently being oxidised by deforestation, drainage, drying, burning, farming and mining for gardening and fuel. Restoring peat, by blocking drainage channels and allowing natural vegetation to recover, can suck back much of what has been lost.

I have been looking into this for several years. It began with the pine beetle infestations that devastated hundreds of thousands of sq. km. of forests across the west from California through to Alaska.

The pine beetles have been here forever. Their population was once held in check over the winter. That required a number of sufficiently cold days in succession. Like the rest of the world, we don't get those lengthy cold spells any longer. We're on this roller coaster of cold days interspersed with warm days. The beetles survive to thrive.

This massive forest die-off has transformed what had been vast swathes of carbon sinks into a giant "carbon bomb" as dead and dying forests succumb to fires and decay, releasing their stored CO2 back into the atmosphere. The pine trees that should have taken their place fall victim to the same pest.

For a while it was hoped the Rocky Mountains would keep the pine beetle infestation contained. No such luck. They've crossed the Rockies and moved into the boreal forests. Ultimately they're expected to reach Labrador.

The good news is that there are other species of trees that can survive global warming and are beetle resistant. The scheme, if it can be shown effective, would be to move through these dead or no longer viable forests, take down those trees, transform them into their constituent components - bio-oil and bio-char - and then replant the clear-cut with more suitable species, restarting the surface carbon cycle, the carbon sinks.

The trick entails adapting technologies already used in the forestry and recycling industries. That part of the concept is already proven. What remains to be demonstrated is that this can be done on a profitable or near-profitable basis.  I do believe I can make the case for a demonstration trial.

We desperately need forests to draw CO2 out of the air. We just need forests suited to the Anthropocene. That can be done. I'm sure of it. Anyone got the number for Tom Steyer?

Alaska - Another Climate Record

Alaska has just logged another record - its earliest 70 degree day.

Parts of the state have had their earliest 70-degree readings on record. Klawock, a town in southeastern Alaska, reached 70 F on March 19 -- the earliest any spot in the state has hit that high. 

More records are expected to be broken this weekend, with temperatures soaring as much as 50 degrees above normal in the fastest-warming state. 

Meanwhile, Northeastern cities such as Boston are still awaiting a 70-degree day more than a week after spring officially began.

Hot? No, Cool.

Heating is a major contributor to modern energy consumption. We like to keep our homes, workplaces and business we attend nice and comfortable. That takes a lot of energy.

Only we're in a warming world, one that has a long way to go yet. This means we're going to need a lot of cooling: refrigeration and air conditioning to handle the heat. It's not estimated that, by mid-century, we'll be using more energy for cooling than for heating.

Energy use for air conditioning, refrigeration and other cooling appliances will jump 90% on 2017 levels, experts estimated, posing a challenge for energy grids and efforts to curb climate change.
The University of Birmingham said the rise would come even with conservative estimates of how much demand for cooling was likely to increase in China, India and hotter countries. 

“Cooling just really isn’t part of the big debate. And yet we lose 200m tonnes of food each year because of a lack of cooling. That has massive repercussions,” said Toby Peters, a professor in power and cold economy, working at the university, who is also part of the Birmingham Energy Institute.

The institute will host the first ever conference on “clean cold” on Wednesday, exploring how to tackle the problem and boost the 0.2% of energy R&D budgets spend on cooling.

Even Britain is in store for an air-conditioning makeover.

The biggest energy demand for cooling comes from air conditioning to keep people comfortable, but it is also essential for stopping food from going to waste and protecting medicines. 

While air conditioning in UK homes is a rarity today, Peters said it was a question of when, not if, the technology became normal for householders.

...If the world’s future appetite for cooling is provided by the current fossil fuel-heavy energy mix, carbon emissions will rise 2.5 gigatonnes by 2050. Global emissions from energy were 35 gigatonnes last year.
To meet the growth in cooling without pushing up emissions would take almost all the new solar power expected to be installed by mid-century, Peters calculated. 

He said: “Yes, we need to look at more efficient cooling technologies and greening electricity, but when you see the size of the demand we have to be much more radical in our thinking and start to invest in [tackling] this.”

Well, That's Certainly Sooner Than We Had Expected. 1.5 C In Just Five Years.

Who can forget the heady days of 2015 when a newly minted prime minister and his enviromin stormed the Paris Climate Summit to promote a new global warming limit of just 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2100, sweeping aside the old target of 2C by 2100,

So, how is that working out? Well, Canada is well off target for meeting its greenhouse gas emissions reductions. And we're still sticking with Stephen Harper's pathetic targets. In other words, they were just f#@king with ya.

The fact is, it seems we're already out of time for that 1.5 C nonsense. Britain's Met Office warns that we're going to break through that 1.5 C ceiling in  the next five years.

“It is now possible that continued warming from greenhouse gases along with natural variability could combine so we temporarily exceed 1.5C in the next five years,” said Stephen Belcher, the chief scientist at the Met Office.

Global temperatures have been steadily rising over the past 20 years, and in each of the last three years averages have topped the 1C threshold. Last year was the second hottest on record, and the hottest not to have been given an additional boost by the El Niño effect.

The 1.5C threshold was set at Paris as an ambitious target because scientists fear that a world warmer than that would be susceptible to ever wilder climactic events that in turn would precipitate greater drought, habitat loss, food insecurity and mass migration.

The thing to bear in mind is that we've already "locked in" centuries of warming. The greenhouse gas, CO2, lasts for centuries. How many centuries we still don't know. Methane, by contrast, is 104 times more powerful than CO2 over the first 20 years but falls off quickly after that so, by the end of a hundred years, its warming factor is only 28 times more powerful than CO2. A mere 28 times. It's like the burner on the stove that you can't turn off.

And every tanker that sails from a Canadian port with a gutload of high-carbon bitumen makes an already nightmarish situation far worse. Trudeau knows that. Notley knows that. They don't give a f#@k what happens to your grandkids. They've got bitumen to flog, as much and as fast as possible.

And here's another thing to bear in mind. These figures are based on man-made emissions - methane from agriculture, CO2 from internal combustion engines, that sort of thing. Only now we're not alone. We've awoken the sleeping giant, nature itself. As we've thawed the Arctic nature is releasing increasing volumes of seabed methane, clathrates, and methane no longer safely sequestered within the melting tundra and permafrost.

Faint Hope

These days good news on climate change is hard to find.  Yet recent progress by major emitters, specifically China, give hope that the world might just meet the Paris Climate Summit goal of limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius by 2100.

Over the past half-century, growth in the global economy and carbon pollution have been tied together. When the global economy has been strong, we’ve consumed more energy, which has translated into burning more fossil fuels and releasing more carbon pollution. But over the past four years, economic growth and carbon dioxide emissions have been decoupled. The global economy has continued to grow, while data from the EU Joint Research Centre shows carbon pollution has held fairly steady.

China’s shift away from coal to clean energy has been largely responsible for this decoupling. Due to its large population (1.4 billion) – more than four times that of the USA (323 million) and nearly triple the EU (510 million) – and rapid growth in its economy and coal power supply, China has become the world’s largest net carbon polluter (though still less than half America’s per-person carbon emissions, and on par with those of Europeans). But as with the global total, China’s carbon pollution has flattened out since 2013.

The good news of a slowing in the growth of man-made carbon dioxide emissions is tempered by the warning that we still face the Herculean chore of rapidly abandoning fossil fuels after 2020. We have a chance, if we're prepared to decarbonize our economies and our societies within the very near future. And the way that can be done isn't easy. It requires what Potsdam Institute's Hans Joachim Schellnhuber told delegates at Paris in 2015 is essential, the "induced implosion" of the fossil fuel industry.  That means governments intervening to force the closure and abandonment of the oil and gas wells and the fossil fuels mines.

We pride ourselves on being a really progressive country that wants only the best for the world. Can you think of a Canadian leader, not only Justin Trudeau but his predecessors and his rivals today, who would padlock Athabasca or force the closure of the gas and oil wells of western Canada?

Let's not kid ourselves. In order to decarbonize we're probably going to have to endure an economic collapse. That's because the fossil energy giants have us by the - cojones. They have an estimated $27 Trillion dollars of proven fossil fuel reserves subscribed on every stock exchange and bourse around the world. 27,000,000,000 dollars from banks, institutional investors, pension funds and ma and pa punters are floating around in today's Carbon Bubble. That's an enormous amount of wealth to simply wipe off the books of the global economy. Bursting that bubble is going to leave lasting scars.

Freedom from fossil energy will take a concerted global effort. We've been lucky so far. Renewable energy costs have been falling to the point where they're sometimes cheaper than fossil fuels. What will fossil fuels cost when that Carbon Bubble bursts?  Cheap, cheap, cheap. Especially if we revert to pre-globalization, slave labour rates in the Third World.

My point is that getting off carbon energy is going to cause enormous economic upheaval of the sort that can readily destabilize vulnerable nations, even entire regions. How do you maintain that concerted global effort to decarbonize in the midst of that sort of dystopian-lite upheaval? Are we prepared for a global sharing economy in which wealth is voluntarily transferred from the haves to the have nots for the sake of global stability? The developed world's record of dealing with growing inequality within their own economies doesn't offer much cause for optimism.

And then there's the real stumbling block, the synergy of climate change, overpopulation and over-consumption of very finite resources. Jared Diamond illustrates in his book, "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed," drives home the point that, when you have these interwoven, synergistic, existential threats you either resolve them all or you'll solve none of them.

Am I suggesting we simply throw in the towel, give up, wait to die off? Of course not. We have to resolve our entirely man-made predicaments.  The overpopulated have to slash their populations. The over-consumptive have to slash their consumption. Everyone, but particularly the big emitters, have to slash their emissions and move off carbon energy. We have to build a new, post-carbon economy first nationally, then regionally and finally globally.

We must give up our illusions that carbon taxes and solar panels will solve our problems. That horse left the barn sometime in the early 1970s.

We have to revert to the past when we lived within the bounds of our environment. We're simply too big for our planet, our biosphere, Spaceship Earth. It's time we had a serious discussion about sustainable retreat.

What Lurks Beneath?

Let's be fair. Climate change isn't all bad. Then again, it's a safe bet that Abraham Lincoln's last visit to the Ford Theatre was pretty decent right up to the point of that gunshot.

One of the good things about global warming, we're told, is that it will make cold places a bit more liveable. In some zones growing seasons will be a bit longer which might open them up for agriculture and other development.

But that warming will probably be a double-edged sword. The BBC reports that the melting of the permafrost could bring some nasty surprises from the distant past. There are diseases hidden in the ice, and they are waking up.


Throughout history, humans have existed side-by-side with bacteria and viruses. From the bubonic plague to smallpox, we have evolved to resist them, and in response they have developed new ways of infecting us.

We have had antibiotics for over a century, ever since Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin. In response, bacteria have responded by evolving antibiotic resistance. The battle is endless: because we spend so much time with pathogens, we sometimes develop a kind of natural stalemate.

However, what would happen if we were suddenly exposed to deadly bacteria and viruses that have been absent for thousands of years, or that we have never met before?

We may be about to find out. Climate change is melting permafrost soils that have been frozen for thousands of years, and as the soils melt they are releasing ancient viruses and bacteria that, having lain dormant, are springing back to life.

...

"Permafrost is a very good preserver of microbes and viruses, because it is cold, there is no oxygen, and it is dark," says evolutionary biologist Jean-Michel Claverie at Aix-Marseille University in France. "Pathogenic viruses that can infect humans or animals might be preserved in old permafrost layers, including some that have caused global epidemics in the past."

Forget chicken pox. How about Wooly Mammoth pox?

In a 2005 study, NASA scientists successfully revived bacteria that had been encased in a frozen pond in Alaska for 32,000 years. The microbes, called Carnobacterium pleistocenium, had been frozen since the Pleistocene period, when woolly mammoths still roamed the Earth. Once the ice melted, they began swimming around, seemingly unaffected.

Two years later, scientists managed to revive an 8-million-year-old bacterium that had been lying dormant in ice, beneath the surface of a glacier in the Beacon and Mullins valleys of Antarctica. In the same study, bacteria were also revived from ice that was over 100,000 years old.

...

Some of the long-sequestered bacteria have been found to have an astonishing resistance even to most of the latest, "thermonuclear" antibiotics. So, should we add this as another existential threat to humanity?

One argument is that the risk from permafrost pathogens is inherently unknowable, so they should not overtly concern us. Instead, we should focus on more established threats from climate change. For instance, as Earth warms northern countries will become more susceptible to outbreaks of "southern" diseases like malaria, cholera and dengue fever, as these pathogens thrive at warmer temperatures.

The alternative perspective is that we should not ignore risks just because we cannot quantify them.

We just don't know which reduces the exercise to a civilizational-scale game of Russian Roulette. What should cause us to err on the side of caution is one thing we do know - modern humans probably have little to no natural immunity to many of these lurking pathogens.

Our Miner's Canary - the Arctic

Do you remember how balmy temperatures were in the high Arctic last winter? No? Well it's a safe bet that most have probably forgotten all about it. That too is our new normal.

Conditions got so warm that a northern cyclone was spawned last December, thinning the sea ice by 4 inches.  Since the sea ice has been thinning for years in the now warmer Arctic that meant an earlier ice melt this summer, even warmer water temperatures and, now, a longer delay in winter ice reforming.

Residents of the Alaskan city of Barrow (due to change its name to Utqiaġvik on 1 December) would normally be looking out across a frozen harbour by now, but this year the sea is reluctant to freeze.

Barrow’s average temperature for October 2016 was a balmy -1C, significantly warmer than the long-term average of around -8C. And over the North Pole the air has been a full 10C warmer than average of late.

Much of the reason for these warm temperatures and the sluggish rate of sea-ice formation is the exceptional summer sea-ice melt that occurred this year. By 10 September the National Snow and Ice Data Center reported that Arctic sea-ice had shrunk to an area of just 4.14m square kilometres – tying with 2007 for second lowest sea-ice extent on record, and some 740,000 square kilometres short of the record set in 2012.

The rapid melting of this ice earlier in the season gave plenty of time for the surface waters of the Beaufort, Chuckchi, Barents and Kara Seas to warm up, and it is these warm waters, combined with persistently warm dry weather blowing up from the south, that have boosted air temperatures and slowed the progress of fresh sea-ice formation.

It's complicated but the growing loss of Arctic sea ice and the warming of the Arctic Ocean and land mass are said to be causing the Polar Vortex that's been hitting eastern North America and parts of Europe.

And now a few words from Katharine Hayhoe, Canadian born, evangelical Christian, climate scientist living in Texas.

IPCC - "Criminally Complacent"

Arctic expert, professor Peter Wadhams, doesn't think much of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In fact, the Cambridge professor of ocean physics and head of the university's Polar Oceans Physics Group, denounces the IPCC as a dangerous sellout.

He highlighted that the IPCC has failed to quantify and properly assess the risk of a methane outbreak from melting permafrost and undersea methane hydrates.

"Because that is scarcely mentioned by the IPCC in it's assessment because I think it is being criminally complacent in not wanting to stress or talk about the possibility of some major catastrophes.

"They were once a body that warned the world about climate change, but now they are a body that is trying to say 'Well, it's bad, but not that bad. Just reduce your carbon emssions and everything will be okay.' But it won't. These things have come along, there is enormous evidence that this is happening, and we should be really worried about it."

Wadhams warned of the knock-on effects of loss of Arctic sea ice including a massive discharge of now frozen Arctic methane deposits, sea level rise and, ultimately, catastrophic global warming.

"Instead of getting less than a metre of sea level rise this century, which is what is predicted by the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the accelerated melt of the Greenland ice sheet could give us a couple of metres or more this century.

"In fact some glaciologists are talking about four or five metres. That might be extreme, but it is very likely to be more sea level rise than so far has been predicted. That means we have been very complacent about sea level rise and we ought to be realizing that many coastal regions, for instance the coast of Bangladesh which is very vulnerable, Eastern China, and a lot of cities like Miami, will have to be abandoned and that will have an enormous impact on the global economy and the lives of people."

He then adds that the reduction in sea-ice will cause the albedo of the Arctic to reduce, absorbing more warmth and further accelerating global warming. "This attempt to pretend that we can keep global warming below 2 degrees, which was already a pretence, is even more ridiculous. It is certainly going to get to 4 or 5 degrees by the end of this century, which will then have quite catastrophic impacts on agricultural production, for instance, and being able to support the population we have now, let alone an increase in population."

"To slow the release of methane and prevent a methane bomb we need to bring back Arctic sea-ice, and to do that we need to cool the planet."

Australian climate scientist Andrew Glikson has also written at The Conversation on Methane and the risk of runaway global warming. But other scientists have also indicated the strong risks of Arctic Methane Feedback amplifying warming

Wadhams also denounced the complacency of the world's political leadership.

"There is a conspiracy of complacency throughout the world in which they [politicians] still imagine that if we do a few minor things, a few minor adjustments and reduce our carbon emissions then all will be well. But it won't. Because we have already got too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We are already going to have more than 2 degrees warming even if we don't emit anymore because of the existing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere." said Wadhams.

"We have to not only stop emitting [CO2] or reduce our emissions, but find ways to take it out of the atmosphere. That is a technology that hasn't been developed. It would be a massive research program to develop, but we should be doing it. A bit like the Manhattan Project. We should be doing it from the point of view of our own survival. That is the sort of thing the present generation should be concentrating all our attention on.

"If we can do that, then all our children have got a future."

"When you put together all the changes that are going on you see how they are ramping up to become a major change. As they go on, they tend to accelerate. Everything is increasing exponentially.

"My fear is that no-one will do anything because of cowardice and inertia and all the normal human attributes. They say 'Well let's wait until it hits us and then we'll act', but by the time it really hits us, by the time weather changes have made it impossible to feed everybody in the world, for instance, and we have worldwide famine, those sort of changes at that scale have happened then it's too late to do anything. We will by then have too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to prevent a runaway global climate catastrophe. My fear is that our own inertia will lead us to not take action until it is actually too late to save ourselves."

I so wish Wadhams was just some wild-eyed radical on a rant - only he's not.  In fact he's just another voice in the choir of Arctic experts who have been trying in vain to warn us of what is happening in the far north and what that holds in store for our children and theirs. Their research, their analyses and their warnings are simply falling on deaf ears.  Everything is flushed down the memory hole.

A lot of the science types believe it quite likely we're heading for between 4C and 6C of warming by the end of this century.  In April I took an online course presented by top experts, including Schellnhuber, from the Potsdam Institute examining what awaited mankind and all other life on Earth should we allow the planet to warm by 4C. It's the sort of information we wouldn't dare teach even at a highschool level.  

Our politicians haven't got the guts to address it, to even hint at it, and neither do we. They know it's a Pandora's Box. Once opened they would stand exposed, incapable of justifying their complacency, borderline perfidy.

By the way, Wadhams believes the only hope left requires geo-engineering to cool the planet and restore the Arctic sea ice and polar atmosphere.

Update:  Meanwhile, the very sort of politician Wadham denounces, in this case the NDP's Tommy Angry Beard, has pulled a rabbit out of his ass to declare that Canada can expand Tar Sands production, just in a "sustainable" way.

It's Called the "Pucker Factor"

There's a powerful yet weird mix of angst and optimism building in advance of the December climate change summit in Paris.

Government types from the US to China to the EU express confidence that this year will succeed and do what every other summit has failed to do - reach an effective agreement to cut global greenhouse gas emissions to stay below the 2 degree Celsius target for man made global warming.

Non-government types mostly don't share that optimism.  Their skepticism, bordering on outright pessimism, is captured by this op-ed from Le Monde:

...Since the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, fossil fuel consumption has gone on growing. The Green Climate Fund launched by the UN in 2011 has attracted only €10bn to date. In 2013 subsidies for fuels responsible for greenhouse gases totalled €400bn worldwide — four times the amount allocated to renewable energy sources.

Any international agreement will fail to keep global warming within 2ºC if governments insist on protecting a production system based on accumulation, pillage and waste. We can’t meet the challenge of climate change without popular involvement; but individual and local initiatives won’t be effective without global political will. If we are to agree to consume less energy and become more frugal — changing well-established habits — we need the prospect of an improved quality of life. There can be no real energy transition without economic and social change, and without proper redistribution of income, globally and nationally. India, where 300 million people have no access to electricity, reports hundreds of thousands of deaths from air pollution each year.

In the West, sobriety stands in direct opposition to austerity, which looks like a trick for bringing about a still more inequitable distribution of wealth. Reducing carbon emissions will require massive investment in housing, public transport and renewable energy — as much as was spent on rescuing the banks in 2008. Improving energy efficiency and living conditions could create jobs, make life easier and generate substantial economies for every household.

Sobriety means a new definition of wellbeing: using less resources and more labour, fewer machines and more human intelligence; taxing fuel to discourage unnecessary air travel; making sea freight more expensive to curb the worst excesses of free trade and encourage the use of shorter shipping routes; deciding not to exploit certain mineral resources.

The industrialised countries, with only a quarter of the world’s population, have run up a hefty environmental bill. Their cumulative emissions have already raised the global temperature by 0.8ºC, and will soon double that (1). Yet they refuse to set targets that take account of past emissions or do more than talk about cooperation, though that will be indispensable. It is time to give the countries of the South the funding and technologies they need to move to development based on energy sobriety. That means quality rather than quantity.
From everything I've read on both sides, the optimists and the skeptics agree on one thing.  Both see the Paris summit as our very last chance for reaching a deal that can satisfy the 2C target.

The Le Monde article is important for making the critical point that we can't win this with only some deal on cutting carbon emissions.  There's more to it than the major players - especially the United States and China - want to acknowledge; things such as overproduction, over-consumption and waste; inequality and wealth redistribution; and the issue no one on either side seems to want to touch - overpopulation.

Connecting the Dots on Climate Change

One of the biggest failures in climate change reporting is the tendency to focus on particular aspects without considering the bigger picture.  What does sea level rise have to do with droughts or floods?  What is the role of changing ocean circulation patterns?  How do these impacts all factor into our rapidly changing jet stream?

When we look at individual aspects we usually wind up with charts that reveal a linear pattern.  Sure, there may be dramatic increases on the curve, but nothing that appears wild or unpredictable.

Yet we're nearing the point where climate change impacts will be wild and unpredictable, totally non-linear.  A big part of this results from the "cascade effect" in which a number of seemingly unrelated impacts begin operating together, even harnessing man-made change with natural feedback mechanisms that will be much harder to control and nearly impossible to reverse.  We can expect to be overtaken by fast-developing events and very possibly without adaptation strategies or preparations.  In the scope of climate change, it's like we've all but given up.

An online course being presented by Germany's prestigious Potsdam Institute provides the missing link.  It begins to connect all the dots to reveal how changes already underway that will continue to accelerate and worsen even if we miraculously decarbonize today to make our world a far more difficult place for almost all forms of life.

One example is the Greenland ice sheet.  As it melts, the cold freshwater released to the sea has a direct impact on the thermohalene circulation (Gulf Stream) which, in turn, speeds up the decline in the Arctic sea ice and the thawing of high latitude permafrost and the loss of Alpine glaciers.

As the Arctic warms the temperature differential between the Arctic and temperate latitudes narrows,  weakening the jet stream and giving rise to Rossby waves, blocking events that can stall weather fronts in a particular location for upwards of four weeks.  These Rossby waves are responsible for Atlanta, Georgia falling into a February deep freeze while a village in Alaska hits temps. in the 60s.  These Rossby waves created the conditions for the Calgary flood and triggered the recent drought in Russia that ruined the wheat harvest there.

The Amazon rainforest governs precipitation patterns in much of South America. A warming beyond 2C carries the risk of transforming the Amazon into savannah grasslands, upending essential rainfall needed for many millions of Brazilians and their neighbours.

The hydrologic cycle is the climate change cycle.  Our civilization is utterly dependent on the steady and predictable supply of precipitation for human needs (drinking, cooking, sanitation), for agricultural production and for industry. When precipitation falters and becomes unreliable or sporadic, there goes your economy and, with it, your civilization.   This is nothing new.  We have a rich history of this sort of societal collapse.

Already billions lack adequate access to safe water.  Billions do not have access to basic sanitation.  Even as we experience growing water scarcity many of the most vulnerable countries also heavily contaminate their freshwater resources. This is compounded by deteriorating ecosystems and by failing infrastructure and lack of investment.  Water is something we're all too ready to fight over when scarcity sets in and there are few coherent international policies to deal with conflict.

Two areas expected to be among the hardest hit are Africa and Asia.  They're also experiencing explosive population growth.  They're going to be especially vulnerable to droughts, floods and sea level rise.  It's estimated the world will need to up food production by 50-70% by 2050 to keep up with the growing population yet these climate change impacts, taken cumulatively, will cause a sharp decline in food production in the most needy areas.  Draw your own conclusions as to how that will play out especially in the Hindu Kush.

Our ecosystems are in a migratory transition.  Plants and animals alike are responding to climate change by steadily moving away from the equator. Although you may think otherwise in central and eastern Canada, Spring is now arriving two weeks earlier globally.  Pests and disease are also migrating.  West Nile virus is one example.  Above 2C be prepared for a spread of malaria and a sharp increase in infections.  As it warms the incubation period for malaria plummets and mosquitoes bite a lot more.  Water-related diseases from cholera to typhus to dysentery also increase.

It's critical to consider the effect this warming already underway will have on biodiversity.  Many species are incapable of evolving to survive the current, early onset, rate of change.  If we fail to arrest global warming at 2C (now considered highly unlikely) and instead allow it to reach 4C, the number of species lost will skyrocket. 2C simply gives many species a window to survive through adaptation, evolution migration.

This week it was announced that, in March, we set another record when every part of the planet experienced GHG concentrations about 400 ppm. Everywhere. To put that in perspective, our coral reefs cannot survive long beyond 350 ppm. of atmospheric CO2.  It's calculated that 1.5C of warming will kill off all but 10% of the world's corals.  Here's the thing.  It was recently reported that our existing emissions, what we've already put into the atmosphere, will "lock in" 1.5C of warming by 2100.  We've already pulled the Celsius trigger.  Now we've pulled the acidification trigger.  Sea level rise stresses corals.  So do severe storm events such as the cyclones savaging the central western Pacific.

As I went through the lectures from these top world scientists, leaders in their own disciplines, in looking to what awaits in a 4C world each said the same thing - "all bets are off."  Each of them described their field in the context of a climate change impacts "cascade" but noted that these combined impacts and they synergies are beyond anything in the experience of human and other life forms. Most also pointed out that, by the time we get to understand the cascade fallout, it'll be too late to do anything about it.

To sum up, we've got two choices - just the two.  Either decarbonize now, just as quickly as humanly possible, or "don't worry, be happy."  

Another Hot Year, Even Hotter for 2016

Word from Australia that this year and next will probably see record-breaking temperatures.

Sea temperatures around Australia are posting "amazing" records that climate specialists say signal global records set in 2014 may be broken this year and next.

March sea-surface temperatures in the Coral Sea region off Queensland broke the previous high by 0.12 degrees – a big jump for oceans that are typically more thermally stable than land. Temperatures for the entire Australian ocean region also set new highs for the month, the Bureau of Meteorology said.

The unusual warmth off Australia comes as the Pacific Ocean remains primed for an El Nino event, as the bureau reported last month.

If such an event occurs, the underlying warming from climate change will get a further boost from natural variability, making 2014's ranking as the hottest year on records going back to the 1880s likely to be short-lived, according to Andy Pitman, head of climate research at the University of NSW.

"If we do get an intense El Nino, it will blitz the records," Professor Pitman said. "The climate is on a performance-enhancing drug and that drug is carbon dioxide."

Making Sense of February

My friends and relatives back east have been finding the reality of global warming  more difficult to accept recently as they endured a pretty amazing and protracted bout of cold weather.  Why not just consider yourselves unique, perhaps even exceptional?  Because, as this graphic of average February temperatures reveals, that's exactly how the rest of the world sees you.

You're that delightful yet quite little patch of indigo in a world that's predominantly brown, red and amber.  That's why it's called global warming and not eastern North America warming.

Maybe if the capitals of Canada and the US were in the west instead of the east, we'd have a bit more political will to deal with what's already a crisis.

Oh yeah, it's now official.  If you're under 30, the average temperature of every month of your life has been above the 20th century average.  Given that science suggests we're in for a bout of accelerated warming, that'll probably hold true for the rest of your days too.

By the way, while you easterners have had to endure a severe winter, in Alaska they've had to relocate the Iditarod Trail sled dog race because of warm conditions.  The course has been moved 250-miles north to ensure adequate snow cover.

Well, That Certainly Fixes Everything

The rightwing state government in Florida knows how to respond to climate change - bar employees of the state environmental protection department from using the words "climate change, global warming" and "sustainability."  There, problem solved.

Florida governor Rick "I am not a scientist" Scott is said to be behind the "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil" policy.

Officials with the Florida Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), the agency in charge of setting conservation policy and enforcing environmental laws in the state, issued directives in 2011 barring thousands of employees from using the phrases “climate change” and “global warming”, according to a bombshell report by the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting (FCIR).

The report ties the alleged policy, which is described as “unwritten”, to the election of Republican governor Rick Scott and his appointment of a new department director that year. Scott, who was re-elected last November, has declined to say whether he believes in climate change caused by human activity.

So Far This Century, We're 14 for 15

Bad news for the tinfoil hat brigade.  The UN World Meteorological Organization reports that 14 of the 15 hottest years on record have occurred since 2000.  Only one year this century hasn't been a record year.  Just one.  One out of fifteen.

The WMO report combined data sets from Britain's Met Office, NASA, NOAA and others.

This Should Give You Something to Chew On

Remember that global warming target of keeping temperature increases within 2 degrees Celsius by 2100?  2C, you may recall, is supposed to be the point within which we might - just might - avoid catastrophic, i.e. runaway, global warming.  2C, it's thought (perhaps wishfully) will give us a better than even chance of keeping this party going.

Did I mention Barrow, Alaska?  Barrow is here, in the red circle:

You probably noticed that Barrow is near the northernmost point in Alaska, well within the Arctic Circle. It's actually because of how far north Barrow is situated that it has already logged 7 degrees Celsius (not Fahrenheit, real degrees - Celsius) of warming.

In the last 34 years, the average October temperature in Barrow has risen by more than 7°C − an increase that, on its own, makes a mockery of international efforts to prevent global temperatures from rising more than 2°C above their pre-industrial levels.

A study by scientists at the University of Alaska Fairbanks analysed several decades of weather information. These show that temperature trends are closely linked to sea ice concentrations, which have been recorded since 1979, when accurate satellite measurements began.

The study, published in the Open Atmospheric Science Journal, traces what has happened to average annual and monthly temperatures in Barrow from 1979 to 2012.

In that period, the average annual temperature rose by 2.7C. But the November increase was far higher − more than six degrees. And October was the most striking of all, with the month’s average temperature 7.2C higher in 2012 than in 1979.

That's 7 degrees Celsius, 12.6 degrees Fahrenheit, of warming over the incredibly brief span of just 34-years. 

The sad thing is this is going to be music to the ears of the "Drill Baby, Drill" crowd.  Sarah Palin & Co., indeed our own Beelzebub, are going to see this as God's delivery to man of all that bountiful Arctic oil and gas wealth.  And what the Lord has given, they will not let languish untouched.

Climate Science Goofs - Again

The climate scientists got it wrong, badly wrong.  You could say they were out by a country mile (if anyone still remembers what that is).

This time it's ocean temperatures or, to be more accurate, ocean warming.  And, as usual, the scientists underestimated the amount of heat absorbed in the top half-mile of our oceans since 1970 by as much as 58 per cent.

The study, by Paul J. Durack of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and others, found that the underestimation was the result of decades of spotty sampling of water temperatures in the Southern Hemisphere, home to three-fifths of the world’s oceans. Until 2004, when a worldwide system of autonomous floats, called Argo, became operational, there were relatively few temperature measurements south of the Equator.

“We potentially may have missed a fair amount of heat that the ocean has been taking up,” Dr. Durack said.

Sea-level rise linked to climate change is related in part to increased melting of ice sheets and in part to the fact that water expands as it warms. So the finding that more heat has been taken up by the oceans may lead to revisions in estimates of the rate of sea-level rise. The finding also may affect assessments of how sensitive the climate is to the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the researchers said.

Municipal and state officials are tossing around ideas to get Boston ready for up to seven feet of sea level rise by 2100.  One idea is to begin preparing parts of the city to become the Venice of the U.S.  In these areas roads would be transformed into canals.

They Call It "The Point of No Return" Study

Greenpeace has come up with a roster of planned oil, gas and coal projects that it calls "carbon bombs."

Prepared by the consultancy firm EcoFys, the study lists 14-major projects that will increase global greenhouse gas emissions by a civilization-wrecking 20%.   That's where the "point of no return" part comes in.

The largest contributors will be China's five north-western provinces, which aim to increase coal production by 620m tonnes by 2015, generating an additional 1.4bn tonnes of greenhouse gases a year.

Australia's burgeoning coal export industry, already the largest in the world, is in second place due to its potential growth to 408m tonnes of shipped resource a year by 2025, resulting in an annual 760m tonnes of CO₂.

Meanwhile, controversial exploitation of oil and gas reserves in the Arctic could release 520m tonnes of CO₂ a year, with further major emissions set to flow from other new fossil fuel frontiers, such as tar sands oil in Canada and shale gas in the US.

The EcoFys report is quite blunt:

...a handful of governments and a small number of
companies in the fossil fuel industry are pushing these
projects, apparently without a care about the climate
consequences. In November 2012, the IEA said in its
annual World Energy Outlook that no more than one-third
of the carbon contained in the proven reserves of fossil
fuels can be released into the atmosphere by 2050 if
the world is to achieve the 2°C goal.8 The development
of these new coal, oil and gas projects would come at
a time when climate scientists are increasingly linking
alarming extreme weather events to climate change.9
These extreme weather events include Hurricane Sandy
in October 201210, droughts in the US in 201211 and
201112, heat waves and forest fires in Russia in 201013,
and the European heat wave in 2003 that killed tens of
thousands14. The disasters the world is experiencing
now are happening at a time when the average global
temperature has increased by 0.8ºC15, and they are
just a taste of our future if greenhouse gas emissions
continue to balloon.

...The huge gap between what governments say they are
doing to prevent catastrophic climate change and what
they are actually doing is most evident with these 14
projects. The governments that have approved them have
all agreed that the global average temperature must be
kept below 2°C.
 
If the governments supporting the projects in this report
help push the world past the point of no return, the
great irony will be that the resulting climate chaos was
preventable. The technology for avoiding the emissions
from these projects and for reducing overall global
emissions exists right now.

...The world is clearly at a Point of No Return: either replace
coal, oil and gas with renewable energy, or face a future
turned upside down by climate change.

The report is an indictment of the petro-politics in Canada's Parliament, Conservative, Liberal and New Democrat alike.

We'll All Be Singing This Tune Before Long

It goes like this:

"If we had had more ambition [on emissions cuts from rich countries], we would not have to ask for so much [money] for adaptation. If there had been more money for adaptation [to climate change], we would not be looking for money for loss and damage. What's next? Loss of our islands?"

That retort was delivered by Ronald Jumeau, representing the Seychelles, to the U.S. negotiator at the now concluded Doha climate summit.   The developing countries actually reached an agreement - to throw more money (supposedly) at the poor and vulnerable countries most heavily impacted by global warming.

Only this time there's a difference.   Instead of funding adaptation measures, we're promising to pay them damages for injuries and loss we have caused them.   Only we're desperately hedging to find something, anything else to call it.   After all, we don't want to admit responsibility, do we?

The US had strongly opposed the initial "loss and damage" proposals, which would have set up a new international institution to collect and disperse funds to vulnerable countries. US negotiators also made certain that neither the word "compensation", nor any other term connoting legal liability, was used, to avoid opening the floodgates to litigation – instead, the money will be judged as aid.

There we go.   We'll just call it "aid."  And we'll pay it, if indeed we pay it at all, on some ad hoc basis to our liking.   And, if we run true to course, if you're a good little country you might get some but if you're a bad little country, the uppity kind, you'll probably be out of luck.

As I read Jumeau's remark I was left to wonder when our own, national emissions impact bill will come due?   Who will fund our adaptation costs here on the coast?   And who will compensate us for our losses?

Sure, we should all pay, perhaps an assessment by province, according to each province's population and per capita greenhouse gas emissions.  Oh dear, that would cause some problems.   Okay, sure, it's Alberta again.  Alberta, of course, seeks great wealth by extracting and exporting bitumen that's processed into a heavy oil, mixed with dilutents and then piped out of province.  It's so filthy, so carbon-intensive, that the stuff is refined elsewhere, keeping those emissions off the books.  But, as reported by the Pembina Institute, if Alberta were a country, its per capita greenhouse gas emissions would be higher than any other country in the world.

No problem, we'll just price carbon emissions wherever and however they're generated, from sea to sea to shining sea.   That would make sense, wouldn't it.   Equality, fairness, polluter pays.

Except the Harper junta sees things differently.  Generalissimo Estoban Harper himself would like to see some carbon, his province's coincidentally, treated differently than other carbon, your province's.  You see if we priced carbon emissions fairly, equally, it would be another blow to the conjuring act of subsidies and deferrals and outsourced emissions necessary to keep up the illusion of Athabasca prosperity.  And that simply won't do.

So we're going to have a sector-based emissions pricing policy and by "sector" we mean bitumen production versus everything else.  That will also probably delay implementation of carbon pricing and ensure it's kept well out of the petro-state danger zone.

And so it's unrealistic to expect major efforts to decarbonize our economy and our society.   Ain't gonna happen if we're to multiply bitumen production several fold and every major petro-party which unless you're Green includes yours seems onside with that.   And we can probably wrangle about carbon pricing a good long time, your grandkids might wind up negotiating that.

So when it comes to funding adaptation and paying to cover damage and loss from climate change, there are two scenarios, neither of them good for coastal Canadians.   One is that the fossil fuel fetish continues in which case adaptation and compensation costs will be politically inconvenient and swept under the carpet.  The other is that the fossil fuel bubble bursts sending the foreign oil companies racing out of town and flushing Alberta's economy straight down the toilet, leaving the province with uncollectable revenues,  debt and economic dislocation similar to that of the Third World.

It's time the Feds had a viable carbon pricing regime actually collecting hundreds of millions of dollars annually to fund climate change adaptation, especially for coastal Canada.   That means talking about what is happening and what is coming.   That means putting a price tag on it (independently audited, of course) that Canadians can actually see.   That means making polluters pay, all of us, and finally encouraging alternative energy solutions.

That means responsible government, something we haven't had for far too long.

Tundra is Fuel and It Will Burn Us

We hear a lot about the tundra that blankets the far north thawing due to global warming.   As it thaws it releases previously trapped methane and CO2.

Well it does more than that.   As tundra thaws it turns into fuel for wildfires.  And let's put it this way, fire fighting isn't very effective up there.

In 2007, a tundra fire on the Anaktuvuk river in Alaska showed what's at stake.

"'Fire has been largely absent from tundra for the past 11,000 or so years, but the frequency of tundra fires is increasing, probably as a response to climate warming,' said co-author Syndonia "Donie" Bret-Harte, an ecosystem ecologist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Institute of Arctic Biology.

"The Anaktuvuk River fire burned 1,039 square kilometers (401 square miles), an area roughly the size of Cape Cod and visible from space, and released more than 2.1 teragrams (2.3 million tons) of carbon into the atmosphere. Radiocarbon dating of the soils revealed the maximum age of the soil carbon emitted from the fire was 50 years."

And a tundra fire is more complex than an ordinary forest fire.


"Smoke from the fire pumped greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, but that's just one part of a tundra fire's potential impact. The fire also consumed up to 30 percent of the insulating layer of organic matter that protects the permafrost beneath the tundra's shrub- and moss-covered landscape.

"In a pine forest, fire would burn up leaf litter on the ground, but not the soil beneath. Because the Arctic tundra has a carbon-rich, peaty soil, however, the ground itself is combustible, and when the fire recedes, some of the soil is gone. In a double whammy, the vulnerable permafrost is not only more exposed, but also covered by blackened ground, which absorbs more of the sun's heat and could accelerate thawing.

"'When the permafrost warms, microbes will begin to decompose that organic matter and could release even more carbon that's been stored in the permafrost for hundreds or thousands of years into the atmosphere,' Mack said. 'If that huge stock of carbon is released, it could increase atmospheric carbon dioxide drastically.'"

Smoke and soot from tundra fires in Labrador also caused dramatic melting of the Greenland ice sheet in July.

Satellite imaging on 8 July showed surface thawing on about 40 per cent of the ice sheet.   Four days later - just four days - that had grown to 97 per cent of the ice sheet thawing.

This is an excellent example of how everything in our biosphere is connected and contained in a remarkably delicate balance.   The tundra is circumpolar and it blankets the permafrost beneath it.   As we warm that tundra we're turning it into fuel - the trees and shrubs
and the carbon-rich soil beneath.

Is this one of those "tipping points" the climate scientists have been warning us about?   It sure seems to check all the boxes, ring all the bells.  We could be witnessing the early onset of runaway global warming.   Fortunately we're much too busy figuring out ways to increase our extraction and export of high-carbon fossil fuels to have time to worry about stuff like the tundra.   Where's the money in that?  Sheesh.