Overview-Climate Change

Economists' erroneous estimates of damages from climate change

Here we review the empirical work done by economists and show that it severely underestimates damages from climate change by committing several methodological errors, including neglecting tipping points, and assuming that economic sectors not exposed to the weather are insulated from climate change. Most fundamentally, the influential Integrated Assessment Model DICE is shown to be incapable of generating an economic collapse, regardless of the level of damages. Given these flaws, economists' empirical estimates of economic damages from global warming should be rejected as unscientific, and models that have been calibrated to them, such as DICE, should not be used to evaluate economic risks from climate change, or in the development of policy to attenuate damages.

Sunspot date vs CO2

Roger Coppock Facebook 1/29/21 Answers in Climate Science

The Sunspot Scapegoat Fossil fools, in their never ending search for something other than their master's oil, coal, and gas products that is the major cause of global warming, have at times blamed sunspots. They produce cherry picked proxy series and collections of anecdotes to try to support this. Often the bafflegab mentions the "Maunder minimum" and the "little ice age." These events occurred in the late 17th century, long before modern instruments could accurately record them.

Climate change will be sudden and cataclysmic. We need to act fast

19 Jan 2021 Peter Giger World Economic Forum

Climate change is often described as global warming, with the implication of gradual changes caused by a steady increase in temperatures; from heatwaves to melting glaciers.

But we know from multidisciplinary scientific evidence - from geology, anthropology and archaeology - that climate change is not incremental. Even in pre-human times, it is episodic, when it isn’t forced by a human-induced acceleration of greenhouse gas emissions and warming.

There are parts of our planet’s carbon cycle, the ways that the earth and the biosphere store and release carbon, that could trigger suddenly in response to gradual warming. These are tipping points that once passed could fundamentally disrupt the planet and produce abrupt, non-linear change in the climate.

Threshold for dangerous climate warming will likely be crossed between 2027–2042

PHY.ORG 12/21/20 by McGill University

The threshold for dangerous global warming will likely be crossed between 2027 and 2042—a much narrower window than the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's estimate of between now and 2052. In a study published in Climate Dynamics, researchers from McGill University introduce a new and more precise way to project the Earth's temperature. Based on historical data, it considerably reduces uncertainties compared to previous approaches.

1978: Is mankind warming the Earth?

This article was originally published in the February 1978 issue of the Bulletin. It is republished here as part of our special issue commemorating the 75th year of the Bulletin. By William W. Kellogg, December 7, 2020 Bulletin of Atomic Scientists

The greening of the Earth is approaching its limit

Phys.org DECEMBER 10, 2020 by Spanish National Research Council (CSIC)

It’s a Race Against Heat, and Humanity Is Losing

[1] By Laura Millan Lombrana, Akshat Rathi and Hayley Warren September 8, 2020

The Arctic is warming faster than the rest of the world. This year, the region is on track for its worst wildfire season in recorded history, toppling a record set in 2019, according to the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service.
Parts of Siberia experienced temperatures 10C above average in May
Not all these wildfires are new. Some were thought to have gone out after temperatures dropped last winter instead continued to smolder under the snow, fueled by methane deposits and fed by peat. Once warm weather returned, last year’s fires reignited.

Surprising pulses of ancient warming found in Antarctic ice samples

By Sid PerkinsAug. 20, 2020 <embed> https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/08/surprising-pulses-ancient-warming-found-antarctic-ice-samples?utm_campaign=news_weekly_2020-08-21&et_rid=35100799&et_cid=3455122&fbclid=IwAR3TYuggFr8K7LpmSpCvp34_YQa95YxEjoyie7bnqsCKFEZ2E3mQscfCEmA# </embed>

In the new study, Christoph Nehrbass-Ahles, a climate physicist at the University of Cambridge, and his colleagues came up with a way to extract CO2 from ancient ice that’s about three times more precise than previous methods. The ice-crushing technique they developed doesn’t involve friction between metal parts, which can be a source of fresh CO2. The new approach allowed them to measure CO2 concentrations to within one part per million.

Nehrbass-Ahles’s team then analyzed portions of a 3.5-kilometer-long ice core drilled at one of the highest points in eastern Antarctica. Their samples capture times between 330,000 and 450,000 years ago—an interval that includes one complete ice age as well as the warm spells on either side. On average, each data point was separated from its neighbors by about 300 years, a four- to sixfold improvement in time resolution over previous studies.

Groundbreaking study: Earth will warm 4.9 to 7 degrees F=

It presents both good and bad news. The worst-case climate scenarios may be somewhat less likely than previous studies suggested. But the best-case climate scenarios — those assuming the least amount of warming — are almost certainly not going to happen.

It's "the most important climate science paper that's come out in several years," according to climate scientist Andrew Dessler of Texas A&M University, who was not involved with the study.

The effort also illuminates some of the challenges of a decadeslong scientific quest to predict the strength of future climate change.

At the heart of the new study is a concept known as "climate sensitivity" — how sensitive the Earth is to greenhouse gas emissions and how much it's likely to warm in response. In studies, scientists often focus on the amount of warming that might be expected if carbon dioxide concentrations doubled their preindustrial levels.

Climate worst-case scenarios may not go far enough, cloud data shows

Compared with the last assessment in 2014, 25% of them show a sharp upward shift from 3C to 5C in climate sensitivity – the amount of warming projected from a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide from the preindustrial level of 280 parts per million. This has shocked many veteran observers, because assumptions about climate sensitivity have been relatively unchanged since the 1980s.

UV-B radiation was the Devonian-Carboniferous boundary terrestrial extinction kill mechanism

Here, we report on a transect (Fig. 1) of terrestrial D-C boundary sections from East Greenland that all include the extinction level. One section is unique in containing abundant plant spores and spore tetrads with malformed sculpture and pigmented walls. These malformations are entirely consistent (9) with exposure to elevated levels of ultraviolet-B (UV-B) that damaged the DNA before the formation of their protective sporopollenin walls. This indicates the temporary loss of the global protective ozone layer.

The 2100 Project: An Atlas for the Green New Deal

This Atlas was conceived in relation to three intersecting issues. First, excess carbon in the atmosphere is changing the world’s climate; sea levels are rising, temperatures are increasing, and destructive weather events are becoming more frequent. Second, because our systems of extraction, production and consumption are causing climate change, an incremental approach to the future is not an option. Third, the US population is expected to grow by at least 100 million people this century, adding significantly to what is already the world’s most consumptive, high-carbon economy.

The conterminous US occupies 3,119,884.69 square miles or 1,996,726,202 acres. It is typically categorized by eight land use types: open space, urban areas, agriculture lands, grassland and pasture lands, forests, wetlands, shrub lands, and other areas. This map illustrates the nation’s land use composition as of 2017, with clear patterns of settlement and use at the 98,765 acre pixel scale. Along the East and West Coasts open spaces, forests, and urban areas are prevelant. In the Midwest and Great Plains, agriculture, grasslands, and pasture lands predominate. Much of the nation’s wetlands are concentrated in the Great Lakes and Gulf Coast megaregions.

New collection of maps and datascapes capturing the spatial consequences of climate change

[2]

As the project's first output, the Atlas draws on the work of scientists, geographers, economists, historians, and others to create a centralized, publicly available collection of visuals to help develop alternative visions for a future built by the Green New Deal.

One of the goals for the Atlas is to provide communities grappling with the scale and scope of the challenges climate change will pose with real, tangible, freely available data they can use to develop plans for the future. Conservative population growth estimates state that more than 100 million people will migrate to the U.S., along with 13 million residents displaced by sea level rise, which doesn't include tens of millions of Americans displaced by other factors such as heat or drought.

Powering the future U.S. also requires significant changes in infrastructure. Clean energy systems, whether powered by wind or solar, are land intensive, with some estimates saying that a clean energy smart grid would require twice as much land than is currently used for energy. Coping with climate change also requires legislators and developers to understand the spatial requirements of population growth and agricultural needs in the context of a green economy.

How saving the ozone layer in 1987 slowed global warming

The Montreal Protocol, an international agreement signed in 1987 to stop chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) destroying the ozone layer, now appears to be the first international treaty to successfully slow the rate of global warming.

New research published today in Environmental Research Letters has revealed that thanks to the Protocol, today's global temperatures are considerably lower. And by mid-century the Earth will be—on average—at least 1°C cooler than it would have been without the agreement. Mitigation is even greater in regions such as the Arctic, where the avoided warming will be as much as 3°C—4°C.

"Remarkably, the Protocol has had a far greater impact on global warming than the Kyoto Agreement, which was specifically designed to reduce greenhouse gases. Action taken as part of the Kyoto Agreement will only reduce temperatures by 0.12°C by the middle of the century—compared to a full 1°C of mitigation from the Montreal Protocol."

Climate models have accurately predicted global heating, study finds

The findings confirm that since as early as 1970, climate scientists have had a solid fundamental understanding of the Earth’s climate system and the ability to project how it will respond to continued increases in the greenhouse effect. Since climate models have accurately anticipated global temperature changes so far, we can expect projections of future warming to be reliable as well.

The research examines the accuracy of 17 models published over the past five decades, beginning with a 1970 study and including 1981 and 1988 models led by James Hansen, the former Nasa climatologist who testified to the US Senate in 1988 about the impacts of anthropogenic global heating. The study also includes the first four reports by the UN’s intergovernmental panel on climate change (IPCC).

The challenge in evaluating climate model accuracy lies in the fact that due to computing power limitations, simulations are only run for a few specific future greenhouse gas emissions scenarios. There are an infinite number of such possible scenarios, but real-world emissions will follow only one path, and it will never exactly match the few scenarios input into climate models. Thus, if Earth warms less than in a climate model projection, it does not necessarily mean the model was inaccurate.

Climate emergency: world 'may have crossed tipping points’

The planet has already heated by 1C and the temperature is certain to rise further, due to past emissions and because greenhouse gas levels are still rising. The scientists further warn that one tipping point, such as the release of methane from thawing permafrost, may fuel others, leading to a cascade.

The researchers, writing in a commentary article in the journal Nature, acknowledge that the complex science of tipping points means great uncertainty remains. But they say the potential damage from the tipping points is so big and the time to act so short, that “to err on the side of danger is not a responsible option”. They call for urgent international action.

he new article comes as the UN warns action is very far from stopping global temperature rise, with the world currently on track for 3C-4C. The commentary lists nine tipping points that may have been activated.

Climate tipping points — too risky to bet against

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) introduced the idea of tipping points two decades ago. At that time, these ‘large-scale discontinuities’ in the climate system were considered likely only if global warming exceeded 5 °C above pre-industrial levels. Information summarized in the two most recent IPCC Special Reports (published in 2018 and in September this year)2,3 suggests that tipping points could be exceeded even between 1 and 2 °C of warming (see ‘Too close for comfort’).

If current national pledges to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions are implemented — and that’s a big ‘if’ — they are likely to result in at least 3 °C of global warming. This is despite the goal of the 2015 Paris agreement to limit warming to well below 2 °C. Some economists, assuming that climate tipping points are of very low probability (even if they would be catastrophic), have suggested that 3 °C warming is optimal from a cost–benefit perspective. However, if tipping points are looking more likely, then the ‘optimal policy’ recommendation of simple cost–benefit climate-economy models4 aligns with those of the recent IPCC report2. In other words, warming must be limited to 1.5 °C. This requires an emergency response.

Coal Knew, Too

1966: “There is evidence that the amount of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere is increasing rapidly as a result of the combustion of fossil fuels,” wrote Garvey. “If the future rate of increase continues as it is at the present, it has been predicted that, because the CO2 envelope reduces radiation, the temperature of the earth’s atmosphere will increase and that vast changes in the climates of the earth will result.”

“Such changes in temperature will cause melting of the polar icecaps, which, in turn, would result in the inundation of many coastal cities, including New York and London,” he continued. 

In a discussion piece immediately following Garvey’s article, Peabody Coal combustion engineer James R. Jones noted that the coal industry was merely “buying time” before more air pollution regulations came into effect. “We are in favor of cleaning up our air,” he wrote. “Everyone can point to examples in his own community where something should be done. Our aim is to have control that does not precede the technical knowledge for compliance.”

Climate-heating greenhouse gases hit new high, UN reports

The rise in concentration of greenhouses gases follows inevitably from the continued surge in global emissions, which was described as “brutal news” for 2018. The world’s scientists calculate that emissions must fall by half by 2030 to give a good chance of limiting global heating to 1.5C, beyond which hundreds of millions of people will suffer more heatwaves, droughts, floods and poverty.

But Petteri Taalas, the WMO secretary-general, said: “There is no sign of a slowdown, let alone a decline, despite all the commitments under the Paris agreement on climate change. We need to increase the level of ambition for the sake of the future welfare of mankind.

The Collapse of Civilization May Have Already Begun

He argues this is not so much a doom-and-gloom scenario as a case of waking up to reality, so that we can do as much as we can to save as many lives as possible. His recommended response is what he calls “Deep Adaptation,” which requires going beyond “mere adjustments to our existing economic system and infrastructure, in order to prepare us for the breakdown or collapse of normal societal functions.”

In March, he launched the Deep Adaptation Forum to connect and support people who, in the face of “inevitable” societal collapse, want to explore how they can “reduce suffering, while saving more of society and the natural world.” Over the last six months, the Forum has gathered more than 10,000 participants. More than 600,000 people have downloaded Bendell’s paper, called Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating our Climate Tragedy, published by the University of Cumbria’s Institute of Leadership and Sustainability (IFALS). And many of the key organizers behind the Extinction Rebellion (XR) campaign joined the protest movement after reading it.

Six Months of the Deep Adaptation Forum

9/09/19

As we see news of a breakdown in our global climate and its increasing impacts on nature and humanity worldwide, it is painful. Opinion surveys report on how many of us now experience climate anxiety. People fortunate enough to have avoided direct harm from climate-related disasters, now fear there will be a breakdown in their own societies, affecting their own families. After the shock and grief, many people remain bewildered about how to respond that realisation. What to do in our professional lives? What to do in personal lives? In this bewilderment we risk paralysis and reverting to denial. We risk going back to the same narratives and tactics for incremental change, with the festering worry that we are lying to ourselves about the nature of the crisis.

In early March 2019, my team and I launched the Deep Adaptation Forum (DAF), as an attempt to connect people who are exploring these questions, and many more besides. A small group of colleagues, private donors, and over two dozen volunteers have provided precious assistance in making this happen.

The DAF now exists to embody and enable loving responses to our predicament. Its fundamental aim is to reduce suffering, while saving more of society and the natural world.

U.S. Suspends More Oil and Gas Leases Over What Could Be a Widespread Problem

The federal Bureau of Land Management's Utah office in September voluntarily suspended 130 oil and gas leases after advocacy groups sued, arguing that BLM hadn't adequately assessed the greenhouse gas emissions associated with drilling and extraction on those leases as required by law.

A series of court rulings have established that BLM must conduct a thorough analysis of the climate impacts of drilling before it allows development in order to comply with the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).

In the latest ruling, a federal district court in Washington, D.C., in March ordered the bureau to redo its environmental analysis for a slate of leases in Wyoming to better assess climate impacts. In response, BLM suspended the Wyoming leases, as well as leases in Utah and Colorado that were included in the lawsuit but not directly addressed by the ruling.

Climate change fueled the rise and demise of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, superpower of the ancient world

Our new research published in the journal Science Advances sheds light on these mysteries. We show that climate change was the proverbial double-edged sword that first contributed to the meteoric rise of the Neo-Assyrian Empire and then to its precipitous collapse.

 We painstakingly pieced together the climatic history of northern Mesopotamia by carefully drilling into stalagmites, across their growth rings, which are similar to those of trees. In each sample, we measured the oxygen isotope ratios to build a timeline of how conditions changed. That told us the order of events but didn’t tell us the amount of time that elapsed between them.

How Scientists Got Climate Change So Wrong

Had a scientist in the early 1990s suggested that within 25 years a single heat wave would measurably raise sea levels, at an estimated two one-hundredths of an inch, bake the Arctic and produce Sahara-like temperatures in Paris and Berlin, the prediction would have been dismissed as alarmist. But many worst-case scenarios from that time are now realities.

The Discovery of Rapid Climate Change

Physics Today.org 8 2003

“How abrupt was the discovery of abrupt climate change? Many climate experts would put their finger on one moment: the day they read the 1993 report of the analysis of Greenland ice cores. Before that, almost nobody confidently believed that the climate could change massively within a decade or two; after the report, almost nobody felt sure that it could not.”

The Climate Crisis-William Hall

The Climate Crisis by William Hall
Growth of World Population
Graph of Energy Usage
Anthropogenic Radiative Forcing
Humanity risks its continued Existence on a Finite World

‘Untold human suffering’: 11,000 scientists from across world unite to declare global climate emergency

Eleven thousand scientists in 153 countries have declared a climate emergency and warned that “untold human suffering” is unavoidable without huge shifts in the way we live......The letter is based on climate science that was first established in 1979 at the first World Climate Conference held in Geneva. For decades multiple global bodies have agreed urgent action is needed but greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise.

THE GLOBAL CLIMATE 2015–2019

Compared to the previous five-year assessment period 2011–2015, the current five-year eriod 2015–2019 has seen a continued increase in carbon dioxide (CO2 ) emissions and an accelerated increase in the atmospheric concentration of major greenhouse gases (GHGs), with growth rates nearly 20% higher. The increase in the oceanic CO2  concentration has increased the ocean’s acidity. The five-year period 2015–20191  is likely to be the warmest of any equivalent period on record globally, with a 1.1 °C global temperature increase since the pre-industrial period and a 0.2 °C increase compared to the previous five-year period.

Earth 4C Hotter

Because prominent scientists addressed the issue of a 4C planet and because climate scientists, in general, are constantly apologizing for being too conservative, too timid in their forecasts as actual climate change buries their predictions with a dagger to the heart, it is a worthwhile exercise to look at a 4C world. It could happen within current lifetimes just like the scientists speculated 10 years ago. But, of course, nobody knows for sure. After all, it helps to brace oneself ahead of time, just in case.

The Crazy Scale of Human Carbon Emission

Current data (from direct measurements of the atmosphere to historical records of industry) tells us that between 1751 and 1987 fossil fuels put about 737 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere. Between just 1987 and 2014 it was about the same mass: 743 billion tons. Total CO2 from industrialized humans in the past 263 years: 1,480 billion tons.

Major Study Rewrites the Driving Source of Atlantic Ocean Circulation

The OSNAP array revealed overturning circulation between the southwestern tip of Greenland and the Scottish shelf is about seven times greater than that in the Labrador Sea, the team reports today in the journal Science. Irregular overturning in the area east of Greenland also accounts for 88 percent of the variation in AMOC, the researchers found.

'No doubt left' about scientific consensus on global warming, say experts

The scientific consensus that humans are causing global warming is likely to have passed 99%, according to the lead author of the most authoritative study on the subject, and could rise further after separate research that clears up some of the remaining doubts.
Three studies published in Nature and Nature Geoscience use extensive historical data to show there has never been a period in the last 2,000 years when temperature changes have been as fast and extensive as in recent decades.

Last phase of the Little Ice Age forced by volcanic eruptions

During the first half of the nineteenth century, several large tropical volcanic eruptions occurred within less than three decades. The global climate effects of the 1815 Tambora eruption have been investigated, but those of an eruption in 1808 or 1809 whose source is unknown and the eruptions in the 1820s and 1830s have received less attention. Here we analyse the effect of the sequence of eruptions in observations, global three-dimensional climate field reconstructions and coupled climate model simu-lations. All the eruptions were followed by substantial drops of summer temperature over the Northern Hemisphere land areas. In addition to the direct radiative effect, which lasts 2–3 years, the simulated ocean–atmosphere heat exchange sustained cool-ing for several years after these eruptions, which affected the slow components of the climate system. Africa was hit by two decades of drought, global monsoons weakened and the tracks of low-pressure systems over the North Atlantic moved south. The low temperatures and increased precipitation in Europe triggered the last phase of the advance of Alpine glaciers. Only after the 1850s did the transition into the period of anthropogenic warming start. We conclude that the end of the Little Ice Age was marked by the recovery from a sequence of volcanic eruptions, which makes it difficult to define a single pre-industrial baseline.

No evidence for globally coherent warm and cold periods over the preindustrial Common Era

Earth’s climate history is often understood by breaking it down into constituent climatic epochs1. Over the Common Era (the past 2,000 years) these epochs, such as the Little Ice Age2–4, have been characterized as having occurred at the same time across extensive spatial scales5. Although the rapid global warming seen in observations over the past 150 years does show nearly global coherence6, the spatiotemporal coherence of climate epochs earlier in the Common Era has yet to be robustly tested. Here we use global palaeoclimate reconstructions for the past 2,000 years, and find no evidence for preindustrial globally coherent cold and warm epochs. In particular, we find that the coldest epoch of the last millennium—the putative Little Ice Age—is most likely to have experienced the coldest temperatures during the fifteenth century in the central and eastern Pacific Ocean, during the seventeenth century in northwestern Europe and southeastern North America, and during the mid-nineteenth century over most of the remaining regions. Furthermore, the spatial coherence that does exist over the preindustrial Common Era is consistent with the spatial coherence of stochastic climatic variability. This lack of spatiotemporal coherence indicates that preindustrial forcing was not sufficient to produce globally synchronous extreme temperatures at multidecadal and centennial timescales. By contrast, we find that the warmest period of the past two millennia occurred during the twentieth century for more than 98 per cent of the globe. This provides strong evidence that anthropogenic global warming is not only unparalleled in terms of absolute temperatures5, but also unprecedented in spatial consistency within the context of the past 2,000 years.

Consistent multidecadal variability in global temperature reconstructions and simulations over the Common Era

Multidecadal surface temperature changes may be forced by natural as well as anthropogenic factors, or arise unforced from  the climate system. Distinguishing these factors is essential for estimating sensitivity to multiple climatic forcings and the amplitude of the unforced variability. Here we present 2,000-year-long global mean temperature reconstructions using seven different statistical methods that draw from a global collection of temperature-sensitive palaeoclimate records. Our recon-structions display synchronous multidecadal temperature fluctuations that are coherent with one another and with fully forced millennial model simulations from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 across the Common Era. A substantial  portion of pre-industrial (1300–1800 CE) variability at multidecadal timescales is attributed to volcanic aerosol forcing. Reconstructions and simulations qualitatively agree on the amplitude of the unforced global mean multidecadal temperature variability, thereby increasing confidence in future projections of climate change on these timescales. The largest warming trends at timescales of 20 years and longer occur during the second half of the twentieth century, highlighting the unusual character of the warming in recent decades.

CO2 Levels Just Hit Another Record—Here’s Why It Matters

There’s still some scientific uncertainty regarding exactly how much warming is associated with a given increase in atmospheric CO2. But scientists are able to calculate a broad range of likely outcomes. This has given rise to a concept known as the “carbon budget”—a scientific estimate of how much additional CO2 would cause the world to blow past its temperature targets.

Climate change:evidence from the Geological Record

The last century has seen a rapidly growing global

population and much more intensive use of resources, leading to greatly increased emissions of gases, such as carbon dioxide and methane, from the burning of fossil fuels (oil, gas and coal), and from agriculture, cement production and deforestation. Evidence from the geological record is consistent with the physics that shows that adding large amounts of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere warms the world and may lead to: higher sea levels and flooding of low-lying coasts; greatly changed patterns of rainfall; increased acidity of the oceans; and decreased oxygen levels in seawater.

Origins of Climate Change

Many people trace the origins of today’s climate crisis to the Industrial Revolution, when humans first began to burn large amounts of coal, but the crisis’s true roots extend further back to the onset of colonialism. When European colonizers ventured to Africa, Asia, North and South America, they invariably plundered the local natural resources, damaged habitats, hunted species to extinction, and often forced human inhabitants into slavery.

The chart that defines our warming world=

BBC 6/20/2019

Is this the simplest way to show what is meant by global warming? The chart below organises all the countries of the world by region, time and temperature. The trend is unmistakeable.

One climate crisis disaster happening every week, UN warns

Catastrophes such as cyclones Idai and Kenneth in Mozambique and the drought afflicting India make headlines around the world. But large numbers of “lower impact events” that are causing death, displacement and suffering are occurring much faster than predicted, said Mami Mizutori, the UN secretary-general’s special representative on disaster risk reduction. “This is not about the future, this is about today.”

Scientists’ warning to humanity: microorganisms and climate change

In the Anthropocene, in which we now live, climate change is impacting most life on Earth. Microorganisms support the existence of all higher trophic life forms. To understand how humans and other life forms on Earth (including those we are yet to discover) can withstand anthropogenic climate change, it is vital to incorporate knowledge of the microbial ‘unseen majority’. We must learn not just how microorganisms affect climate change (including production and consumption of greenhouse gases) but also how they will be affected by climate change and other human activities. This Consensus Statement documents the central role and global importance of microorganisms in climate change biology. It also puts humanity on notice that the impact of climate change will depend heavily on responses of microorganisms, which are essential for achieving an environmentally sustainable future.

Scientists Issue Warning To Humanity: Climate Change Depends On Microbes

The world’s dirt holds on to some 2.2 trillion tons of carbon. That’s more than the combined amount of carbon in the atmosphere and in vegetation. And what controls how much carbon soil can hang on to and how much it releases? Microbes. Their carbon gatekeeping is critical, because the element is one of the key components of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2), which is currently at record levels in Earth’s atmosphere.

The same is true of soil microbes. “In terrestrial environments, microbes release a range of important greenhouse gases to the atmosphere (carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide), and climate change is causing these emissions to increase,” Cavicchioli said. That’s because, as with plants, hotter temperatures cause soil microbes to release more carbon. And since climate-change-induced warming is only getting worse, scientists expect more carbon from vegetation and soils will go into the atmosphere.

Leaving microbes out of climate change conversation has major consequences, experts warn

More than 30 microbiologists from 9 countries have issued a warning to humanity - they are calling for the world to stop ignoring an 'unseen majority' in Earth's biodiversity and ecosystem when addressing climate change.

For example, the Census of Marine Life estimates that 90% of the ocean's total biomass is microbial. In our oceans, marine lifeforms called phytoplankton take light energy from the sun and remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as much as plants. The tiny phytoplankton form the beginning of the ocean food web, feeding krill populations that then feed fish, sea birds and large mammals such as whales.

"Climate change also expands the number and geographic range of vectors (such as mosquitos) that carry pathogens. The end result is the increased spread of disease, and serious threats to global food supplies."

Microbes hold the balance in climate crisis

They argue that research is ignoring the silent, unseen majority that makes up the microbial world. Lifeforms that add up to a huge proportion of living matter on the planet are being largely left out of climate calculations.

A Kentucky Power Plant's Demise Signals a Reckoning for Coal

The 1,000-megawatt coal plant on the banks of the Ohio River hadn't produced toxic ash—or electricity—since it was retired by its owner, LG&E, in 2015. But its demise, which took less than a minute, symbolized the broader decline of coal in both generating capacity and the production of electricity.

White House physicist sought aid of rightwing thinktank to challenge climate science

In the messages, part of a group of emails obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, Happer and the Heartland adviser Hal Doiron discuss Happer’s scientific arguments in a paper attempting to knock down the concept of climate emergency, as well as ideas to make the work “more useful to a wider readership”. Happer writes he had already discussed the work with another Heartland adviser, Thomas Wysmuller.

Existential climate-related security risk: A scenario approach

2030–2050: Emissions peak in 2030, and start to fall consistent with an 80 percent reduction in fossil-fuel energy intensity by 2100 compared to 2010 energy intensity. This leads to warming of 2.4°C by 2050, consistent with the Xu and Ramanathan “baseline-fast” scenario. However, another 0.6°C of warming occurs 19 — taking the total to 3°C by 2050 — due to the activation of a number of carbon-cycle feedbacks and higher levels of ice albedo and cloud feedbacks than current models assume. [It should be noted that this is far from an extreme scenario: the low-probability, high-impact warming (five percent probability) can exceed 3.5–4°C by 2050 in the Xu and Ramanathan scheme.]
While sea levels have risen 0.5 metres by 2050, the increase may be 2–3 metres by 2100, and it is understood from historical analogues that seas may eventually rise by more than 25 metres. Thirty-five percent of the global land area, and 55 percent of the global population, are subject to more than 20 days a year of lethal heat conditions, beyond the threshold of human survivability. The destabilisation of the Jet Stream has very significantly affected the intensity and geographical distribution of the Asian and West African monsoons and, together with the further slowing of the Gulf Stream, is impinging on life support systems in Europe. North America suffers from devastating weather extremes including wildfires, heatwaves, drought and inundation. The summer monsoons in China have failed, and water flows into the great rivers of Asia are severely reduced by the loss of more than one-third of the Himalayan ice sheet. Glacial loss reaches 70 percent in the Andes, and rainfall in Mexico and central America falls by half. Semi-permanent El Nino conditions prevail. Aridification emerges over more than 30 percent of the world’s land surface. Desertification is severe in southern Africa, the southern Mediterranean, west Asia, the Middle East, inland Australia and across the south-western United States.

Michael Bloomberg Launches Beyond Carbon

Beyond Carbon will work to put the U.S. on track towards a 100% clean energy economy by working with advocates around the country to build on the leadership and climate progress underway in our states, cities, and communities. Bloomberg and his foundation joined forces with the Sierra Club in 2011 to launch Beyond Coal with the goal of closing at least a third of the country’s coal plants.

Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change

Editor’s Note:This narrative by Nathaniel Rich is a work of history, addressing the 10-year period from 1979 to 1989: the decisive decade when humankind first came to a broad understanding of the causes and dangers of climate change. Complementing the text is a series of aerial photographs and videos, all shot over the past year by George Steinmetz. With support from the Pulitzer Center, this two-part article is based on 18 months of reporting and well over a hundred interviews. It tracks the efforts of a small group of American scientists, activists and politicians to raise the alarm and stave off catastrophe. It will come as a revelation to many readers — an agonizing revelation — to understand how thoroughly they grasped the problem and how close they came to solving it. Jake Silverstein

Humans held responsible for twists and turns of climate change since 1900

While industry and agriculture belched greenhouse gases at an increasing pace through the 20th century, global temperature followed a jagged course, surging for 3 decades starting in 1915, leveling off from the 1950s to the late 1970s, and then resuming its climb. For decades, scientists have chalked up these early swings to the planet’s internal variability—in particular, a climatic pacemaker called the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO), which is characterized by long-term shifts in ocean temperatures. But researchers are increasingly questioning whether the AMO played the dominant role once thought. The oceanic pacemaker seems to be fluttering.
It is now possible to explain the record’s twists and turns almost entirely without the AMO, says Karsten Haustein

Climate change impacts worse than expected, global report warns

The impacts and costs of 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius) of global warming will be far greater than expected, according to a comprehensive assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released Sunday in Incheon, South Korea.

National Geo Climate change impacts worse than expected, global report warns

The impacts and costs of 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius) of global warming will be far greater than expected, according to a comprehensive assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released Sunday in Incheon, South Korea.

Country-level social cost of carbon

Here we estimate country-level contributions to the Social Cost of Carbon (SCC) using recent  climate model projections, empirical climate-driven economic damage estimations and socio-economic projections.  Central specifications show high global SCC values (median, US$417 per tonne of CO2 (tCO2); 66% confidence intervals, US$177–805 per tCO2) and a country-level SCC that is unequally distributed. However, the relative ranking of countries is robust to different specifications: countries that incur large fractions of the global cost consistently include India, China,  Saudi Arabia and the United States.

Climate disasters cost the world $650 billion over 3 years — Americans are bearing the brunt: Morgan Stanley

North America absorbed two-thirds of the global cost of climate disasters over the last three years, Morgan Stanley says.

At $415 billion, the price of the disasters is equal to 0.66 percent of North America’s GDP.

2018 takes the podium as one of the hottest years on record. Let’s look deeper.

NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies keeps track of Earth's changing temperatures with a data bank that reaches back to the 1880s. This year will end up as the 4th-warmest year in recorded history, Gavin Schmidt, the director of the NASA program, said over email.

World 'nowhere near on track' to avoid warming beyond 1.5C target

A massive, immediate transformation in the way the world’s population generates energy, uses transportation and grows food will be required to limit the global temperature rise to 1.5C and the forthcoming analysis is set to lay bare how remote this possibility is.

California 4th Annual Report Climate Change

Key Findings
California’s Fourth Climate Change Assessment provides information to build resilience to climate impacts, including temperature, wildfire, water, sea level rise, and governance. Here you can view a snapshot of the key findings of the Fourth Assessment. For additional information, please download the Key Findings brochure, “California's Changing Climate 2018.”

100 Corporations Responsible For 71% Of Carbon Emissions

The Carbon Majors Database stores greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions data on the largest company-related sources of all time. CDP’s Carbon Majors Report 2017 is the first in an ongoing series of publications aimed at using this Database – the most comprehensive available – to highlight the role that corporations can play in driving the global energy transition.

The Impacts of Climate Change at 1.5c, 2C and Beyond

Carbon Brief has extracted data from around 70 peer-reviewed climate studies to show how global warming is projected to affect the world and its regions.
Scroll down to see how these impacts vary at different temperature levels, across a range of key metrics. Click on the icons below to skip to specific categories and regions.

Abrupt Climate Changes Inevitable Surprises 2003

In 2002, the National Academies acknowledged the reality of rapid climate change in a report, “Abrupt Climate Change: Inevitable Surprises,” which described the new consensus as a “paradigm shift.” This was a reversal of its 1975 report.

Climatic Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?

Science Mag * 1975

If man-made dust is unimportant as a major cause of climatic change, then a strong case can be made that the present cooling trend will, within a decade or so, give way to a pronounced warming induced by carbon dioxide. By analogy with similar events in the past, the natural climatic cooling which, since 1940, has more than compensated for the carbon dioxide effect, will soon bottom out. Once this happens, the exponential rise in the atmospheric carbon dioxide content will tend to become a significant factor and by early in the next century will have driven the mean planetary temperature beyond the limits experienced during the last 1000 years.