by DGR News Service | Oct 2, 2021 | Climate Change, Human Supremacy, Women & Radical Feminism
This article originally appeared in Common Dreams.
“This is the time to unite together to build the healthy and just future we know is possible for each other and the Earth.”
By JULIA CONLEY
As world leaders gathered in New York for the United Nations General Assembly Thursday and amid preparations for a global climate conference coming up in November, women leading more than 120 international organizations delivered a call to action demanding “a transformation of how we relate to the natural world and to one another”—one that will enable far-reaching action to save the planet.
“As the world prepares for one of the most important climate talks since the Paris Agreement, we know solutions exist to mitigate the worst impacts, and that women are leading the way.” —Osprey Orielle Lake, WECAN International
Led by Women’s Earth & Climate Action Network (WECAN) International, the organizations called on governments and financial institutions to commit to policies that prioritize “social, racial, and economic justice for all” as they work to keep the heating of the planet below 1.5C.
“We must rapidly halt the extraction of oil, gas, and coal and end all deforestation while building a new economy predicated on community-led solutions,” reads the call to action, which was signed by groups including MADRE, CodePink, and Women’s Earth Alliance.
“As we herald in sustainable, democratic, and equitable governance paradigms, we need to prioritize the leadership and well-being of women, gender non-conforming people, Black and Brown communities, and Indigenous peoples who are disproportionately impacted by climate change, but also lead the frontlines of systemic solutions,” the groups said.
The organizations also plan to present their demands at the 2021 U.N. Climate Change Conference (COP 26) in November, where leaders from nearly 200 countries will be under pressure to increase their ambitions to reduce emissions and uphold their existing obligations to frontline communities across the globe, particularly in the Global South.
“We are at a choice point for humanity,” said Osprey Orielle Lake, executive director of WECAN International. “Every day, we can see for ourselves forest fires burning all over the world, massive flooding, extreme droughts, people losing their livelihoods and lives—we are in a climate emergency. As the world prepares for one of the most important climate talks since the Paris Agreement, we know solutions exist to mitigate the worst impacts, and that women are leading the way.”
The call to action includes a number of steps recommended for governments as well as financial institutions, including:
- End fossil fuel expansion and rapidly accelerate a just transition to 100% renewable and regenerative energy;
- Promote women’s leadership and gender equity;
- Protect the rights of Indigenous people by upholding all treaties, and follow Indigenous communities’ traditional ecological knowledge;
- Protect forests and biodiversity with a global moratorium on logging and a phase-out of agricultural practices that cause soil erosion and depletion;
- Preserve oceans and freshwater;
- Promote food security and food sovereignty;
- Protect the rights of nature; and
- Halt the financing of all fossil fuel projects.
The call to action comes ahead of a six-day virtual forum organized by WECAN.
At the Global Women’s Assembly for Climate Justice, which begins Saturday, speakers will include scientist and conservationist Dr. Jane Goodall; Casey Camp-Horinek of the Ponca Nation, a WECAN board member and environmental ambassador; Ruth Nyambura of the African Ecofeminist Collective in Kenya; and Sônia Bone Guajajara of the Articulation of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil.
“As a Matriarch of the Ponca Nation, I am honored to have the responsibility of caring for the generations to come by ensuring the health and welfare of Mother Earth, Father Sky, and Relatives in every form,” said Camp-Horinek. “Life itself hangs in the balance, and we women are coming together to say that we must make the correct choices for our collective future now.”
Events at the six-day forum will include discussions about protecting the planet’s forests, rejecting “greenwashing” by corporations, and supporting feminist frameworks for climate justice.
“We can act now and we must act now, which is why WECAN is hosting the Global Women’s Assembly for Climate Justice to uplift women, gender-diverse and community-led solutions, strategies, policies, and frameworks to address the climate crisis,” said Lake. “It is code red and we are drawing a red line to say no more sacrifice people and no more sacrifice zones. This is the time to unite together to build the healthy and just future we know is possible for each other and the Earth.”
by DGR News Service | Sep 27, 2021 | Climate Change, Human Supremacy, Strategy & Analysis
This article originally appeared in Resilience. It is adapted from the book POWER: Limits and Prospects for Human Survival (New Society Publishers, September 2021) by Richard Heinberg
Editor’s note: Under the current system, Economies of Scale create Jevons Paradox. “This is crucial: Increased energy efficiency not only doesn’t generally reduce demand, but instead increases it. This is called the “rebound effect,” and we see it all the time.”
– Bright Green Lies p. 213
Our power over nature is only an illusion. Nature has no mercy.
By Richard Heinberg
Climate change is often incorrectly described as an isolated pollution issue. In this flawed framing, humanity has simply made a mistake in its choice of energy sources; the solution entails switching sources and building enough carbon-sucking machines to clear the atmosphere of polluting CO2. Only the political power of the fossil fuel companies prevents us from adopting this solution and ending our existential environmental crisis.
But techno-fixes (that is, technological solutions that circumvent the need for personal or cultural change) aren’t working so far, and likely won’t work in the future. That’s because fossil fuels will be difficult to replace, and energy usage is central to our collective economic power.
In other words, power is the key to solving climate change—but not necessarily in the way that many pundits claim. Solutions will not come just from defeating fossil fuel interests and empowering green entrepreneurs; real climate progress will require the willingness of large swathes of the populace, especially in wealthy countries, to forgo forms of power they currently enjoy: comfort and convenience, the ability to travel far and fast, and the option to easily obtain a wide range of consumer products whose manufacture entails large inputs of energy and natural resources.
This is not a feel-good message, but the longer we postpone grappling with power in this larger sense, the less successful we’re likely to be in coming to terms with the climate threat.
The Big Picture: Power and Consequences
Why can there be no climate techno-fix? There are two routes to this conclusion. The first one meanders through the history of humans on Earth, revealing how each new technological or social innovation empowered some people over others, while often imposing a long-term environmental cost. The adoption of agriculture was a milestone on this path: it enabled more people to subsist in any given area, and it led to cities, kings, and slavery; further, in many places, plowing tended to deplete or ruin topsoil, and city-dwellers cut down nearby forests, leading to eventual societal collapse.
But the real show-stopper came much more recently. The adoption of fossil fuels gave humans the biggest jolt of empowerment ever: in just the last two centuries, our global population has grown eight-fold, and so has per capita energy consumption. Our modern way of life—with cars, planes, supermarkets, tractors, trucks, electricity grids, and internet shopping—is the result.
Climate change is the shadow of this recent cavalcade of industriousness, since it results from the burning of fossil fuels, the main enablers of modern civilization. Nevertheless, rapidly increasing population and consumption levels are inherently unsustainable and are bringing about catastrophic environmental impacts on their own, even if we disregard the effects of carbon emissions. The accelerating depletion of resources, increasing loads of chemical pollution, and the hastening loss of wild nature are trends leading us toward ecological collapse, with economic and social collapse no doubt trailing close behind. Ditching fossil fuels will turn these trends around only if we also deal with the issues of population and consumption.
That’s the big picture. However, the quest for a climate techno-fix also fails on its own terms—that is, as a painless means of averting climate change while maintaining our current industrial economy and way of life. The rest of this essay deals with this second trail of evidence and logic, which requires a more detailed presentation. So: buckle up. Here we go.
Why Solar Panels Won’t Save Consumerism
Most energy analysts regard solar and wind as the best candidates to substitute for fossil fuels in electrical power generation (since nuclear is too expensive and too risky, and would require too much time for build-out; and hydro is capacity constrained). But these “renewables” are not without challenges. While sunlight and wind are themselves renewable, the technologies we use to capture them aren’t: they’re constructed of non-renewable materials like steel, silicon, concrete, and rare earth minerals, all of which require energy for mining, transport, and transformation. These materials are also depleting, and many will be difficult or impossible to recycle.
Sunlight and wind are intermittent: we cannot control when the sun will shine or the wind will blow. Therefore, to ensure constant availability of power, these sources require some combination of four strategies:
- Energy storage (e.g., with batteries) is useful to balance out day-to-day intermittency, but nearly useless when it comes to seasonal intermittency; also, storing energy costs energy and money.
- Source redundancy (building far more generation capacity than will actually be needed on “good” days, and then connecting far-flung solar and wind farms by way of massive super-grids), is a better solution for seasonal intermittency, but requires substantial infrastructure investment.
- Excess electricity generated at times of peak production can be used to make synthetic fuels (such as hydrogen, ammonia, or methanol), perhaps using carbon captured from the atmosphere, as a way of storing energy; however, making large amounts of such fuels will again require substantial infrastructure investment, and the process is inherently inefficient.
- Demand management (using electricity when it’s available, and curtailing usage when it isn’t) is the cheapest way of dealing with intermittency, but it often implies behavioral change or economic sacrifice.
Today the world uses only about 20 percent of its final energy in the form of electricity. The other 80 percent of energy is used in the forms of solid, liquid, and gaseous fuels. A transition away from fossil fuels will entail the electrification of much of that other 80 percent of energy usage, which includes most transportation and key industrial processes. However, many uses of energy, such as aviation and the making of cement for concrete, will be difficult or especially costly to electrify. In principle, the electrification conundrum could be overcome by powering aviation and high-heat industrial processes with synfuels. However, doing this at scale would require a massive infrastructure of pipelines, storage tanks, carbon capture devices, and chemical synthesis plants that would essentially replicate much of our current natural gas and oil supply system.
Machine-based carbon removal and sequestration methods work in the laboratory, but would need staggering levels of investment in order to be deployed at a meaningful scale, and it’s unclear who would pay for them. These methods also use a lot of energy, and, when full lifecycle emissions are calculated, it appears that more emissions are often generated than are captured.[1] The best carbon capture-and-sequestration responses appear instead to consist of various methods of ecosystem restoration and soil regeneration. These strategies would also reduce methane and nitrous oxide emissions. But they would require a near-complete rethinking of food systems and land management.
Not long ago I collaborated with a colleague, David Fridley, of the Energy Analysis Program at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, to look closely at what a full transition to a solar-wind economy would mean (our efforts resulted in the book Our Renewable Future).[2] We concluded that it will constitute an enormous job, requiring tens of trillions of dollars in investment. In fact, the task may be next to impossible—if we attempt to keep the overall level of societal energy use the same, or expand it to fuel further economic growth.[3] David and I concluded:
We citizens of industrialized nations will have to change our consumption patterns. We will have to use less overall and adapt our use of energy to times and processes that take advantage of intermittent abundance. Mobility will suffer, so we will have to localize aspects of production and consumption. And we may ultimately forgo some things altogether. If some new processes (e.g., solar or hydrogen-sourced chemical plants) are too expensive, they simply won’t happen. Our growth-based, globalized, consumption-oriented economy will require significant overhaul.[4]
The essence of the problem with a climate techno-fix is this: nearly everything we need to do to solve global warming (including building new low-emissions electrical generation capacity, and electrifying energy usage) requires energy and money. But society is already using all the energy and money it can muster in order to do the things that society wants and needs to do (extract resources, manufacture products, transport people and materials, provide health care and education, and so on). If we take energy and money away from those activities in order to fund a rapid energy transition on an unprecedented scale, then the economy will contract, people will be thrown out of work, and many folks will be miserable. On the other hand, if we keep doing all those things at the current scale while also rapidly building a massive alternative infrastructure of solar panels, wind turbines, battery banks, super grids, electric cars and trucks, electrified industrial equipment, and synthetic fuel factories, the result will be a big pulse of energy usage that will significantly increase carbon emissions over the short term (10 to 20 years), since the great majority of the energy currently available for the project must be derived from fossil fuels.
It takes energy to make solar panels, wind turbines, electric cars, and new generations of industrial equipment of all kinds. For a car with an internal combustion engine (ICE), 10 percent of lifetime energy usage occurs in the manufacturing stage. For an electric car, roughly 40 percent of energy usage occurs in manufacturing, and emissions during this stage are 15 percent greater than for an ICE car (over the entire lifetime of the e-car, emissions are about half those of the gasoline guzzler). With solar panels and wind turbines, energy inputs and carbon emissions are similarly front-loaded to the manufacturing phase; energy output and emissions reduction (from offsetting other electricity generation) come later. Replacing a very high percentage of our industrial infrastructure and equipment quickly would therefore entail a historically large burst of energy usage and carbon emissions. By undertaking a rapid energy transition, while also maintaining or even expanding current levels of energy usage for the “normal” purpose of economic growth, we would be defeating our goal of reducing emissions now—even though we would be working toward the goal of reducing emissions later.
Many folks nurture the happy illusion that we can do it all—continue to grow the economy while also funding the energy transition—by assuming that the problem is only money (if we find a way to pay for it, then the transition can be undertaken with no sacrifice). This illusion can be maintained only by refusing to acknowledge the stubborn fact that all activity, including building alternative energy generators and carbon capture machinery, requires energy.
The only way out of the dilemma arising from the energy and emissions cost of the transition is to reduce substantially the amount of energy we are using for “normal” economic purposes—for resource extraction, manufacturing, transportation, heating, cooling, and industrial processes—both so that we can use that energy for the transition (building solar panels and electric vehicles), and so that we won’t have to build as much new infrastructure. Increased energy efficiency can help reduce energy usage without giving up energy services, but many machines (LED lights, electric motors) and industrial processes are already highly efficient, and further large efficiency gains in those areas are unlikely. We would achieve an efficiency boost by substituting direct electricity generators (solar and wind) for inherently inefficient heat-to-electricity generators (natural gas and coal power plants); but we would also be introducing new inefficiencies into the system via battery-based electricity storage and hydrogen or synfuels production. In the end, the conclusion is inescapable: actual reductions in energy services would be required in order to transition away from fossil fuels without creating a significant short-term burst of emissions. Some energy and climate analysts other than David Fridley and myself—such as Kevin Anderson, Professor of Energy and Climate Change at the University of Manchester—have reached this same conclusion independently.[5]
Energy is inextricably related to power. Thus, if society voluntarily reduces its energy usage by a significant amount in order to minimize climate impacts, large numbers of people will likely experience this as giving up power in some form—whether physical, social, or economic.
It can’t be emphasized too much: energy is essential to all economic activity. An economy can grow continuously only by employing more energy (unless energy efficiency can be increased substantially, and further gains in efficiency can continue to be realized in each succeeding year—a near-impossibility over the long run, since investments in making processes more efficient typically see diminishing returns over time). World leaders demand more economic growth in order to fend off unemployment and other social ills. Thus, in effect, everyone is counting on having more energy in the future, not less.
A few well-meaning analysts and pundits try to avoid the climate-energy-economy dilemma by creating scenarios in which renewable energy saves the day simply by becoming dramatically cheaper than energy from fossil fuels; or by ignoring the real costs of dealing with energy intermittency in solar and wind power generation. Some argue that we have to fight climate change by becoming even more powerful than we already are—by geoengineering the atmosphere and oceans and thus taking full control of the planet, thereby acting like gods.[6] And some business and political leaders simply deny that climate change is a problem; therefore, no action is required. I would argue that all of these people are deluding themselves and others.
Do the Right Thing—Even if It’s Hard
Problems ignored usually don’t go away. And not all problems can be solved without sacrifice. If minimizing climate change really does require substantially reducing world energy usage, then policy makers should be discussing how to do this fairly and with as little negative impact as possible. The longer we delay that discussion, the fewer palatable options will be left.
The stakes could hardly be higher. If emissions continue, the result will be the failure of ecosystems, massive impacts on economies, widespread human misery and migration, and unpredictable disruptions to political systems. The return of famine as a familiar feature of human existence is a very real likelihood.[7]
It’s easy to see why people would wish to avoid giving up social, political, economic, and physical power to the degree that’s necessary in order to deal with climate change. Fighting entrenched power is a contentious activity, often a dangerous one. People with power don’t like threats to it, and they often fight back.
That’s why environmentalists like to choose their battles. The fossil fuel industry is wealthy and formidable, but at least it’s an enemy that’s easy to identify, and a lot of people already feel critical of the oil and gas companies for a variety of reasons (gasoline is too expensive, oil pipelines cause pollution, and so on).
But not all roadblocks to climate solutions are attributable to the oil companies. The rest of us are also implicated, though to greatly varying degrees depending on where we live and how much we consume. Our whole modern consumerist way of life, the essence of our economic system, is at fault. Unless we’re willing to give up some of our power over nature—our power to extract and transform resources and deliver the goods that we have come to rely on—then we’re destined to careen from one disaster to the next until our worst fears are realized.
It’s understandable why most environmentalists frame global warming the way they do. It makes solutions seem easier to achieve. But if we’re just soothing ourselves while failing to actually stave off disaster, or even to understand our problems properly, what’s the point?
The only real long-range solution to climate change centers on reining in human physical, social, and economic power dramatically, but in ways that preserve human dignity, autonomy, and solidarity. That’s more daunting than any techno-fix. But this route has the singular advantage that, if we follow it intelligently and persistently, we will address a gamut of social and environmental problems at once. In the end, it’s the only path to a better, safer future.
[1] June Sekera and Andreas Lichtenberger, “Assessing Carbon Capture: Public Policy, Science, and Societal Need.” Biophysical Economics and Sustainability volume 5, Article number: 14 (2020); https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41247-020-00080-5
[2] Richard Heinberg and David Fridley, Our Renewable Future: Laying the Path for 100 Percent Clean Energy. Washington D.C.: Island Press, 2016. Full text available at www.ourrenewablefuture.org. Accessed September 2, 2020.
[3] Other researchers have come to similar conclusions. For example, Tim Morgan (former head of research at Tullett Prebon) argues that it is surplus energy—the energy left over once energy required for energy-producing activities—that has driven economic expansion, and that a transition to renewables will necessarily result in declining surplus energy (see Tim Morgan, Surplus Energy Economics website https://surplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.com/ Accessed September 2, 2020.) In a recent paper, Carey King of the Energy Institute at the University of Texas, Austin, shows the inadequacy of current growth-based economic modeling of the renewable energy transition and proposes a new model that incorporates data-derived relationships between energy use, resource extraction, and economic growth. His conclusion is that the renewable energy transition will entail trade-offs with consumption, population, and wages; these trade-offs will depend on the path taken (whether high or low rate of investment). Carey King, “An Integrated Biophysical and Economic Modeling Framework for Long-Term Sustainability Analysis: The HARMONY Model.” Ecological Economics, Vol. 169, March 2020. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2019.106464 Accessed September 2, 2020.
[4] Heinberg and Fridley, Our Renewable Future, p. 140
[5] Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows-Larkin, “Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change Demands De-Growth Strategies from Wealthier Nations.” KevinAnderson.Info, November 2013. https://kevinanderson.info/blog/avoiding-dangerous-climate-change-demands-de-growth-strategies-from-wealthier-nations/. Accessed September 2, 2020. See also Patrick Moriarty and Damon Honnery, “Can Renewable Energy Power the Future?” Energy Policy Vol. 93, June 2016, pp. 3-7. www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151630088X. Accessed September 2, 2020.
[6] Rachel Kaufman, “The Risks, Rewards and Possible Ramifications of Geoengineering Earth’s Climate.” Smithsonian, March 11, 2019. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/risks-rewards-possible-ramifications-geoengineering-earths-climate-180971666/. Accessed September 3, 2020.
[7] Christopher Flavelle, “Climate Change Threatens the World’s Food Supply, United Nations Warns.” New York Times, August 8, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/08/climate/climate-change-food-supply.html Accessed September 3, 2020.
by DGR News Service | Sep 26, 2021 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Climate Change, Strategy & Analysis, The Problem: Civilization
This article originally appeared in Climate & Capitalism.
Editor’s note: DGR has always argued that civilizations are inherently destructive and environmental destruction and degradation has been ongoing for millenia. Climate change is only another concequence of this inherently destructive way of life. This is why technical solutions will never work. What we need to do to save the planet is 1. immediately stop destroying it, and 2. restore what we already have destroyed. This logic is easy to understand if your loyalty lies with the planet and all life on it, but it seems very hard to understand if your loyalty lies with this destructive and addictive way of life.
By Brian Tokar
Beyond the headlines: what climate science now shows about Earth’s future. Can we act in time?
The UN-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recently released its latest comprehensive report on the state of the earth’s climate. The much-anticipated report dominated the headlines for a few days in early August, then quickly disappeared amidst the latest news from Afghanistan, the fourth wave of Covid-19 infections in the US, and all the latest political rumblings. The report is vast and comprehensive in its scope, and is worthy of more focused attention outside of specialist scientific circles than it has received thus far.
The report affirms much of what we already knew about the state of the global climate, but does so with considerably more clarity and precision than earlier reports. It removes several elements of uncertainty from the climate picture, including some that have wrongly served to reassure powerful interests and the wider public that things may not be as bad as we thought. The IPCC’s latest conclusions reinforce and significantly strengthen all the most urgent warnings that have emerged from the past 30 to 40 years of climate science. It deserves to be understood much more fully than most media outlets have let on, both for what it says, and also what it doesn’t say about the future of the climate and its prospects for the integrity of all life on earth.
Click image to download report. (PDF, 248MB)
First some background. Since 1990, the IPCC has released a series of comprehensive assessments of the state of the earth’s climate, typically every 5–6 years. The reports have hundreds of authors, run for many hundreds of pages (this one has over 3000), and represent the international scientific consensus that has emerged from the period since the prior report. Instead of releasing a comprehensive report in 2019, as originally scheduled, the IPCC followed a mandate from the UN to issue three special reports: on the implications of warming above 1.5 degrees (all temperatures here are in Celsius except where otherwise noted), and on the particular implications of climate change for the earth’s lands and oceans. Thus the sixth comprehensive Assessment Report (dubbed AR6) is being released during 2021–22 instead of two years prior.
Also the report released last week only presents the work of the first IPCC working group (WGI), focused on the physical science of climate change. The other two reports, on climate impacts (including implications for health, agriculture, forests, biodiversity, etc.) and on climate mitigation — including proposed policy measures — are scheduled for release next February and March, respectively. While the basic science report typically receives far more press coverage, the second report on climate impacts and vulnerabilities is often the most revealing, describing in detail how both ecosystems and human communities will experience the impacts of climate changes.
In many respects, the new document represents a qualitative improvement over the previous Assessment Reports, both in terms of the precision and reliability of the data and also the clarity of its presentation. There are countless detailed charts and infographics, each illuminating the latest findings on a particular aspect of current climate science in impressive detail. There is also a new Interactive Atlas (freely available at interactive-atlas.ipcc.ch), which allows any viewer to produce their own maps and charts of various climate phenomena, based on a vast array of data sources and climate models.
If there is a key take-home message, it is that climate science has vastly improved over the past decade in terms of its precision and the degree of confidence in its predictions. Many uncertainties that underlay past reports appear to have been successfully addressed, for example how a once-limited understanding of the behavior and dynamics of clouds were a major source of uncertainty in global climate models. Not only have the mathematical models improved, but we now have more than thirty years of detailed measurements of every aspect of the global climate that enable scientists to test the accuracy of their models, and also to substitute direct observations for several aspects that once relied heavily upon modeling studies. So we have access to better models, and are also less fully reliant upon them.
Second, scientists’ understanding of historic and prehistoric climate trends have also vastly improved. While the IPCC’s third report in 2001 made headlines for featuring the now-famous “hockey stick” graph, showing how average temperatures had been relatively stable for a thousand years before starting to spike rapidly in the past few decades, the current report highlights the relative stability of the climate system over many thousands of years. Decades of detailed studies of the carbon contents of polar ice cores, lake and ocean sediments and other geologically stable features have raised scientists’ confidence in the stark contrast between current climate extremes and a couple of million years of relative climate stability.
The long-term cycle of ice ages, for example, reflects shifts of about 50 to 100 parts per million (ppm) in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations, compared to a current concentration (approximately 410 ppm) that is well over 150 ppm higher than the million-year average. We need to look back to the last interglacial era (125,000 years ago) to find an extended period of high average temperatures comparable to what we are experiencing now, and current carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere are believed to be higher than any time in at least two million years.
With these overarching issues in mind, it is time to summarize some of the report’s most distinctive findings and then reflect upon their implications.
First, the question of “climate sensitivity” has been one of the more contentious ones in climate science. It is a measure of how much warming would result from a doubling of atmospheric CO2 from preindustrial levels, i.e. from 280 ppm to 560 ppm. Early estimates were all over the map, giving policymakers the wiggle room to suggest it is reasonable to reduce emissions more slowly or wait for newer technologies — from better batteries to carbon capture and even nuclear fusion — to come along. This report greatly narrows the scope of that debate, with a “best estimate” that doubling CO2 will produce approximately 3 degrees of warming — far too high to avoid extremely dire consequences for all of life on earth.
Climate sensitivity is very likely (more than 90% confidence) between 2.0–4.5 degrees and likely (2/3 confidence) between 2.5 and 4 degrees. Of the five main future scenarios explored in the report, only those where global greenhouse gas emissions reach their peak before 2050 will avoid that disastrous milestone. If emissions continue increasing at rates comparable to the past few decades, we’ll reach doubled CO2 by 2100; if emissions accelerate, it could happen in just a few decades, vastly compounding the climate disruptions the world is already experiencing.
A second key question is, how fast do temperatures rise with increasing emissions? Is it a direct, linear relationship, or might temperature rises begin to level off any time in the foreseeable future? The report demonstrates that the effect remains linear, at least up to the level of 2 degrees warming, and quantifies the effect with high confidence. Of course there are important deviations from this number (1.65 degrees per thousand gigatons of carbon): the poles heat up substantially more quickly than other regions, the air over continental land masses heats up faster than over the oceans, and temperatures are warming almost twice as fast during cold seasons than warm seasons, accelerating the loss of arctic ice and other problems.
Of course more extreme events remain far less predictable, except that their frequency will continue to increase with rising temperatures. For example the triple digit (Fahrenheit) temperatures that swept the Pacific Northwest of the US and southwestern Canada this summer have been described as a once in 50,000 years event in “normal” times and no one excludes the possibility that they will happen again in the near future. So-called “compound” events, for example the combination of high temperatures and dry, windy conditions that favor the spread of wildfires, are the least predictable events of all.
The central conclusion from the overall linear increase in temperatures relative to emissions is that nothing short of a complete cessation of CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions will significantly stabilize the climate, and there is also a time delay of at least several decades after emissions cease before the climate can begin to stabilize.
Third, estimates of likely sea level rise, in both the near- and longer-terms, are far more reliable than they were a few years ago. Global sea levels rose an average of 20 centimeters during the 20th century, and will continue to rise throughout this century under all possible climate scenarios — about a foot higher than today if emissions begin to fall rapidly, nearly 2 feet if emissions continue rising at present rates, and 2.5 feet if emissions rise faster. These, of course, are the most cautious scientific estimates. By 2150 the estimated range is 2–4.5 feet, and more extreme scenarios where sea levels rise from 6 to 15 feet “cannot be ruled out due to deep uncertainty in ice sheet processes.”
With glacial melting expected to continue for decades or centuries under all scenarios, sea levels will “remain elevated for thousands of years,” potentially reaching a height of between 8 and 60 feet above present levels. The last time global temperatures were comparable to today’s for several centuries (125,000 years ago), sea levels were probably 15 to 30 feet higher than they are today. When they were last 2.5 to 4 degrees higher than preindustrial temperatures — roughly 3 million years ago — sea levels may have been up to 60 feet higher than today. Again these are all cautious estimates, based on the available data and subject to stringent statistical validation. For residents of vulnerable coastal regions around the world, and especially Pacific Island dwellers who are already forced to abandon their drinking water wells due to high infiltrations of sea water, it is far from just a theoretical problem.
Also, for the first time, the new report contains detailed projections for the unfolding of various climate-related phenomena in every region of the world. There is an entire chapter devoted to regionally-specific effects, and much attention to the ways in which climate disruptions play out differently in different locations. “Current climate in all regions is already distinct from the climate of the early or mid-20th century,” the report states, and many regional differences are expected to become more pronounced over time. While every place on earth is getting hotter, there are charts showing how different regions will become consistently wetter or dryer, or various combinations of both, with many regions, including eastern North America, anticipated to experience increasingly extreme precipitation events.
There are also more specific discussions of potential changes in monsoon patterns, as well as particular impacts on biodiversity hotspots, cities, deserts, tropical forests, and other places with distinctive characteristics in common. Various drought-related phenomena are addressed in more specific terms, with separate projections for meteorological drought (lack of rainfall), hydrological drought (declining water tables) and agricultural/ecological drought (loss of soil moisture). It can be expected that all these impacts will be discussed in greater detail in the upcoming report on climate impacts that is due in February.
There are numerous other important observations, many of which directly counter past attempts to minimize the consequences of future climate impacts. For those who want to see the world focus more fully on emissions unrelated to fossil fuel use, the report points out that between 64 and 86 percent of carbon emissions are directly related to fossil fuel combustion, with estimates approaching 100 percent lying well within the statistical margin of error. Thus there is no way to begin to reverse climate disruptions without an end to burning fossil fuels. There are also more detailed projections of the impacts of shorter-lived climate forcers, such as methane (highly potent, but short-lived compared to CO2), sulfur dioxide (which counteracts climate warming) and black carbon (now seen as a substantially less significant factor than before).
To those who assume the vast majority of emissions will continue to be absorbed by the world’s land masses and oceans, buffering the effects on the future atmosphere, the report explains how with rising emissions, a steadily higher proportion of the CO2 remains in the atmosphere, rising from only 30 to 35 percent under low emissions scenarios, up to 56 percent with emissions continuing to increase at present rates and doubling to 62 percent if emissions begin to rise more rapidly. So we will likely see a declining capacity for the land and oceans to absorb a large share of excess carbon dioxide.
The report is also more skeptical than in the past toward geoengineering schemes based on various proposed technological interventions to absorb more solar radiation. The report anticipates a high likelihood of “substantial residual or overcompensating climate change at the regional scales and seasonal time scales” resulting from any interventions designed to shield us from climate warming without reducing emissions, as well as the certainty that ocean acidification and other non-climate consequences of excess carbon dioxide would inevitably continue. There will likely be substantially more discussion of these scenarios in the third report of this IPCC cycle, which is due in March.
In advance of the upcoming international climate conference in Glasgow, Scotland this November, several countries have pledged to increase their voluntary climate commitments under the 2015 Paris Agreement, with some countries now aiming to achieve a peak in climate-altering emissions by mid-century. However this only approaches the middle range of the IPCC’s latest projections. The scenario based on a 2050 emissions peak is right in the middle of the report’s range of predictions, and shows the world surpassing the important threshold of 1.5 degrees of average warming in the early 2030s, exceeding 2 degrees by mid-century, and reaching an average temperature increase between 2.1 and 3.5 degrees (approximately 4–6 degrees Fahrenheit) between 2080 and 2100, nearly two and a half times the current global average temperature rise of 1.1 degrees since preindustrial times.
We will learn much more about the impacts of this scenario in the upcoming February report, but the dire consequences of future warming have been described in numerous published reports in recent years, including an especially disturbing very recent paper reporting signs that the Atlantic circulation (AMOC), which is the main source of warm air for all of northern Europe, is already showing signs of collapse. If carbon emissions continue to increase at current rates, we are looking at a best estimate of a 3.6 degree rise before the end of this century, with a likely range reaching well above 4 degrees — often viewed as a rough threshold for a complete collapse of the climate system.
There are two lower-emissions scenarios in the report, the lowest of which keeps the temperature rise by the century’s end under 1.5 degrees (after exceeding it briefly), but a quick analysis from MIT’s Technology Review points out that this scenario relies mainly on highly speculative “negative emissions” technologies, especially carbon capture and storage, and a shift toward the massive-scale use of biomass (i.e. crops and trees) for energy. We know that a more widespread use of “energy crops” would consume vast areas of the earth’s landmass, and that the regrowing of trees that are cut down to burn for energy would take many decades to absorb the initial carbon release– a scenario the earth clearly cannot afford.
The lower-emissions scenarios also accept the prevailing rhetoric of “net-zero,” assuming that more widespread carbon-sequestering methods like protecting forests can serve to compensate for still-rising emissions. We know that many if not most carbon offset schemes to date have been an absolute failure, with Indigenous peoples often driven from their traditional lands in the name of “forest protection,” only to see rates of commercial logging increase rapidly in immediately surrounding areas.
It is increasingly doubtful that genuine long-term climate solutions can be found without a thorough transformation of social and economic systems. It is true that the cost of renewable energy has fallen dramatically in the past decade, which is a good thing, and that leading auto manufacturers are aiming to switch to electric vehicle production over the coming decade. But commercial investments in renewable energy have leveled off over the same time period, especially in the richer countries, and continue to favor only the largest-scale projects that begin to meet capitalist standards of profitability. Fossil fuel production has, of course, led to exaggerated standards of profitability in the energy sector over more than 150 years, and most renewable projects fall far short.
We will likely see more solar and wind power, a faster tightening of fuel efficiency standards for the auto industry and subsidies for electric charging stations in the US, but nothing like the massive reinvestment in community-scaled renewables and public transportation that is needed. Not even the landmark Biden-Sanders budget reconciliation plan that is under consideration in in the US Congress, with all its necessary and helpful climate measures, addresses the full magnitude of changes that are needed to halt emissions by midcentury. While some obstructionists in Congress appear to be stepping back from the overt climate denial that has increasingly driven Republican politics in recent years, they have not backed away from claims that it is economically unacceptable to end climate-altering pollution.
Internationally, the current debate over reducing carbon pollution (so called “climate mitigation”) also falls far short of addressing the full magnitude of the problem, and generally evades the question of who is mainly responsible. While the US and other wealthy countries have produced an overwhelming share of historic carbon pollution since the dawn of the industrial era, there is an added dimension to the problem that is most often overlooked, and which I reviewed in some detail in my Introduction to a recent book (co-edited with Tamar Gilbertson), Climate Justice and Community Renewal (Routledge 2020). A 2015 study from Thomas Piketty’s research group in Paris revealed that inequalities within countries have risen to account for half of the global distribution of greenhouse gas emissions, and several other studies confirm this.
Researchers at Oxfam have been studying this issue for some years, and their most recent report concluded that the wealthiest ten percent of the global population are responsible for 49 percent of individual emissions. The richest one percent emits 175 times more carbon per person on average than the poorest ten percent. Another pair of independent research groups have released periodic Carbon Majors Reports and interactive graphics profiling around a hundred global companies that are specifically responsible for almost two-thirds of all greenhouse gases since the mid-19th century, including just fifty companies — both private and state-owned ones — that are responsible for half of all today’s industrial emissions (See climateaccountability.org). So while the world’s most vulnerable peoples are disproportionately impacted by droughts, floods, violent storms and rising sea levels, the responsibility falls squarely upon the world’s wealthiest.
When the current IPCC report was first released, the UN Secretary General described it as a “code red for humanity,” and called for decisive action. Greta Thunberg described it as a “wake-up call,” and urged listeners to hold the people in power accountable. Whether that can happen quickly enough to stave off some of the worst consequences will be a function of the strength of our social movements, and also our willingness to address the full scope of social transformations that are now essential for humanity and all of life on earth to continue to thrive.
Brian Tokar is the co-editor (with Tamra Gilbertson) of Climate Justice and Community Renewal: Resistance and Grassroots Solutions. He is a lecturer in Environmental Studies at the University of Vermont and a long-term faculty and board member of the Vermont-based Institute for Social Ecology.
by DGR News Service | Aug 20, 2021 | Alienation & Mental Health, Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Climate Change, Human Supremacy, Mining & Drilling, Toxification
Editor’s note: In addition to running away from the unnormal normal this culture has created (which in my understanding means to stop identifying with the culture of empire which most people perceive as normal) we must take bold action to protect our only home, and the future generations who rely on us.
Featured image: “Strip” by Nell Parker
This article originally appeared on the blog By My Solitary Hearth.
By Eliza Daley
Central Vermont is under a heat advisory today. There is also smoke from fires on the opposite side of the continent, though rains are periodically washing it out of the sky. Thus sometimes we don’t have the air quality advisory to go with the heat, though last night I could see no Perseid meteors through the combined haze of smoke particulates and equatorial Atlantic humidity. In my small and rural county where around 83% of the eligible population is vaccinated, Delta variant cases are sending people to the hospital at roughly ten times any rate that has been seen in the previous eighteen months of pandemic. A local summer camp outbreak is at 25 sick kids and increasing. Local schools are scrambling to figure out how to pack our unvaccinated children back into classrooms in a few days with no good ideas and quite a lot of hand-wringing. My co-worker on a landscape job had to pull a dead rat out of an active well this week. And there are no tomatoes.
These are the headlines of ecological collapse. This is not normal. There will be no return to normal. Normal was not normal. Normal, as we defined it in the late 20th century, was an ecological aberration, unsustainable in every way. We were merrily gobbling up all the easily accessible resources, especially those that create the abundant energy necessary to gobble up the rest efficiently (meaning profitably, not practically). We dug up, concentrated, and synthesized poisons of all sorts, relying on the magnanimous Earth to scatter and diffuse the toxins, murdering billions of life-forms in the process, right down to the life-sustaining microbes in our own digestive tracts. We killed off much of the biosphere both intentionally — as in the case of insect population crashes due to widespread insecticide use — and accidentally — as in the heat-induced bleaching of coral that is collapsing ocean ecosystems worldwide. We harvested far more than we needed of nearly every natural resource and agricultural product in order to turn the biosphere into wealth for some humans. And we concentrated far too many of ourselves into geographical areas that can’t produce the means to meet our needs at all — but are remarkably good at meeting the needs of viruses and other agents of infection. This is what normal has created.
This overly-hot summer, I’ve seen far too many bleating demands to return to normal. They claim that we have to get back to working in the resource intensive and micro-managed environments of our bullshit jobs. We have to send our kids back to over-crowded classrooms and day-care centers, mostly so that we are then free to go back to the office. We have to fly and drive and spend money on tourism and the service industry. We have to buy stuff — though this last is somewhat muted because there are many ineradicable kinks in the stuff supply lines and there is much less stuff to buy. We have to go to the movies.
Yes, that was an actual New York Times opinion piece. A rather long complaint about the writer’s diminished movie-watching joy because he sat in an empty theater. He also complained about the recent lack of mob emotion at sporting events and music venues and a reduced capacity to gossip around the office water cooler. I think maybe this person needs some real social bonding so he doesn’t have to rely on these shoddy substitutions. However, it must be pointed out that this is the type of person with a New York Times publishing platform. A person in a privileged position of power, influence, and wealth who has such inferior family and friendship ties that he must seek out relief to his feelings of isolation in economic activity. This is what normal has created.
This is what normal has created. But it will not continue. It will not continue not because we will stop it. We are not stopping. We are bleating about our inability to get back to normal. We are endeavoring in every way to keep that normal churning out death and destruction and isolation. The most vocal among us, those with the most wealth and status and public reach, are not even looking to a world that does not include normal. But that world exists; that world is the real world that is ruining normal for us. And it is winning. Normal is not normal. Normal is not sustainable. And the world is showing us that this is true in no uncertain terms, no matter all bleating to the contrary.
Normal will end, probably has ended in spite of all our efforts and bleating, because it is artificial and unsustainable. Reality wins every time. It has taken a while in human terms (though almost no time in geological terms), but normal is losing. In smokey air that covers a continent, normal is revealed as the aberration it always was. In variant viruses that fill hospitals and sicken our children, we see that normal is failing. In the sad isolation that cries out for contact of any synthetic form, we know that normal is wrong.
This week there was a kerfuffle over the latest IPCC report, telling us what we already know of the death of our normal. We have heated the planet — through burning fossil fuels — past any hope of averting disastrous change. They do not use the hyperbolic language because they are not allowed to do so, but the message is quivering underneath their stolid words. They are telling us that the normal we created has destroyed itself. There is no evidence that we can save it. It was never real enough to perpetuate without nearly infinite resources fed into it daily to prop it up in the face of reality. There is nothing of our normal to save.
However, there is everything else. And for that everything, we must make some efforts. I’m not sure I agree with the IPCC findings, but they say there is still hope of saving something of this real world — with some mighty big IFs. IF we reduce our greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050 and IF no tipping points are breached, we have about a random chance — a coin flip probability — of remaining below 2°C of warming and recovering a true normal in some century down the road. These big IFs incorporate some even bigger IFs. To reduce emissions to net-zero means that we need to remove carbon from the atmosphere — with technology that we do not have or natural draw-downs that we have not yet planted. Trees need time to root in and mature, time that does not remain in this IPCC budget. And as to tipping points, we’ve already seen accelerated rates of warming and melting in the polar regions. We’ve already seen population crashes that happen in a year or two. We’ve already seen crushing feedback loops that decimate large portions of the hydrosphere overnight. In other words, we’ve already seen intensification in rates of change that indicates without much doubt that we’ve already breached many known tipping points. The main point of doubt now is what surprises await us.
So I don’t know about the hope of the IPCC. What I do know is that we can all build our own small resilience, and in doing that we might be better able to both effect a carbon draw-down and save what we can of the real world — the world we depend upon. We are already imbedded in the real world. Our failing normal tells us this. If we stop making huge efforts to prop it up, it will go away entirely. Very likely it will go away rapidly. Collapse, when it does happen, is a tipping point. It is sudden and largely uncontrollable. It will hurt. But my suspicion is that it will hurt money and privilege more than it will hurt people and places — largely because our normal doesn’t benefit most people or places. It hurts them. It’s my hope that removing this hurt will balance out the hurt that collapsing normal might cause for most people. Money and privilege can bear the hurt — they are not even as real as normal.
I don’t know about the hope of the IPCC, but I do have hope still. Ironically, it comes from the very headlines that scare me, the very air that is cooking my body and choking me. These tell me that the normal we created is destroying itself rapidly. These headlines are also showing me that we probably can survive that destruction. Not all of us, not without pain, not without massive upheaval. But we are surviving. We are coming together to help each other. We are building new systems to support ourselves in the face of the collapse of the old ones. And large numbers of people are turning their backs on the bleaters. Because humans are a rather practical bunch when it comes down to it, and the practical solution is to run away from all this isolation and destruction and help each other. We’re very good at running away from pain. And at helping each other — as long as we’re not being constrained by artificial normals.
So I’ll bear the smoke and heat and diseases philosophically — though not without grumbling. And I think most of you will do the same. And together we’ll get through this. Mostly by running away.
But I just don’t know about the tomatoes…
by DGR News Service | Jul 21, 2021 | Climate Change
Editor’s note: I’m living in Germany quite close to the flooded areas. This summer we had the longest period of very heavy rainfall I ever experienced in my life. The heavy rain just wouldn’t stop for weeks and months.
I cannot repeat it often enough: We are in a state of acute global emergency. Instead of continuing to fantasize about the “Energiewende” and switching to “clean” energy, we have to act like in a state of emergency and stop burning any fossil fuels immediately. This is just the beginning of the age of climate catastrophe and it will become much worse if we don’t act.
This article originally appeared in Common Dreams.
By JULIA CONLEY
“This is your climate on fossil fuel.”
Climate scientists on Friday were stunned by the intensity of flooding in Germany and Belgium that killed at least 120 people and damaged tens of thousands of homes, with experts saying they did not expect such extreme weather to result from the human-caused climate crisis as rapidly as it has.
More than a dozen records for rainfall were set across Western Europe, including in Cologne, where officials recorded six inches of rainfall in just 24 hours on Wednesday into Thursday morning—nearly double the monthly average for July. The city’s previous record for daily rainfall was only three inches.
“This week’s event is totally untypical for that region,” Dieter Gerten, professor of global change climatology and hydrology at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, told The Guardian.
Aerial footage of Ahrweiler in Rhineland Palatinate showed fallen trees, abandoned cars, and indundated roads.
According to the European Severe Weather Database, Reifferscheid saw more than eight inches of rainfall in just nine hours, leading to extreme flash flooding.
“We are still waiting for a definitive toll, but it could be that this flood becomes the most catastrophic our country has ever known.”
—Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo
On Thursday night, officials reported that as many as 1,300 people were still unaccounted for, noting that the high number could be related to power supplies and cell phone networks being disrupted and some areas being difficult for rescue crews to reach.
Gerten expressed shock at the severity of the disaster.
“We seem to be not just above normal but in domains we didn’t expect in terms of spatial extent and the speed it developed,” Gerten said.
Climate scientists have warned for years that the continued extraction of fossil fuels is causing numerous changes in the climate, including extreme heat, drought, and more frequent and heavy rain—which has been linked to the warming of oceans and increased amounts of water evaporating into the air.
“With climate change we do expect all hydro-meteorological extremes to become more extreme. What we have seen in Germany is broadly consistent with this trend,” Carlo Buontempo, director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, told The Guardian.
But as the BBC reported, scientists said Friday they “failed to predict the intensity of the German floods” as well as the extreme heat which enveloped the Western United States and Canada in recent weeks, killing hundreds of people.
“The obvious acceleration of the breakdown of our stable climate simply confirms that—when it comes to the climate emergency—we are in deep, deep shit,” Bill McGuire, a professor emeritus of geophysical and climate hazards at University College London, told the BBC.
The effects of the torrential downpour stretched across Western Europe, with officials in Belgium saying Friday at least 23 people were confirmed dead and at least 19 were missing, and experts in the Netherlands and Switzerland expecting more inundation on Friday.
“We are still waiting for a definitive toll, but it could be that this flood becomes the most catastrophic our country has ever known,” said Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo on Friday.
On social media, progressive organizer Doyle Canning of Oregon, where temperatures reached 116 degrees earlier this month, responded to a video of flash flooding in one German city.
“This is your climate on fossil fuel,” said Canning as she reshared the footage.
The flooding came days after the European Union unveiled a plan to transition away from fossil fuels by 2030 as part of its plan to become carbon-neutral by 2050.
Armin Laschet, the governor of one of Germany’s hardest-hit states and a candidate to replace Angela Merkel as chancellor in the September elections, said the rising death toll and damage to communities across Germany demonstrated that “we need to continue Germany’s path toward climate neutrality even faster.”
