David Suzuki: Humanity’s Fate Depends on the Choices We Make Today #auspol

We’re living in a time of records. More renewable energy came on stream in 2015 than ever—147 gigawatts, equal to Africa’s entire generating capacity—and investment in the sector broke records worldwide. Costs for producing solar and wind power have hit record lows. Portugal obtained all its electricity from renewable sources for four straight days in May—the longest achieved by any country—and Germany was able to meet 90 percent of its electricity needs with renewable power for a brief period. Clean energy employment and job growth now outpace the fossil fuel industry by a wide margin.

That’s just a portion of the good news. Oil prices have fallen so low that some more damaging activities are becoming unprofitable, a record number of coal companies are going bankrupt or filing for bankruptcy and fewer coal mines are operating in the U.S.
But are the good records enough to help us deal with the bad? Global average temperatures are hitting record highs every recent month and year and atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases are rising steadily, to levels unheard of in human history. Arctic sea ice is vanishing at unprecedented levels, mass bleaching is killing the Great Barrier Reef and record-setting droughts, floods, heat waves and extreme weather are happening around the world.
As Prof. Stefan Rahmstorf of Germany’s Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research told the Guardian: “These are very worrying signs and I think it shows we are on a crash course with the Paris targets unless we change course very, very fast. I hope people realize that global warming is not something down the road, but it is here now and is affecting us now.”
The Paris agreement, accepted in December by most nations, offered hope that world leaders are aware of this serious problem and know that unless we quickly employ a range of solutions—from renewable energy to reducing consumption to changing dietary and agricultural practices—humanity is at risk.
Despite overwhelming evidence for human-caused climate change, the fossil fuel industry continues to employ shady people and organizations to fool fearful and apparently blind followers into believing the problem doesn’t exist or isn’t serious enough to worry about. Their messaging follows a pattern: Spread a simplistic lie until it becomes so discredited that few people accept it and then move on to another simplistic lie.
The most recent from Canadian industry propagandists like Patrick Moore, Tom Harris (of the misnamed International Climate Science Coalition) and their pals at organizations like the U.S. Heartland Institute is that CO2 is not a pollutant, just a benign or beneficial gas that stimulates plant growth. It’s true CO2 is good for plants. So is nitrogen, but when it runs into waterways and the oceans, it pollutes them. Overwhelming scientific evidence proves that increased atmospheric CO2 is a major cause of global warming. The profound effects of that warming are already here and new and frightening aspects are also coming to light, such as ocean oxygen depletion.
Recent bankruptcy filings for Peabody Energy showed the U.S. coal company owes money to a range of deniers and their organizations, including the also misnamed Calgary-based Friends of Science. It claims the sun and not human activity drives climate change (and that the world is cooling, not warming), a ridiculous assertion, often repeated by coal companies, that real scientists have thoroughly debunked. Extensive research shows coal, oil and gas interests have pumped huge amounts of money into these denial campaigns, all the while knowing that human-caused climate change is real and dangerous.
It’s good that deniers’ voices are being drowned out by evidence and rational arguments and that solutions are becoming better, cheaper and more readily available daily. But we no longer have time to allow compromised politicians, greedy industrialists and dishonest organizations to stall progress. We need record numbers of people to do all they can—develop solutions, write letters, sign petitions, talk to politicians, vote and take to the streets—to demand that governments, industry and society treat climate change with the seriousness it deserves.
Humanity’s fate depends on the choices we make today. We can’t let a polluting sunset industry and its minions block progress to a cleaner, healthier future.

Press link for more:  Ecowatch.com

Why a half-degree temperature rise is a big deal #Auspol

The Paris Agreement, which delegates from 196 countries hammered out in December 2015, calls for holding the ongoing rise in global average temperature to “well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels,” while “pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 °C.” How much difference could that half-degree of wiggle room (or 0.9 degree on the Fahrenheit scale) possibly make in the real world? Quite a bit, it appears.
The European Geosciences Union published a study in April 2016 that examined the impact of a 1.5 degree Celsius vs. a 2.0 C temperature increase by the end of the century, given what we know so far about how climate works. It found that the jump from 1.5 to 2 degrees—a third more of an increase—raises the impact by about that same fraction, very roughly, on most of the phenomena the study covered. Heat waves would last around a third longer, rain storms would be about a third more intense, the increase in sea level would be approximately that much higher and the percentage of tropical coral reefs at risk of severe degradation would be roughly that much greater.
But in some cases, that extra increase in temperature makes things much more dire. At 1.5 C, the study found that tropical coral reefs stand a chance of adapting and reversing a portion of their die-off in the last half of the century. But at 2 C, the chance of recovery vanishes. Tropical corals are virtually wiped out by the year 2100.
With a 1.5 C rise in temperature, the Mediterranean area is forecast to have about 9 percent less fresh water available. At 2 C, that water deficit nearly doubles. So does the decrease in wheat and maize harvest in the tropics.
On a global scale, production of wheat and soy is forecast to increase with a 1.5 C temperature rise, partly because warming is favorable for farming in higher latitudes and partly because the added carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which is largely responsible for the temperature increase, is thought to have a fertilization effect. But at 2 C, that advantage plummets by 700 percent for soy and disappears entirely for wheat.
Three climate scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who were not involved with this study, shed some light on the study’s results, starting with the impact on agriculture.

Corn plants with no corn

Why does a half degree of temperature increase make such a difference to some of the crops that were studied? For one thing, a half degree averaged out over the whole world can mean much more of an increase in some locations and at certain times.
“Most of that temperature change may occur during a small fraction of the year, when it actually represents conditions that could be 5 or 10 degrees warmer than pre-industrial temperatures instead of just 1.5 or 2 degrees warmer,” said Dave Schimel, who supervises JPL’s Carbon Cycle and Ecosystems group.

There are places in the world where, for these important breadbasket crops, they are already close to a thermal limit for that crop species,” Schimel said. Adding to the burden, he said, “this analysis (the EGU study) does not take into account the fact that pests and pathogens may spread more rapidly at higher temperatures.”

And Schimel pointed out that heat can imperil agriculture even when crops don’t die. “If you get really high temperatures or very dry conditions during critical parts of the development of the crop, it produces essentially no grain. For example, above certain temperature thresholds, corn doesn’t die but it doesn’t grow seed. It doesn’t grow a corncob. And other crops are similar to that, where the development of the actual food part of the crop is dramatically inhibited above critical temperatures.”
But what about that fertilization effect from carbon dioxide? “It does help a bit, but it doesn’t make the underlying problem go away,” he said. “And by the way, if the plant was growing really fast when it died, it still died.”
Can we avoid the extra half-percent temperature increase? Schimel agrees that we should try hard to do so, but cautions that we don’t know how to fine-tune global warming with that much precision. “If we aim for 2 degrees, we might hit 3 degrees,” he said. “If we aim for 1.5 degrees, we might still hit 2 degrees.”
A multi-century commitment

Felix Landerer, who studies sea level and ice at JPL, said timescale is critical to forecasting how high the ocean will rise.
“This paper looks at this century,” he said. “So the effects appear to be fairly linear.” That is, a third more increase in temperature produces about a third more increase in sea level.
“But,” he said, “I would frame the discussion in the context that in recent studies—in particular of ocean-ice interactions—there is growing concern that the ice sheets are very sensitive to the surrounding ocean warming.” These studies show that giant glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica melt not only from the top down, but also from the bottom up as relatively warm ocean water makes its way to their undersides.

FEATURES | June 30, 2016

Why a half-degree temperature rise is a big deal

By Bob Silberg,

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Press link for more: NASA