Climate – Feb 8

February 8, 2008

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Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage


New report: climate code red

David Spratt and Phillip Sutton, Carbon Equity
Climate policy is characterised by the habituation of low expectations and a culture of failure. There is an urgent need to understand global warming and the tipping points for dangerous impacts that we have already crossed as a sustainability emergency, that takes us beyond the politics of failure-inducing compromise. We are now in a race between climate tipping points and political tipping points.

5 keys to a safe-climate future

1. Our goal is a safe-climate future – we have no right to bargain away species or human lives.
2. We are facing rapid warming impacts: the danger is immediate, not just in the future.
3. For a safe climate future, we must take action now to stop emissions and to cool the earth.
4. Plan a large-scale transition to a post-carbon economy and society.
5. Recognise a climate and sustainability emergency, because we need to move at a pace far beyond business and politics as usual.

Read 5 keys to a safe-climate future

Summary
Re-printed below -BA

  • The extensive melting of Arctic sea-ice in the northern summer of 2007 starkly demonstrated that serious climate-change impacts are already happening, both more rapidly and at lower global temperature increases than projected. Human activity has already pushed the planet’s climate past several critical “tipping points”, including the initiation of major ice sheet loss.

  • The loss in summer of all eight million square kilometres of Arctic sea-ice now seems inevitable, and may occur as early as 2010, a century ahead of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projections. There is already enough carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere to initiate ice sheet disintegration in West Antarctica and Greenland and to ensure that sea levels will rise metres in coming decades.
  • The projected speed of change, with temperature increases greater than 0.3°C per decade and the consequent rapid shifting of climatic zones will, if maintained, likely result in most ecosystems failing to adapt, causing the extinction of many animal and plant species. The oceans will become more acidic, endangering much marine life.
  • The Earth’s passage into an era of dangerous climate change accelerates as each of these tipping points is passed. If this acceleration becomes too great, humanity will no longer have the power to reverse the processes we have set in motion.
  • We stand at a time where we still have the power to make a choice. Only by dealing with the full scale and urgency of the problem can we create a realistic path back to a safe-climate world. Targets should be chosen and actions taken that can actually solve the problem in a timely manner. A temperature cap of 2-2.4°C, as proposed within the United Nations framework, would take the planet’s climate beyond the temperature range of the last million years and into catastrophe.
  • The loss of the Arctic sea-ice unambiguously represents dangerous climate change. As the tipping point for this event was around two decades ago when temperatures were about 0.3°C lower than at present, we propose a long-term precautionary warming cap of 0.5°C and equilibrium atmospheric greenhouse gas level of not more than 320 parts per million (ppm) carbon dioxide.
  • The USA’s leading climate scientist, James Hansen, stated recently that we should set an atmospheric carbon dioxide target that is low enough to avoid “the point of no return”. To achieve this, he says, we must not only eliminate current greenhouse gas emissions but also remove excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and take urgent steps to “cool the planet”.
  • These scientific imperatives are incompatible with the “realities” of “politics as usual” and “business as usual”. Our conventional mode of politics is short-term, adversarial and incremental, fearful of deep, quick change and simply incapable of managing the transition at the necessary speed. The climate crisis will not respond to incremental modification of the business-as-usual model.
  • There is an urgent need to reconceive the issue we face as a sustainability emergency, that takes us beyond the politics of failure-inducing compromise. The feasibility of rapid transitions is well established historically. We now need to “think the unthinkable”, because the sustainability emergency is now not so much a radical idea as simply an indispensable course of action if we are to return to a safe-climate planet.

(8 February 2008)
A project of Greenleap, CarbonEquity, and Friends of the Earth. Full report available as a 1-MB PDF.

Recommended by Ethan X who writes:
The new Carbon Equity report is out! It’s really a phenomenal summary of the state of climate science & politics, and even includes an extensive discussion of peak oil… (page 45-46)


Deep-sea collapse

Anna Barnett, Nature
The effects of human-caused climate change might eventually reach one of the least explored realms of the planet: the bottom of the ocean. A new analysis of miniscule marine fossils from the last 20,000 years shows that during past periods of global cooling, changes in ocean circulation led to the collapse of deep-sea ecosystems.
(4 February 2008)


Has Earth entered a new epoch? What geologists think

Robert C. Cowen, Christian Science Monitor
The Anthropocene epoch would mark the period when humans became the predominant force over the Earth’s environment.

Geologists wonder if they should add a new epoch to the geological time scale. They call it the Anthropocene – the epoch when, for the first time in Earth’s history, humans have become a predominant geophysical force. Naming such a new epoch would also recognize that humans now share responsibility with natural forces for the state of our planet’s ecological environment.

Geologists have been using the term informally for at least half a decade. Now members of the Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London have laid out the case for giving the term official scientific status.

Presenting that case in the February issue of GSA Today magazine, the team notes that “since the start of the industrial revolution, Earth has endured changes sufficient to leave a global stratigraphic signature.” It is different from anything found in the entire geological record up to that point. That means the team expects future geologists examining this record will recognize a distinct break with the Holocene (“recent whole”) epoch that covers the past 10,000 years.
(7 February 2008)


Georgia lawmakers want border redrawn for some Tennessee water

Greg Bluestein, Associated Press
Desperate for water amid a historic drought, some Georgia lawmakers are trying to reopen an 1818 border dispute with Tennessee.

They have set their sights on a stretch of the 652-mile long Tennessee River that flows tantalizingly close to the Georgia line – and by some historic accounts, should be within Georgia’s borders.

“It’s never too late to right a wrong,” said Georgia state Sen. David Shafer, R-Duluth.

Shafer’s Senate resolution says a flawed survey in 1818 mistakenly marked Georgia’s border one mile south of the 35th parallel – and thus excluded the Tennessee River from Georgia’s reach.

There is a reason thirsty lawmakers are eyeing the river: It has a flow about 15 times greater than the river feeding Atlanta.
(7 February 2008)


Jail politicians who ignore climate science: Suzuki
Didn’t mean it literally says scientist’s spokesperson

Craig Offman, National Post
David Suzuki has called for political leaders to be thrown in jail for ignoring the science behind climate change.

At a Montreal conference last Thursday, the prominent scientist, broadcaster and Order of Canada recipient exhorted a packed house of 600 to hold politicians legally accountable for what he called an intergenerational crime. Though a spokesman said yesterday the call for imprisonment was not meant to be taken literally, Dr. Suzuki reportedly made similar remarks in an address at the University of Toronto last month.

The proposal has lit up many conservative blogs since it was first reported by the McGill Daily on Monday.

Addressing the McGill Business Conference on Sustainability, hosted by the Faculty of Management, Dr. Suzuki’s wide-ranging speech warned against favouring the economy to the detriment of the ecology — the tarsands in Northern Alberta being his prime example.

“You have lived your entire lives in a completely unsustainable period,” he told students and fans. “You all think growth and [climate] change is normal. It’s not.”

Toward the end of his speech, Dr. Suzuki said that “we can no longer tolerate what’s going on in Ottawa and Edmonton” and then encouraged attendees to hold politicians to a greater green standard.

“What I would challenge you to do is to put a lot of effort into trying to see whether there’s a legal way of throwing our so-called leaders into jail because what they’re doing is a criminal act,” said Dr. Suzuki, a former board member of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association.

“It’s an intergenerational crime in the face of all the knowledge and science from over 20 years.”

The statement elicited rounds of applause.
(7 February 2008)
This statement by David Suzuki may be spun as a “gaffe”; but as someone said, a “gaffe” is when a prominent figure tells the truth. The underlying truth is that certain behaviors are causing harm to future generations and to far-off populations (e.g. those in low lying coastal regions), but our systems of law and morality have not caught up with this reality. -BA