tipping point

12/17

disambiguation, but maybe positive vs DOOM (death spiral)

THOM 10 23

Sometime in the past year, this tiny planet we live on in an obscure corner of our Milky Way galaxy went through some sort of tipping point, a “state change” of sorts, and now things are different from how they’ve been at any other time in the 300,000 year history of the human race.

Nobody knows for sure what that change or tipping point is.

— One theory is that variations in dust concentrations in the Northern Hemisphere’s atmosphere — a function of the temperature of the Atlantic Ocean allowing more or less fine dirt to be picked up and carried aloft from northern Africa — are changing the reflectivity of the atmosphere and trapping more of the sun’s heat.

— Another theory follows the January, 2022 eruption of the volcano at Hunga Tonga–Hunga Ha’apai, which injected so much water vapor (146 million tons) and sulfur dioxide (420,000 tons) into the stratosphere that scientists were predicting soon after it happened that there would be a year or two of unusual heat signatures across the planet.

— Some scientists argue it was caused by a change in worldwide regulations mandating ships at sea burn cleaner diesel fuel, reducing the soot-type particles they’re emitting that previously formed heat-reflective clouds.

— And, of course, the current El Niño ocean pattern appears to be drawing heat from the ocean up to the surface where it’s transferred to the atmosphere in unprecedented amounts.

But regardless of the why/how,somethinghas definitely happened in the past year or so that has pushed our atmosphere’s state of equilibrium out of an older, stable range and into a newer, warmer, and apparently far less stable state.

Graphic from: “The 2023 State of the Climate Report: Entering Uncharted Territory.” BioScience24 Oct 2023. Red line is 2023; gray lines are previous years.

It’s so dramatic and so shocking that scientists — typically not prone to hyperbole — publishing in the peer-reviewed journal BioScience about this anomaly open their article with:

“Life on planet Earth is under siege. We are now in an uncharted territory.

“For several decades, scientists have consistently warned of a future marked by extreme climatic conditions because of escalating global temperatures caused by ongoing human activities that release harmful greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere.

“Unfortunately, time is up. We are seeing the manifestation of those predictions as an alarming and unprecedented succession of climate records are broken, causing profoundly distressing scenes of suffering to unfold. We are entering an unfamiliar domain regarding our climate crisis, a situation no one has ever witnessed firsthand in the history of humanity.”

Looking at 35 different “vital signs” that signal the health of our planet and its atmosphere, 20 of which have deviated from their norms so badly as to alarm researchers, the scientists who wrote for BioScience warn us all:

“We are venturing into uncharted climate territory.”

In just the past 24 hours, a tropical storm that nobody thought was a threat blew up into a full-on Category 5 hurricane and is, as you’re reading these words, devastating Acapulco. Not one weather agency predicted it: this is how unpredictable and violent our weather has become because we’re still burning fossil fuels.

While wind and solar power grew 17 percent worldwide between 2021 and 2022, and both are now cheaper that any unsubsidized fossil fuels, humanity is still using fossil fuels at a 15:1 ratio against renewables. Life on earth won’t be safe until those numbers are reversed.

Our forests worldwide are not only under assault from loggers and poachers; climate change has now altered their environment enough that hundreds of millions of acres of trees are suffering from beetle infestations, drought, dieback, and forest fires. While the world needs to reverse the trend toward deforestation by 2030 (we’re currently losing around 22 million hectares of forest and jungle a year), we’re still a long way away from that goal.

All over the planet glaciers are in retreat, as are the ice shelves and glaciers covering Greenland and Antarctica. Coral reefs are bleaching and dying, and fish and marine mammal species are undergoing radical shifts in their habitat and range as waters warm, driving most ambulatory animals toward the north and south poles.

Deadly storms, derechos, flash flooding, bomb cyclones, rapidly-forming hurricanes, severe/damaging hail, tornadoes in areas that had never before seen them: all these are creating vast swaths of human misery and costing hundreds of billions worldwide.

Given that the cost of the damages inflicted by climate change are so much higher than the profits the worldwide fossil fuel industry is making selling us their destructive products it’s surprising that more governments haven’t ended hydrocarbon subsidies and begun to directly bill these corporations for the climate change destruction their products are causing.

There’s a huge issue of economic and social justice associated with the climate crisis. The top 10 percent of the world, wealth-wise, produce fully 48 percent of the world’s emissions. The bottom half of humanity, wealth-wise, produces a mere 12 percent.

Yelling at poor people that they need to turn lights off (if they even have lights) and insulate their houses (when they have houses) will never have even a fragment of the impact that could be achieved by imposing a carbon tax on private jets, yachts, and mega-mansions.

Along those same lines, economists need to come up with new ways to model the health and success of societies and their economies that don’t rely only or even primarily on growth (as most do now). Instead, indices of sustainability and quality-of-life should be pushed front-and-center as alternatives to growth are developed and publicized.

Last year over 700 million people experienced chronic — regular, long-lasting — hunger, an uptick of over 100 million people over the previous two years. Driving this are climate extremes that are wiping out crops, failing soil exhausted by factory farming, and armed conflicts.

Producing a single pound of beef takes 1,700 gallons of water (compared with 39 gallons for a pound of vegetables): if everybody in America were to simply adopt “Meatless Mondays,” it would save the nation 70 million gallons of gas every year (“enough to fill up every car in Canada and Mexico and then some”) and free up an amount of land twice the size of Delaware.

It would also measurably reduce the rates of heart disease, stroke, cancer, and obesity. Cutting meat down to once a week or once a month — well within what human diets require — we’d have enough food left over to end world hunger while taking a bite out of climate change as well.

The fossil fuel industry would prefer we focus on talking about recycling, turning off lights, keeping our homes cool, and yelling at friends who fly for vacation. But the real power to change the future is in Congress and state houses across the country.

Making fossil fuels and meat more expensive (while subsidizing public transportation and healthy food for low-income people) is something that can only be done by government bodies, and will have a far greater impact than any amount of complaining or accusing people around their individual actions.

And there’s never been a better or more important time than now to join climate actions and lobby your elected representatives for large scale, long-term solutions to our fossil fuel addiction.

While nobody is exactly sure why we’ve hit this year of sudden anomalies, scientists are certain it’s a blinking red neon warning that we must change our course or suffer an unimaginable catastrophe. And we still have the tools to solve this crisis of our own making: we just have to use them before it’s too late.

https://www.alternet.org/2022/08/climate-endgame/

https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2108146119

https://yyy.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/01/climate-endgame-risk-human-extinction-scientists-global-heating-catastrophe

no lnx twt

The worst-case outcomes of an unmitigated climate emergency—civilizational collapse or even human extinction—are "dangerously underexplored" scenarios requiring further study, an analysis published Monday asserted.

In a perspective published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, climate scientists Luke Kemp, Chi Xu, Joanna Depledge, and Timothy M. Lenton argue that humanity must prepare for what they call the "climate endgame."

"It is time for the scientific community to grapple with the challenge of better understanding catastrophic climate change," the researchers write.

Although climate scientists say such catastrophic consequences are unlikely, the paper's authors caution that "facing a future of accelerating climate change while blind to worst-case scenarios is naïve risk management at best and fatally foolish at worst."

"There is ample evidence that climate change could become catastrophic. We could enter such 'endgames' at even modest levels of warming," they warn. "Understanding extreme risks is important for robust decision-making, from preparation to consideration of emergency responses."

"This requires exploring not just higher temperature scenarios but also the potential for climate change impacts to contribute to systemic risk and other cascades," the authors add. "We suggest that it is time to seriously scrutinize the best way to expand our research horizons to cover this field."

The scientists propose a research agenda that seeks to answer four main questions:

What is the potential for climate change to drive mass extinction events?

What are the mechanisms that could result in human mass mortality and morbidity?

What are human societies' vulnerabilities to climate-triggered risk cascades, such as from conflict, political instability, and systemic financial risk?

How can these multiple strands of evidence—together with other global dangers—be usefully synthesized into an "integrated catastrophe assessment?"

"Knowing the worst cases can compel action, as the idea of 'nuclear winter' in 1983 galvanized public concern and nuclear disarmament efforts," the analysis states. "Exploring severe risks and higher-temperature scenarios could cement a recommitment to the 1.5 °C to 2 °C guardrail" that the Paris climate agreement says is imperative to avoid an irreversible climate catastrophe.

"I think it's sane risk management to think about the plausible worst-case scenarios and we do it when it comes to every other situation, we should definitely do when it comes to the fate of the planet and species," study lead author Luke Kemp, a researcher at the University of Cambridge in England, told the BBC.

In a separate interview with The Guardian, Kemp said that "paths to disaster are not limited to the direct impacts of high temperatures, such as extreme weather events. Knock-on effects such as financial crises, conflict, and new disease outbreaks could trigger other calamities."

Study co-author Xu of Nanjing University in China told the BBC that "average annual temperatures of 29°C currently affect around 30 million people in the Sahara and Gulf Coast."

"By 2070, these temperatures and the social and political consequences will directly affect two nuclear powers, and seven maximum containment laboratories housing the most dangerous pathogens," he added. "There is serious potential for disastrous knock-on effects."

ref guk

no lnx

Climate endgame: risk of human extinction ‘dangerously underexplored’

Scientists say there are ample reasons to suspect global heating could lead to catastrophe

@dpcarrington

Mon 1 Aug 2022

The risk of global societal collapse or human extinction has been “dangerously underexplored”, climate scientists have warned in an analysis.

They call such a catastrophe the “climate endgame”. Though it had a small chance of occurring, given the uncertainties in future emissions and the climate system, cataclysmic scenarios could not be ruled out, they said.

“Facing a future of accelerating climate change while blind to worst-case scenarios is naive risk management at best and fatally foolish at worst,” the scientists said, adding that there were “ample reasons” to suspect global heating could result in an apocalyptic disaster.

The international team of experts argue the world needs to start preparing for the possibility of the climate endgame. “Analysing the mechanisms for these extreme consequences could help galvanise action, improve resilience, and inform policy,” they said.

Explorations in the 1980s of the nuclear winter that would follow a nuclear war spurred public concern and disarmament efforts, the researchers said. The analysis proposes a research agenda, including what they call the “four horsemen” of the climate endgame: famine, extreme weather, war and disease.

They also called for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to produce a special report on the issue. The IPCC report on the impacts of just 1.5C of heating drove a “groundswell of public concern”, they said.

“There are plenty of reasons to believe climate change could become catastrophic, even at modest levels of warming,” said Dr Luke Kemp at the University of Cambridge’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, who led the analysis. “Climate change has played a role in every mass extinction event. It has helped fell empires and shaped history.

“Paths to disaster are not limited to the direct impacts of high temperatures, such as extreme weather events. Knock-on effects such as financial crises, conflict and new disease outbreaks could trigger other calamities.”

The analysis is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and was reviewed by a dozen scientists. It argues that the consequences of global heating beyond 3C have been underexamined, with few quantitative estimates of the total impacts. “We know least about the scenarios that matter most,” Kemp said.

A thorough risk assessment would consider how risks spread, interacted and amplified, but had not been attempted, the scientists said. “Yet this is how risk unfolds in the real world,” they said. “For example, a cyclone destroys electrical infrastructure, leaving a population vulnerable to an ensuing deadly heatwave.” The Covid pandemic underlined the need to examine rare but high-impact global risks, they added.

Particularly concerning are tipping points, where a small rise in global temperature results in a big change in the climate, such as huge carbon emissions from an Amazon rainforest suffering major droughts and fires. Tipping points could trigger others in a cascade and some remained little studied, they said, such as the abrupt loss of stratocumulus cloud decks that could cause an additional 8C of global warming.

The researchers warn that climate breakdown could exacerbate or trigger other catastrophic risks, such as international wars or infectious disease pandemics, and worsen existing vulnerabilities such as poverty, crop failures and lack of water. The analysis suggests superpowers may one day fight over geoengineering plans to reflect sunlight or the right to emit carbon.

“There is a striking overlap between currently vulnerable states and future areas of extreme warming,” the scientists said. “If current political fragility does not improve significantly in the coming decades, then a belt of instability with potentially serious ramifications could occur.”

There were further good reasons to be concerned about the potential of a global climate catastrophe, the scientists said: “There are warnings from history. Climate change has played a role in the collapse or transformation of numerous previous societies and in each of the five mass extinction events in Earth’s history.”

[Domino-effect of climate events could move Earth into a ‘hothouse’ state

IPCC: A Primer for Archaeologists

American Antiquity, 2020

Marcy Rockman

Timothy Kohler

Rediscovering lessons of adaptation from the past

by Rowan Jackson

yikes OMFG note models not good at tip pt

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/top-scientists-warn-of-an-amazon-tipping-point/2019/12/20

dec. 20, 2019 at 12:14 p.m. PST

Deforestation and other fast-moving changes in the Amazon threaten to turn parts of the rainforest into savanna, devastate wildlife and release billions of tons carbon into the atmosphere, two renowned experts warned Friday.

“The precious Amazon is teetering on the edge of functional destruction and, with it, so are we,” Thomas Lovejoy of George Mason University and Carlos Nobre of the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil, both of whom have studied the world’s largest rainforest for decades, wrote in an editorial in the journal Science Advances.“Today, we stand exactly in a moment of destiny: The tipping point is here, it is now.”

Combined with recent news that the thawing Arctic permafrost may be beginning to fill the atmosphere with greenhouse gases, and that Greenland’s ice sheet is melting at an accelerating pace, it’s the latest hint that important parts of the climate system may be moving toward irreversible changes at a pace that defies earlier predictions.

The speed of the transformation in some key systems, such as Greenland’s ice and the Arctic’s permafrost, has “indeed been underestimated by climate science,” said Stefan Rahmstorf, the head of Earth system analysis at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. “And that’s partly because we cannot really capture them well in our models.”

In interviews, Lovejoy and Nobre said they decided to sound a dire alarm about the Amazon after witnessing the acceleration of troubling trends. The combination of rising temperatures, crippling wildfiresand ongoing land clearing for cattle ranching and crops has extended dry seasons, killed off water-sensitive vegetation and created conditions for more fire.

How we know that global warming is real]

The Amazon is 17 percent deforested, but for the large portion of it inside Brazil, the figure is closer to 20 percent. The fear is that soon there will be so little forest that the trees, which not only soak up enormous quantities of rainwater but also give off mist that aids agriculture and sustains innumerable species, won’t be able to recycle enough rainfall.At that point, much of the rainforest could decline into a drier savanna ecosystem. Rainfall patterns would change across much of South America. Several hundred billion tons of carbon dioxide could wind up in the atmosphere, worsening climate change. And such a feedback loop would be tough to reverse.

That point of no return, commonly referred to by scientists as a tipping point, “is much closer than we anticipated,” Nobre said in an interview.

The troubling news comes on top of other alarming developments regarding the Earth’s climate.

This month, nearly 100 scientists detailed how the Greenland ice sheet’slosses have accelerated in recent decades, growing from 33 billion tons lost per year in the 1990s to a current average of 254 billion tons annually.

“Greenland is losing ice faster than expected, partly because climate models aren’t good at predicting extreme melting events, but also because many of the ice sheet’s smaller glaciers have started to speed up, too,” said Andrew Shepherd, a glaciologist at the University of Leeds in Britain who led the latest study. “So the [worst]-case scenario now becomes business as usual."

Separately, a report this month from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration laid out evidence suggesting that the global Arctic already has become a net emitter of carbon dioxide because of the thawing permafrost. That would be a profound shift for a region that includes vast stretches of Alaska, Canada, Siberia and Greenland, and which haslong stored massive amounts of carbonin its frozen soil.

At the same time, a global die-off of coral reefs in 2016 and 2017, which included the loss of nearly half of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, shocked scientists.

“Compared to coral bleaching in 1998 and 2002, the 2016 event was much more extreme — hotter, far more extensive, and deadlier,” said Terry Hughes, an expert on the reef and the director of the ARC Center of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University in Australia. “The reef has changed forever."

While the speed of the changes involving the Amazon, permafrost and ice sheets has surprised experts, models that scientists created decades ago regarding the average global temperature have largely held true.

The world has experienced about 1 degree Celsius, or 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit, of warming since the late 19th century, largely because of greenhouse gas emissions from human activity.

But much of the Arctic has already warmed by 2 degrees Celsius and some regions even more.

The Amazon also is warming at an accelerated rate. An analysis by The Washington Post of global temperature changes found that almost the entirety of Brazil has warmed by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, since the late 1800s.

Higher temperatures and deforestation are drying out parts of the Amazon and posing a fundamental threat to the rainforest.

In the southern Amazon dry season in particular, temperatures are already 3 degrees Celsius higher than in the 1980s, and the dry season is getting longer, exceeding four months in some regions, Nobre said.

Particularly worrying, he said, is a recent study showing how trees are faring in more than 100 locations across the Amazon.Led by Adriane Esquivel Muelbert of the University of Leeds, researchers found forest transition has begun — trees accustomed to dry conditions are more likely to grow now while trees that require more moisture are disproportionately dying in places where climate changes are the greatest.

Paulo Brando, a tropical ecologist and professor at the University of California at Irvine who has long studied the Amazon, said it is tricky to try to determine the tipping point.

"The definition of ‘tipping point’ can be quite broad,” Brando said, so it is difficult to say whether the Amazon has reached what scientists would call a point of irreversible change. But this much is clear, he added: “We’re not moving away from that tipping point. We’re probably driving very fast toward that direction.”

The impact of changes to the Amazon reach far beyond South America. The rainforest stores an immense amount of carbon in its enormous trees, and if they die, that carbon is released.

In a radically different part of the world, scientists last week described something eerily similar.

Ted Schuur, an expert on northern permafrost at Northern Arizona University, wrote in NOAA’s 2019 Arctic Report Card that recent studies suggest that the thawing of the permafrost — a repository for millennia of dead plant and animal remains — is likely to be contributing carbon dioxide to the atmosphere as those once-frozen materials begin to decompos.

For the “science community at large,” Schuur said in an email, “this is a ‘surprising’ confirmation that the data show the Arctic currently acting as a carbon source.”

Schurr’s reasoning is based heavily on a groundbreaking study led by Susan Natali of the Woods Hole Research Center, research that is in many ways parallel to the new Amazon study. It pools the results from large numbers of scientists across the Arctic to show that in winter, permafrost soils are already emitting a lot of carbon. And those releases are probably enough to offset what happens in the growing season, when Arctic plant growth absorbs carbon.

The models that scientists have used to try to determine how the Arctic region is processing carbon were too conservative when it came to losses in winter in particular, Natali said. As a result, the potential for a transition of the Arctic from a “sink” that takes up carbon to a “source” that emits it may have been underestimated.

"The models, they project that to be happening quite a ways out in the future, but I would say it’s happening now,” Natali said.

Occasional extreme heat events in the Arctic can cause abrupt hillside collapses or “thaw slumps,” which rapidly expose very old and deep permafrost to the open air. Meanwhile, worsening Arctic fires can quickly remove insulating soil and vegetation layers from large stretches of permafrost, suddenly exposing it to the sun.

“It’s like you’re opening the top of a cooler,” Natali said.

In combination, the Amazon and Arctic news underscores that even as humans are largely failing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the Earth may increase such emissions yet further.

Still, it is possible to slow the transformation of the Amazon through reforestation, researchers said.

“A tipping point is a way to talk about a moment of system shift or system change,” Lovejoy said. “In this case, it’s not going to be instantaneous, and that’s good news. It allows you to do something about it.”

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/27112019/climate-tipping-points-permafrost-forests-ice-antarctica-greenland-amazon-nature

Humans are playing Russian roulette with Earth's climate by ignoring the growing risk of tipping points that, if passed, could jolt the climate system into "a new, less habitable 'hothouse' climate state," scientists are warning ahead of the annual UN climate summit.

Research now shows that there is a higher risk that "abrupt and irreversible changes" to the climate system could be triggered at smaller global temperature increases than thought just a few years ago. There are also indictations that exceeding tipping points in one system, such as the loss of Arctic sea ice, can increase the risk of crossing tipping points in others, a group of top scientists wrote Wednesday in the scientific journal Nature.

"What we're talking about is a point of no return, when we might actually lose control of this system, and there is a significant risk that we're going to do this," said Will Steffen, a climate researcher with the Australian National University and co-author of the commentary. "It's not going to be the same conditions with just a bit more heat or a bit more rainfall. It's a cascading process that gets out of control."

The scientists focused on nine parts of the climate system susceptible to tipping points, some of them interconnected:

Arctic sea ice, which is critical for reflecting the sun's energy back into space but is disappearing as the planet warms.
The Greenland Ice Sheet, which could raise sea level 20 feet if it melts.
Boreal forests, which would release morecarbon dioxide (CO2) than they absorb if they die and decay or burn.
Permafrost, which releases methane and other greenhouse gases as it thaws.
The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, a key ocean current, which would shift global weather patterns if it slowed down or stopped.
The Amazon rainforest, which could flip from a net absorber of greenhouse gases to a major emitter.
Warm-water corals, which will die on a large scale as the ocean warms, affecting commercial and subsistence fisheries.
The West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which would raise sea level by at least 10 feet if it melted entirely and is already threatened by warming from above and below.
Parts of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet that would also raise sea level significantly if they melted.

Just looking at Arctic changes shows how the links between parts of the climate system susceptible to tipping can amplify global warming and its effects, said Tim Lenton, director of the Global Systems Institute at Exeter University and an author of the commentary.

Shrinking sea ice increases ocean heat because it no longer reflects as much of the sun's energy back to space and it enables the darker water to absorb more warmth. The ocean heat extends over land and, combined with other heating effects, thaws permafrost, which releases more heat-trapping gases to the atmosphere, Lenton said.

Research shows that melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet may also be slowingtheAtlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, a key Atlantic Ocean current that transports heat between the Northern and Southern Hemispheres and directs rainfall around the planet. That could disrupt monsoon rains critical to agriculture in developing countries.

"If you transfer less heat from south to north, it warms up the Southern Hemisphere, which affects the Antarctic ice sheets. When you start thinking about this, heading to a new climate state becomes very plausible indeed," he said.

The ocean circulation slowdown was documented in a 2015 study by researchers including Michael Mann and Stefan Rahmstorf, a co-author of the new commentary. Cold water from the melting Greenland Ice Sheet is likely slowing the current, showing "how these tipping point responses are actually interrelated, not independent," Mann said. "If one goes early then so too may the others, like dominoes."

Lack of Policy Urgency as Permafrost Thaws

Despite increasingly urgent warnings about the effects of rising greenhouse gas emissions, two new reports published this week by the United Nations show that international efforts to slow global warming are falling far short of what scientists recommend.

The Emissions Gap Report—an annual assessment of global pledges to cut greenhouse gas emissions—shows that countries' current pledges under the Paris climate agreement will still raise global temperatures 3.2°C (5.8°F) by the end of the century, well beyond the Paris goal of limiting warming to well below 2°C (3.6°F).The Production Gap Report shows that the amount of oil, gas and coal that countries already plan to produce will lead to 50 percent more fossil fuels produced by 2030 than would be allowable to stay under 2°C warming.

The Earth is now warming faster and CO2 levels "are increasing at rates that are an order of magnitude higher than at the end of the last ice age," when rapid climate change destabilized the climate quickly, the scientists wrote in the Naturecommentary.

"To err on the side of danger is not a responsible option," they wrote.

long, cont....]

...The Western U.S. may already be seeing a forest dieback tipping point, Overpeck said.

"Much of our western forest cover is either dying or burning, leading to irreversible changes in vegetation that, in turn, impact water supplies and natural carbon storage," he said.

Some Tipping Points Are Already Close

One of the biggest concerns is that some tipping points, like the meltdown of alpine glaciers and near-total loss of coral reefs, will be reached even if the world meets the goals of the Paris climate agreement, said Katherine Richardson, a climate researcher at the University of Copenhagen and co-author of the commentary.

If multiple tipping points are reached, it's questionable whether emissions reductions will be enough to stabilize the climate system, she said.

"Another problem we have is that we have taken a cost-benefit approach," she said. "Economists assume high-impact tipping points are low probability events, but we may already have passed some of them—which completely changes the way we should be doing our cost-benefit analyses.

"In 2001, IPCC said not to worry (about tipping points) until there is 5 degrees Celsius warming, now they're saying 1 to 2 degrees. Economists have to stay on top of the science."

[map graf scary]

Richardson said she had just explained that morning to the Danish Parliament that some of the common tools for cutting emissions weren't proving to be effective enough, including the European Union's carbon trading marketat its current prices.

"There are so many emissions credits floating around that using them won't have any effect on total emissions or atmospheric concentrations on a meaningful time scale. We can't wait 30 to 40 years," she said. The UN Emissions Gap Report released this week "basically says we've done nothing so far."

The new Nature article reinforces other recent similar warnings, said climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe, director of the Texas Tech University Climate Science Center.That includes a chapter in the latest U.S. National Climate Assessment on "potential surprises" in the climate system, "The scariest thing that you'll ever read that's not by Stephen King," Hayhoe said.

It explores climate impacts and feedback systems that we don't fully understand, she said, and "that may be far more worrisome than what we do know."

booktv 1119 decline of liberal thinking

when x becomes an extreme form of itself, loses ability to self-correct

President Trump has not commented on the rash of recent coal producer bankruptcies, which have not been saved by his promises to save and revive the industry. Despite Trump’s declaration that “coal is back” as recently as last year, U.S. coal consumption has fallen to its lowest level since 1978, according to the Department of Energy.

Since his election, 51 coal plants have closed and eight coal companies have filed for bankruptcy, CBS News reported.

Just last month, the U.S. Energy Information Administration revealed that renewable energy production had surpassed coal-fired generation for the first time in history.

“The fate of coal has been sealed, the market has spoken. The trend is irreversible now, the decline of coal is unstoppable despite Donald Trump’s rhetoric,” Michael Webber, an energy expert at the University of Texas, told The Guardian. “Trump has made a promise that will be broken, which is a tragedy for coalminers who were told they don’t need to get other jobs or get new skills. They have been sent the wrong signal and now there are lay-offs.”

same sex marriage big win faster than anyone imagined

hmmn

619 dereg nation

The Wall Street Journal reports that “a small but growing number of Republican lawmakers are urging action on climate change, driven by shifting sentiment among GOP voters and the effects of global warming, from stronger hurricanes to more-destructive wildfires.”

According to the Journal, longtime Republican pollster Frank Luntz (author of a now-infamous memo on how to confuse and divide votersabout climate change) has warned Republicans that their obstruction and anti-science rhetoric are driving away voters, particularly younger conservatives.

great: flood survivors want answers for unnatural disasters

After her hometown flooded for the fourth time in three years, killing some of her neighbors,Missourian Susan Liley got mad.
Liley and other De Soto residents founded the Citizen’s Committee for Flood Relief in 2015 with two initial goals, as Ensia, the solutions-focused digital magazine, reports:“figure out some kind of early warning system” and “understand the root causes of repeated flooding and address them”...

https://www.desmogblog.com/2019/06/10/rod-schoonover-trump-attempted-suppress-state-dept-analyst-testimony-climate-crisis

The Trump administration issued one of its most blatant attacks on climate science this past week when it tried to stop a State Department employee from testifying on the climate crisis, reports showed on Saturday.

As the Washington Post reported, intelligence analyst Rod Schoonover's testimony was submitted to the White House for approval ahead of his planned appearance before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. His remarks focused on the national security risks posed by the climate crisis.

The Trump administration refused to approve the testimony for entry into the congressional record, noting that the data Schoonover planned to present—drawing from top government scientists' research and peer-reviewed scientific reports—did not align with the executive branch's views.

[pix]

National Security Council advisers wrote a number of comments on Schoonover's draft, saying the testimony was “not objective.”

The testimony “includes lots of climate alarm propaganda that is not science at all,” wrote William Happer,a senior member of the National Security Council who has sought to create a federal task force to challenge the consensus reached by 97 percentof peer-reviewed climate scientists who say humans are contributing to the climate crisis.

“I am embarrassed to have this go out on behalf of the executive branch of the federal government,” Happer added, noting a particular objection to Schoonover's use of the term “tipping point” in reference to possible devastating, irreversible effects of the climate crisis.

“'Tipping points' is a propaganda slogan for the scientifically illiterate,” Happer wrote.

Related: Get the background from DeSmog on climate science denier William Happer, and read: Physicist William Happer, the 'Unmoored' Climate Science Denier Heading a White House Climate Probe

Schoonover was ultimately permitted to testify before the committee, but his testimony was not submitted into the record because, the Office of Legislative Affairs said, it did not “jibe” with the Trump administration's views on the climate.

President Donald Trump and many of his appointeesdenythat human activity like the extraction of fossil fuels are contributing to the warming of the globe, which scientists warn is already causing extreme weather events like hurricanes and wildfires, rising sea levels, and melting glaciers. As Schoonover mentioned in his testimony, the last five years have been the warmest on record according to NASA.

Although Schoonover was able to testify, climate action advocates decried the White House's attempt to stifle the information he eventually shared with the committee.

“Any attempt to suppress information on the security risks of climate change threatens to leave the American public vulnerable and unsafe,” Francesco Femia, chief executive of the Council on Strategic Risks and co-founder of the Center for Climate and Security, told the Post.

...

1st good act?!

e American Medical Associationhas voted to take on two major public health issues: gun violence and climate change. During its annual meeting in Chicago this week, the AMA voted to support nearly a dozen gun control measures, including a ban on the sale and ownership of assault-style weapons. Former AMA President Dr. David O. Barbe said in a statement, “In emergency rooms across the country, the carnage of gun violence has become a too routine experience. … It doesn’t have to be this way, and we urge lawmakers to act.” The AMA also voted this week to divest from companies that get the majority of their income from fossil fuels. Climate activist Bill McKibben celebrated the news, tweeting, “The AMA is saying to the dirty fuels industry what it said to tobacco a generation ago: You are killing our patients and we will not allow it anymore.”

https://www.democracynow.org/2018/6/15/headlines/american_medical_association_demands_gun_control_divests_from_fossil_fuels

game over tipping pt?! rbg v gorsuch

https://www.democracynow.org/2018/5/23/supreme_court_deals_blow_to_workers

a major blow to workers’ rights, the Supreme Court ruled 5 to 4 Monday that employers can use arbitration clauses to prohibit workers from banding together to challenge violations of federal labor laws in class-action lawsuits. Arbitration is often confidential. Many workers may agree to mandatory arbitration clauses without even being aware of it when they sign a contract with their employer. In a rare show of public displeasure, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg read her dissent from the bench, calling the majority opinion “egregiously wrong” and saying, “The court today holds enforceable these arm-twisted, take-it-or-leave-it contracts—including the provisions requiring employees to litigate wage and hours claims only one-by-one. Federal labor law does not countenance such isolation of employees.” For more, we speak with Terri Gerstein, former labor bureau chief for the New York State Attorney General’s Office

whoohoo, tipping pt?

https://www.ecowatch.com/nyc-divestment-2524285373.html

...

"This is a first-in-the-nation step to protect our future and our planet—for this generation and the next," said Comptroller Scott M. Stringer.

Stringer announced last month that he would soon bring a proposal to the trustees of the pension funds that included divestment. Following through on that promise, a statement from the city released Wednesday says that he and Mayor Bill de Blasio"will submit a joint resolution to pension fund trustees" to begin the steps needed to purge the funds from the dirty industry, which will first entail an analysis on the financial impacts to be carried out by the City Comptroller's Bureau of Asset Management.

350.org co-founder Bill McKibben said in a tweet responding to the news that it was "One of the biggest days in 30 years of the climate fight."

The city's five pension funds hold $189 billion in assets, and roughly $5 billion of that amount are held in the securities of over 190 fossil fuel companies, the city said.

The new lawsuit names BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Exxon Mobil and Royal Dutch Shell and seeks billions of dollars in damages for harm already inflicted on the city as a result of the climate crisis as well for preparing for effects yet to come, including "imminent threats to its property, its infrastructure, and the health and safety of its residents."

New York's lawsuit follows similar suits filed by seven cities and counties in California.

The city's statement references the industry's deliberate misinformation campaign to cover up the effects of fossil fuels.

"We're bringing the fight against climate change straight to the fossil fuel companies that knew about its effects and intentionally misled the public to protect their profits," de Blasio said in a statement. "As climate change continues to worsen, it's up to the fossil fuel companies whose greed put us in this position to shoulder the cost of making New York safer and more resilient."

Daniel Zarrilli, the city's senior director of Climate Policy and Programs and Chief Resilience officer, echoed that statement, saying, "Today, after a decades-long pattern of deception and denial by fossil fuel companies, New York City is holding them to account. By seeking damages for the investments necessary to protect New Yorkers from the impacts of climate change, and divesting our pension funds from fossil fuel reserves, we are taking the largest action by any city to confront the growing climate crisis and demonstrate the leadership necessary to win this fight against fossil fuels and the damages they've caused."

Among the state lawmakers praising the city's action was Democratic Sen. Liz Krueger who said, "Divestment sends the clear message that it is no longer acceptable to support companies whose fundamental business model puts our entire society at risk."

Climate campaigners heaped praise on the city as well.

McKibben said in a statement, "New York City today becomes a capital of the fight against climate change on this planet."

"With its communities exceptionally vulnerable to a rising sea, the city is showing the spirit for which it's famous: it's not pretending that working with the fossil fuel companies will somehow save the day, but instead standing up to them, in the financial markets and in court," he added.

The announcements also drew praise from Carroll Muffett, president of Center for International Environmental Law, who said they marked "a watershed in corporate accountability for climate change and a wake-up call to investors that the risks facing fossil fuel companies are real, material, and rapidly growing."

The city's move also follows New York State's announcement last month that it was putting forth a "a de-carbonization roadmap" that included divesting from fossil fuels.

With NYC becoming the first major U.S. city to call for divestment—a call more than 800 institutions have heeded—and a growing number of municipalities filing suit against the industry, climate activists say it's clear "the global tide is turning."

...

#metoo?

could tell you stories of other professors, editors, journalists, and TV hosts. But they would be much the same as those we read almost every day now as women go public with their own stories of sexual harassment and worse at the hands of powerful men in the film industry, major media outlets, Silicon Valley, and Congress, among other places. In response, almost every day come new denials, excuses, or half-baked apologies.

Some commentators are now reconsidering Bill Clinton’s record in the sharper light of the present moment. Others ask if the current “witch hunt” for sexual predators has gone too far. Expecting inevitable backlash, some recommend that women exercise restraint -- as all of us have been taught to do for so many eons -- lest some unsubstantiated accusation discredit the stories of thousands of women reporting #MeToo. I don’t share such tender concern for the reputations of men, especially not that of the president, the self-congratulatory pussy-grabber-in-chief whose followers seem to mistake his behavior for the norm, if not an aspirational ideal.

Discussion of these matters quickly becomes political, eliciting erratic, gender-bending partisan judgments. Some prominent Republican men called for former judge Roy Moore of Alabama, accused of harassing and assaulting teenaged girls when he was a 30-something assistant district attorney, to endhis campaign for the Senate, while many Republican women in that state, including many who are presumably the mothers of daughters, continue to stand behind him.

At the same time, Democrats parse which of Bill Clinton’s accusers to believe and which not. And who hasn’t thought again about Clarence Thomas? He was elevated to the Supreme Court by an all-white male Congressional committee despite the thoroughly credible testimony of harassed law professor Anita Hill and the accounts of many other women, similarly violated and ready to testify against Thomas, but never called. Given his long misogynistic history on the court, isn’t it time to look at his testimony again? Did he commit perjury to gain his seat? And if so, what’s to be done about his consistent judicial record inimical to the common interests of women?..