350 or bust?

350

James Hansen, NASA's chief climate scientist and the first to warn about global warming more than two decades ago, recently wrote:

If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO² will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm (parts per million) to at most 350 ppm.

Speaking at last week's UN climate conference in Poznan, Poland, Nobel prize-winner Al Gore called for a new global goal of limiting carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere to 350 ppm -- current levels are already over 380 ppm, up from about 280 ppm before the Industrial Revolution began.

An ambitious organization aptly named 350.org is working hard to bring attention to what they call "the most important number on the planet."

It's the new number for climate scientists, one they will emphasize with increasing force and in growing unanimity. Once there was a time when 550 ppm was thought to be a point we should not exceed and at which our world might be reasonably safe; more recently that ceiling was lowered to 450 ppm. Now it's becoming accepted that we'll have to shoot for 350 or bust.

Fast forward another ten years, after we've learned more about the climate and after we've seen more obvious impacts of rapid climate change, and this number -- 350 -- will be close to a household word. Most people will know its significance and understand the urgency behind it.

Even in 2009, you can expect to to hear about climate change much more often. As a story in the Associated Press says:

When Bill Clinton took office in 1993, global warming was a slow-moving environmental problem that was easy to ignore. Now it is a ticking time bomb that President-elect Barack Obama can't avoid.

Since Clinton's inauguration, summer Arctic sea ice has lost the equivalent of Alaska, California and Texas. The 10 hottest years on record have occurred since Clinton's second inauguration. Global warming is accelerating. Time is close to running out, and Obama knows it.

"The time for delay is over; the time for denial is over," he said on Tuesday after meeting with former Vice President Al Gore. . .

Scientists are increasingly anxious, talking more often and more urgently about exceeding "tipping points."

"We're out of time," Stanford University biologist Terry Root said. "Things are going extinct."

U.S. emissions have increased by 20 percent since 1992. China has more than doubled its carbon dioxide pollution in that time. World carbon dioxide emissions have grown faster than scientists' worst-case scenarios. Methane, the next most potent greenhouse gas, suddenly is on the rise again and scientists fear that vast amounts of the trapped gas will escape from thawing Arctic permafrost.

Are we really "out of time" already? Is it too late to prevent the worst from happening?

If you believe climate scientists like Kevin Anderson, an expert at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at Manchester University, things look exceedingly dire:

The cream of the UK climate science community sat in stunned silence as Anderson pointed out that carbon emissions since 2000 have risen much faster than anyone thought possible, driven mainly by the coal-fuelled economic boom in the developing world. So much extra pollution is being pumped out, he said, that most of the climate targets debated by politicians and campaigners are fanciful at best, and "dangerously misguided" at worst.

Despite the political rhetoric, the scientific warnings, the media headlines and the corporate promises, carbon emissions were soaring way out of control -- far above even the bleak scenarios considered by last year's report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Stern review. The battle against dangerous climate change had been lost, and the world needed to prepare for things to get very, very bad.

In the jargon used to count the steady accumulation of carbon dioxide in the Earth's thin layer of atmosphere, he said it was "improbable" that levels could now be restricted to 650 parts per million (ppm).

That's from David Adam, writing in The Guardian. He goes on to show that Anderson is not alone in his pessimistic outlook:

Bob Watson, chief scientist at the UK Environment Department and a former head of the IPCC, warned this year that the world needed to prepare for a 4C rise, which would wipe out hundreds of species, bring extreme food and water shortages in vulnerable countries and cause floods that would displace hundreds of millions of people. Warming would be much more severe towards the poles, which could accelerate melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets.

Watson said: "We must alert everybody that at the moment we're at the very top end of the worst case [emissions] scenario. I think we should be striving for 450 [ppm] but I think we should be prepared that 550 [ppm] is a more likely outcome." Hitting the 450 ppm target, he said, would be "unbelievably difficult".

And if hitting 450 would be unbelievably difficult, then what about 350?

Joseph Romm, author of the excellent Climate Progress blog, analyzes how much effort would be required to make a reduction in atmospheric CO² back to 350 ppm.

His conclusion, sadly, is that this is a next to impossible goal with a vanishingly small chance of being achieved within this century.

So, where do we go from here? Are we, as David Letterman rants, "walking dead people?"

Maybe we are, and maybe we aren't. I'll finish, below, by offering a glimmer of hope. 

Before then, though, a reminder of how tough a challenge we face:

The escalating scale of human emissions could not have come at a worst time, as scientists have discovered that the Earth's forests and oceans could be losing their ability to soak up carbon pollution. Most climate projections assume that about half of all carbon emissions are reabsorbed in these natural sinks.

Computer models predict that this effect will weaken as the world warms, and a string of recent studies suggests this is happening already.

The Southern Ocean's ability to absorb carbon dioxide has weakened by about 15% a decade since 1981, while in the North Atlantic, scientists at the University of East Anglia also found a dramatic decline in the CO² sink between the mid-1990s and mid-2000s.

A separate study published this year showed the ability of forests to soak up anthropogenic carbon dioxide -- that caused by human activity -- was weakening, because the changing length of the seasons alters the time when trees switch from being a sink of carbon to a source.

Soils could also be giving up their carbon stores: evidence emerged in 2005 that a vast expanse of western Siberia was undergoing an unprecedented thaw.

The region, the largest frozen peat bog in the world, had begun to melt for the first time since it formed 11,000 years ago. Scientists believe the bog could begin to release billions of tonnes of methane locked up in the soils, a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide.

That sounds bad, really bad. Can it possibly be prevented? Or have climate feedback cycles already advanced so far and so fast that these potentially catastrophic methane releases are a foregone conclusion?

The glimmer of hope I alluded to above is, of course, exponential general-purpose molecular manufacturing, likely the only emerging technology with the power to utterly transform our energy infrastructure, capture and store excess carbon, restore the planet to climate equilibrium, and avert global warming disaster.

CRN believes the technology will be that powerful.

What we don't know, unfortunately, is how soon it will be developed, nor, perhaps more important, how it will be used. Will climate change mitigation be the #1 priority? Or will a nano-enabled arms race take precedent? Will the leading nations of the world band together to use advanced nanotechnology for the benefit of everyone, or will its emergence result in a mad scramble for superiority, widening inequalities, and decreasing stability?

These are questions that will have to be answered. Technology -- no matter how powerful -- is never a solution. It is only a tool, to be used by humans, for good or for ill. 

Mike Treder

Comments

[jim moore]

Three days after Passover, 2019

My god, this nightmare just keeps getting worse. The assassinations of over 500 of the worlds rich and powerful on passover was just a distraction! And boy did it work, everyone was looking at Israel, not just because of its religious holiday but primarily because no Israeli leaders were killed and the micro UAV's that were used in the assassinations are an Israeli specialty.

Apparently we should have been keeping our eyes on factional infighting in China. This "Council of Harmonious Order" scare the hell out of me, they are smart, ruthless and ambitious as all hell. They achieved a bloodless coup in china, assassinated many of their most powerful opponents in the rest of the world and launched all the components for a self assembling Hall Shell in less than a week, effectively making them rulers of the earth.

Under their control now, there is a layer of Nano-tech Balloons (many equipped with lasers) covering the earth at about 5 miles high. They have as far as I can tell, wiped out the US air force, (I was up to visit the Air Force Museum in Dayton this morning when the attack started. Thousands of beams of light were kris-crossing the sky all around the air force base, every plane out in the open was hit.) Their decree today that all air travel is banned can be easily enforced. We all live with a billion light sabers dangling above our heads now, many of their decrees will be easy to enforce. ( i don't even want to think about the 1.5 children decree.) I see how they intend to fund their global empire, the decree that all coal burning power plants be closed within one year makes solar power beamed from their Hall Shell the only viable alternative.

Well I guess we always figured that the logic of a nano-tech arms race favored an early first strike and this "Council of Harmonious Order" have been very precise in their targeting, and they do have the tools to address climate change and the growing ungovernable regions but this way of coming to power will create a backlash.

not good
not good at all

[harbinger]

What a load of absolute gibberish. James Hansen is Al Gore's favourite doom seller, so he says 350 ppm and Al Gore the famous climate scientist, follows suit. Hansen is now becoming clinically hysterical. Of course Gore has a great interest in all this as the chief salesman of carbon indulgences. Bob Watson is another Gore acolyte and former NASA/World Bank/IPCC gloomster, who is now esconced in the UK Tyndall Centre from where Kevin Anderson, an engineering professor, takes the IPCC as a given and produces computer simulations to frighten the masses. He is the guy who wants every individual to have a carbon credit card, but he doesn't say if that allows breathing. He also doesn't want anyone to fly, unless of course they are going to yet another climate conference in some nice location at taxpayer's expense

The basic scam begins with the claim that CO2 levels are higher than they have ever been in human history and that before industrialisation they were static at a fixed 280 ppm and never moved. That is false and there is ample evidence that they have fluctuated considerably above that. The planet has actually entered ice ages at levels at least twelve times higher than current.

The next scam says that all CO2 in the atmosphere is down to fossil fuels, when in fact anthropogenic sources are only a small proportion of the whole, most of atmospheric CO2 is the result of complex interactions with the oceans.

The next scam is that CO2 is the major greenhouse gas when in fact water vapour is 95% of all greenhouse gasses. The modellers can't deal with water vapour, so they ignore it.

The follow on scam is that we can control atmospheric CO2 by controlling our energy use and treat it as a planetary thermostat, turn it up, turn it down.

Next scam, people like Hansen are blessed with supreme omniscience and know what the temperature of the planet should be.

Ongoing scam, the sun has nothing to do with the temperature of the planet and sunspot activity, in spite of strong evidence to the contrary, has no influence.

A good scam, when temperatures fall at a time of rising CO2 levels, as they did from the late 50's to the 80's it's because of "aerosols" cooling the atmosphere. When it starts to happen again, as there has been no warming since 1998, it's "natural variation" masking the greenhouse effect and you can't expect an increasing temperature year on year.

Overall guiding scam, we need a world government with world energy taxes, under a world president and the UN is leading us to that Valhalla.

Scam after scam after scam and a load of grant seeking scientists on the same band wagon with all the control freak politicians and rent-seeking small nations looking to get in on the act and so ably assisted by the main stream media who diligently print evry scary press release without ever entertaining contrary evidence.

Today's headline is all about "the man who fooled the world". I thought it was a piece on Al Gore until I realised it was about a scam artist who fooled the financial experts.

[xie mo]

We know that the Internet has become the enterprises to promote products, increase the visibility of the necessary means to their business information in BtoB's Web site to log into a lot of business after the Internet will do; At the same time, relatively well-known site in order to enrich their own Data resources, has been the find this kind of enterprise customer base continued to increase their visibility.

[tedlow]

There’s a great video on San Francisco I Am where hundreds of teens in the Bay Area ditched their video games at home and headed for the biggest green festival in the nation. The Festival was held in San Francisco and the kids learned AND taught one another about climate change and green jobs. Even Chuck D from Public Enemy was there.

You can check out the video here:

http://www.sanfranciscoiam.com/videos/c898d779b574