By David Spratt, Climate Code Red
How much will the world warm with ongoing fossil-fuel carbon emissions? It’s a big question that preoccupies policymakers and activists, with important discussions about when the world will hit two degrees, are we really on a path to four degrees of warming with current Paris commitments, and so on.
By Zeke Hausfather, The Guardian blog
The popular discourse around the climate emergency all too often highlights fringe voices that predict the end of the world or suggest that there is little to worry about. But as the climatologist Steven Schneider presciently remarked a decade ago, when it comes to the climate “the end of the world” and “good for us” are probably the two least likely outcomes.
By Piers Forster, Zeke Hausfather, Gabi Hegerl, Steven Sherwood, Kyle Armour, Carbon Brief
After four years of labour and detailed discussions by an international team of scientists, we are able to quantify better than ever before how the world’s surface temperature responds to increasing CO2 levels.
By Joel Stronberg, Resilience.org
Climate change is not about short-term changes in the weather but long-term systemic environmental shifts in response to warming temperatures. Scenario planning is about the efforts of an organization to stay relevant in relation to a host of external factors beyond climate including the enactment of government policies and shifts in population.
By Zeke Hausfather, Carbon Brief
In this article, Carbon Brief examines how the emissions scenario underlying RCP8.5 was developed and how it has subsequently been used in the academic literature and media.
By Joe Romm, Climate Progress
The United States faces a choice between manageable warming and unmanageable catastrophe, according to a leaked draft report by scientists from 13 federal agencies. The report’s “higher emissions” scenario projects a devastating 8°F to 10°F warming over the interior of this country–and, unimaginably, upwards of 18°F over in the Arctic!–by 2071 to 2100. In that case, global sea levels could rise as much as 8 feet, inundating every major coastal city in this country and around the world.
By Carey W. King, Earth Magazine
There is a very real trade-off between the rate at which we address climate change and the amount of economic growth we can expect during the transition to a low-carbon economy, but most economic models insufficiently address this trade-off, and thus are incapable of assessing the transition.
By Joe Romm, Climate Progress
New York Magazine has stirred up a firestorm of debate by publishing a worst-case scenario for climate change this week, “The Uninhabitable Earth” by David Wallace-Wells.
By Carey W. King, Cynthia and George Mitchell Foundation blog
Why should we make policy using economic models that don’t reflect what should be obvious to a third-grader?
By Carey W. King, Cynthia and George Mitchell Foundation blog
Economic growth...in macroeconomic models is the so-called elephant in the room that, unfortunately, almost no one talks about or seeks to improve.
By Stuart Staniford, Early Warning
In Friday's post, I argued that the likely pattern of human response to climate change would be characterized by very limited action until manifestly serious consequences were clear by looking out the window; then, and only then would serious action ensue. In other words, the pattern would be one of panic and repentance.