Here's a highly objectionable little nugget you snuck in there: "But that was then. Today, things have changed. Hydraulic fracturing (fracking) produced a tidal wave of cheap natural gas, which produces less carbon dioxide when converted to electricity." --> Are you literally being funded by Chesapeake Energy?!
This intentionally ignores the impact of methane leaked directly into the atmosphere by natural gas operations. Such methane is not being measured or monitored by the industry or government, so we truly have no idea how much there is, but citizens with infrared cameras document huge plumes of the stuff. Since they're not being measured, they're not ending up in your models. That doesn't mean that they don't exist. As the other commenter on this post points out, your models are underestimating warming by a huge amount. All these models and scenarios are tools of political obfuscation and mendacity.
But more to the point is what the fracking boom has done, politically. It caused the war in Ukraine, which resulted in the biggest single methane release in human history when the Nord Stream pipeline was blown up by the CIA. Here's how the Fracking boom caused Ukraine:
Consider the orchestration of events in 2022. Remember, as you do so, the history that orchestrated those events: the coup in the Maidan, but earlier than that, the fracking boom in America that briefly transformed the landscape of the midwest into man-camps. This turned out to be the worst petroinvestment in recent history; frackers were losing money on every unit sold. The energy section of the Stock Market became a toxic swamp of cons as dollars turned into costly objects that produced oil at a capital loss. It was a perpetual moneyhole during years when the rest of the Market was delivering big returns on the beloved FAANGS. And yet, money kept going down the moneyhole. The big guys don’t pull their money out of an investment that goes down. Rather, they intervene in the material world to turn the bet around, at least to the point where they can exit the position without embarrassing losses. The $5.4 billion that Cheniere used to build the first LNG export terminal at Sabine Pass came from people who expected that money back. The problem was, the economics made no sense at the energy prices of the day. The price of natural gas had crashed with everything else in 2008, but had never recovered as frackers like Chesapeake Energy (ticker: CHK) swamped the market with product that couldn’t really be stored or stockpiled. They had cracked the earth and the methane was spurting out; not a process over which the human agents have all that much control. For one thing, it could only be transported via pipeline. Since it is so voluminous, tanks don’t make economic sense. Therefore, unlike oil, it could only be sold in places continentally contiguous to its source. The gas market in Europe faced towards the East; the Nord Stream 1 had been online since 2011; many things America wants to control, but can’t. Chesapeake could only sell to North and South America, and they had crashed those markets with a massive influx in product, the result of a fun-sounding process of underground liquid sandbombs that destabilized the very earth to shake free the methane within. They lost more money with each cubic-foot they pumped out, and yet they could not stop. They desperately needed to reach the Asian and European markets. And not only reach, but control over, because fracking was already more expensive than conventional methane extraction, and squeezing it into a liquid only added expense. So they needed to sell it, but they needed to sell it in a market that could support much higher prices. They needed a war.
February of 2012, Blackstone and other partners committed $5.4 billion in debt financing to Cheniere Energy (Stock ticker: LNG) to build the Sabine Pass LNG export terminal. An asset that could become a liability unless Russia was shut out of the European gas market by the time the product came online, projected to be in 2016. Maidan in 2014 was just on time.
The first thing to say is that there is a huge population of Russian-speaking Ukranians. The borders have shifted and dissolved many times around people who are culturally and linguistically Russian, as opposed to those who speak Ukrainian. However inconvenient it may be for those who want war, those people exist and were being treated as second-class citizens.
Much has been written but too little read about the 2014 Maidan coup. I urge you to remember back at the time, we were keenly aware that the protestors and then the new government included Banderite fascists. Though many now profess ignorance. It looks like a textbook post-gladio operation, the type which is frequently attempted but that rarely works, except when they do. It’s been proven that the massacre at the Maidan was perpetrated by the protesters on their own unwitting numbers, and it is the post-coup government was more virulently anti-Russian than any since the end of the Soviet Union. The first act of the Poroshenko government involved marginalizing the Russian language from public spaces. If the function of a machine is its result, the function of the Maidan operation was to put everyone on a war footing, a position from which the state department leveraged more and more pressure against Russia by scheduling the inclusion of the Kiev government in NATO. If you don’t understand why that was a red line for the Russians, you need to read more history.
Sabine Pass was an export terminal without a corresponding import terminal anywhere in the world. The investors were content to play con games with the debt from Sabine Pass, but paled at the prospect of funding anything else before the cash started to flow.
When Zelensky was elected in 2019, it looked like it could get in the way of the war planning. He was elected as the peace candidate, who spoke Russian and was Jewish. It’s unclear what the Americans did to him to get him to fully commit to this, but they got him where they wanted, and finally in 2022, America gave Russia the final ultimatum: Invade Ukraine, or we’ll include it in NATO. That happened to be Putin’s red line – whatever his red line happened to be, the US would have threatened to cross it in January 2022. We wanted the war, which is exactly why we are told with such vehemence that the war is unprovoked.
Once war started just in time to cancel Nord Stream 2, deals are made fast. The European people were threatened with a cold winter of gas shortages, and so they let the EU arrange a massive public investment in LNG. Immediately, shipments that had been going to China were diverted to Europe. As was the desired outcome, Russian exports to the EU dropped by 56% and American LNG imports to the EU jumped from 2,585 million cubic metres per month to 4,562. All out of existing LNG infrastructure: Sabine Pass in Louisiana to export, Dunkirk to import. Even during that time, these facilities were being utilized at a maximum of ~80% of capacity, a peak which went down quickly. In 2022 the UK, Switzerland, France, Germany, Norway, and Portugal signed 17 long-term contracts—15 or 20 years—to buy billions of cubic meters per year, from brand-new plants. By March 2023, there were nine export terminals operating, and three more under construction, including the massive Plaquemines facility, which is visible to the naked eye from space.
From now on, LNG stands for “Leaky Natural Gas.” It is impossible to know how leaky all this infrastructure is. It could all very well be spewing vast amounts of methane into the air at every transition-point. We don’t know how much, and we don’t want to know. The input gas leaks from every pore on its way into the factory, and also it frequently explodes. Once it is liquid, it must be kept at -162ᵒC or else it evaporates (your freezer keeps stuff at -18ᵒC). An energy-intensive proposition, especially sailing across the Atlantic in unprecedented heat. One assumes that every time the tank accidentally warms up, from a power failure or just a cost-saving measure on the open sea, they outgas the evaporated methane. That could be a little, or it could be a lot, and we will likely never know.
Remember that methane retains a lot more heat than CO2. The Gotta Hear Both Sides is that it does degrade into component molecules over time. But the next ten to twenty years of warming are the ones that worry me the most. By the end of what’s coming, it may not really matter anymore.
We have many points of agreement. Particularly on LNG, it has to be shut down completely. Like RIGHT NOW. It was always the "transition" strategy of the Fossil Fuel Elites. They sold it hard in the early aughts and laid the infrastructure for it.
The Developed World would transition to LNG while the Developing World would use oil and coal to 'catch up'. Over the next 30 years the Developed World would make the change to renewables. Then the Developing World would follow the same path, LNG to renewables. Profits for the Fossil Fuel companies for another 60 years.
They thought this would work because their models are flawed. They underestimated warming by 40%, they completely got wrong the speed of warming because NO ONE understood the effect of particulates in cooling the planet. The best estimate now is that we would have hit 2010 levels of warming in 1970, if the effect of particulates was removed from the Climate System.
I reference Pinatubo frequently because that's when Climate Science first "woke up" to just how much particulate could affect the GMT. In the f'ing 90's!
The Moderates looked at warming in the late 80's and calculated warming like this.
CO2 level at 350ppm, up 70ppm from 1850, immediate warming of 0.6C.
Now, how much warming would you predict from the next 70ppm increase of CO2, and the next 70ppm after that?
Everyone understands that Climate Sensitivity declines as CO2 levels increase. So, if 70ppm caused 0.6C of warming by the late 80's, the next 70ppm should cause a smaller immediate response, right?
That's the underpinning of our Climate Models. That's how they generate a 1.2C current warming level and a 1.8C warming for CO2 levels of 490ppm. By looking at 'Immediate Warming' and ASSUMING that the Thermal Equilibrium will happen VERY SLOWLY over hundreds or thousands of years.
They were wrong. We are about to have a Paradigm Shift in our understanding of the Climate System. We are going to somewhere between 4-5C of warming by 2100 now. Unless we take radical actions to save ourselves.
It's almost too late. This is our last chance to try saving our civilization.
Yeah. We'll get to 2100 and RCP 8.5 will look like an optimistic fantasy. We will laugh that "climate activists" were publishing articles like this -- wildly naïve, breathtakingly so.
This greenpeace report on LNG is must-read. They might have sold it as a "transition fuel" a few years ago, but now they don't need to do even that. It's a war fuel. With long-term contracts of 15-20 years signed last year, they're not planning to transition away from anything. We need to stop perseverating about broken statistical models and talk instead about Power.
On the subjects of Power, Equality, Democracy, Peace, Progress and Sustainability, I propose an idea, about a game, about defunding private banks, changing Politics, changing some habits, overthrowing the Warpigs, abolishing Citizen's United, seizing the insurance companies and the real estate market, and the many other ways to Revolutionize, to take back our Congress and our Courts, to create Laws that better serve the People and Planet vs. serving the Bankers, Mega-Corporations, and people with already too much money who crave even more money, and yachts, and spaceships. Revolution is Fucking Necessary. When you look at the World and you see what you see, how can you not agree Revolution is Necessary? If you agree, the monumental task then becomes; How To Revolution? Doing something is better than doing nothing. I'm not saying the idea I'm about to suggest is perfect, but it will definitely create change, it could cause innumerable and countless Revolutions, and will most likely change the fabrics of several Societies the World over, as certain Revolutions tend to do: www.humbledeeds.com
Consumer activism?!? The comment you made doesn't seem to match the link you sent. I'm all for what you said in the comment, but the link sucks. The revolution will not come until everyone considers PRODUCTION rather than CONSUMPTION. This is Marx's fundamental insight, and it's equally true with environmental issues. What matters is the fact of industrial production, not the ways in which the products are consumed. We will buy what we are sold, and no app is ever going to change that. We as people, making buying decisions or any other decisions, are subjects, not agents. We buy what we are sold. We do not decide what to sell.
Of course the ways products are consumed (and disposed of) matters and we can choose to be agents of change, at any moment, as often as we want to, and for as long as we want to. I'm very sorry you disagree. How do you suppose a Revolution can happen, without agents of change? You can decide what TO BUY and what NOT TO BUY. It is absurd to believe if hundreds of millions of people stopped buying coca cola and budweiser, then it wouldn't affect the means of production of coca cola AND budweiser. Know this: if the Leaders of the Revolution are some red and some blue, then it won't be a Revolution at all, and the streets will flow with blood of red and blue. If you want Revolution, stop being red or blue. Which color are you, Jed? Or are you the absurd Libertarian type, who thinks without any government at all, things would be just fine, lol. There must be Laws for there to be Justice. You wanna change the Laws to change means of production MORE, then we need to make Revolution happen, but the right way. You see any good plans out there? Is Extinction Rebellion the Movement we should be talking about? Thanks for checking out my website/plan and for your feedback, Jed.
You're not giving me a very coherent theory of change to respond to here.
The actions that have consequence in the world aren't consumer choices between brands. Actions that have more consequences are: Unionizing, Striking, and then to participating in civic life where you are, finding some way to join an organization with other people, form bonds of solidarity with each other. Start a reading group or sewing circle. "Consumer choice" is an illusion, same as the choice between democrats and republicans. "lesser evil" never seems to deliver on being lesser.
If you want my political identity, I'd go with Marxist-Leninist just to keep it simple, but it's ideas that matter, not labels.
Very interesting Jed and Andrew. I'm also interested in the pharmaceutical industry which is part of petrocapitalism as well. Rockefeller et al have been disease mongering and controlling regulation for decades before, la piece de resistance, 'covid'.
You have a LOT more faith in them than I do. There are so many flaws in our current models that are artifacts of how our understanding of the Climate System has evolved over time. The main thing to understand is that they are underestimating the warming effect of CO2 by about 40%.
There are huge amounts of evidence indicating this is the case.
1. The Paleoclimate data for the last 23 million years indicates this. The last time CO2 levels were this high the global mean temperature was 4C warmer than our 1950-1980 baseline. Not 1.5C, 4C.
2. How hot do you think it is now? The "observed" temperature is 1.3C over the baseline. But, we now know that as much as 0.9C of warming has been hidden by anthropogenic particulates in the atmosphere. IE, it's really about 40% hotter than we feel. If we stop acting like a "Pinatubo" and putting massive amounts of SOx particulate into the air via diesel fuels, our planet will RAPIDLY warm.
BTW this is happening"right now".
In 2020 the World Maritime Organization mandated a reduction of sulfur in all marine diesel fuels globally. From 3.5% to 0.5%. This will prevent 22 million deaths from air pollution each year. It is also causing a massive drop in SOx levels in the atmosphere as these particulates wash out of the air in about 3-5 years (see Pinatubo eruption effect).
This is a big reason this El Nino is going to be a world shaking monster. We are about to get a lot of the warming that's been masked. We are about to find out how much our models (dominated by the Moderate Faction in Climate Science) were off.
Also, I'm not sure where you think those SO2 cooling estimates come from (hint, its models). Our models also foresee dramatic reductions in aerosols in deep mitigation scenarios as we phase out fossil fuels. https://twitter.com/hausfath/status/1444679408573419520
Estimates indicate that aerosol pollution emitted by humans is offsetting about 0.7 degrees Celsius, or about 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit, of the warming due to greenhouse gas emissions. This translates to a 40-year delay in the effects of climate change. Without cooling caused by aerosol emissions, we would have achieved 2010-level global mean temperatures in 1970.”
Because in 2020 we deliberately reduced the levels of SOx particulate in the atmosphere in order to reduce global deaths from air pollution by about 22 million a year. In 2020 there was a change in the diesel fuels used by the shipping industry. This was not a trivial change.
Because, the shipping industry is among the world’s largest emitters of sulfur behind the energy industry, with the sulfur dioxide (SOx) content in heavy fuel oil up to 3,500 times higher than the latest European diesel standards for vehicles. Although energy production produces more SOx particulate overall, it has less effect on the Climate System.
Because power plants are fixed in one place and ships spread the SOx across the entire planet. “One large vessel in one day can emit more sulfur dioxide than all the new cars that come onto the world’s roads in a year.”
Cleaner Air in 2020: 0.5% sulfur cap for ships enters into force worldwide
From January 2020, the maximum sulphur content of marine fuels is reduced to 0.5% (down from 3.5%) globally — reducing air pollution and protecting health and the environment.
It’s been 3 years since that happened. The El Nino that’s starting is going to be turbocharged by a massive decrease in S0x (Sulfur Dioxide) levels in the atmosphere. They are falling rapidly.
Global warming in the pipeline is greater than prior estimates. Eventual global warming due to today’s GHG forcing alone — after slow feedbacks operate — is about 10°C.
James E. Hansen (1), Makiko Sato (1), Leon Simons (2), Larissa S. Nazarenko (3 and 4), Karina von Schuckmann (5), Norman G. Loeb (6), Matthew B. Osman (7), Pushker Kharecha (1), Qinjian Jin (8), George Tselioudis (3), Andrew Lacis (3), Reto Ruedy (3 and 9), Gary Russell (3), Junji Cao (10), Jing Li (11) ((1) Climate Science, Awareness and Solutions, Columbia University Earth Institute, New York, NY, USA, (2) The Club of Rome Netherlands, 's-Hertogenbosch, The Netherlands, (3) NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York, NY, USA, (4) Center for Climate Systems Research, Columbia University Earth Institute, New York, NY, USA, (5) Mercator Ocean International, Ramonville St.-Agne, France, (6) NASA Langley Research Center, Hampton, VA, USA, (7) Department of Geosciences, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA, (8) Department of Geography and Atmospheric Science, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS, USA, (9) Business Integra, Inc., New York, NY, USA, (10) Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China, (11) Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, School of Physics, Peking University, Beijing, China)
Improved knowledge of glacial-to-interglacial global temperature change implies that fast-feedback equilibrium climate sensitivity is at least ~4°C for doubled CO2 (2xCO2), with likely range 3.5-5.5°C. Greenhouse gas (GHG) climate forcing is 4.1 W/m2 larger in 2021 than in 1750, equivalent to 2xCO2 forcing. Global warming in the pipeline is greater than prior estimates. Eventual global warming due to today's GHG forcing alone -- after slow feedbacks operate -- is about 10°C. Human-made aerosols are a major climate forcing, mainly via their effect on clouds. We infer from paleoclimate data that aerosol cooling offset GHG warming for several millennia as civilization developed. A hinge-point in global warming occurred in 1970 as increased GHG warming outpaced aerosol cooling, leading to global warming of 0.18°C per decade. Aerosol cooling is larger than estimated in the current IPCC report, but it has declined since 2010 because of aerosol reductions in China and shipping. Without unprecedented global actions to reduce GHG growth, 2010 could be another hinge point, with global warming in following decades 50-100% greater than in the prior 40 years. The enormity of consequences of warming in the pipeline demands a new approach addressing legacy and future emissions. The essential requirement to "save" young people and future generations is return to Holocene-level global temperature. Three urgently required actions are: 1) a global increasing price on GHG emissions, 2) purposeful intervention to rapidly phase down present massive geoengineering of Earth's climate, and 3) renewed East-West cooperation in a way that accommodates developing world needs.
Comments: 48 pages, 27 figures. Correction of formatting error on page 21, which messed up placement of all following figures
Subjects: Atmospheric and Oceanic Physics (physics.ao-ph)
Cite as: arXiv:2212.04474 [physics.ao-ph]
(or arXiv:2212.04474v2 [physics.ao-ph] for this version)
Thankfully its inaccurate, at least over human-relevant timescales. The amount of century-scale warming in the pipeline is effectively zero after net-zero emissions, as discussed in the IPCC AR6 and found in ZECMIP: https://bg.copernicus.org/articles/17/2987/2020/
Zeke, it is unfortunate that you did not read the comments on your article. That line of modelling is scientifically unsound and you are spreading dangerous misinformation here. On the surface, the idea that when we hit the fabled state of "net carbon zero" the natural carbon sinks which are, to quote you, "the land and ocean" (very specific), will suck CO2 out of the atmosphere at a rate that just so happens to perfectly offset the future warming coming from the oceans, should be concerning to anyone informed on the issue.
I am not sure how you can claim, "By chance, these two factors cancel each other out. The additional warming from the oceans continuing to heat up is balanced by the cooling from falling atmospheric CO2." Because you don't go into any detail at all about this "land" carbon sink. Many of the forests that are already accounted for as part of the Carbon Indulgence Scam have already burned up. The Amazon rainforest and Canadian boreal are the two largest forest systems on the planet and both have been net emitters for years. Fire season has already arrived in both Alberta and Siberia, on the back of unprecedented heat.
In the comments of your Carbon Brief article, user Billhook goes into more detail about the "land" carbon sink and the outlook is not good. But, even with a second comment directly calling out the lack of response, you didn't address any of the valid questions or concerns in those comments.
Then there is the idea that the oceans, or as Michael Mann put it in his WaPo op-ed on the topic, "in particular the oceans," will be a carbon sink that is really troubling. Did you not have to take any physical chemistry? Have you not heard of Henry's Law? While the oceans take in a good portion of our emissions, that's all they do: Take in a portion of our emissions. The amount of CO2 that remains dissolved in the surface ocean is directly proportional to its partial pressure in the atmosphere and the air-sea gas exchange equilibrates in under a year. If atmospheric concentrations stop rising, ocean carbon uptake will significantly decrease, if not cease altogether. In the fantastical scenario where we are able to deploy the technology that does not exist at a scale far beyond anything humanity has ever attempted and are capable of actually drawing down atmospheric CO2, the oceans would start emitting. Since it takes centuries-to-milliennia for the oceans to overturn, the majority of our emissions that they have taken in are just sitting in the surface layer, waiting to be re-emitted in the incredibly unlikely event that happens. The oceans were never the "get out of jail free card" you are pretending they are.
There is also a temperature dependency and warmer liquids are less capable of holding dissolved gases. The old warming lag theory that you are now claiming is invalid included CO2 emissions from the warming of the oceans. To quote from Skeptical Science:
"As both land and oceans start to warm up, they both release large amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere, from melting permafrost and from warming ocean water, since CO2 solubility in water is greater in cold conditions. That release enhances the greenhouse effect, amplifying the warming trend and leading to yet more CO2 being degassed."
Your heading of "Warming oceans and falling atmospheric CO2" is therefore a situation that can only result in oceanic emissions, and yet they are treated as a significant sink in all of these models, often times even dominating the effect. This is deeply concerning, and yet all you provide for proof is, "By chance, these two factors cancel each other out," and a link to MacDougall et. al (2020), also linked in your comment.
I don't know if you've read it, but it's a meta study that found "Models exhibit a wide variety of behaviours after emissions cease, with some models continuing to warm for decades to millennia and others cooling substantially." Reading deeper, I echo the concerns about robustness:
"Given that the behaviour of the terrestrial carbon cycle varies strongly between models and that many models lack feedbacks related to nutrient limitation and permafrost carbon pools, the strong dependence of ZEC50 on terrestrial carbon uptake is concerning for the robustness of ZEC50 estimates. Notably, the three ESMs with the weakest terrestrial carbon sink response include terrestrial nutrient limitations."
"The analysis here has shown that across models decadal-scale ZEC is poorly correlated to other metrics of climate warming, such as TCR and ECS, though relationships may exist within model frameworks. However, the three factors that drive ZEC, ocean heat uptake, ocean carbon uptake, and net land carbon flux correlate relatively well to their states before emissions cease."
Why even consider models that lack basic elements like "terrestrial nutrient limitations"? I also don't know how to read that last sentence as anything other than a confirmation that this modelling is in direct violation of the physical chemistry of the situation. This is pure GIGO and not something that should be heeded.
As the saying goes "all models are wrong, but some are useful." What is ZECMIP useful for besides pretending that things can still turn out OK, somehow, if we just ignore all of the evidence to the contrary, including the aerosol masking effect and the other positive feedbacks, which are seemingly not accounted for in your "the century-scale warming in the pipeline is effectively zero" claim.
It's unsurprising the IPCC groupthink would pick this up. William Nordhaus' belief that most of the economy will be spared because it happens indoors made it into AR5, after all. It's truly demoralizing that we are still hearing things like 1.5C "future warming" will be "safe". But I guess I have a different interpretation of what "safe" is because we have already pushed the climate crisis to the point where it is directly impacting our ability to grow food; both because of long-term issues like drought and desertification, and extremes like heat, hail, wind, and flooding that are routinely destroying crops.
All of the worst years in terms of damage done by humanity have happened since the IPCC was formed. All they have to show for over three decades of talks is increasingly unhinged rationalizations to justify further emissions and environmental destruction. Like in this quote from an article earlier this year:
"But the increase in carbon pollution from more mining will be more than offset by a huge reduction in pollution from heavy carbon emitting fuels, Hausfeather [sic] said."
I gotta know Zeke, are these "huge reductions" in the room with you right now? Because they have yet to happen in our reality of 'line only goes up' and it seems like every few weeks we hear about a new oil lease being granted in a previously protected area. Never mind your advocating for an expansion of mining, which is truly disgusting.
The most impactful thing the climatology community could do today is admit that they were wrong, apologize for the systematic downplaying, and denounce the IPCC as the politically compromised organization that it is. It's also well past time to stop with the COPping out. Between last year's insultingly tone deaf decision to accept sponsorship money from Coca-Cola, one of the biggest polluters on the planet, and this year's taking place in Dubai and headed by an oilman, it's like you are going out of your way to discredit yourselves. Enough already! It was never necessary to guess at the future in order for us to stop burning fossil fuels today.
Oh, you are so wrong on that. That's not what it says at all.
What they THINK, is that once emissions stop rising, the temperature increase will rapidly level off. Becoming so slow after that as to be imperceptible on a "human timescale". That's NOT the same as stopping.
This is basically the "fossil fuel industry" position of the 80's. After the famous memo to Carter warning of the potential for catastrophic warming and urging a "slowdown and movement away" from an oil and coal based economy.
The "Moderate Faction" of the new field of Climate Science agreed with them. Hansen and the Alarmists did not. Hansen, is now treated as a pariah and Gavin Schmitt, current head of GISS, is a Climate Moderate.
They made their careers on that position, they are now defending the current paradigm. Science is a social process, that's the message of Kuhn's, "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions". They were wrong about the Climate Sensitivity.
Really, 100ppm between 180ppm and 280ppm causes 6C of warming consistently for 2.1 million years, and it makes any sense in the real world that the next 140ppm only raises the global temperature 1.2C. Really?
Are you that gullible?
The paleoclimate record of the entire global paleontology and geology community and 60 years of research says 400ppm means 4C of warming.
The rate of warming has increased to about 0.3C per decade now.
We are observing 1.2C of warming, but are sure there is more.
I share your concern that we aren't doing enough to mitigate global warming. And our current models are not perfect. But any statement about current models such as "they are underestimating the warming effect of CO2 by about 40%" is implicitly based on a new model, say model X, that you are proposing. Such a model X has to go through the comprehensive validation procedures that current models go through before its results can be considered credible. Model X has to consider all important feedbacks, be able to simulate current and past climates adequately on so on. Statements or simple arguments about the future that consider only a small subset of feedbacks can be misleading because they may exclude stabilizing feedbacks.
Earth observation satellites are constantly measuring the Earth’s albedo using a suite of sensors, and the reflectivity of the planet is measured through earthshine, the light from the Earth that reflects off the Moon. This paper analyzes earthshine measurements between 1998 and 2017 to see if the Earth’s albedo is rising or declining in response to climate change. Here’s their conclusion.
“We have reported a two-decade long data set of the Earth’s nearly globally averaged albedo as derived from earthshine observations. Stringent data quality standards were applied to generate monthly and annual means. These vary significantly on monthly, annual, and decadal scales with the net being a gradual decline over the two decades, which accelerated in the most recent years (much of the decrease in reflectance occurred during the last three years of the two-decade period the team studied). Remarkably, the inter-annual earthshine anomalies agree well with those from CERES satellite observations, despite their differences in global coverage, underlying assumptions to derive the albedo, and the very different sensitivities to retroflected and wider-angle reflected light.”
The two-decade decrease in earthshine-derived albedo corresponds to an increase in radiative forcing of about 0.5 W/m2, which is climatologically significant (Miller et al., 2014). For comparison, total anthropogenic forcing increased by about 0.6 W/m2 over the same period. The CERES data show an even stronger trend of decreasing global albedo over the most recent years, which has been associated to changes in the PDO, SSTs and low cloud formation changes. It is unclear whether these changes arise from the climate’s internal variability or are part of the feedback to external forcings.”
Notice that last paragraph. It quantifies how much of an effect this change in albedo is having. By 2017 it had reached 0.5 W/m2 (Watts per square meter). That doesn’t sound like much, until you realize that the effect of all our CO2 pollution in 2017 was 0.6 W/m2. Bottom line,
By 2017 the decline in the Earth’s albedo doubled the rate that the Earth was warming. We are warming up twice as fast as we were.
These measurements and observations are incontrovertible. Two separate teams; Goode’s “Project Earthshine” and NASA’s “Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System” (CERES) measured the Earth’s albedo over the last 20 years. Using different methodologies, they arrived at the same conclusions.
Since the year 2000, the planet has reflected less energy back into space: about one-half a watt per square meter.
Using the CERES and Earthshine data a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in July of 2021 found that it is 97.5 percent certain that changes in clouds brought about by climate change will amplify warming.
Observational evidence that cloud feedback amplifies global warming
Other researchers analyzing these patterns agree. One team at Princeton University managed to model the satellite data with near-perfect accuracy by adjusting the influence of clouds in their model. Their model considered the impacts of pollution, greenhouse gases, sea ice levels, and cloud response. Their conclusion:
The observed trend in Earth’s energy imbalance (TEEI), a measure of the acceleration of heat uptake by the planet, is a fundamental indicator of perturbations to climate. Satellite observations (2001–2020) reveal a significant positive globally-averaged TEEI of 0.38 ± 0.24 Wm−2decade−1, but the contributing drivers have yet to be understood. Using climate model simulations, we show that it is exceptionally unlikely (<1% probability) that this trend can be explained by internal variability. Instead, TEEI is achieved only upon accounting for the increase in anthropogenic radiative forcing and the associated climate response. TEEI is driven by a large decrease in reflected solar radiation and a small increase in emitted infrared radiation. This is because recent changes in forcing and feedbacks are additive in the solar spectrum, while being nearly offset by each other in the infrared. We conclude that the satellite record provides clear evidence of a human-influenced climate system.
Anthropogenic forcing and response yield observed positive trend in Earth’s energy imbalance
“This is on us,” said Shiv Priyam Raghuraman, a Ph.D. student who led the Princeton study and was not involved in the Earthshine Project. “We should be aware that we’re driving these changes.”
Do you REALLY want to wait at this point to find out 100% "for sure" the Moderates were WRONG?
Duh, "impacting the natural greenhouse effect" IS GLOBAL WARMING. Do people somewhere think you are smart? Do you mostly bloviate this pap to stupid people?
You should read my Climate Report 2022. At least the part on where the heat is coming from. The planetary albedo has dimmed enough to double the radiative solar forcing since around 2014 (see Goodes paper on Project Earthshine and the NASA Ceres datasets if you have doubts). Hansen confirmed this and several other researchers as well.
Here's a study that confirms the rate of warming has accelerated.
Heat stored in the Earth system 1960–2020: where does the energy go?
This study builds on the first internationally and multidisciplinary Earth heat inventory in 2020 (von Schuckmann et al., 2020) and provides an update on total Earth system heat accumulation, heat storage in all Earth system components (ocean, land, cryosphere, atmosphere), and the Earth energy imbalance up to the year 2020.
Moreover, this study improved earlier estimates and further extended and fostered international collaboration, allowing researchers to move towards a more complete view of where and how much heat is stored in the Earth system through the addition of new estimates such as for permafrost thawing, inland freshwater (Sect. 4), and Antarctic sea ice (Sect. 5).
Results obtained reveal a total Earth system heat gain of 381±61 ZJ over the period 1971–2020, with an associated total heating rate of 0.48±0.1 W m−2.
About 89 % of this heat is stored in the ocean, about 6 % on land, about 4 % in the cryosphere, and about 1 % in the atmosphere (Figs. 8, 9).
The analysis additionally reconfirms an increased heating rate which amounts to 0.76±0.2 W m−2 for the most recent era (2006–2020).
The drivers for this change still need to be elucidated, and they most likely reflect the interplay between natural variability and anthropogenic change (Loeb et al., 2021; Kramer et al., 2021; Liu et al., 2020); their implications for changes in the Earth system are reflected in the many record levels of change in the 2000s reported elsewhere (e.g., Cheng et al., 2022b; Forster et al., 2021; Gulev et al., 2021).
Solar forcing jumped from about 0.48W/m2 to about 0.76W/m2 around 2010.
It's getting hotter faster now. Another hard measurement indicating the models and the Moderates are wrong.
Interesting and amusing. A novel way of framing things and making an easy to follow/understand narrative. I have multiple points of disagreement but I liked what you did here.
It was interesting that you said a 1% increase in CO2 levels was unlikely. If CO2 levels are at 420ppm and go up about 4ppm per year (close to the current rate) then they are going up 1% per year. Particularly when the influence of increasing methane level has driven the de facto level of CO2 equivalent to over 460ppm levels.
Your statement that the RCP8.5 scenario is "unlikely" is flat out wrong. It is actually quite possible.
Ahh a Denier or a Climate Optimist speaks up. His solution, don't tell people how bad things could get if they are wrong. We need 'optimism and hope now" right?
These days, lots of people think this.
Why climate ‘doomers’ are replacing climate ‘deniers’ WAPO 03/24
How U.N. reports and confusing headlines created a generation of people who believe climate change can’t be stopped.
The doomers are wrong about humanity’s future — and its past - The necessity of progress. VOX 03/20
The biggest danger we face today, if we care about actually making the future a more perfect place, isn’t that industrial civilization will choke on its own exhaust or that democracy will crumble or that AI will rise up and overthrow us all.
It’s that we will cease believing in the one force that raised humanity out of tens of thousands of years of general misery: the very idea of progress. Progress solves the problems we didn’t know were problems.
Against doomerism VOX 03/20
It’s boom times for doom times, but from artificial intelligence to climate change to food supplies, there’s plenty of reason to be optimistic that the future will be better — if we make it so.
We need the right kind of climate optimism - Climate pessimism dooms us to a terrible future. VOX 03/21
People might defend doomsday scenarios as the wake-up call that society needs. If they’re exaggerated, so what? They might be the crucial catalyst that gets us to act on climate change.
Setting aside the moral problem of stretching the truth, this claim is wrong.
Scaring people into action doesn’t work. That’s true not just for climate change, air pollution, and biodiversity loss, but for almost any issue we can think of. We need optimism to make progress.
“CLIMATE CHANGE WILL END THE WORLD BY 2100…” Climate doomism doesn’t help much. In fact, it’s counterproductive.
Climate denial and climate doom are both extremes on the climate action spectrum. And they are both as dangerous.
Climatologist Michael E Mann: 'Good people fall victim to doomism. I do too sometimes' The Guardian 02/21
Doom-mongering has overtaken denial as a threat and as a tactic. Inactivists know that if people believe there is nothing you can do, they are led down a path of disengagement. They unwittingly do the bidding of fossil fuel interests by giving up.
“What is so pernicious about this is that it seeks to weaponise environmental progressives who would otherwise be on the frontline demanding change. These are folk of good intentions and good will, but they become disillusioned or depressed and they fall into despair.”
“Too late” narratives are invariably based on a misunderstanding of science.
“If the science objectively demonstrated it was too late to limit warming below catastrophic levels, that would be one thing and we scientists would be faithful to that.”
“But science doesn’t say that.” - Dr. Michael Mann
We have a "communication problem", that's true. All of the non-optimist realistic voices are being marginalized, ridiculed, and made to seem ignorant.
Dr. Mann is actually outright lying to you. Because here's what "real" non-optimist Climate Scientists think about the science.
Top climate scientists are sceptical that nations will rein in global warming - Nature Nov 2021.
A Nature survey reveals that many authors of the latest IPCC climate-science report are anxious about the future and expect to see catastrophic changes in their lifetimes.
4 out of 5 Climate Scientists think warming will be 2.5C or HIGHER. Michael is parsing his words very carefully. It hinges on what he means by “catastrophic”. If you don't know that, his statement that “scientists would say something” is a misleading “true lie”.
Of the scientists who responded to this poll, 88% think global warming constitutes a crisis and nearly as many said they expect to see “catastrophic impacts of climate change in their lifetimes”.
Just under half said that global warming has caused them to reconsider major life decisions, such as where to live and “whether to have children”.
More than 60% said that they experience anxiety, grief, or other distress because of concerns over climate change.
Have you heard anything about this?
The REAL communications problem here.
The “Climate Communicators”. The "Techno Optimists" have decided that telling you the TRUTH isn't a good idea.
Because, “Telling everyone the world as they know it is over and that they’re going to die isn’t an effective communications strategy, even if it’s true.”
Moving Beyond Doomism: Data-Driven Strategies for Effective Climate Content.
Here's a highly objectionable little nugget you snuck in there: "But that was then. Today, things have changed. Hydraulic fracturing (fracking) produced a tidal wave of cheap natural gas, which produces less carbon dioxide when converted to electricity." --> Are you literally being funded by Chesapeake Energy?!
This intentionally ignores the impact of methane leaked directly into the atmosphere by natural gas operations. Such methane is not being measured or monitored by the industry or government, so we truly have no idea how much there is, but citizens with infrared cameras document huge plumes of the stuff. Since they're not being measured, they're not ending up in your models. That doesn't mean that they don't exist. As the other commenter on this post points out, your models are underestimating warming by a huge amount. All these models and scenarios are tools of political obfuscation and mendacity.
But more to the point is what the fracking boom has done, politically. It caused the war in Ukraine, which resulted in the biggest single methane release in human history when the Nord Stream pipeline was blown up by the CIA. Here's how the Fracking boom caused Ukraine:
Consider the orchestration of events in 2022. Remember, as you do so, the history that orchestrated those events: the coup in the Maidan, but earlier than that, the fracking boom in America that briefly transformed the landscape of the midwest into man-camps. This turned out to be the worst petroinvestment in recent history; frackers were losing money on every unit sold. The energy section of the Stock Market became a toxic swamp of cons as dollars turned into costly objects that produced oil at a capital loss. It was a perpetual moneyhole during years when the rest of the Market was delivering big returns on the beloved FAANGS. And yet, money kept going down the moneyhole. The big guys don’t pull their money out of an investment that goes down. Rather, they intervene in the material world to turn the bet around, at least to the point where they can exit the position without embarrassing losses. The $5.4 billion that Cheniere used to build the first LNG export terminal at Sabine Pass came from people who expected that money back. The problem was, the economics made no sense at the energy prices of the day. The price of natural gas had crashed with everything else in 2008, but had never recovered as frackers like Chesapeake Energy (ticker: CHK) swamped the market with product that couldn’t really be stored or stockpiled. They had cracked the earth and the methane was spurting out; not a process over which the human agents have all that much control. For one thing, it could only be transported via pipeline. Since it is so voluminous, tanks don’t make economic sense. Therefore, unlike oil, it could only be sold in places continentally contiguous to its source. The gas market in Europe faced towards the East; the Nord Stream 1 had been online since 2011; many things America wants to control, but can’t. Chesapeake could only sell to North and South America, and they had crashed those markets with a massive influx in product, the result of a fun-sounding process of underground liquid sandbombs that destabilized the very earth to shake free the methane within. They lost more money with each cubic-foot they pumped out, and yet they could not stop. They desperately needed to reach the Asian and European markets. And not only reach, but control over, because fracking was already more expensive than conventional methane extraction, and squeezing it into a liquid only added expense. So they needed to sell it, but they needed to sell it in a market that could support much higher prices. They needed a war.
February of 2012, Blackstone and other partners committed $5.4 billion in debt financing to Cheniere Energy (Stock ticker: LNG) to build the Sabine Pass LNG export terminal. An asset that could become a liability unless Russia was shut out of the European gas market by the time the product came online, projected to be in 2016. Maidan in 2014 was just on time.
The first thing to say is that there is a huge population of Russian-speaking Ukranians. The borders have shifted and dissolved many times around people who are culturally and linguistically Russian, as opposed to those who speak Ukrainian. However inconvenient it may be for those who want war, those people exist and were being treated as second-class citizens.
Much has been written but too little read about the 2014 Maidan coup. I urge you to remember back at the time, we were keenly aware that the protestors and then the new government included Banderite fascists. Though many now profess ignorance. It looks like a textbook post-gladio operation, the type which is frequently attempted but that rarely works, except when they do. It’s been proven that the massacre at the Maidan was perpetrated by the protesters on their own unwitting numbers, and it is the post-coup government was more virulently anti-Russian than any since the end of the Soviet Union. The first act of the Poroshenko government involved marginalizing the Russian language from public spaces. If the function of a machine is its result, the function of the Maidan operation was to put everyone on a war footing, a position from which the state department leveraged more and more pressure against Russia by scheduling the inclusion of the Kiev government in NATO. If you don’t understand why that was a red line for the Russians, you need to read more history.
Sabine Pass was an export terminal without a corresponding import terminal anywhere in the world. The investors were content to play con games with the debt from Sabine Pass, but paled at the prospect of funding anything else before the cash started to flow.
When Zelensky was elected in 2019, it looked like it could get in the way of the war planning. He was elected as the peace candidate, who spoke Russian and was Jewish. It’s unclear what the Americans did to him to get him to fully commit to this, but they got him where they wanted, and finally in 2022, America gave Russia the final ultimatum: Invade Ukraine, or we’ll include it in NATO. That happened to be Putin’s red line – whatever his red line happened to be, the US would have threatened to cross it in January 2022. We wanted the war, which is exactly why we are told with such vehemence that the war is unprovoked.
Once war started just in time to cancel Nord Stream 2, deals are made fast. The European people were threatened with a cold winter of gas shortages, and so they let the EU arrange a massive public investment in LNG. Immediately, shipments that had been going to China were diverted to Europe. As was the desired outcome, Russian exports to the EU dropped by 56% and American LNG imports to the EU jumped from 2,585 million cubic metres per month to 4,562. All out of existing LNG infrastructure: Sabine Pass in Louisiana to export, Dunkirk to import. Even during that time, these facilities were being utilized at a maximum of ~80% of capacity, a peak which went down quickly. In 2022 the UK, Switzerland, France, Germany, Norway, and Portugal signed 17 long-term contracts—15 or 20 years—to buy billions of cubic meters per year, from brand-new plants. By March 2023, there were nine export terminals operating, and three more under construction, including the massive Plaquemines facility, which is visible to the naked eye from space.
From now on, LNG stands for “Leaky Natural Gas.” It is impossible to know how leaky all this infrastructure is. It could all very well be spewing vast amounts of methane into the air at every transition-point. We don’t know how much, and we don’t want to know. The input gas leaks from every pore on its way into the factory, and also it frequently explodes. Once it is liquid, it must be kept at -162ᵒC or else it evaporates (your freezer keeps stuff at -18ᵒC). An energy-intensive proposition, especially sailing across the Atlantic in unprecedented heat. One assumes that every time the tank accidentally warms up, from a power failure or just a cost-saving measure on the open sea, they outgas the evaporated methane. That could be a little, or it could be a lot, and we will likely never know.
Remember that methane retains a lot more heat than CO2. The Gotta Hear Both Sides is that it does degrade into component molecules over time. But the next ten to twenty years of warming are the ones that worry me the most. By the end of what’s coming, it may not really matter anymore.
Hmmm....
We have many points of agreement. Particularly on LNG, it has to be shut down completely. Like RIGHT NOW. It was always the "transition" strategy of the Fossil Fuel Elites. They sold it hard in the early aughts and laid the infrastructure for it.
The Developed World would transition to LNG while the Developing World would use oil and coal to 'catch up'. Over the next 30 years the Developed World would make the change to renewables. Then the Developing World would follow the same path, LNG to renewables. Profits for the Fossil Fuel companies for another 60 years.
They thought this would work because their models are flawed. They underestimated warming by 40%, they completely got wrong the speed of warming because NO ONE understood the effect of particulates in cooling the planet. The best estimate now is that we would have hit 2010 levels of warming in 1970, if the effect of particulates was removed from the Climate System.
I reference Pinatubo frequently because that's when Climate Science first "woke up" to just how much particulate could affect the GMT. In the f'ing 90's!
The Moderates looked at warming in the late 80's and calculated warming like this.
CO2 level at 350ppm, up 70ppm from 1850, immediate warming of 0.6C.
Now, how much warming would you predict from the next 70ppm increase of CO2, and the next 70ppm after that?
Everyone understands that Climate Sensitivity declines as CO2 levels increase. So, if 70ppm caused 0.6C of warming by the late 80's, the next 70ppm should cause a smaller immediate response, right?
That's the underpinning of our Climate Models. That's how they generate a 1.2C current warming level and a 1.8C warming for CO2 levels of 490ppm. By looking at 'Immediate Warming' and ASSUMING that the Thermal Equilibrium will happen VERY SLOWLY over hundreds or thousands of years.
They were wrong. We are about to have a Paradigm Shift in our understanding of the Climate System. We are going to somewhere between 4-5C of warming by 2100 now. Unless we take radical actions to save ourselves.
It's almost too late. This is our last chance to try saving our civilization.
Yeah. We'll get to 2100 and RCP 8.5 will look like an optimistic fantasy. We will laugh that "climate activists" were publishing articles like this -- wildly naïve, breathtakingly so.
This greenpeace report on LNG is must-read. They might have sold it as a "transition fuel" a few years ago, but now they don't need to do even that. It's a war fuel. With long-term contracts of 15-20 years signed last year, they're not planning to transition away from anything. We need to stop perseverating about broken statistical models and talk instead about Power.
https://www.greenpeace.org/international/publication/59432/who-profits-from-war/
On the subjects of Power, Equality, Democracy, Peace, Progress and Sustainability, I propose an idea, about a game, about defunding private banks, changing Politics, changing some habits, overthrowing the Warpigs, abolishing Citizen's United, seizing the insurance companies and the real estate market, and the many other ways to Revolutionize, to take back our Congress and our Courts, to create Laws that better serve the People and Planet vs. serving the Bankers, Mega-Corporations, and people with already too much money who crave even more money, and yachts, and spaceships. Revolution is Fucking Necessary. When you look at the World and you see what you see, how can you not agree Revolution is Necessary? If you agree, the monumental task then becomes; How To Revolution? Doing something is better than doing nothing. I'm not saying the idea I'm about to suggest is perfect, but it will definitely create change, it could cause innumerable and countless Revolutions, and will most likely change the fabrics of several Societies the World over, as certain Revolutions tend to do: www.humbledeeds.com
Consumer activism?!? The comment you made doesn't seem to match the link you sent. I'm all for what you said in the comment, but the link sucks. The revolution will not come until everyone considers PRODUCTION rather than CONSUMPTION. This is Marx's fundamental insight, and it's equally true with environmental issues. What matters is the fact of industrial production, not the ways in which the products are consumed. We will buy what we are sold, and no app is ever going to change that. We as people, making buying decisions or any other decisions, are subjects, not agents. We buy what we are sold. We do not decide what to sell.
Of course the ways products are consumed (and disposed of) matters and we can choose to be agents of change, at any moment, as often as we want to, and for as long as we want to. I'm very sorry you disagree. How do you suppose a Revolution can happen, without agents of change? You can decide what TO BUY and what NOT TO BUY. It is absurd to believe if hundreds of millions of people stopped buying coca cola and budweiser, then it wouldn't affect the means of production of coca cola AND budweiser. Know this: if the Leaders of the Revolution are some red and some blue, then it won't be a Revolution at all, and the streets will flow with blood of red and blue. If you want Revolution, stop being red or blue. Which color are you, Jed? Or are you the absurd Libertarian type, who thinks without any government at all, things would be just fine, lol. There must be Laws for there to be Justice. You wanna change the Laws to change means of production MORE, then we need to make Revolution happen, but the right way. You see any good plans out there? Is Extinction Rebellion the Movement we should be talking about? Thanks for checking out my website/plan and for your feedback, Jed.
You're not giving me a very coherent theory of change to respond to here.
The actions that have consequence in the world aren't consumer choices between brands. Actions that have more consequences are: Unionizing, Striking, and then to participating in civic life where you are, finding some way to join an organization with other people, form bonds of solidarity with each other. Start a reading group or sewing circle. "Consumer choice" is an illusion, same as the choice between democrats and republicans. "lesser evil" never seems to deliver on being lesser.
If you want my political identity, I'd go with Marxist-Leninist just to keep it simple, but it's ideas that matter, not labels.
Thanks, I will read it.
Very interesting Jed and Andrew. I'm also interested in the pharmaceutical industry which is part of petrocapitalism as well. Rockefeller et al have been disease mongering and controlling regulation for decades before, la piece de resistance, 'covid'.
Jo
A second point concerning the validity of models.
You have a LOT more faith in them than I do. There are so many flaws in our current models that are artifacts of how our understanding of the Climate System has evolved over time. The main thing to understand is that they are underestimating the warming effect of CO2 by about 40%.
There are huge amounts of evidence indicating this is the case.
1. The Paleoclimate data for the last 23 million years indicates this. The last time CO2 levels were this high the global mean temperature was 4C warmer than our 1950-1980 baseline. Not 1.5C, 4C.
2. How hot do you think it is now? The "observed" temperature is 1.3C over the baseline. But, we now know that as much as 0.9C of warming has been hidden by anthropogenic particulates in the atmosphere. IE, it's really about 40% hotter than we feel. If we stop acting like a "Pinatubo" and putting massive amounts of SOx particulate into the air via diesel fuels, our planet will RAPIDLY warm.
BTW this is happening"right now".
In 2020 the World Maritime Organization mandated a reduction of sulfur in all marine diesel fuels globally. From 3.5% to 0.5%. This will prevent 22 million deaths from air pollution each year. It is also causing a massive drop in SOx levels in the atmosphere as these particulates wash out of the air in about 3-5 years (see Pinatubo eruption effect).
This is a big reason this El Nino is going to be a world shaking monster. We are about to get a lot of the warming that's been masked. We are about to find out how much our models (dominated by the Moderate Faction in Climate Science) were off.
At the moment our latest models are modestly overestimating observed warming. I don't think we have any particularly strong evidence that they are underestimating future warming (and certainly not by 40%!). https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/climate-model-projections-compared-to-observations/
Also, I'm not sure where you think those SO2 cooling estimates come from (hint, its models). Our models also foresee dramatic reductions in aerosols in deep mitigation scenarios as we phase out fossil fuels. https://twitter.com/hausfath/status/1444679408573419520
This is our future “RIGHT NOW”.
Estimates indicate that aerosol pollution emitted by humans is offsetting about 0.7 degrees Celsius, or about 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit, of the warming due to greenhouse gas emissions. This translates to a 40-year delay in the effects of climate change. Without cooling caused by aerosol emissions, we would have achieved 2010-level global mean temperatures in 1970.”
Climate effects of aerosols reduce economic inequality. Nature Climate Change, 2020; DOI: 10.1038/s41558–020–0699-y
Because in 2020 we deliberately reduced the levels of SOx particulate in the atmosphere in order to reduce global deaths from air pollution by about 22 million a year. In 2020 there was a change in the diesel fuels used by the shipping industry. This was not a trivial change.
Because, the shipping industry is among the world’s largest emitters of sulfur behind the energy industry, with the sulfur dioxide (SOx) content in heavy fuel oil up to 3,500 times higher than the latest European diesel standards for vehicles. Although energy production produces more SOx particulate overall, it has less effect on the Climate System.
Because power plants are fixed in one place and ships spread the SOx across the entire planet. “One large vessel in one day can emit more sulfur dioxide than all the new cars that come onto the world’s roads in a year.”
Cleaner Air in 2020: 0.5% sulfur cap for ships enters into force worldwide
From January 2020, the maximum sulphur content of marine fuels is reduced to 0.5% (down from 3.5%) globally — reducing air pollution and protecting health and the environment.
It’s been 3 years since that happened. The El Nino that’s starting is going to be turbocharged by a massive decrease in S0x (Sulfur Dioxide) levels in the atmosphere. They are falling rapidly.
You do realize that dramatic reductions in aerosols are baked into all our mitigation scenarios, right? https://twitter.com/hausfath/status/1444679408573419520
I don't do Twitter. I read science papers, books, and research.
Here’s what Dr. James Hansen and others state.
Global warming in the pipeline is greater than prior estimates. Eventual global warming due to today’s GHG forcing alone — after slow feedbacks operate — is about 10°C.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.04474 Hansen’s latest “Global Warming in the pipeline” study.
James E. Hansen (1), Makiko Sato (1), Leon Simons (2), Larissa S. Nazarenko (3 and 4), Karina von Schuckmann (5), Norman G. Loeb (6), Matthew B. Osman (7), Pushker Kharecha (1), Qinjian Jin (8), George Tselioudis (3), Andrew Lacis (3), Reto Ruedy (3 and 9), Gary Russell (3), Junji Cao (10), Jing Li (11) ((1) Climate Science, Awareness and Solutions, Columbia University Earth Institute, New York, NY, USA, (2) The Club of Rome Netherlands, 's-Hertogenbosch, The Netherlands, (3) NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York, NY, USA, (4) Center for Climate Systems Research, Columbia University Earth Institute, New York, NY, USA, (5) Mercator Ocean International, Ramonville St.-Agne, France, (6) NASA Langley Research Center, Hampton, VA, USA, (7) Department of Geosciences, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA, (8) Department of Geography and Atmospheric Science, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS, USA, (9) Business Integra, Inc., New York, NY, USA, (10) Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China, (11) Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, School of Physics, Peking University, Beijing, China)
Improved knowledge of glacial-to-interglacial global temperature change implies that fast-feedback equilibrium climate sensitivity is at least ~4°C for doubled CO2 (2xCO2), with likely range 3.5-5.5°C. Greenhouse gas (GHG) climate forcing is 4.1 W/m2 larger in 2021 than in 1750, equivalent to 2xCO2 forcing. Global warming in the pipeline is greater than prior estimates. Eventual global warming due to today's GHG forcing alone -- after slow feedbacks operate -- is about 10°C. Human-made aerosols are a major climate forcing, mainly via their effect on clouds. We infer from paleoclimate data that aerosol cooling offset GHG warming for several millennia as civilization developed. A hinge-point in global warming occurred in 1970 as increased GHG warming outpaced aerosol cooling, leading to global warming of 0.18°C per decade. Aerosol cooling is larger than estimated in the current IPCC report, but it has declined since 2010 because of aerosol reductions in China and shipping. Without unprecedented global actions to reduce GHG growth, 2010 could be another hinge point, with global warming in following decades 50-100% greater than in the prior 40 years. The enormity of consequences of warming in the pipeline demands a new approach addressing legacy and future emissions. The essential requirement to "save" young people and future generations is return to Holocene-level global temperature. Three urgently required actions are: 1) a global increasing price on GHG emissions, 2) purposeful intervention to rapidly phase down present massive geoengineering of Earth's climate, and 3) renewed East-West cooperation in a way that accommodates developing world needs.
Comments: 48 pages, 27 figures. Correction of formatting error on page 21, which messed up placement of all following figures
Subjects: Atmospheric and Oceanic Physics (physics.ao-ph)
Cite as: arXiv:2212.04474 [physics.ao-ph]
(or arXiv:2212.04474v2 [physics.ao-ph] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2212.04474
Thankfully its inaccurate, at least over human-relevant timescales. The amount of century-scale warming in the pipeline is effectively zero after net-zero emissions, as discussed in the IPCC AR6 and found in ZECMIP: https://bg.copernicus.org/articles/17/2987/2020/
See this for details: https://www.carbonbrief.org/explainer-will-global-warming-stop-as-soon-as-net-zero-emissions-are-reached/
Zeke, it is unfortunate that you did not read the comments on your article. That line of modelling is scientifically unsound and you are spreading dangerous misinformation here. On the surface, the idea that when we hit the fabled state of "net carbon zero" the natural carbon sinks which are, to quote you, "the land and ocean" (very specific), will suck CO2 out of the atmosphere at a rate that just so happens to perfectly offset the future warming coming from the oceans, should be concerning to anyone informed on the issue.
I am not sure how you can claim, "By chance, these two factors cancel each other out. The additional warming from the oceans continuing to heat up is balanced by the cooling from falling atmospheric CO2." Because you don't go into any detail at all about this "land" carbon sink. Many of the forests that are already accounted for as part of the Carbon Indulgence Scam have already burned up. The Amazon rainforest and Canadian boreal are the two largest forest systems on the planet and both have been net emitters for years. Fire season has already arrived in both Alberta and Siberia, on the back of unprecedented heat.
In the comments of your Carbon Brief article, user Billhook goes into more detail about the "land" carbon sink and the outlook is not good. But, even with a second comment directly calling out the lack of response, you didn't address any of the valid questions or concerns in those comments.
Then there is the idea that the oceans, or as Michael Mann put it in his WaPo op-ed on the topic, "in particular the oceans," will be a carbon sink that is really troubling. Did you not have to take any physical chemistry? Have you not heard of Henry's Law? While the oceans take in a good portion of our emissions, that's all they do: Take in a portion of our emissions. The amount of CO2 that remains dissolved in the surface ocean is directly proportional to its partial pressure in the atmosphere and the air-sea gas exchange equilibrates in under a year. If atmospheric concentrations stop rising, ocean carbon uptake will significantly decrease, if not cease altogether. In the fantastical scenario where we are able to deploy the technology that does not exist at a scale far beyond anything humanity has ever attempted and are capable of actually drawing down atmospheric CO2, the oceans would start emitting. Since it takes centuries-to-milliennia for the oceans to overturn, the majority of our emissions that they have taken in are just sitting in the surface layer, waiting to be re-emitted in the incredibly unlikely event that happens. The oceans were never the "get out of jail free card" you are pretending they are.
There is also a temperature dependency and warmer liquids are less capable of holding dissolved gases. The old warming lag theory that you are now claiming is invalid included CO2 emissions from the warming of the oceans. To quote from Skeptical Science:
"As both land and oceans start to warm up, they both release large amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere, from melting permafrost and from warming ocean water, since CO2 solubility in water is greater in cold conditions. That release enhances the greenhouse effect, amplifying the warming trend and leading to yet more CO2 being degassed."
Source: https://skepticalscience.com/co2-lags-temperature-basic.htm
Your heading of "Warming oceans and falling atmospheric CO2" is therefore a situation that can only result in oceanic emissions, and yet they are treated as a significant sink in all of these models, often times even dominating the effect. This is deeply concerning, and yet all you provide for proof is, "By chance, these two factors cancel each other out," and a link to MacDougall et. al (2020), also linked in your comment.
I don't know if you've read it, but it's a meta study that found "Models exhibit a wide variety of behaviours after emissions cease, with some models continuing to warm for decades to millennia and others cooling substantially." Reading deeper, I echo the concerns about robustness:
"Given that the behaviour of the terrestrial carbon cycle varies strongly between models and that many models lack feedbacks related to nutrient limitation and permafrost carbon pools, the strong dependence of ZEC50 on terrestrial carbon uptake is concerning for the robustness of ZEC50 estimates. Notably, the three ESMs with the weakest terrestrial carbon sink response include terrestrial nutrient limitations."
"The analysis here has shown that across models decadal-scale ZEC is poorly correlated to other metrics of climate warming, such as TCR and ECS, though relationships may exist within model frameworks. However, the three factors that drive ZEC, ocean heat uptake, ocean carbon uptake, and net land carbon flux correlate relatively well to their states before emissions cease."
Why even consider models that lack basic elements like "terrestrial nutrient limitations"? I also don't know how to read that last sentence as anything other than a confirmation that this modelling is in direct violation of the physical chemistry of the situation. This is pure GIGO and not something that should be heeded.
As the saying goes "all models are wrong, but some are useful." What is ZECMIP useful for besides pretending that things can still turn out OK, somehow, if we just ignore all of the evidence to the contrary, including the aerosol masking effect and the other positive feedbacks, which are seemingly not accounted for in your "the century-scale warming in the pipeline is effectively zero" claim.
It's unsurprising the IPCC groupthink would pick this up. William Nordhaus' belief that most of the economy will be spared because it happens indoors made it into AR5, after all. It's truly demoralizing that we are still hearing things like 1.5C "future warming" will be "safe". But I guess I have a different interpretation of what "safe" is because we have already pushed the climate crisis to the point where it is directly impacting our ability to grow food; both because of long-term issues like drought and desertification, and extremes like heat, hail, wind, and flooding that are routinely destroying crops.
All of the worst years in terms of damage done by humanity have happened since the IPCC was formed. All they have to show for over three decades of talks is increasingly unhinged rationalizations to justify further emissions and environmental destruction. Like in this quote from an article earlier this year:
"But the increase in carbon pollution from more mining will be more than offset by a huge reduction in pollution from heavy carbon emitting fuels, Hausfeather [sic] said."
https://apnews.com/article/science-green-technology-climate-and-environment-renewable-energy-141761657a8e7a5627a0e49e601dd48e
I gotta know Zeke, are these "huge reductions" in the room with you right now? Because they have yet to happen in our reality of 'line only goes up' and it seems like every few weeks we hear about a new oil lease being granted in a previously protected area. Never mind your advocating for an expansion of mining, which is truly disgusting.
The most impactful thing the climatology community could do today is admit that they were wrong, apologize for the systematic downplaying, and denounce the IPCC as the politically compromised organization that it is. It's also well past time to stop with the COPping out. Between last year's insultingly tone deaf decision to accept sponsorship money from Coca-Cola, one of the biggest polluters on the planet, and this year's taking place in Dubai and headed by an oilman, it's like you are going out of your way to discredit yourselves. Enough already! It was never necessary to guess at the future in order for us to stop burning fossil fuels today.
Oh, you are so wrong on that. That's not what it says at all.
What they THINK, is that once emissions stop rising, the temperature increase will rapidly level off. Becoming so slow after that as to be imperceptible on a "human timescale". That's NOT the same as stopping.
This is basically the "fossil fuel industry" position of the 80's. After the famous memo to Carter warning of the potential for catastrophic warming and urging a "slowdown and movement away" from an oil and coal based economy.
The "Moderate Faction" of the new field of Climate Science agreed with them. Hansen and the Alarmists did not. Hansen, is now treated as a pariah and Gavin Schmitt, current head of GISS, is a Climate Moderate.
They made their careers on that position, they are now defending the current paradigm. Science is a social process, that's the message of Kuhn's, "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions". They were wrong about the Climate Sensitivity.
Really, 100ppm between 180ppm and 280ppm causes 6C of warming consistently for 2.1 million years, and it makes any sense in the real world that the next 140ppm only raises the global temperature 1.2C. Really?
Are you that gullible?
The paleoclimate record of the entire global paleontology and geology community and 60 years of research says 400ppm means 4C of warming.
The rate of warming has increased to about 0.3C per decade now.
We are observing 1.2C of warming, but are sure there is more.
We will be at 4C by 2080. Faster if we use LNG.
I share your concern that we aren't doing enough to mitigate global warming. And our current models are not perfect. But any statement about current models such as "they are underestimating the warming effect of CO2 by about 40%" is implicitly based on a new model, say model X, that you are proposing. Such a model X has to go through the comprehensive validation procedures that current models go through before its results can be considered credible. Model X has to consider all important feedbacks, be able to simulate current and past climates adequately on so on. Statements or simple arguments about the future that consider only a small subset of feedbacks can be misleading because they may exclude stabilizing feedbacks.
Here’s the bad news: the Earth’s albedo has been declining during the last 20 years.
Earth’s Albedo 1998–2017 as Measured From Earthshine pub. Aug 2021
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2021GL094888
Earth observation satellites are constantly measuring the Earth’s albedo using a suite of sensors, and the reflectivity of the planet is measured through earthshine, the light from the Earth that reflects off the Moon. This paper analyzes earthshine measurements between 1998 and 2017 to see if the Earth’s albedo is rising or declining in response to climate change. Here’s their conclusion.
“We have reported a two-decade long data set of the Earth’s nearly globally averaged albedo as derived from earthshine observations. Stringent data quality standards were applied to generate monthly and annual means. These vary significantly on monthly, annual, and decadal scales with the net being a gradual decline over the two decades, which accelerated in the most recent years (much of the decrease in reflectance occurred during the last three years of the two-decade period the team studied). Remarkably, the inter-annual earthshine anomalies agree well with those from CERES satellite observations, despite their differences in global coverage, underlying assumptions to derive the albedo, and the very different sensitivities to retroflected and wider-angle reflected light.”
The two-decade decrease in earthshine-derived albedo corresponds to an increase in radiative forcing of about 0.5 W/m2, which is climatologically significant (Miller et al., 2014). For comparison, total anthropogenic forcing increased by about 0.6 W/m2 over the same period. The CERES data show an even stronger trend of decreasing global albedo over the most recent years, which has been associated to changes in the PDO, SSTs and low cloud formation changes. It is unclear whether these changes arise from the climate’s internal variability or are part of the feedback to external forcings.”
Notice that last paragraph. It quantifies how much of an effect this change in albedo is having. By 2017 it had reached 0.5 W/m2 (Watts per square meter). That doesn’t sound like much, until you realize that the effect of all our CO2 pollution in 2017 was 0.6 W/m2. Bottom line,
By 2017 the decline in the Earth’s albedo doubled the rate that the Earth was warming. We are warming up twice as fast as we were.
These measurements and observations are incontrovertible. Two separate teams; Goode’s “Project Earthshine” and NASA’s “Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System” (CERES) measured the Earth’s albedo over the last 20 years. Using different methodologies, they arrived at the same conclusions.
Since the year 2000, the planet has reflected less energy back into space: about one-half a watt per square meter.
Using the CERES and Earthshine data a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in July of 2021 found that it is 97.5 percent certain that changes in clouds brought about by climate change will amplify warming.
Observational evidence that cloud feedback amplifies global warming
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2026290118
Other researchers analyzing these patterns agree. One team at Princeton University managed to model the satellite data with near-perfect accuracy by adjusting the influence of clouds in their model. Their model considered the impacts of pollution, greenhouse gases, sea ice levels, and cloud response. Their conclusion:
The observed trend in Earth’s energy imbalance (TEEI), a measure of the acceleration of heat uptake by the planet, is a fundamental indicator of perturbations to climate. Satellite observations (2001–2020) reveal a significant positive globally-averaged TEEI of 0.38 ± 0.24 Wm−2decade−1, but the contributing drivers have yet to be understood. Using climate model simulations, we show that it is exceptionally unlikely (<1% probability) that this trend can be explained by internal variability. Instead, TEEI is achieved only upon accounting for the increase in anthropogenic radiative forcing and the associated climate response. TEEI is driven by a large decrease in reflected solar radiation and a small increase in emitted infrared radiation. This is because recent changes in forcing and feedbacks are additive in the solar spectrum, while being nearly offset by each other in the infrared. We conclude that the satellite record provides clear evidence of a human-influenced climate system.
Anthropogenic forcing and response yield observed positive trend in Earth’s energy imbalance
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-24544-4
“This is on us,” said Shiv Priyam Raghuraman, a Ph.D. student who led the Princeton study and was not involved in the Earthshine Project. “We should be aware that we’re driving these changes.”
Do you REALLY want to wait at this point to find out 100% "for sure" the Moderates were WRONG?
Duh, "impacting the natural greenhouse effect" IS GLOBAL WARMING. Do people somewhere think you are smart? Do you mostly bloviate this pap to stupid people?
Lastly, here's a link to my Climate Report. It's in multiple parts.
https://richardcrim.substack.com/p/the-crisis-report-33
You should read my Climate Report 2022. At least the part on where the heat is coming from. The planetary albedo has dimmed enough to double the radiative solar forcing since around 2014 (see Goodes paper on Project Earthshine and the NASA Ceres datasets if you have doubts). Hansen confirmed this and several other researchers as well.
Here's a study that confirms the rate of warming has accelerated.
Heat stored in the Earth system 1960–2020: where does the energy go?
Pub. April 2023 Earth System Science Data
https://essd.copernicus.org/articles/15/1675/2023/#section8
This study builds on the first internationally and multidisciplinary Earth heat inventory in 2020 (von Schuckmann et al., 2020) and provides an update on total Earth system heat accumulation, heat storage in all Earth system components (ocean, land, cryosphere, atmosphere), and the Earth energy imbalance up to the year 2020.
Moreover, this study improved earlier estimates and further extended and fostered international collaboration, allowing researchers to move towards a more complete view of where and how much heat is stored in the Earth system through the addition of new estimates such as for permafrost thawing, inland freshwater (Sect. 4), and Antarctic sea ice (Sect. 5).
Results obtained reveal a total Earth system heat gain of 381±61 ZJ over the period 1971–2020, with an associated total heating rate of 0.48±0.1 W m−2.
About 89 % of this heat is stored in the ocean, about 6 % on land, about 4 % in the cryosphere, and about 1 % in the atmosphere (Figs. 8, 9).
The analysis additionally reconfirms an increased heating rate which amounts to 0.76±0.2 W m−2 for the most recent era (2006–2020).
The drivers for this change still need to be elucidated, and they most likely reflect the interplay between natural variability and anthropogenic change (Loeb et al., 2021; Kramer et al., 2021; Liu et al., 2020); their implications for changes in the Earth system are reflected in the many record levels of change in the 2000s reported elsewhere (e.g., Cheng et al., 2022b; Forster et al., 2021; Gulev et al., 2021).
Solar forcing jumped from about 0.48W/m2 to about 0.76W/m2 around 2010.
It's getting hotter faster now. Another hard measurement indicating the models and the Moderates are wrong.
Interesting and amusing. A novel way of framing things and making an easy to follow/understand narrative. I have multiple points of disagreement but I liked what you did here.
It was interesting that you said a 1% increase in CO2 levels was unlikely. If CO2 levels are at 420ppm and go up about 4ppm per year (close to the current rate) then they are going up 1% per year. Particularly when the influence of increasing methane level has driven the de facto level of CO2 equivalent to over 460ppm levels.
Your statement that the RCP8.5 scenario is "unlikely" is flat out wrong. It is actually quite possible.
Yes, RCP8.5 is possible, but unlikely. Those are not contradictions.
Ahh a Denier or a Climate Optimist speaks up. His solution, don't tell people how bad things could get if they are wrong. We need 'optimism and hope now" right?
These days, lots of people think this.
Why climate ‘doomers’ are replacing climate ‘deniers’ WAPO 03/24
How U.N. reports and confusing headlines created a generation of people who believe climate change can’t be stopped.
The doomers are wrong about humanity’s future — and its past - The necessity of progress. VOX 03/20
The biggest danger we face today, if we care about actually making the future a more perfect place, isn’t that industrial civilization will choke on its own exhaust or that democracy will crumble or that AI will rise up and overthrow us all.
It’s that we will cease believing in the one force that raised humanity out of tens of thousands of years of general misery: the very idea of progress. Progress solves the problems we didn’t know were problems.
Against doomerism VOX 03/20
It’s boom times for doom times, but from artificial intelligence to climate change to food supplies, there’s plenty of reason to be optimistic that the future will be better — if we make it so.
We need the right kind of climate optimism - Climate pessimism dooms us to a terrible future. VOX 03/21
People might defend doomsday scenarios as the wake-up call that society needs. If they’re exaggerated, so what? They might be the crucial catalyst that gets us to act on climate change.
Setting aside the moral problem of stretching the truth, this claim is wrong.
Scaring people into action doesn’t work. That’s true not just for climate change, air pollution, and biodiversity loss, but for almost any issue we can think of. We need optimism to make progress.
“CLIMATE CHANGE WILL END THE WORLD BY 2100…” Climate doomism doesn’t help much. In fact, it’s counterproductive.
Climate denial and climate doom are both extremes on the climate action spectrum. And they are both as dangerous.
Climatologist Michael E Mann: 'Good people fall victim to doomism. I do too sometimes' The Guardian 02/21
Doom-mongering has overtaken denial as a threat and as a tactic. Inactivists know that if people believe there is nothing you can do, they are led down a path of disengagement. They unwittingly do the bidding of fossil fuel interests by giving up.
“What is so pernicious about this is that it seeks to weaponise environmental progressives who would otherwise be on the frontline demanding change. These are folk of good intentions and good will, but they become disillusioned or depressed and they fall into despair.”
“Too late” narratives are invariably based on a misunderstanding of science.
“If the science objectively demonstrated it was too late to limit warming below catastrophic levels, that would be one thing and we scientists would be faithful to that.”
“But science doesn’t say that.” - Dr. Michael Mann
We have a "communication problem", that's true. All of the non-optimist realistic voices are being marginalized, ridiculed, and made to seem ignorant.
Dr. Mann is actually outright lying to you. Because here's what "real" non-optimist Climate Scientists think about the science.
Top climate scientists are sceptical that nations will rein in global warming - Nature Nov 2021.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02990-w
A Nature survey reveals that many authors of the latest IPCC climate-science report are anxious about the future and expect to see catastrophic changes in their lifetimes.
4 out of 5 Climate Scientists think warming will be 2.5C or HIGHER. Michael is parsing his words very carefully. It hinges on what he means by “catastrophic”. If you don't know that, his statement that “scientists would say something” is a misleading “true lie”.
Of the scientists who responded to this poll, 88% think global warming constitutes a crisis and nearly as many said they expect to see “catastrophic impacts of climate change in their lifetimes”.
Just under half said that global warming has caused them to reconsider major life decisions, such as where to live and “whether to have children”.
More than 60% said that they experience anxiety, grief, or other distress because of concerns over climate change.
Have you heard anything about this?
The REAL communications problem here.
The “Climate Communicators”. The "Techno Optimists" have decided that telling you the TRUTH isn't a good idea.
Because, “Telling everyone the world as they know it is over and that they’re going to die isn’t an effective communications strategy, even if it’s true.”
Moving Beyond Doomism: Data-Driven Strategies for Effective Climate Content.
https://myclimatejourney.substack.com/p/beyond-doomism-data-driven-climate-content