The original headline of the article said we had 5 years but now it’s less than 2 years to stop building any new stuff that uses fossil fuels. Here’s lightly updated repost.
[Authors note: One of the most difficult and important articles I’ve written in 20 years of environmental journalism. Originally published Sept 6 2014 @Vice Motherboard]
Here’s the frightening implication of a landmark study on CO2 emissions:
By 2018, no new cars, homes, schools, factories, or electrical power plants should be built anywhere in the world, ever again, unless they’re either replacements for old ones or carbon neutral. Otherwise greenhouse gas emissions will push global warming past 2˚C of temperature rise worldwide, threatening the survival of many people currently living on the planet.
Every climate expert will tell you we’re on a tight carbon budget as it is—that only so many tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) can be pumped into the atmosphere before the global climate will overheat. We’ve already warmed temperatures 0.85˚C from pre-industrial levels, and the number rises every year. While no one thinks 2˚ C is safe, per…
[Originally published Jul 31, 2010 for the Inter Press Service (IPS)]
The oceans are the lifeblood of our planet and plankton its red blood cells. Those vital “red blood cells” have declined more than 40 percent since 1950 and the rate of decline is increasing due to climate change, scientists reported this week. (Update Dec 2016: New analysis show this is an overestimate. See my comment below.)
“Phytoplankton are a critical part of our planetary life support system. They produce half of the oxygen we breathe, draw down surface CO2, and ultimately support all of our fisheries,” said
Boris Worm of Canadas Dalhousie University and one of the worlds leading experts on the global oceans.
“An ocean with less phytoplankton will function differently,” said Worm, the co-author of a new study on plankton published this week in Nature.Plankton are the equivalent of grass, trees and other plants that make land green, says study co-author Marlon Lewis, an oceanographer at Dalhousie.
“It is frightening to realise we have lost nearly half of the oceans’ green plants,” Lewis told IPS.
“It looks like the rate of decline is increasing,” he said.
A large phytoplankton bloom in the Northeast Atlantic -NASA Earth Observatory Collection.
Climate change is warming the oceans about 0.2C per decade on average. This warmer water tends to stay on top because it is lighter and essentially sits on top of a layer of colder water. This layering, or stratification, is a problem for light-loving plankton because they can only live in the top 100 to 200 meters.
Eventually they run out of nutrients to feed on unless the cold, deeper waters mix with those near the surface. Ocean stratification has been widely observed in the past decade and is occurring in more and larger areas of the world’s oceans. Continue reading →
The moon has no atmosphere so it is scorching hot (+100C) during the day and bitterly cold (-150C) at night. The Earth has an atmosphere made up of oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide (CO2) and other gases. Over 150 years ago scientists proved that CO2 traps heat from the sun. We also know without any doubt that burning fossil fuels like oil, gas and coal emits CO2.
Measurements, not computer models or theories, measurements show that there is now 46% more CO2 in the atmosphere than 150 years ago before massive use of fossil fuels. That extra CO2 is like putting another blanket on at night even though you are already nice and warm.
The Earth is now 1.0 C hotter on average according to the latest measurements. Heat is a form of energy and with so much more energy in our atmosphere our weather system is becoming supercharged resulting in stronger storms, worse heat waves, major changes in when and where rain falls and more.
[For story behind this explanation – a Russian journalist and a bar are involved – click here. (only 320 words!)]
Graphic by Peter Gleick, President-Emeritus/Chief Scientist Pacific InstituteThese climate experts publish studies in peer-reviewed journals like Nature or Science. There is a something called the ‘Oregon Petition’ that claims otherwise. However some of the signatories are fraudulent, such as Charles Darwin and members of the Spice Girls, and less than 1% of signatories have backgrounds in climate science.
One night in a bar a Russian journalist who I’d just met says: “This global warming is too complicated for people to know if it’s real or not”.
“You don’t think climate change is happening?” I asked with surprise since we were both covering a big United Nations climate conference.
“No one has been able to give me a good explanation to prove it’s real,” said Yuri (not his real name).
“I can explain it to you in less than one minute,” I replied.
Yuri was sceptical but I went ahead and said:
“The moon has no atmosphere so it is scorching hot (+100C) during the day and bitterly cold (-150C) at night. The Earth has an atmosphere made up of oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide (CO2) and other gases. Over 150 years ago scientists proved that CO2 traps heat from the sun. We also know without any doubt that burning fossil fuels like oil, gas and coal emits CO2.
Measurements, not computer models or theories, measurements show that there is now 42% more CO2 in the atmosphere than 150 years ago before massive use of fossil fuels. That extra CO2 is like putting another blanket on at night even though you are already nice and warm. The Earth is now 1.0 C hotter on average according to the latest measurements. Heat is a form of energy and with so much more energy in our atmosphere our weather system is becoming supercharged resulting in stronger storms, worse heat waves, major changes in when and where rain falls and more.
That’s it.
After a long silence Yuri says “I guess that makes sense…”.
I’m not sure he was convinced but the truth is that climate change is not that complicated.
One additional thing to know is that CO2 is forever. Every little CO2 molecule we add to the atmosphere will continue to trap the sun’s heat for hundreds and thousands of years.
Helle Thorning-Schmidt came home at 3:30am one night last August to find her home flooded after heavy rains. Ironically the Danish prime minister had been attending European Commission meetings discussing climate change among other topics. As she cleaned up the soggy mess at home, she recalls thinking that “climate change truly affects us all”.
According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Synthesis Report, there are now more and longer-lasting heat waves, more heavy rainfall events, bigger storm surges, larger wildfires and other extreme events than prior to 1950. Some of these “have been linked to human influences” and such events are “very likely” to get worse in future than they are today, the IPCC report concludes.
For example, Denmark has experienced extensive flooding in recent years. In 2011, one downpour resulted in 5 billion euros in damages to the city of Copenhagen alone. “We’re having lots of floods now and these are badly damaging our infrastructure,” Thorning-Schmidt told 750 attendees at the IARU Sustainability Science Congress in Copenhagen in October. “Climate change is happening now.”
“All weather events are affected by climate change because the environment in which they occur is warmer and moister than it used to be,” says Kevin Trenberth, senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NOAA) in Boulder, Colorado and an expert on extreme events.
Conditions in the atmosphere have fundamentally changed, he explains, thanks to hundreds of millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide emitted from burning fossil fuels. Carbon dioxide traps the sun’s heat and as a result there is far more heat energy in the climate system and warmer temperatures. This also means 4-6% more moisture in the air – “fuel” for storms that makes them more destructive, says Trenberth.
“This is the new normal,” he says. “It doesn’t make sense to rebuild in some regions – they’ll just be swept away again.”
Changing odds
This new normal is borne out by a ground-breaking series of studies of 16 extreme weather events in 2013, most of which bear the fingerprints of climate change according to a team of researchers from around the world. For the first time, thanks to new data and better computer models, scientists were able attribute the odds of actual extreme events occurring with or without climate change. They found that climate change increased the odds of nine extremes in 2013: heat waves in Australia, Europe, China, Japan and Korea, intense rain in parts of the United States and India, and severe droughts in California and New Zealand. The studies were published in the special edition of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society in September.
California’s devastating drought is ongoing and researchers at Stanford University determined that the warming from carbon emissions was three times more likely to create the conditions for drought than with no emissions. “There was a strong link to climate warming,” says Stanford’s Daniel Swain.
Australia’s record breaking heat wave in 2013, meanwhile, would not have happened without climate change, Swain told chinadialogue. Not all extreme events are so clearly connected to global warming, however, in large part because the complex natural variability of weather systems and a lack of data in some cases, he added.
Forecasting where and when extreme events will occur is even more challenging. However a new mathematical method based on “big data” may help to predict extreme rainfall in the South American Andes. An international team of scientists led by Germany’s Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) say they can “correctly predict 90% of extreme rainfall events in the Central Andes”.
“The data was there, but nobody joined the dots like this before,” says co-author Jürgen Kurths of PIK.
Rising costs
The insurance industry is getting increasingly worried by the strengthening evidence that climate change is increasing extreme weather since they face rapidly rising bills. In Canada, for example, property damages from extreme weather averaged US$200 to US$500 million a year over 24 consecutive years. In the last six years it shot up to US$1 billion a year and in 2013 it was US$3.4 billion.
“Extreme weather events are increasing in frequency and intensity,” explains Blair Feltmate, professor at Canada’s University of Waterloo and chair of the Climate Change Adaptation Project Canada, though not every event is caused by climate change.
“It’s like a baseball player on steroids: you can’t say every home run is because of the drug but it does increase the odds of hitting more home runs.”
He adds: “What people need to understand is this is only going to get much worse. A US$35 billion flood is coming to Canada.”
Many countries have contributed relatively little CO2 to the fossil-fuel blanket heating the planet but are, like the Philippines with Typhoon Haiyan, which killed more than 6,000 people, already experiencing significant impacts from extreme events. This reality was officially recognised at a contentious United Nations climate treaty meeting last December in Warsaw, Poland.
After 36 straight hours of intense negotiations industrialised nations finally agreed with developing nations that a new climate treaty will have what’s called a “loss and damage mechanism”, or the “Warsaw mechanism”. This recognises that the impacts of climate change will lead to both economic and non-economic losses, including the growing issue of climate refugees.
Aftermath of an early tornado in Lancaster, Texas. To join thousands of others connecting the dots between climate change and extreme weather, visit ClimateDots.org.
Nearly a year later there has been little progress on fleshing out how the Warsaw Mechanism will work. A leaked internal US State Department document revealed US fears that poor nations will seek “redress for climate damages from sea level rise, droughts, powerful storms and other adverse impacts”.
A new climate treaty that effectively phases out carbon emissions entirely was signed by all nations in Paris in December 2015. However difficult issues including financial assistance for adaptation and a functional Warsaw Mechanism were not resolved in Paris.
“From a science perspective there is a good case that climate change contributed substantially to the damage from Haiyan,” says NOAA’s Trenberth. How much damage is hard to determine. In addition perhaps there were too many people living in too vulnerable a region he said. “Who was responsible for that?”
Updated dec 2015. First published on China Dialogue 17.11.2014
I’m really thrilled Canada was able to play an active part of it.
— Catherine McKenna, Minister of environment and climate change
Years from now, today may very well be the day our children look back to as the beginning of an ambitious global effort to finally fight climate change. I am proud of the role Canada is playing in reaching this historic and balanced agreement, and I am confident that the world will rise to the challenge of addressing climate change.
— Justin Trudeau, Prime Minister of Canada
Canada: What a difference an election can make
The historic Paris Agreement is front page news in most of Canadian media in part because Canada’s new minister of environment and climate change Catherine McKenna was a key player in the final outcome. Moreover McKenna endorsed the 1.5C target, and lobbied to ensure human and indigenous rights were part of the agreement.
In Paris Canada might have won the “most helpful” or “biggest turn around” award if such things existed — 180 degree change from previous COPs.
For eight years under the previous Stephen Harper government, ‘won’ consecutive “Fossil of the Day” awards for being the most unhelpful country. An award Canada’s previous Minister’s of the Environment took pride in. It was a government so intent on supporting the county’s fossil fuel industry it denied the reality that climate change was already impacting the country.
“We see in Canada the impacts of climate change. We have wildfires in B.C.; we have flooding in Alberta; Prince Edward Island is shrinking; and we see in our Arctic the permafrost is melting and hunters have shorter seasons. Canadians know that we need to act, and that’s what we’re going to do,” McKenna told the Toronto Star.
“Now it’s time to do the hard work,” McKenna added. “We’re going to go home and figure out the plan. . . Every Canadian has to do their part.”
Most Canadian media focused on the details of the agreement nearly all considered it a historic shift to a low-carbon economy. Some focused on the huge challenge of doing so calling it daunting.
So far there is little analysis of the implications of the deal for Canada, the world’s fifth largest crude oil producer and the biggest supplier of oil to the US. It is also the third largest producer of natural gas and one of the top ten miners of coal.
For context here is myfour part series revealing how Canada became a very wealthy, fossil-fuelled energy superpower and an international climate pariah.
First published on the Climate News MosaicParis Climate Talks Live Blog available here:
Now that parties have had a chance to review the final text points of disagreement remain. Some changes will likely be made in the final plenary this evening. However these usually need to be agreed on beforehand in the informal sessions that are happening right now.
Tension mounts while it is clear nearly everyone senses the end of COP21 is very near.
The Paris agreement is a historic turning point for the whole world. One of the most remarkable outcomes of the agreement is that its objective is to “pursue efforts to limit” global warming to 1.5C above preindustrial, while holding warming “well below 2C.
While the agreement is itself historic, the challenges ahead in achieving it will dominate the 21st-century. The agreement has been made at a time when national greenhouse gas emission reduction contributions for 2025 and 2030 together far exceed the levels needed to hold global warming well below 2C, let alone limit to 1.5C.”
Bill Hare, CEO of Climate Analytics
“If agreed and implemented, this means bringing down greenhouse-gas emissions to net zero within a few decades.
John Schellnhuber, Director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research
There’s much in the text that has been diluted and polluted by the people who despoil our planet, but it contains a new imperative to limit temperature rises to 1.5 degrees. That single number, and the new goal of net zero emissions by the second half of this century, will cause consternation in the boardrooms of coal companies and the palaces of oil-exporting states.”
— Kumi Naidoo, International Director, Greenpeace
Rich countries have moved the goal posts so far that we are left with a sham of a deal in Paris. Through piecemeal pledges and bullying tactics, rich countries have pushed through a very bad deal
Sara Shaw, Friends of the Earth International climate justice and energy coordinator.
t’s a sad day for vulnerable people everywhere. An exclusion clause that robs the poor of their right to compensation.
Azeb Girmai, LDC Watch International
If agreed and implemented, this means bringing down greenhouse-gas emissions to net zero within a few decades. … CO2 emissions have to peak well before 2030…
John Schellnhuber, Director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research
“If agreed, this deal will represent a turning point in history, paving the way for the shift to 100% clean energy that the world wants and the planet needs. By marching in the streets, calling leaders and signing petitions, people everywhere created this moment, and now people everywhere will deliver on it to secure the future of humanity.
Emma Ruby-Sachs, Acting Executive Director, Avaaz
For the first time in history, the whole world has made a public commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and deal with the impacts of climate change
Mohamed Adow, Senior Climate Advisor, Christian Aid
“How can our voices be silenced here?” Jannie Staffansson – a Sami woman from Northern Europe
We are the persons who are dying. My friends, my family are the ones who go through water, they are the ones killed in avalanches. How can the purpose of this negotiation not be people? How can our voices be silenced here?
Jannie Staffansson – a Sami woman from Northern Europe
Two environmental activists are killed every week according to Global Witness, and disproportionate number are Indigenous people
Kumi Nadioo, Greenpeace International
References to human and Indigenous rights have been removed from Article 2 in the core part of the Paris Agreement draft. They remain in the preamble. More than 240 civil society groups insist the human rights language be re-inserted into Article 2.
Why is this important?
Article 2 is about the purpose of the agreement which surely is to protect people and the climate said María José Veramendi Villa, Asociacion Interamericana Para La Defensa Del Ambiente (AIDA) of Perú. “Indigenous peoples are amongst the most impacted by climate change,” she said in a press conference today.
Article 2 also sets out how the agreement is to be implemented. This is crucial because some purported climate actions already in place such as biofuel plantations and carbon sequestration projects have already violated the rights of local people. People have been removed from their ancestral lands and protesters have been killed in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
Norway, the European Union, the US and others oppose the inclusion for reasons that are completely unclear said Veramendi.
“It doesn’t change obligations that are already in the UN Declaration on Human Rights,” she said.
Countries like the US are only acting to protect the interests of a few powerful corporations in these negotiations, said Greenpeace’s Nadioo.
That’s why there is a global movement, a dynamic movement for real climate action that they cannot stop, he said.
Things are moving faster than expected, debate continues overnight with hopes of a final agreement ready to be voted on late Friday. We’ll see. Remember this is a consensus process, one country can hold up the rest.
It is slightly longer with about 50 brackets – down from 150 to 200.
Some reactions in the order they were made:
“The standard of any effective climate policy is clear: does it keep fossil fuels in the ground and accelerate a just transition to 100% renewable energy?
The commitments we are seeing in the text are a start, but they won’t get the job done, so activists are already mobilizing to close the gap between rhetoric and reality.”
— Payal Parekh, 350.org Global Managing Director
At first glance happy with new COP21 draft – target ‘well below 2C’ and ’emissions neutrality’ in 2050-2100 both ambitious but achievable
— Corinne Le Quéré (@clequere)
$100bn confirmed as rich nations’ floor in new draft Paris #COP21 text. Left – today Right – yesterday
— Simon Evans (@DrSimEvans)
#Oceans #biodiversity & “Mother Earth” out of #brackets in Preamble #update #UNFCCC #COP21
— Paris Agreement News (@ParisAgreement)
Binding part of new #climate agreement draft no longer includes #humanrights – that is going to upset a lot of people
— Megan Rowling @meganrowlin
As I’ve been saying, addition of 1.5C wording is about recognizing harm to small islands and other countries #COP21 pic.twitter.com/Cw4Di5dtGz
Simon Donner (@simondonner)
3rd draft is out. No liability/compensation. Adriano Campolina of @ActionAid called it “draft deal that denies the world justice”
— Stella Paul (@stellasglobe)
By including a clause for no future claim of compensation and liability, the US has ensured people suffering from the disastrous impacts of climate change will never be able to seek the justice owed to them.
This unfair and unjust draft deal won’t face up to the realities of climate change and will only serve to widen the chasm between rich and poor.Rich countries have a responsibility to ensure a fair global deal for everyone, not just themselves, and as we move into these final hours of negotiations poorer countries must not settle for anything less.
— Adriano Campolina, ActionAid Chief Executive
New #COP21 text is remarkably streamlined. But big issues on target, differentiation (funding) & transparency still open. Important progress
— Simon Lewis (@SimonLLewis)
First published on the Climate News Mosaic Paris Climate Talks Live Blog available here:
Inter Press Service News Agency (International)
DeSmog Blog (Seattle)
Philippine EnviroNews (Philippines)
Earth Journalism (International)
Watson (Switzerland)
Skeptical Science (International)
Late Wednesday night for over 3 hours dozens of countries’ stated the draft Paris Agreement is a great start but… x, y and z need fixing.
And so informal groups are meeting overnight to find compromises on a number of key issues. In the morning a new revised draft Paris Agreement will be released. There will still be bracketed issue.
Expect negotiations to go into the weekend.
Key Issues in Dispute
* Developing countries want a strong and separate article for the Warsaw International Mechanism for loss and damage associated with climate change impacts
* Finance – who’s going to pay and by when. More $$ from rich nations will be needed
* Differentiation – who has to do what
* Ambition – what’s the long-term temperature goal
* Response measures -what to do when measures to address climate change hurt fossil fuel-dependent economies ie Saudi Arabia
First published on the Climate News Mosaic Paris Climate Talks Live Blog available here:
The historic Paris Agreement is front page news in most of Canadian media in part because Canada’s new minister of environment and climate change Catherine McKenna was a key player in the final outcome. Moreover McKenna endorsed the 1.5C target, and lobbied to ensure human and indigenous rights were part of the agreement.
Stephen Leahy, International Environmental Journalist 