There is a very important new climate science paper which promises to dramatically increase concern about potential impacts and needed mitigation.
Bill McKibben titles his review of the paper ‘The big, big, big, big, big picture’ because it is a new way of assessing the global mean surface temperature (GMST) of the last 485 million years of the vast expanse of the 539 million year Phanerozoic eon.
There are three main takeaways of relevance: over this huge expanse of time the average temperature has often been far hotter than previously understood, with a high of 39C, more than double the historic high of nearly 15C achieved last year; the ‘apparent’ climate sensitivity over this period of time is a very ominous ~8C; and the rate of warming today is many orders of magnitude faster than any previous warming during this period.
What are the implications for understanding climate change today?
The paper “portrays a global climate that was more dynamic and extreme than researchers had imagined, said Jess Tierney, a climate scientist at the University of Arizona and co-author of the study. Compared with graphs based solely on climate models, which tend to depict smaller and slower swings in temperatures, the new timeline is full of sudden spikes and abrupt shifts”(WashPost).
Our present climate science has been skewed based on information from the more recent ‘icehouse’ Cenozoic era. We have much higher temperatures to fear from our burning of fossil fuels.
McKibben on the unprecedented rate of warming:
“The really scary part is how fast we’re (warming today).
In fact, nowhere in that long record have the scientists been able to find a time when it’s warming as fast as it is right now. “We’re changing Earth’s temperature at a rate that exceeds anything we know about,” Tierney said.
Much much much faster than, say, during the worst extinction event we know about, at the end of the Permian about 250 million years ago, when the endless eruption of the so-called Siberian traps drove the temperature 10 Celsius higher and killed off 95 percent of the species on the planet. But that catastrophe took fifty thousand years—our three degree Celsius increase—driven by the collective volcano of our powerplants, factories, furnaces and Fords—will be measured in decades.”
Tierney again: “(We) should be worried about human warming because it’s so fast. We’re changing Earth’s temperature at a rate that exceeds anything we know about.”
We’ve suddenly found out that temperature rise could be far more dangerous, far faster and far higher than what we have been calculating.
The majority of climate scientists (the moderates if not the alarmists such as James Hansen) have been predicting a human caused rise in GSMT of from 1.5-2C to maybe 3.5C with less than a 2C rise this century. It now looks like we should be expecting a rise in temperature (as we double CO2 in the atmosphere) that could exceed 8C (Hansen has predicted a possible 10C rise) of which 3C could be expected to occur this century.
Our present global civilization can not survive a 3C rise by 2100. An 8C rise would create a largely uninhabitable Earth, an unfathomable evil inflicted upon every future generation for thousands of years by our inability to reduce our use of fossil fuels.
As a climate activist on the periphery it’s easy to see how moderates (scientists and especially policymakers) have been trying for decades to shoehorn climate change and especially climate mitigation into economic and political business as usual (BAU). Scientists and policymakers, like every other actor in our society who wants to be effective, must work within society’s written and unwritten rules. This severely constrains even our conception of effective mitigation. We have been consistently failing to come to grips with the climate change threat for decades, the climate threat that moderates everywhere only conservatively described with mitigation that was only conservatively allowed.
Climate change has clearly been an emergency with a suite of dangers that threaten civilization if not humanity, but moderates will not even consider really giving up fossil fuels (preferring to pretend to phase them out by trying to power a fossil fuel civilization with renewables) and only considering policies and instruments that are compatible with BAU (that won’t reduce GDP or employment by even minor percentage points or negatively effect their governments electability). Real mitigation hasn’t been possible in this BAU for decades.
With one new climate science paper (if after critical review its conclusions hold), the climate problem has become scarily more dangerous and must be mitigated much more urgently.
We need to conceive and implement a massive uturn in climate mitigation from ineffectual time wasting to a globally effective urgent reduction of emissions.
Bill Henderson is a long time climate activist and CounterCurrents contributor.
Bhenderson(at)dccnet(dot)com
