Climate Change: Even Worse Than You Think
| Thu Sep. 24, 2009 8:11 PM PDT
Juliet Eilperin reports in the Washington Post:
Climate researchers now predict the planet will warm by 6.3 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century even if the world's leaders fulfill their most ambitious climate pledges, a much faster and broader scale of climate change than forecast just two years ago, according to a report released Thursday by the United Nations Environment Program.
That's odd. This is 3.5 degrees Celsius. A couple of hours ago that same story said 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit, or 4 degrees Celsius. But if you click on the link and read the UN report, neither of those numbers appears. At least, not that I can find. What's going on?
Robert Corell, who chairs the Climate Action Initiative....collaborated with climate researchers at the Vermont-based Sustainability Institute, Massachusetts-based Ventana Systems and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to do the analysis. The team has revised its estimates since the U.N. report went to press and has posted the most recent figures at ClimateInteractive.org.
The group took the upper-range targets of nearly 200 nations' climate policies — including U.S. cuts that would reduce domestic emissions 73 percent from 2005 levels by 2050, along with the European Union's pledge to reduce its emissions 80 percent from 1990 levels by 2050 — and found that even under that optimistic scenario, the average global temperature is likely to warm by 6.3 degrees.
Ah. The number comes not from the UN report, but from Robert Corell. And it's been updated, which presumably accounts for the Post story being updated.
Except that if you go to ClimateInteractive.org, their graph still says 4 degrees Celsius. And it seems to be based on a model called C-ROADS, not the UN report.
So color me confused. Except for one thing: both the UN report and Corell's analysis agree that climate change is much worse than we thought even a few years ago. Virtually every measure of warming is increasing faster than our models predicted — something that regular readers of this blog already know. From the first chapter of the UN study:
The climate forcing arriving sooner-than-expected includes faster sea-level rise, ocean acidification, melting of Arctic sea-ice cover, warming of polar land masses, freshening in ocean currents, and shifts in circulation patterns in the atmosphere and the oceans.
....In early 2008, a team of scientists published the first detailed investigation of vulnerable Earth System components that could contain tipping points. The team introduced the term ‘tipping element’ for these vulnerable systems and accepted a definition for tipping point as “...a critical threshold at which a tiny perturbation can qualitatively alter the state or development of a system...”
The nine tipping points are below. Three of them could happen within ten years, and two more are possible within 50. Time to quit mucking around, folks.
UPDATE: The ClimateInteractive folks now seem to have updated their graphs to show warming of 6.3°F/3.5°C. Graphs are here.
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Comments
Lovelock has been saying it's worse for a while. Yeah, the world is pretty much toast, as they say. And a temperature jump like that will have a lot of people treading water. Soggy toast? The real tipping point is when the wealthy members of the Republican party realize they are the ones with the most to lose. I predict within 4 years they will be blaming the Democrats for dragging their feet on climate change and anxious to spend big bucks to save their beach front property.
Maybe under some weird definitions of "measure"
Submitted by -_- on Thu Sep. 24, 2009 8:44 PM PDT.
" Virtually every measure of warming is increasing faster than our models predicted"
This may be so, but does that fit with anything you wrote above? A brief glance seems to indicates that everything you wrote above was based on models and predictions and estimates of policies.
Not on anything that anyone could call a measurement of observable warming.
And is the mojo website being grossly sucky tonight? It is impossible to get anything other than a blank page when clicking post comments and not logged in, and that's for firefox, chrome and ie 8.
Yeah, sucks to be MoJo
Submitted by -_- on Thu Sep. 24, 2009 8:48 PM PDT.
If you're not logged in, this post shows zero comments, and clicking on post brings up a blank page. If you're logged in, the post shows 2 comments, and clicking on post/read brings up the comments.
Well...
Submitted by John Sully (not verified) on Thu Sep. 24, 2009 9:12 PM PDT.
The general consensus at this point is still 3.0C. Some people, such as Hansen are much more worried (not that 3.0C is a worry free number), but the science to support that is still slim at best. The C-ROADS model is almost certainly not a model to be believed based on the silly block model plus the claims made about speed. I would not trust the higher numbers.
However, the 3.5C number is believable. But my best guess is that the 2011, or whenever then next IPCC report is due, the best estimate will still be 3.0C. This is a number which has held pretty closely for the last 40 years or so. The range gets smaller but the best estimate seems to stay the same.
Now the reported estimate by the IPCC is for a doubling of CO2 from preindustrial levels of 280ppm, while these estimates may be based on a higher concentration of CO2, but the current economic unpleasantness has led to a substantial decrease in anthropogenic releases of CO2. My guess is that the curve will bend down quite a bit given the proven efficacy of efficiency and that the BAU SRES (I forget the designation) will probably rule in the end.
Tipping points...
Submitted by John Sully (not verified) on Thu Sep. 24, 2009 9:45 PM PDT.
Some of the tipping points listed are just silly, on others the science is still out.
The Indian Summer Monsoon is heavily influenced by ENSO and it tends to be suppressed when the SOI is negative (El Nino). Stating that the monsoon might go away in a year is just silly. Far more worrisome from an impact point of view is the melting of Himalayan glaciers. This will reduce year round river flows and hurt the ability to irrigate crops on the subcontinent. From an economic standpoint this is far worse and much more (virtually certain) to happen within a decade or two.
Except for Arctic sea ice, for which the timeframe is probably 20 to 30 years, and the boreal forest effects, which are happening right now, the science is unsettled at best. There is no doubt that the effects of warming are happening faster than current models show. All this really shows is that even the best models are poor at showing regional effects, a problem which has long been acknowledged and on which much work and billions of computer cycles are being expended to improve.
It pays to spend some time perusing the actual scientific literature to get a real handle on what is known and not known. However, there is one question to which the answer is clearly known: if we keep dumping CO2 into the atmosphere the earth will warm by about 3.0C if we get to 460ppm.
"Virtually every measure of
Submitted by coyote (not verified) on Thu Sep. 24, 2009 10:30 PM PDT.
"Virtually every measure of warming is increasing faster than our models predicted"
The only measure of warming I can think of that is an exception to this is that one called "temperature"
Weather and climate are not
Submitted by dob (not verified) on Fri Sep. 25, 2009 5:55 AM PDT.
Weather and climate are not the same thing, you hopelessly ignorant naif.
nice weather we're having
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Fri Sep. 25, 2009 7:32 AM PDT.
I got mine while the climate was fine.
Tipping points are determined experimentally. Our civilization, with its heavy reliance on fossil fuels, IS the experiment. We won't know we've crossed any tipping points until AFTER we've crossed them (and it's too late to do anything about it).
Sorry for your progeny.
Lovelock thinks it will get really bad by 2012 and unsustainable by 2020. This is because there are many, many living things in our environment that won't survive even a few degrees of average temperature warming. We depend on some of these living things to sustain the environment that sustains us.
Every extreme weather event is an indicator of climate change. Climate is average weather and averages move fastest when extremes occur repeatedly. Remember to examine the actual meteorological phenomenon, not the impacts on human activity. (If no one lived along the Gulf Coast, Katrina would have pretty much been just another hurricane.)
I'm doing my part. I no
Submitted by Luther on Fri Sep. 25, 2009 7:46 AM PDT.
I'm doing my part. I no longer listen to Michael Savage to save electricity. I make fun of Al Gore and his personal carbon footprint. Whenever I see Hispanic looking people, especially with a lot of kids, in a big car, I report them to ICE as possible illegal aliens so they can be deported to their country of origin and tread a lower carbon footprint.
Will the roaches survive? Perhaps we are just a step in the evolutionary scheme.
What are you liberals doing on an individual basis?
Ignoring published science
Submitted by Tom Fuller (not verified) on Fri Sep. 25, 2009 7:54 AM PDT.
I find this post truly amazing and the Nine Tipping Points even more so.
I cannot comment on the Indian monsoon season, but the other points seem really bizarre.
After a century of worry about desertification, the fact that governments and citizens have managed to, at great effort and expense, actually reverse the trend and start to reclaim land lost to the Sahara is... evidence of climate change?
Arctic ice melt is a fact, and a matter of some concern, but you cannot say it has increased over the past 2 years--it has decreased since the dramatic melt of 2007. It is still a concern, but why would anyone say it is accelerating? It most certainly is not. It is still dramatically below the mean for the past three decades, but ice melt is not decreasing.
I wouldn't believe everything I hear coming from a Brazilian government official, but this story (http://english.cctv.com/program/worldwidewatch/20090902/108879.shtml) claims that destruction of the rainforest is at its lowest level in 20 years.
Boreal forests are certainly vulnerable to fires, but that is far more a cause of poor forest management practices and globalisation introducing pests than global warming.
There is no--not one--absolutely zero--scientist working in the field who thinks there is any chance at all of a stoppage of the ocean circulation system. Not in the near future. Not in the far future. But the movie was fun...
This is the first I've read of any claim that El Nino may enter a switched on state. I find it curious that I would first read of it here. But I cannot comment on this, other than to note that this El Nino, like the last, despite predictions from James Hansen and others, have not been strong at all...
Their comment on the Greenland Ice Sheet dropped a zero--significant melt due to projected global warming is expected only after 3,000 years, and that's only if global warming never stops and never slows down. At least if you go by the science, rather than the science fiction.
The West Antarctic Ice Sheet will crumble due to mechanical stress eventually, whether temperatures rise or fall. This has been known for over a century--since well before global warming was an issue.
It is true that current commitments to curb emissions will not affect the course of climate change at all--which is one reason why Republicans are attacking Cap and Trade, sadly. But to say that temperatures are rising now is disingenuous at best, using weighted decadal averages. To say that temperature rise is accelerating is totally false.
I would love references to information about the monsoon's changes, if anybody can point me there.
Tipping Points, Redux..
Submitted by John Sully (not verified) on Fri Sep. 25, 2009 1:06 PM PDT.
There are several misconceptions and errors in the above post, and I would like to address them here.
I cannot comment on the Indian monsoon season, but the other points seem really bizarre.
As I explained in my post above, the South Asian monsoon is heavily influenced by El Nino. When the SOI (Southern Oscillation Index) is negative (El Nino) the monsoon tends to fail. Should a warming climate tend to make the SOI negative more often -- a "permanent" El Nino -- then failure of the monsoon would occur more often.
However, the science is out on this. There are some indications that a warming climate could weaken the Walker circulation, which drives trade winds, but there are also indications that it might not. Should trade winds weaken, then El Ninos would become more common and the monsoon would fail more often.
Arctic ice melt is a fact, and a matter of some concern, but you cannot say it has increased over the past 2 years--it has decreased since the dramatic melt of 2007. It is still a concern, but why would anyone say it is accelerating? It most certainly is not. It is still dramatically below the mean for the past three decades, but ice melt is not decreasing.
The important thing to consider here is that the actual trend of the amount of ice melt during the summer is increasing at a faster rate than a simple linear extrapolation of the trend from 1979 - 2000. This means that ice melt is accelerating, not slowing down as you seem to believe.
I wouldn't believe everything I hear coming from a Brazilian government official, but this story (http://english.cctv.com/program/worldwidewatch/20090902/108879.shtml) claims that destruction of the rainforest is at its lowest level in 20 years.
This tipping point has nothing to do with man made destruction of the rainforest. Recent experimental research has shown that even short periods of drought in the Amazon rainforest, on the order of four or five years, can cause die off of the canopy. Because of the reduced respiration by the forest, drought will be intensified leading to desertification and further reductions in rainfall.
This is something which should be worried about since all climate models indicate an expansion of mid latitude deserts, but the time frame is almost certainly on century timescales.
Boreal forests are certainly vulnerable to fires, but that is far more a cause of poor forest management practices and globalisation introducing pests than global warming.
In this case, you should talk to people out west about this. The problem is definitely due to global warming. The fact that we have had warmer winters over the last ten years allows mountain pine beetles to survive the winters. This has led to uncontrolled infestations in our forests and massive tree die off. Drive over McDonald pass between Deer Lodge and Helena in Montana for an extreme example of this: there is a new species of pine up there, the red pine -- because that is the color of a dead pine tree. This problem is now endemic throughout the Rocky Mountain West and extends far up into British Columbia. BTW, the MPB is a native pest, not introduced.
The West Antarctic Ice Sheet will crumble due to mechanical stress eventually, whether temperatures rise or fall. This has been known for over a century--since well before global warming was an issue.
This statement would surprise the scientists who are studying this. The hypothesized mechanism involves the melting of the sea floor grounded outlet glaciers. The melting of these glaciers, in particular the Pine Island glacier, which currently plug up the drainage of the WAIS will speed up the flow of the ice sheet and cause increased sea level rise. This is similar to the effects recently noted in Greenland, in particular the Jacobshaven (sp?) glacier. However, as you noted this is on millennial timescales.
It is true that current commitments to curb emissions will not affect the course of climate change at all--which is one reason why Republicans are attacking Cap and Trade, sadly. But to say that temperatures are rising now is disingenuous at best, using weighted decadal averages. To say that temperature rise is accelerating is totally false.
These claims are based on a cherry pick of 1998 as the start year. 1998 was an exceptionally warm year, likely the warmest of the past millenium and almost certainly the warmest of the last few centuries. Eyeballing a graph of temperature since then would seem to show a downward trend. However if a trend is calculated, you would see that since 1998 there is actually a slight upward trend and the 30 year trend is not affected at all, it continues to chug on at around .16C/decade.
So, even if we cut 70%, the
Submitted by Yancey Ward (not verified) on Fri Sep. 25, 2009 8:19 AM PDT.
So, even if we cut 70%, the world goes into the crapper anyway? Next thing you know, we "pledge" to cut 100%, and guess what- the world will probably be predicted to go into the crapper anyway due to something else, if not still CO2.
Honestly, how anyone could read this and not come to the conclusion that the writers of these warnings aren't totally mad is beyond me.
worse than the reports
Submitted by tpx on Fri Sep. 25, 2009 9:26 AM PDT.
Climate change deniers will react the most violently to climate change, and that is worse than what the reports about climate change reveal.
If El Nino switches to a
Submitted by cld (not verified) on Fri Sep. 25, 2009 10:40 AM PDT.
If El Nino switches to a permanently 'on' state doesn't that increase precipitation throughout the South and West in the US, offsetting desertification?
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