Summaries (mostly by the Press)

World on Brink of 5 ‘Disastrous’ Climate Tipping Points 0922.rtf

How Not to Solve the Climate Change Problem 0722.rtf - by Kevin Trenberth, a leading climate scientist for 4 decades who helped write IPCC assessments, influence exceeded only by Jim Hansen, in Dr. Fry's opinion.

     Paraphrasing: We are well on the way to 1.5°C hotter than 1880; damages will get even worse above 1.5°C.  We need net-zero by 2050 to limit warming to 2°C.  The changeover to renewables has been slow.  Solar radiation management (SRM), by imitating major volcano eruptions, has the bad side effect of moving monsoon rain offshore.  It is also expensive.  For CO2 removal (CDR), CCS has proven to be too expensive - as well as ineffective, because it is mostly used for enhanced oil recovery.  Direct air capture is also too expensive so far, as it uses a lot of energy.  Removing our legacy CO2, even at a hoped-for $100 / ton, would exceed the Gross World Product (GWP).  Trees are cheaper, but impermanent; forests burn.  “The arithmetic highlights the tremendous need to cut emissions.  There is no viable workaround.”

     Dr. Fry’s comments: Achieving net zero would be wonderful, but it is very far from sufficient to hold global heating to 2°C.  When Earth last wore 420 ppm CO2, millions of years ago, global temperatures were 4-8°C above 1880’s.  This further (past and future, beyond 2°C) heating was, is and will be driven mostly by feedbacks from albedo (reflectivity) changes from snow, ice, and sulfates, plus their water vapor and clouds multiplier.  The impacts of 5°C are far worse (several multiples of world GWP) than the cost of SRM and CDR.  We indeed have a tremendous need to cut greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, but cutting them to zero, even immediately, is way not enough.  Small companies, recent start-ups, are devising ways (no fans, no heat to regenerate catalysts) to cut DAC energy use (and cost) by 95% or so.  For SRM, the costs are measured in billions rather than trillions of dollars.  Perhaps better SRM than imitating volcanoes is marine cloud brightening (MCB), targeted in the Arctic.  There, warming has caused the polar jet stream to meander, bringing long dry hot spells, long rainy spells (floods), and deep excursions of polar air into temperate zones in winter.  MCB probably would not affect monsoons much

Why Some Climate Models Are Running Red Hot - Clouds, Water, Ice 0522.rtf

West’s ‘Dust Bowl’ Future Now ‘Locked In’, as World Risks Imminent Food Crisis 1219.rtf

     Past climate emissions mean the US and Europe will experience devastating drought in 80 years, and a global food crisis could be triggered in the 2020s — yet it’s not too late to build resilience and avert the worst.

Research sponsored by global credit ratings agency Moody’s concludes that, by the end of century, parts of the US and Europe are now bound to experience severe reductions in rainfall equivalent to the American ‘dust bowl’ of the 1930s, which devastated Midwest farming for a decade.  These consequences are now ‘locked in’, as a result of carbon emissions which we have already accumulated into the atmosphere.

But that’s not all.  A spate of new scientific research released through 2019 has thrown light on nearer-term risks of a global food crisis in coming decades, such as a multi-breadbasket failure — due not just to climate change, but a combination of factors including population growth, industrial soil degradation, rising energy costs, and groundwater depletion, among other trends.

Taken in context with a number of climate change models produced over the last decade, the heightened risk of droughts in the 2020s means that a global food crisis could be imminent.  Over 1,700 published climate models examined by the University of Leeds point to the risk of a global food crisis after 2030; 12 models point to this risk emerging and amplifying in just 3 years.

None of this research shows that the destructive impacts on human societies are unavoidable.  With foresight, planning, mitigation, adaptation and cooperation, it’s possible for us to not simply build resilience to coming crises by minimizing disruptions and protecting the vulnerable; but to pave the way for a sustainable food system that can operate as a solution to climate catastrophe.

The ‘locked in’ impacts of climate change are bound to produce “severe” impacts on societies over the next decades, according to new research sponsored by one of the world’s biggest financial agencies.  Among those impacts, the degradation of global freshwater supplies in particular threatens to destabilize the global food system.  Historic carbon emissions appear to have made it inevitable that, by the end of this century, some of the world’s most important agricultural producers will experience conditions similar to the ‘dust bowl’, the worst human-induced ecological disaster in American history.

     and so on, in great detail

China’s National Assessment Spells Out “Grim" Climate Change Risks 0112.rtf

     from the 710-page report:

     “China faces extremely grim ecological and environmental conditions, under the impact of continued global warming and changes to China's regional environment.”  Assuming no measures to counter global warming, grain output in the world's most populous nation could fall from 5 to 20% by 2050.  "But steadily, as the temperatures continue to rise, the negative consequences will be increasingly serious….  For a certain length of time, people will be able to adapt, but costs of adaptation will rise, including for agriculture.”
    "Climate change will lead to severe imbalances in China's water resources, within each year and across the years.  In most areas, precipitation will be increasingly concentrated in the summer and autumn rainy seasons, and floods and droughts will become increasingly frequent….  Without effective measures in response, by the latter part of the 21st century, climate change could still constitute a threat to our country's food security,"

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