The Secret Reason We Haven’t Stopped Climate Change Yet

by Molly Dorozenski

November 1, 2018

The majority of Americans and 97% of scientists agree, so what’s the deal?

Climate change is real and it’s happening now. If you are reading this, you probably agree with me, and with 97% of scientists who have come to consensus on this — not only because, well, you’re reading a Greenpeace blog, but also because 70% of Americans accept that climate change is happening, and around 60% think that to some extent it’s manmade.
I’ve been working in the environmental movement for a decade, and nothing has been more alarming to me than the most recent IPCC report, which says we have just 12 years left to reign in emissions and figure out how to make sure we have a livable planet, not only for our children but for us.
Buried beneath the shocking headlines is the fact that it’s both affordable and feasible to make the changes we need to make, and with the majority of Americans in agreement with scientific consensus, you would think this would be a no-brainer. Here at Greenpeace, we ask ourselves often how to communicate about this. Do we communicate the scale of the threat — what would happen if the planet warmed two degrees or even three? Do we immediately communicate solutions, or do we
let people sit with their fear and try to impress upon the world how serious this problem is?
The truth is, I’m already feeling how climate change is impacting my life, and I know you can feel it too…In New York, the L train will stop service connecting Brooklyn and Manhattan for a whopping 15 months because of damage caused by the climate-supercharged Hurricane Sandy. It’s the severity of the red tide in Florida and out of control sargassum seaweed in the Caribbean, impacting the fishing and tourism industries. It’s the rapidly increasing number of days every summer where extreme heat is a
severe health risk that keeps people indoors — a dystopian fact that we are already coming to accept. It’s wildfires spreading faster because of drought and taking people’s homes and the painfully slow recovery for Puerto Rico nearly a year after Hurricane Maria.

Thousands of people queue for buses to Manhattan at the Barclay’s Center in Brooklyn as they transfer from subways and LIRR. The subway was out of commission due to flooding in tunnels by Hurricane Sandy. This subway hub is the 3rd biggest in NYC.
So why is it with impacts visible, solutions possible and people and scientists on board, that climate change isn’t being addressed at the level reflecting the s eriousness of the situation — not only by the current administration but also by ANY administration?
One huge reason is that more than half of Congress still denies climate change is real and manmade. And why is that? Is it that we’re continually electing people who don’t understand basic science? Well, maybe, but more likely it’s the shocking amount of money that the oil and gas industry has been pouring into our electi ons — more than $31 million in 2016 — and that’s not including dark money which could easily double that figure. The result is a Congress that increasingly represents the interests of
the fossil fuel industry over the people.
Ultimately we have to fix our democracy to fix the climate. It’s not the easiest thing to get your head around when you realize that it’s not much easier to fix democracy. Ultimately, we need fair, publicly funded elections, an end to racist voting restrictions like Voter ID laws, a secure and modernized voting system with automatic registration, and to end gerrymandering and more to have a government that is of, by and for the people. We need to lift up the voices and choices of people and make sure corporations
and big donors don’t succeed at controlling the conversation and the agenda — because we’re running out of time.
If it sounds daunting, think of it this way — with a democracy that truly represents the people, so much will be possible. I imagine we’ll find fewer polarizing issues and more common ground. We’ll be able to advocate for the policies that impact us and our families, including a just transition that creates jobs as we shift to a clean energy economy, and also other policies supported by the vast majority of Americans. Despite the public narrative on how polarized we are, Americans agree on a lot of issues that
could immediately help millions of people, like affordable healthcare, federal funding of education, and paid medical and family leave. Our democracy is nothing more than a tool for justice and we have a right and a responsibility to advocate for the best system that delivers the change we need.
You have a role in all of this. First, you have to get out and vote, and preferably volunteer for the candidates near you that are champions for a fair democ racy and champions for the climate. But we’ll also be sharing opportunities in the coming months and years to really stand up for this kind of change, inviting and encouraging people to meet with elected officials, call, text, write letters, and work with their friends and family to make this urgent change possible.

Don’t like the current system? Here’s the first step in fixing it.
Right now you can do three huge things:
1. Find your polling place and make a plan to vote. Vote the entire ballot, from the bottom up — not just Senators and Representatives — and check out a ballot guide ahead of time so you are educated on the issues.
2. Text Democracy to 877-877 to get alerts from Greenpeace’s Democracy Campaign about important moments where we can all act collectively. We’ll ask you to do big things and small things, to sign petitions but also call the people who represent you in Congress, and help spread these opportunities to others.
3. Share this infographic and spread the message.
It’s a lot, I know. But the scale of the problem is huge, so it’s time to go all in. Join us, and be part of something huge. Our planet and all the life it supports depends on it.
Greenpeace.org

Americans Who Accept Climate Change Outnumber Those Who Don’t 5 to 1

Seventy percent of Americans now accept that climate change is happening, outnumbering those who don’t by a 5 to 1 ratio, according to a new survey by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. More than half of those surveyed, 58 percent, said they also understand global warming is caused mostly by human activities, such as the burning of fossil fuels.
The share of Americans who think climate change is happening has increased seven percentage points since March 2015. Their certainty has increased 12 percentage points in three years, with 49 percent of the U.S. now “extremely” or “very sure” it is happening, according to the new survey.

Americans are increasingly linking global warming to extreme weather events, the survey shows. Six in ten Americans surveyed said they think climate change is affecting U.S. weather. Four in ten said they have personally experienced the effects of climate change, an uptick of 10 percentage points since 2015.

Yet few Americans, 6 percent, say they believe nations can and will successfully combat climate change. One in five survey participants said humans won’t reduce global warming because people are unwilling to change their behavior.

E360.yale.edu

Responding to Climate Change

NASA is a world leader in climate studies and Earth science. While its role is not to
set climate policy or prescribe particular responses or solutions to climate change, its
purview does include providing the robust scientific data needed to understand
climate change. NASA then makes this information available to the global community
– the public, policy- and decision-makers and scientific and planning agencies around
the world.

Climate change is one of the most complex issues facing us today. It involves many
dimensions – science, economics, society, politics and moral and ethical questions –
and is a global problem, felt on local scales, that will be around for decades and
centuries to come. Carbon dioxide, the heat-trapping greenhouse gas that has driven
recent global warming, lingers in the atmosphere for hundreds of years, and the
planet (especially the oceans) takes a while to respond to warming. So even if we
stopped emitting all greenhouse gases today, global warming and climate change will
continue to affect future generations. In this way, humanity is “committed” to some
level of climate change.

How much climate change? That will be determined by how our emissions continue
and also exactly how our climate system responds to those emissions. Despite
increasing awareness of climate change, our emissions of greenhouse gases
continue on a relentless rise. In 2013, the daily level of carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere surpassed 400 parts per million for the first time in human history. The
last time levels were that high was about three to five million years ago, during the
Pliocene era.

Because we are already committed to some level of climate change, responding to

climate change involves a two-pronged approach:

1. Reducing emissions of and stabilizing the levels of heat-trapping greenhouse

gases in the atmosphere (“mitigation”);
2. Adapting to the climate change already in the pipeline (“adaptation”).

Mitigation and adaptation

Mitigation – reducing climate change – involves reducing the flow of heat-

trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, either by reducing sources of
these gases (for example, the burning of fossil fuels for electricity, heat or transport)
or enhancing the “sinks” that accumulate and store these gases (such as the oceans,
forests and soil). The goal of mitigation is to avoid significant human interference with
the climate system, and “stabilize greenhouse gas levels in a timeframe sufficient to
allow ecosystems to adapt naturally to climate change, ensure that food production is
not threatened and to enable economic development to proceed in a sustainable
manner” (from the 2014 report on Mitigation of Climate Change from the United
Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, page 4).

Adaptation – adapting to life in a changing climate – involves adjusting to

actual or expected future climate.The goal is to reduce our vulnerability to the
harmful effects of climate change (like sea-level encroachment, more intense
extreme weather events or food insecurity). It also encompasses making the most of
any potential beneficial opportunities associated with climate change (for example,
longer growing seasons or increased yields in some regions).

Throughout history, people and societies have adjusted to and coped with changes in
climate and extremes with varying degrees of success. Climate change (drought in
particular) has been at least partly responsible for the rise and fall of civilizations.
Earth’s climate has been relatively stable for the past 12,000 years and this stability
has been crucial for the development of our modern civilization and life as we know it.
Modern life is tailored to the stable climate we have become accustomed to. As our
climate changes, we will have to learn to adapt. The faster the climate changes, the
harder it could be.

While climate change is a global issue, it is felt on a local scale. Cities and
municipalities are therefore at the frontline of adaptation. In the absence of national
or international climate policy direction, cities and local communities around the world
have been focusing on solving their own climate problems. They are working to build
flood defenses, plan for heatwaves and higher temperatures, install water-permeable
pavements to better deal with floods and stormwater and improve water storage and
use.

According to the 2014 report on Climate Change Impacts, Adaptation and

Vulnerability (page 8) from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change, governments at various levels are also getting better at adaptation. Climate
change is starting to be factored into a variety of development plans: how to manage
the increasingly extreme disasters we are seeing and their associated risks, how to
protect coastlines and deal with sea-level encroachment, how to best manage land
and forests, how to deal with and plan for reduced water availability, how to develop
resilient crop varieties and how to protect energy and public infrastructure.

How NASA is involved

NASA, with its Eyes on the Earth and wealth of knowledge on the Earth’s climate
system and its components, is one of the world’s experts in climate science. NASA’s
purview is to provide the robust scientific data needed to understand climate change.
For example, data from the agency’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment
(GRACE) and Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) missions and from
radar instruments in space have shown rapid changes in the Earth's great ice sheets.
The Jason-3, Jason-2/OSTM Surface Topography Mission (OSTM) and Jason-1
missions have documented an increasing sea level since 1992.

NASA makes detailed climate data available to the global community – the public,
policy- and decision-makers and scientific and planning agencies around the world. It
is not NASA’s role to set climate policy or prescribe particular responses or solutions
to climate change. NASA is one of 13 U.S. government agencies that form part of the
U.S. Global Change Research Program, which has a legal mandate to help the
nation and the world understand, assess, predict and respond to global change.
These U.S. partner agencies include the Department of Agriculture,
the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy, each of which
has a different purview depending on their area of expertise.

Started in 2010, NASA’s Carbon Monitoring System (CMS) is a forward-looking

initiative established under direction by the U.S. government. The CMS is improving
the monitoring of global carbon stocks (where carbon is stored around the planet)
and fluxes (how carbon is cycled from one stock to the next). The ultimate goal is to
make breakthroughs in quantifying, understanding and predicting how worldwide
carbon sources and sinks are changing, since this could have major ramifications for
 how our planet will respond to increasing emissions and/or efforts to combat climate
change. The work will also help inform near-term policy development and planning.

NASA’s related Megacities Carbon Project is focused on the problem of accurately

measuring and monitoring greenhouse-gas emissions from the world’s biggest
cities. About three-quarters of fossil-fuel carbon dioxide emissions come from about 2
percent of the land surface – the cities and the power plants that feed them. At
present the focus is on pilot projects in Los Angeles and Paris that sample the air
there. The goal is to add other cities around the world and to ultimately deploy a
worldwide urban carbon monitoring system that will enable local policymakers to fully
account for the many sources and sinks of carbon and how they change over time.

Although NASA’s main focus is not on energy-technology research and development,

work is being done around the agency and by/with various partners and collaborators
to find viable alternative sources of energy to power our needs. These sources of
energy include the wind, waves, the Sun and biofuels. Our Energy
Innovations section gives some examples of the work that is being done in this area.

Climate.nasa.gov

Why we can’t reverse climate change

with ‘negative emissions’ technologies
October 9, 2018 11.44am BST

Without rapid and dramatic changes, the world will face a higher risk of extreme weather and other effects of
climate change.

Author

1. Howard J. Herzog
Senior Research Engineer, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

In a much-anticipated report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

(IPCC) said the world will need to take dramatic and drastic steps to avoid the
catastrophic effects of climate change.

Featured prominently in the report is a discussion of a range of techniques for

removing carbon dioxide from the air, called Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR)
technologies or negative emissions technologies (NETs). The IPCC said the world
would need to rely significantly on these techniques to avoid increasing Earth’s
temperatures above 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, compared to pre-
industrial levels.

Given that the level of greenhouse gases continues to rise and the world’s efforts at
lowering emissions are falling way short of targets climate scientists recommend,
what contribution we can expect from NETs is becoming a critical question. Can they
actually work at a big enough scale?

What are negative emissions technologies?

There is a wide range of opinion on how big an impact these techniques can have in
addressing climate change. I became involved in the debate because two of the most
prominent negative emissions technologies involve CO2 capture and storage (CCS), a
technology that I have been researching for almost 30 years.

Many NETs remove the CO2 from the atmosphere biologically through
photosynthesis – the simplest example being afforestation, or planting more trees.
Depending on the specific technique, the carbon removed from the atmosphere may
end up in soils, vegetation, the ocean, deep geological formations, or even in rocks.

Technology or technique Description CO2 Removal CO2 Storage

Mechanism Medium

Afforestation/reforestation The planting of trees to fix Biological Soils/Vegetation

atmospheric carbon in
biomass and soils

Biochar Converting biomass to Biological Soils

biochar and using the
biochar as a soil amendment

Bioenergy with CO2 Removal the CO2 from the Biological Deep Geologic
capture and storage air by plants into biomass, Formations
combustion of the biomass
to produce energy and CO2,
which is captured

Direct air capture Removal of CO2 from Physical/chemical Deep Geologic

ambient air by engineered Formations
systems

Enhanced weathering Enhancing the weathering of Geochemical Rocks

(Mineral carbonation) minerals, where CO2 in the
atmosphere reacts with
silicate minerals to form
carbonate rocks

Modified agricultural Adopting agricultural Biological Soils

practices practices like no-till farming
to increase carbon storage in
soils

Ocean (iron) fertilization Fertilizing the ocean to Biological Ocean

increase biological activity to
 pull carbon from the
atmosphere into the ocean

Ocean alkalinity Adding alkalinity to the Chemical Ocean

oceans to pull carbon from
the atmosphere via chemical
reactions

NETs vary on their cost, scale (how many tons they can potentially remove from the
atmosphere), technological readiness, environmental impacts and effectiveness.
Afforestation/reforestation is the only NET to have been deployed
commercially though others have been tested at smaller scales. For example, there
are a number of efforts to produce biochar, a charcoal made with plant matter that
has a net negative carbon balance.

A recent academic paper discusses the “costs, potentials, and side-effects” of the
various NETs. Afforestation/reforestation is one of the least expensive options, with a
cost on the order of tens of dollars per ton of CO2, but the scope for carbon removal is
small compared to other NETs.

On the other extreme is direct air capture, which covers a range of engineered
systems meant to remove CO2 from the air. The costs of direct air capture, which has
been tested at small scales, are on the order of hundreds of dollars or more per ton of
CO2, but is on the high end in terms of the potential amount of CO2 that can be
removed.

In a 2014 IPCC report, a technology called bio-energy with carbon capture and
storage (BECCS) received the most attention. This entails burning plant matter, or
biomass, for energy and then collecting the CO2 emissions and pumping the gases
underground. Its cost is high, but not excessive, in the range of US$100-200 per ton
of CO2 removed.

The biggest constraint on the size of its deployment relates to the availability of “low-
carbon” biomass. There are carbon emissions associated with the growing,
harvesting, and transporting of biomass, as well as potential carbon emissions due
to land-use changes – for example, if forests are cut down in favor of other forms of
biomass. These emissions must all be kept to a minimum for biomass to be “low-
carbon” and for the overall scheme to result in negative emissions. Potential “low-
carbon” biomass includes switchgrass or loblolly pine, as opposed to say corn, which
is currently turned into liquid fuels and acknowledged to have a high carbon
footprint.

Some of the proposed NETs are highly speculative. For example, ocean fertilization is
generally not considered a realistic option because its environmental impact on the
ocean is probably unacceptable. Also, there are questions about how effective it would
be in removing CO2.

Academic takes
A 2017 study at the University of Michigan did a literature review of NETs. One the
one hand, they showed that the literature was very bullish on NETs. It concluded
these techniques could capture the equivalent of 37 gigatons (billion tons) of CO2 per
year at a cost of below $70 per metric ton. For comparison, the world currently emits
about 38 gigatons of CO2 a year.

However, I think this result should be taken with a large grain of salt, as they rated
only one NET as established (afforestation/reforestation), three others as
demonstrated (BECCS, biochar and modified agricultural practices), and the rest as
speculative. In other words, these technologies have potential, but they have yet to be
proven effective.

Other studies have a much harsher view of NETs. A study in Nature Climate
Change from 2015 states, “There is no NET (or combination of NETs) currently
available that could be implemented to meet the <2°C target without significant
impact on either land, energy, water, nutrient, albedo or cost, and so ‘plan A’ must be
to immediately and aggressively reduce GHG emissions.” In another study from
2016, researchers Kevin Anderson and Glen Peters concluded “Negative-emission
technologies are not an insurance policy, but rather an unjust and high-stakes
gamble. There is a real risk they will be unable to deliver on the scale of their
promise.”

The bottom line is that NETs must be shown to work on a gigaton scale, at an
affordable cost, and without serious environmental impacts. That has not happened
yet. As seen from above, there is a wide range of opinion on whether this will ever
happen.

Safety net?
A critical question is what role NETs can play, both from a policy and economic point
of view, as we struggle to stabilize the mean global temperature at an acceptable level.

One potential role for NETs is as an offset. This means that the amount of CO2
removed from the atmosphere generates credits that offset emissions elsewhere.
Using negative emissions this way can be a powerful policy or economic lever.

For example, with airline travel the best approach to net zero emissions may be to let
that industry to continue to emit CO2, but offset those emissions using credits from
NETs. Essentially those negative emissions are a way to compensate for the emissions
from flying, which is expected to rely on fossil fuels for many years.

About 25 percent of our current carbon emissions can be classified as hard to

mitigate. This offset model makes economic sense when the cost of negative
emissions is less than the cost to cut emissions from the source itself. So if we can
produce negative emissions from say BECCS at about $150 per ton of CO2, they can
economically be used to offset emissions from aircraft that would cost several
hundred dollars per ton CO2 to mitigate by changing how planes are fueled.

The economics of using NETs to correct an “overshoot” are very different.

We as a society seem unwilling to undertake sufficient efforts to reduce carbon
emissions today at costs of tens of dollars per ton CO2 in order to keep enough CO2
out of the atmosphere to meet stabilization targets of 1.5 or 2 degrees Celsius.
However, correcting an “overshoot” means we expect future generations to clean up
our mess by removing CO2 from the atmosphere at costs of hundreds of dollars or
more per ton CO2, which is what the future deployment of NETs may cost.

This makes no sense, economic or otherwise. If we are unwilling to use the relatively
cheap mitigation technologies to lower carbon emissions available today, such as
improved efficiency, increased renewables, or switching from coal to natural gas,
what makes anyone think that future generations will use NETs, which are much,
much more expensive?

That’s why I see the role of NETs as an offset being very sound, with some
deployment already happening today and increased deployment expected in the
future. By contrast, treating NETs as a way to compensate for breaking the carbon
budget and overshooting stabilization targets is more hope than reality. The
technical, economic and environmental barriers of NETs are very real. In formulating
climate policy, I believe we cannot count on the future use of NETs to compensate for
our failure to do enough mitigation today.

Theconversation.com

Climate Scientists to World: We Have Only 20 Years Before

There’s No Turning Back

So we’d better get it together and do something NOW.

October 12, 2018

Jeff Turrentine
NASA

It’s normal to feel temporarily paralyzed in the face of terrifying news. Obstacles never seem more insurmountable—and foes never seem more invincible—than they do at the moment you finally realize what you’re up against: the scale of the battle that awaits you, the consequences of losing it, the amount of time you’ve been given to organize and rally. No matter how much time you have, it never feels like enough.

Earlier this week, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a chilling report that has sent most people (with the notable exception of the current president of the United States) into a deep funk. In it, some 90 climate scientists from 40 countries conclude that if humans don’t take immediate, collective action to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2040, the consequences will effectively be baked into the natural systems of the planet. With so much heat-trapping carbon in the

atmosphere, there will be, in effect, no turning back. The extreme droughts, devastating wildfires, massive floods, deadly hurricanes, and widespread famines that we’re seeing more and more of these days will cease to be statistical anomalies and instead be more like seasonal markers, as regular as the changing of the leaves.

If such imagery shocks, the time line stuns. To avoid global catastrophe, according to the report, we’ll need to reduce globa l carbon emissions by as much as 40 percent by 2030. Despite all the evidence at our feet showing that climate change is an indelible part of our present-day lives, there are still some people who think of it as something far-off—a problem primarily for future generations to solve. But children who entered kindergarten last month will be high school sopho mores in 2030. The “far-off”

generation is no farther off than the next one.

In the three decades since it was founded, the IPCC has released many reports, each one coming with its own unique warnings. This one feels different, though. The authors aren’t just telling us what could happen if we don’t mend our ways and limit warming to less than 1.5 °C—the droughts, the wildfires, the melting permafrost, the coastal flooding, and so on. They state unequivocally that governmen ts must make “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society” if we’re to beat the

clock and save the planet.

Many of us are now trying to wrap our heads around what these changes might look like and how we might achieve them given our current political and economic realities. The details might vary around the edges, but fundamental to any escape plan will be energy policies that phase out coal entirely and replace it with renewables. Also essential will be global efforts to electrify our vehicle fleets, exponentially ramp up energy efficiency in our buildings, and—crucially—preserve our carbon-trapping forests. The

cost of all this, the IPCC soberly estimates, will be nothing less than 2.5 percent of global GDP. To help pay this tremendously large bill, the authors propose a worldwide carbon tax of as much as $27,000 per ton.

With everything else the world’s governments are currently dealing with, could we ever really come together so quickly and collectively embark on this singular act of civilizational self-defense? There’s just not enough time, some say. We don’t have the technology yet. The deck is stacked against us. We can’t possibly hope to win.

But history says otherwise. After that feeling of temporary paralysis subsides, human beings are actually quite good at rising to the occasion—tapping into hidden reservoirs of energy, ingenuity, and resolve and doing whatever it takes to solve a problem or even to bend the arc of history. In the early 1950s, polio, which had been literally plaguing America for decades, was stil l paralyzing and killing tens of thousands of Americans, including thousands of children, each year. Jonas Salk’s vaccine was the

culmination of a worldwide race among scientists to find a way of ending the annually recurring epidemics. A polio vaccine was first made available to the public in 1955, and by the early 1960s the epidemics were 97 percent contained.
It’s precisely when the stakes are high that humans show they’re capable of uniting toward a shared goal. World War II ended in Europe exactly 5 years, 8 months, and 7 days after Germany invaded Poland in 1939. Nations—even those that normally thought of themselves as antagonists—set aside their differences and united to defeat a seemingly unstoppable force. In other words, when confronted with the image of a bleak future, greater humanity fought back. And ultimately, greater humanity won.

It took us 5 years, 8 months, and 7 days to save the world last time. We don’t have much more time than that now. But we do still have some time to act. And unlike WWII, it’s a fight we know up front we can win. We have not only the technology and the solutions to do it, but also the twin benefits of scientific foresight and historical hindsight at our disposal. The former tells us what awaits us if we don’t come together. The latter tells us what we can accomplish if we do.

Nrdc.org

Why don’t we care about climate change?

Ignorance and selfishness aren’t the reasons we face environmental catastrophe – it’s
the way our ancient brains calculate risk and reward. Learning to accept that may
help save us

DAN GARDNER
PUBLISHED DECEMBER 21, 2018UPDATED DECEMBER 21, 2018

Dan Gardner is the author of Risk: The Science and Politics of Fear and a principal at
Tactix, an Ottawa consultancy.

This essay is about a riddle. I’ll start by revealing the answer: It’s a cat that is
simultaneously dead and alive.

Now here is the riddle: Why aren’t we more concerned about climate change?

By “we,” I mean, of course, most Canadians. There are some who are so concerned
that they despair and lose sleep over climate change. But most of us? Polls show we
accept that climate change is real and threatening. And we tell pollsters we are truly,
deeply worried. More than a decade ago, an Ipsos Reid survey found almost two-
thirds of Canadians said they were “desperately concerned that if we don’t take
drastic action right now the world may not last much longer than another couple of
generations.” Desperately concerned is what parents are when a child goes missing.

But those words were crafted by a pollster. And it costs people nothing to say, “Yeah,
that one,” when a stranger on the telephone asks how much they care about
something they know they are supposed to care about. It even feels good – admit it –
to display your social conscience.

So let’s set aside what we say and what we tweet – #ClimateCrisis – and look at what
we do.

Climate change doesn’t dominate elections. It doesn’t dominate headlines, airtime

and social media. It doesn’t dominate consumer choices.

It doesn’t even dominate Google searches. For the past decade, “climate change” and
“global warming” have been searched about as often as “terrorism.” People search far
more often for “autism,” and more still for “flu.” Terrorism, autism and influenza are
all serious hazards, but none of them has even an outside chance of ravaging the
natural world and collapsing civilization. (It should be noted in passing – for the
edification of the alien archeologists investigating the ruins on Earth – that every year
for the past decade, “Kardashian” has been searched far more than any of the
foregoing terms.)
Of course, there are occasional spasms of attention, usually when some international
conference convenes. Big ones such as Copenhagen (2009) and Paris (2015). Lesser
ones such as the conference in Poland that just concluded. They’re now familiar
enough that there is a settled routine. Officials gather, scientists warn, commentators
opine and politicians intone. Climate change gets headlines, although not the top
ones, and it gets airtime, if not in the quantities garnered by a Trump tweet or a
Kardashian baby. And there is the usual flurry of hashtag activism. But so much of
this feels dutiful, even desultory. And it lasts as long as snow in June.

Now, compare that to the reality we face: In the coming decades and centuries,
climate change will be a major challenge in the best-case scenario and something
truly terrifying in the worst case. What we do now will significantly determine
whether the future unfolds closer to the former or the latter. In any scenario, the
poorest and weakest will suffer most.

Most people know and accept all this. And those three sentences are reason enough to
conclude that climate change is the greatest threat we face, save for nuclear war. But
we sure don’t act like it.

So why isn’t our collective concern remotely proportionate to the danger?

The problem isn’t ignorance. Most people get the basic idea. And when yet another
dire report is issued by scientists, people do pay attention – for a few minutes, at
least, before their thoughts return to the latest political imbroglio, taxes, work, the
hockey game and the thousands of other concerns that consistently beat climate
change in the battle for our attention.

It’s also not selfishness. The brunt of the storm may be suffered by future generations
and poor people far away, but researchers do not find that the old shrug while the
young quake. In fact, one U.S. newspaper found that "millennials have similar or less
engagement on global warming than other generations.”

So back to the answer to the riddle – the cat is simultaneously dead and alive.

In 1935, physicist Erwin Schrodinger devised a vivid way to criticize a school of

thought in quantum mechanics known as the Copenhagen interpretation. He
imagined a cat.

The cat is inside a box. With the cat is a vial of poison. The poison can be released by
the radioactive decay of a subatomic particle.

The Copenhagen interpretation says subatomic particles can exist in multiple states
simultaneously, meaning a particle can be decayed and not decayed at the same time.

The cat Schrodinger imagined would be dead if the particle were decayed, alive if not.
It follows that if the particle is both decayed and not decayed, the cat is both dead and
alive.

Since this is plainly absurd, Schrodinger reasoned, the Copenhagen interpretation

must be wrong. It’s common sense.
But 83 years later, the Copenhagen interpretation is mostly accepted by physicists.
Common sense says it’s wrong. Math says it’s right.

A lot of modern physics is like that. What our senses and judgment tell us must be
true is revealed by math to be false, while what is true feels wrong. To use the old
head and gut metaphor, head can grasp the science – barely, and with great effort –
but gut is entirely flummoxed.

The cause of this divide is evolution. Our species evolved in environments where
subatomic weirdness was irrelevant to surviving and reproducing, so we never
developed an intuitive grasp of it; while we may understand it, we cannot feel it.

We struggle with climate change in much the same way and for much the same
reason.

Like us, our Stone Age ancestors were constantly looking into the future and
imagining alternative courses of action. They had to predict the weather, foresee how
an ambushed deer would try to escape and plan to return to a rich berry patch at
harvest time. And most important for survival, they had to decide what to worry
about. Whether it was lions, food shortages or sub-zero temperatures, the future was
packed with threats that had to be anticipated and managed.

But note three features of this ancient forecasting and risk analysis.

Firstly, it didn’t look decades ahead, let alone centuries. Seasons would have been
important frames of reference, but generally, the outer limit of prospection would
have been one cycle of seasons – a year. Our ancestors’ forward-looking thoughts
were overwhelmingly measured in days, hours, minutes and seconds.

Secondly, it didn’t concern itself with problems far away. The only information
available to our ancient ancestors came from personal experience, the experience of
others in their little band of perhaps 40 or 50 and stories passed from one person to
another.

As forward-looking as our species was, ancient risk analysis was about survival in the
here and now. Or at least the nearby and soon.

Finally, it had nothing to do with statistics, probability and the other tools of modern
risk analysis. These didn’t exist. Its raw material was experience, and its analytical
mechanisms were intuitive. Risks were not calculated. They were felt.

To put this in the terms made famous by Nobel-winning psychologist Daniel

Kahneman, our judgments about risk were seldom made by our ancestors' slow,
conscious, analytical mode of thinking – the one dubbed System 2. They were the
product of the fast, experiential, largely unconscious and intuitive mode – System 1.

It’s System 2 that can work very hard and get a decent grasp of subatomic physics. It’s
System 1 that moans, “But a cat can’t be dead and alive at the same time!”
As it was in the Stone Age, so it was in the Iron Age and the Middle Ages. How people
thought about and managed risks didn’t change throughout almost the entire history
of our species. System 1 dominated, always.

Even today, much less has changed than we might imagine. We routinely encounter
risks – even eating breakfast can kill – so we routinely decide which risks are worth
worrying about. Overwhelmingly, these judgments are felt, not calculated – or at least
far more felt than calculated. And what dominates our forward-looking thoughts is
the here and now, or the nearby and soon. Replace the word “quarter” with “season”
and the thoughts of the average MBA would sound at least a little familiar to a Stone
Age hunter-gatherer.

Of course, today, we also have science, statistics and computer modelling capable of
churning out sophisticated risk analyses. Sometimes these confirm System One’s
intuitions. Sometimes they suggest they are a little off. Occasionally, they say our
feelings are seriously wrong.

What happens when head and gut disagree?

In 1950, a landmark study linking smoking to lung cancer was published. Evidence
piled up rapidly. In 1964, the surgeon-general officially confirmed the danger in the
United States. And yet, despite the clarity of the evidence and the severity of the
hazard, smokers kept smoking, non-smokers continued to take up the habit and
overall smoking rates declined only very slowly.

Nicotine addiction doubtless helped slow smoking’s fall. So did corporate marketing.
But more fundamentally, it was psychology at work.

In those decades, people smoked in stores, offices, hospitals, airplanes and elevators,
as well as on TV and in the movies. When the British minister of health called a news
conference in 1954 to discuss the link between smoking and lung cancer, he smoked
throughout.

As psychologists have demonstrated, mere exposure to something boosts positive

feeling for it. Lots of exposure meant lots of positive feeling. That mattered because
one of the most basic mechanisms used by System 1 to make quick, intuitive
judgments about risk is the “affect heuristic”: The more negative feeling there is
about something, the riskier it is felt to be, while positive feeling drives down
perceived risk.

Smoking was everywhere. That made people feel good about it. And that made
smoking feel safe.

For smokers, this effect was amplified by personal experience. One cigarette isn’t
dangerous. Neither is the next cigarette. Or the next. Over and over, the smoker lights
up, inhales and experiences no harm, only pleasure. Primal wiring in the smoker’s
brain – the same wiring that convinces a bird it can safely take seeds from the hand of
a human who repeatedly feeds it – sees this as proof that smoking is safe.

Scientists insisted that while one cigarette may not be dangerous, continued smoking
raises the probability of harm imperceptibly but steadily. Over a lifetime, a smoker’s
likelihood of developing lung cancer becomes roughly similar to that of losing a round
of Russian roulette. People heard this message and understood it, but only
intellectually. It wasn’t intuited. It wasn’t felt.

What they felt was that smoking was safe. And that slowed the descent of smoking
rates for decades.

When head and gut clash, it is not inevitable that gut has its way. After all, the
evidence tying smoking to lung cancer did bend the trend lines in the 1950s and
1960s. But intuitive judgments are empowered by biology and evolution, so
modifying a strongly felt conclusion is deeply unnatural, and rejecting it entirely can
be a Herculean challenge.

This is why people build homes on floodplains and volcano slopes. It’s why
earthquake-insurance sales spike immediately after a major earthquake then slowly
decline, exactly the opposite of the risk.

And it’s why we aren’t remotely as concerned about climate change as we should be.

Scientists have informed me that when I drive my gasoline-powered car, the car emits
carbon dioxide into the air, which makes the atmosphere an ever-so-slightly more
efficient heat-trapping blanket. If I multiply my car’s emissions by one billion cars
and thousands more greenhouse-gas sources and seven billion people and 150 years
of industrialization, the total is big trouble. I know this. We all do.

But the last time I got in my car, drove and got out, there was no perceptible change. I
suffered no harm. No one did. The same is true of the time before that. And the time
before that. Not once in the hundreds of times I have driven has anything bad
happened. And look around at all the other drivers and all the other cars and all the
trips being taken without anything bad happening to anyone.

My Stone Age brain’s conclusion? It’s the same conclusion it would have drawn about
smoking in 1964.

That’s what I see and feel in the present. But I also know bad stuff is coming in the
future. Rising ocean levels. More droughts and hurricanes. Pests and diseases moving
north. When I think about that, I imagine it. I see it in my mind’s eye. Surely that
should be enough to ring my internal alarm bell. And yet that bell is quiet.

The problem is “psychological distance.” If you imagine a street a few blocks from
your house, what comes to mind is solid and vivid, with lots of detail about house
styles, colours, people and so on. But do the same for a street in a city in another
province and your thoughts go to a higher level of abstraction – meaning you will see
only the basic character of the street, with few particulars. A street in another country
will be more abstract still.

That’s thought across physical distances. But psychologists have found the same
tendency to move from the concrete to the abstract with other forms of distance. One
is distance across time; thoughts about a vacation next week will be detailed, while a
vacation next year will be less so. There is also social distance; you will imagine
people like you in real terms, while those who are different will be more abstract. And
there is hypothetical distance, where what is perceived to be likely is seen in more
concrete terms than the unlikely. Together, these are “psychological distance.”

Psychological distance matters for judgments about risk because concrete thoughts
are tangible. They engage our senses. We can feel them, and they can move us. But
abstract thoughts have none of those qualities. They are cold and lifeless. It’s a
contrast captured perfectly in a saying often attributed to Joseph Stalin: “The death
of one man is a tragedy. The death of one million is a statistic.”

Climate change is distant in every dimension. The worst of it lies decades in the
future, to be suffered in far-off lands by foreigners very different from us, and the
worst scenarios are highly uncertain. It would be hard to design a threat more likely
to induce highly abstract thoughts. And shrugs.

And there’s another big problem with climate change: It’s right there in the first
word.

What is climate? It’s not weather. Weather is rain, wind, snow, sunshine. We have a
feel for weather. Our species has been intuiting it as long as we have existed.

But climate? It’s the probability of weather.

On any given day in a particular place, a range of weather is possible. Not all
outcomes are equally likely. Some are much more probable, others less so and some
are extremely unlikely. Think of a bell curve, with temperature, precipitation, wind,
cloud and so on arrayed across it. That’s the climate of that place at that time of year.
We can understand that if we think carefully. But we have no natural, intuitive feel for
it.

As the philosopher Ian Hacking showed, the modern idea of probability didn’t even
exist until the mid-17th century, while the first mathematical examination of
probability was only published in 1713. For a species that is about 200,000 years old,
1713 is the day before yesterday. And so, when we handle probability, we are often
like cavemen with smart phones – confused by even the simplest functions.

Consider the forecast, “There is a 70-per-cent chance a thing will happen.” It also
means there is a 30-per-cent chance it won’t, so the forecast is not proved wrong if
the thing does not happen. That could not be more obvious. And yet, after the 2016
U.S. presidential election, forecaster Nate Silver was almost universally said to have
been wrong because he had forecast that Hillary Clinton had a 70-per-cent chance of
winning. This mistake is astonishingly common, even among smart, educated people
dealing with matters of great importance. Robert Rubin, Bill Clinton’s Treasury
Secretary, once told me that when he informed top people in the White House and
Congress that there was an 80-per-cent chance something would happen, he had to
“almost pound the table” to make them see that meant there was a one in five chance
it would not.

We struggle with probability, and probability defines climate. So it should be no

surprise that we struggle with climate, let alone climate change.
Or that System 1 substitutes weather, which it does understand, for climate, which it
does not. It’s a phenomenon researchers have called “local warming.”

“Do you believe anthropogenic climate change is real? How concerned are you?” We
might think that people’s answers to these questions don’t vary much, and whatever
change there is must be the result of significant new information, such as a new
scientific report or a speech by a political leader. In fact, they do vary. And one of the
biggest influences is the weather.

If the weather has been unusually hot recently, belief and concern go up. Unusual
cold has the opposite effect.

Climate-change activists get angry when politicians who deny or belittle climate
change point to cold weather as proof there’s nothing to worry about, as Donald
Trump did in November and Senator James Inhofe did a few years ago when he held
a snowball triumphantly aloft on the floor of the U.S. Senate. Such claims are
ridiculous, of course. It’s like saying a snowfall in Jerusalem proves that Jerusalem’s
climate isn’t hotter than Stockholm’s. But activists see deliberate deception. It’s
likelier that the Trumps and Inhofes are themselves deceived, as so many of us are, by
a System 1 that uses recent weather to judge the reality and magnitude of a threat that
will take decades to reach full force and centuries to play out.

That is dismaying. But it’s also predictable.

Extrapolating recent experience into the future is how people have always made
forecasts. If a band of ancient hunter-gatherers suffered a lion attack, they would see
lion attacks in their future, putting them on guard, until enough time passed without
a lion attack to allow memories to fade and the sense of threat to ebb – a matter of
days, weeks or months. It worked well in that environment, on that time scale.

Today, in a very different world, we forecast this way as naturally and easily as
breathing. And we do it even when a little reflection would tell us we shouldn’t.

When terrorists destroyed the Twin Towers, officials and ordinary people alike were
instantly certain their world would be scarred by major terrorist attacks far into the
future. When the price of oil surged above US$100 a barrel, it was very widely
believed it would blow past US$150 and never come back down. But the most striking
illustrations are found in stock markets. Nothing convinces investors that stock prices
will soar like soaring stock prices or that markets will plunge like plunging markets.

System 1 won’t stop forecasting lion attacks. It can’t. That’s what it evolved to do. And
when it rings the alarm bell, it’s hard not to listen.

It’s just as hard to be alarmed when System 1 doesn’t ring the bell.

So why is our concern about climate change so small relative to the threat? The
problem is not that we are ignorant or selfish. The problem is how we think.

The decision-making system capable of understanding the danger is incapable of

ringing our internal alarm bell. The system that can raise the alarm cannot grasp the
threat because it was shaped by the world as it was millenniums ago, not the world
we live in now.

Our past endangers our future.

A generation ago, officials meeting in board rooms agreed to implement sensible

policies, and the acid rain and ozone-depletion crises were solved. Climate change
won’t be stopped the same way. It can’t be. No matter what good work is done at
meetings such as the recent United Nations conference in Poland, pushing the needle
away from the most dangerous climate-change scenarios requires economic and
social changes so fundamental that they cannot happen in a democracy without broad
popular support for collective action. The only precedent for such mobilization is
wartime.

But in war, we face an enemy. In this struggle, there are no tanks on the horizon. Or
worse, the enemy is us. How can we rally against ourselves?

When people don’t fear what they should, or fear what they shouldn’t, governments
and corporations typically turn to information and exhortation: If people won’t stop
smoking, tell them yet again that smoking causes lung cancer and urge them to quit.
If they won’t buy emergency supplies to prepare for disasters, tell them disasters
happen and that they should be prepared, even though they already know this and
agree, they just don’t do it. If they fear nuclear plants or chemicals or air travel, show
them safety data, and when their feelings don’t change, wave the data at them and
demand they be reasonable.

This approach seldom works because it only speaks to System 2. Worse, it treats
System 2 as the Good One and System 1 as the Bad One, pitting the two against each
other – a wrestling match System 1 is likely to win.

A very different approach is to see System 1 and System 2 as yin and yang, two halves
of one whole. Neither is good or bad. Each is capable of making mistakes, or
correcting them, depending on circumstances, and each interacts with the other in
complex ways. Our judgment is at its best when the two are harmonious.

Seen this way, the goal is to help System 1 feel what System 2 calculates.

We’re doing that now with smoking. Gory photos on cigarette packages tell smokers
nothing they don’t already know, but they do associate cigarettes with something
hideous, which boosts negative affect and System 1’s feeling of risk. Similarly,
smoking bans pushed cigarettes out of the public sphere, turning what was familiar
and likeable into something alien and unsettling. These and other stigmatization and
denormalization policies helped drive down smoking rates by turning psychological
mechanisms that once encouraged smoking against it.

Climate-change researchers are exploring a wide range of interventions designed to

speak to System 1. The most promising involves shrinking psychological distance by
replacing “distant” abstractions with concrete, here-and-now words and images.

That means replacing an abstraction such as “rising ocean levels” with an image of
Prince Edward Island’s coastline when the iconic red beaches have been swallowed.
In place of “future generations,” describe a person with a face, name and story.
Instead of “the economy” and “global temperatures,” describe her hunger and the
sweltering heat.

Done well, the remote threat becomes as concrete – as detailed, vivid and visceral –
as a lion crouching at the edge of the long grass, her muscles tense, her stare
relentless.

There’s nothing new about this, of course. But that’s the point. Good storytellers have
been shrinking psychological distance since the days when stories were told around
campfires and System 1 was evolving to help us make sense of the world.

People cannot feel dangers measured in atmospheric concentrations of a gas so

common we exhale it.

But we can feel lions. We just have to see them.

theglobeandmail.com

The Paris Accord Won’t

Stop Global Warming on
Its Own
The world needs a new alliance of green economic powers to create a low-
carbon economic zone.
BY RICHARD SAMANS
| SEPTEMBER 26, 2018, 8:24 AM

The 2015 United Nations Paris climate agreement was an important

political accomplishment, but confronting climate change will ultimately
require an economic breakthrough.

The Paris agreement established a consensus goal for humanity: a

maximum temperature increase of 2 degrees Celsius over the level
prevailing before the dawn of the Industrial Revolution in the mid-1700s. It
also created a universally acceptable political framework in which states
make nonbinding, nationally determined contributions toward this goal,
subject to periodic peer review and voluntary adjustment.
As important as this diplomatic achievement was, it represents only half the
job that the international community must perform. To stabilize the planet’s
warming by midcentury at levels our children and grandchildren will find
manageable, the world needs a new economic framework to accelerate the
propagation of low-carbon energy innovations

To stabilize the planet’s warming by

midcentury at levels our children and
grandchildren will find manageable, the
world needs a new economic framework to
accelerate the propagation of low-carbon
energy innovations
that entrepreneurs are increasingly bringing to market on
competitive terms.
Even with the national commitments registered under the Paris agreement,
the world remains on course for a catastrophic 3 degree temperature rise
rather than the 2 degree goal set in Paris.

This new phase of international climate change cooperation will require a

different cast and architecture than the one that produced the Kyoto and
Paris accords. Foreign and environment ministries were the key players in
the creation of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change’s Kyoto
Protocol in 1997 and the Paris accord in 2015, with crucial input from the
scientific community through assessments organized through the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

This time around, the economic ministries (finance, trade, energy,

transport, infrastructure, development, and technology) will need to be
engaged as well, with active input from the business and financial
communities.

While the climate diplomacy of the past two decades has taken place at the
multilateral level in the U.N., this new economic phase will require a more
purpose-built and variable configuration. Since the speed and volume of
greenhouse gas emissions reductions is what matters most, a universal,
multilateral approach will be unnecessary and even counterproductive.
Global emissions are concentrated in a limited number of locations and
industrial sectors, so there is no need to seek unanimous agreement among
the U.N.’s nearly 200 member states.
The best approach would be for a group of like-minded major economies to
use their combined market power to speed the diffusion of carbon-efficient
utility, industrial, and consumer goods and services by aligning their policy
incentives and standards in ways that create greater economies of scale and
lower transaction costs for producers.

A coalition of countries with big markets and ambitious environmental

goals as well as supportive business communities could together accelerate
a shift of production and consumption patterns

A coalition of countries with big markets

and ambitious environmental goals as well
as supportive business communities could
together accelerate a shift of production
and consumption patterns
, directly at first within their own sizable collective share of the
world economy and then indirectly in other markets as these
increased economies of scale drive down production costs of low-
carbon goods and services and make them more affordable globally.
Examples of climate-related economic cooperation have begun to emerge
over the past several years. For example, the Major Economies Forum,
World Trade Organization environmental goods negotiations, Carbon
Pricing Leadership Coalition, RE100, the Financial Stability Board Task
Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures, and other initiatives have
all taken important steps forward. But relative to the challenge the world
faces, these are baby steps—fledgling and uncoordinated efforts that
unfortunately are not yet making a major difference in production and
consumption patterns where they would most affect global emissions.

A vanguard coalition of countries could, however, generate a significant

change in the pace of low-carbon adoption within the world economy by
working together to shift the relative prices of the high- and low-carbon
goods and services within their markets. Indeed, a growing chorus of
citizens and business, civil society, and international organization leaders
have been calling for the introduction of “a price on carbon.” This drumbeat
is growing louder, but it is an appeal that suffers from being too narrowly
focused, potentially to the point of making the perfect the enemy of the
good.

The most effective way to shift the relative prices of low- and high-carbon
alternatives would be to impose a broad carbon tax or implement a national
cap-and-trade scheme. But these policies have been slow to spread, and
when adopted—often at considerable political cost—they have
yielded meager results. While the idea of putting a price on carbon might
appear to be a magic bullet, in the real world, it has so far been a
disappointment.

While the idea of putting a price on carbon

might appear to be a magic bullet, in the
real world, it has so far been a
disappointment.
The focus of climate change strategy therefore needs to expand beyond
carbon pricing on an economy-wide basis to using a much larger set of
policy tools to shift relative prices with respect to specific carbon-intensive
products, as well as magnifying the combined market pull of these
incentives by jointly applying them across many of the world’s largest
markets.

There are multiple ways to shift the relative prices of high- and low-carbon
goods in an economy beyond a broad tax or cap-and-trade scheme, whether
via tariffs, procurement, financing, corporate governance, subsidies,
technical standards, targeted tax, investor disclosure, or emission trading
rules and policies. Some of these instruments have the potential to influence
prices directly, others more indirectly through a shift in purchasing
behavior that generates expanded economies of scale for low-carbon
technology producers.

The actors relevant to this broad economic agenda are currently scattered
across many different ministries, international organizations, and
industries. Each has no shortage of challenges and priorities on its
traditional turf, which is why the machinery of international economic
cooperation has remained so quiet in the fight against climate change for so
many years. Only presidents and prime ministers—whose authority spans
finance, trade, development, infrastructure, energy, and technology
ministers—can galvanize the necessary domestic and intergovernmental
action. And only they can compel the engagement of the key business
leaders in their societies needed to co-design and support such a strategy.

But there is an alternative. Imagine if the leaders of France, Germany,

China, Japan, South Korea, Canada, and Britain—all countries that have
exhibited broad popular support for climate action—agreed to create a new
kind of international economic alliance aimed at collectively scaling market
incentives for low-carbon adoption.
Imagine if the leaders of France, Germany,
China, Japan, South Korea, Canada, and
Britain—all countries that have exhibited
broad popular support for climate action—
agreed to create a new kind of
international economic alliance aimed at
collectively scaling market incentives for
low-carbon adoption.
By creating a low-carbon economic zone that aims to take full
advantage of the growing price competitiveness of clean technology
products, they would add fresh momentum to humanity’s race
against time, propelling faster adoption of clean technology in a
group of the world’s most important economies and driving down
the relative price differential of these products worldwide in the
process.
They could begin to form this new kind of trade alliance later this year,
agree on its initial set of aligned incentives and standards by the U.N.
secretary-general’s special climate summit in New York in September 2019,
and declare membership of the club open as of 2020: Any country prepared
to align its low-carbon economic incentives and standards with those of the
alliance would be welcome to join it.

The alliance could take a flexible approach to the terms of membership,

requiring each member country to commit to implementing at least half of
the policies on its agenda within a certain number of years, while
encouraging all to adopt as many as possible over time.

The policy menu could include: zero tariffs for a defined set of low-carbon
goods and services; common energy efficiency standards for government
procurement of energy-intensive goods and services; mutual recognition of
technical standards for related goods and services; minimum, time-bound
targets for the reduction of fossil fuel subsidies; a trade dispute peace clause
and consistent rules on the use of clean energy subsidies; implementation of
the Financial Stability Board’s industry task force on climate-related
financial disclosure framework in corporate governance and disclosure
rules; coordination of efforts within the boards of multilateral development
banks to have them make more effective use of their balance sheets to
mobilize the private finance necessary for climate mitigation and adaptation
in key developing countries; alignment of policies in carbon-intensive
sectors such as maritime, aviation, cement, steel, and oil and gas;
coordination of basic and applied clean-energy research to avoid wasteful
duplication and speed the rate of technical progress; mutual recognition of
the rough equivalency of domestic carbon pricing schemes to avoid the tit-
for-tat imposition of border adjustment taxes on one another’s carbon-
intensive products in the name of industrial competitiveness; and linkage of
emission trading systems.

Building such an expanding low-carbon zone within the world economy

would help to scale up demand for low-carbon goods and services by
embedding and aligning price advantages for them through linked trade,
procurement, tax, and investment rules.

Building such an expanding low-carbon

zone within the world economy would help
to scale up demand for low-carbon goods
and services by embedding and aligning
price advantages for them through linked
trade, procurement, tax, and investment
rules.
A virtuous cycle of policy leadership, technological innovation, and
market forces would ensue. And the risk of border adjustment tax
disputes relating to differences among national carbon tax and cap-
and-trade regimes could recede as member countries used the club
as a mechanism to recognize the equivalency of effort of each other’s
carbon pricing policies or eventually to negotiate a common scheme
at either the national level or within key industrial sectors.
A climate leadership club of this nature need not be restricted to national
governments. City and provincial governments could be invited to accede to
those elements of the menu within their jurisdiction, particularly with
respect to procurement rules and energy-efficiency product regulations.

Supplementing the architecture of global climate action in this manner

would accelerate the implementation of the U.N. Paris agreement by
speeding up the underlying economic transformation that is needed before
nation-states can fully realize the political commitments they have made.

The world urgently needs to build on the 2015 agreement, not rest on its
laurels by hoping for the best from voluntary national plans. The best way to
do so is to think beyond the Paris accord. In particular, economic
institutions and policies need to be at the center of this effort—and that will
only happen if a group of the most like-minded heads of government of
major economies compels it. Only they can cut through the Gordian knot of
fragmentation and inattention that has plagued international economic
cooperation on climate change for so many years.

foreignpolicy.com

New climate report shows efforts to end global warming are falling short.
Here's how we can get on track.
Climate scientist Rachel Licker is optimistic that transformative changes can limit sea level
rise and help save our coral reefs.
Oct. 9, 2018, 8:07 PM GMT+2

By David Freeman

It'll be even harder than we thought.

Three years after representatives of almost 200 nations met in Paris to agree on a set of goals
to curb global warming, a U.N. climate advisory group has issued a stark new
report indicating that meeting those goals may be much more difficult than previously
recognized.

The report, issued on Monday by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC),
shows that "we are nowhere near on track to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement," said
Rachel Licker, a senior climate scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists, a
Cambridge, Massachusetts-based science advocacy nonprofit. "Current commitments have us
on track to reach a level of global warming that is closer to 3 degrees Celsius (C) — far above
the 1.5 C and 2 C targets of the Paris agreement."

A couple of degrees might not sound like much. But Licker said it could bring devastating
changes in the global environment, including large increases in sea levels and the loss of the
world's coral reefs.

Why is it so hard to stop climate change? Can we turn the tide? What is required of
governmental leaders — and how can citizens help? Licker answered these and other
questions in a wide-ranging interview with NBC News MACH. The interview, conducted via
internet chat and email, has been edited for clarity and brevity.

NBC News MACH: The report makes it clear that we must do more to limit the rise in
global temperatures — is that right?

That's correct. The report brings greater clarity to the actions necessary to limit global
warming to 1.5 or 2 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit). It shows society
will need to achieve net-zero emissions of carbon dioxide by 2050, and achieve
net reductions of other global warming gases by 2030.
One IPCC scientist said the effects of climate change could be irreversible. You've mentioned
sea level rise and the loss of coral reefs as possibilities. Can you explain just what's at stake
here?

Coral reefs are critical for a variety of reasons. They are home to huge concentrations of
marine biodiversity and, as such, are important sources of food as well as tourism revenue.
They also provide important services to coastal communities. For example, they help break
up storm waters before they make landfall.

Earth's sea level has already risen by about seven or eight inches since 1900. The new report
shows that in a 2 C world, sea level rise is projected to be about four inches higher than it
would be in a 1.5 C world. That's enough to expose an additional 10 million people around the
world to risks from sea level rise.

The report also says the Arctic Ocean could become free of sea ice in the summer — once a
century in a 1.5 C world and at least once a decade in a 2 C world. What difference would that
make?

If the Arctic Ocean were to have just one summer where the sea ice completely disappeared,
this would be catastrophic for species whose life cycle is dependent on Arctic sea ice.

What about severe weather?

The report shows that in midlatitude countries like the U.S., our hottest days are expected to
be significantly higher in a 2 C world than in a 1.5 C world — and will only increase from
there with more global warming. Eastern North American is among the regions likely to see
higher risks from heavy precipitation events — and again, those risks will only be higher with
higher levels of global warming. The U.S is also likely to experience other serious impacts,
including more intense hurricanes and large wildfires.

What would those changes mean for our health and safety?

Even today, extreme weather events have serious consequences for the health and safety of
people in the U.S. and around the world. We only need to look to this year to see how extreme
heat waves helped create the conditions for large wildfires in the West, which led to the loss
of life and homes. Hurricane Florence led to numerous deaths and damaged infrastructure.
And last year's wildfire season and hurricanes tell a similar story. More global warming
means more of these kinds of events.

Another IPCC scientist said limiting the temperature rise to 1.5 C was "possible within the
laws of chemistry and physics but doing so would require unprecedented changes." What
sorts of changes are needed?

Limiting warming to 1.5 or 2 C will require many transformative changes, from the
composition of our energy infrastructure to the way we travel to the way we grow and
consume food. It will also require using what we know as carbon dioxide removal
measures — things like reforesting areas and restoring land so they can take up carbon
dioxide from the atmosphere. While it won't be easy, we have many of the necessary
technologies in hand now.
The report makes it clear that to cut carbon dioxide emissions we need large-scale
transformations in the way we generate and use electricity, shifting away from fossil fuel-
based sources and ramping up renewable energy and energy efficiency. The pathways to
limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius that were examined in this report also generally
include an increase in the share of nuclear energy production and carbon capture and
storage.

How realistic is it to think that we'll be able to take the necessary steps?

Countries, states and cities are already making significant strides to step up on reducing
global warming emissions. These actions are getting us closer to the Paris Agreement's goals,
but we need each and every nation to follow suit.

What about the U.S.?

As one of the biggest emitters of global warming emissions, the U.S. has a big role to play in
limiting warming to 1.5 C. The Trump administration's move to pull the U.S. out of the Paris
Agreement, as well as its moves to roll back other key domestic policies that would reduce our
global warming emissions, will only make things harder. Many states, communities, the
private sector and other such actors are stepping in to try to fill the gap, but as this report
shows now is not the time for scaling back ambition. We need all hands on deck.

Are there things citizens can do to help?

Absolutely. In our daily life, we can take many measures to reduce our global warming
emissions. We can reduce our home energy consumption by using more efficient appliances
and reduce the amount that we travel by car, using other means of transportation when
possible. We can also call upon our elected officials to enact policies that will make it easier
and less expensive in the long run for us to reduce our energy use, rely on clean energy
sources, and produce fewer global warming emissions.

What about giving up meat?

Meat consumption is a significant source of global warming emissions. Eating less meat is, in
general, a way that people can reduce their carbon footprint.

If we're not even on track to limit the temperature rise to 2 C above pre-industrial levels,
what hope do we have to keep it below 1.5 C? Isn't the new report ultimately more reason
for pessimism about the climate?

Limiting global warming to 1.5 C will certainly not be easy. It will require major societal
transformations. At the end of the day, though, whether we enact measures to achieve this is
our choice.

We've known about the risks associate with global warming for years now. Why the new
report — and why now?

The report was requested by members of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate
Change, including the U.S., during the adoption of the Paris Agreement. Member countries
recognized that the commitments countries were putting forth at that point were not enough
to meet the Paris Agreement goals, so they asked the IPCC to provide them with technical
information that could inform their deliberations. The report will serve as key technical input
for a discussion at the next U.N. climate change conference in Poland later this year.

Nbcnews.com

What Happens AFTER Global Warming?

By: Curt Stager © 2012 Nature Education

Citation: Stager, C. (2012) What Happens AFTER Global Warming? Nature Education Knowledge 3(10):7

What happens to our heat-trapping fossil fuel emissions after we release them, how long will
they persist, and what might life be like in a warming - and then cooling - world?
Until recently, most discussions of modern global warming have looked only as far ahead as 2100 AD. Now, new
investigations by pioneering climate modelers are beginning to tell another story, one in which the legacy of our heat-
trapping carbon emissions lasts not just decades or centuries but long enough to interfere with future ice ages. As
science-journalist Mason Inman (2005) puts it, with only slight exaggeration, "carbon is forever."

Specialists are now investigating the long-term future of our greenhouse gas pollution with the help of a new generation
of sophisticated climate models with names like CLIMBER, GENIE, and LOVECLIM. But the basics of that future boil
down to one simple principle: what goes up must come down.

Climate Whiplash
Greenhouse gas concentrations and global temperatures will not increase indefinitely — today's carbon dioxide buildup
and warming trend must eventually top out and then reverse as the atmosphere gradually recovers. The first stage of
this process will occur when the rate at which we burn coal, oil, and natural gas levels off and then declines, either
because we switch to alternative energy sources soon, or because we run out of affordable fossil fuels later. As a result,
CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere will also eventually peak and then decline. This, in turn, will cause a series of
linked environmental responses in which other currently rising trends reverse one by one in a "climate whiplash" phase
that follows the lead of our carbon emissions. For example, as CO2 dissolves into the oceans, it combines with water to
form carbonic acid, which alters the chemistry of seawater and makes limestone, chalk, and other carbonate-rich
substances more likely to dissolve. Ocean acidification will peak shortly after atmospheric CO2concentrations do,
threatening marine species that have acid-soluble carbonate shells or skeletons, including corals, shellfish, and
crustaceans (Figure 1).

After a delay due to slow response times in the atmosphere and oceans (Wigley 2005), global average temperatures will
pivot into cooling mode as CO2concentrations continue to fall. However, global mean sea level will still rise long after the
thermal peak passes, because even though temperatures will be falling, they will still be warmer than today. Therefore,
land-based glacial ice will continue to melt and the oceans will continue to expand even though Earth's atmosphere has
begun to recover. Sea level will only return to today's position when it finally becomes cool enough for large, land-based
ice sheets to build up again on Antarctica and in the Arctic.
Where Does the Carbon Go?
In order to work out the timing of these processes in more detail, one must consider where CO 2 goes after it leaves our
smokestacks and exhaust pipes. Some of it will be taken up by soils and organisms but most of it will dissolve into the
oceans, with between two thirds and half of our emissions perhaps going into solution during the next millennium or so
(Inman 2008, Eby et al. 2009). In many computer simulations, maximum ocean acidification lasts 2000 years or more,
depending on the amount of CO2 we emit in the near future. Marine species living in the polar regions and deep sea
basins and trenches will be the most rapidly and severely impacted because the solubility of such gases is greatest in
cold waters. But after the seas have absorbed as much CO2 as they can, roughly a fifth of our fossil carbon emissions
will still be left adrift in the air (Tyrell et al. 2007, Inman 2008).
The next stage of the cleanup will proceed more slowly. As atmospheric CO2 dissolves into raindrops, the carbonic acid
that it produces will react with calcite and other carbonate minerals in rocks and sediments. Over thousands of years,
those geochemical weathering processes will transfer many of the formerly airborne carbon atoms into groundwater and
runoff, finally delivering them to the oceans in the form of dissolved bicarbonate and carbonate ions. Meanwhile,
carbonate-rich deposits on the sea floor will experience similar reactions with overlying seawater as the oceans become
more acidified. This slow addition of acid-buffering substances to marine ecosystems will act much like an antacid pill
that allows the seas to consume more CO2 from the overlying atmosphere. These processes are generally expected to
dominate the long-term recovery for 5,000 years or so.
But even this second, lengthier phase won't remove the very last fraction of our carbon pollution. Only tens of thousands
of years later, or possibly even hundreds of thousands if we burn most of our enormous coal reserves, the last remnants
of our CO2 will finally be scrubbed away by even slower reactions with resistant silicate minerals, such as the feldspars
found in granite and basalt. This is what University of Chicago oceanographer David Archer calls "the long tail of the
carbon curve" (Archer 2005), and it will be dominated by gradual global cooling, albeit at higher temperatures than those
of today.
Choices Before Us
The intensity and duration of the warming peak and recovery will depend upon choices we make during this century. If
we switch to carbon-free energy sources during the next several decades, then approximately 1000 gigatons of fossil
carbon will have been released into the atmosphere since the start of the Industrial Revolution (1 gigaton = 1 billion
tons). Atmospheric CO2 concentrations will peak close to 550–600 parts per million (ppm) by 2200 AD or so, and then
begin to fall (Figure 2; Archer 2005, Archer & Brovkin 2008).

In the climate whiplash phase that follows this relatively moderate scenario, global mean temperatures are likely to climb
2–3°C higher than today by 2200–2300 AD, then enter a cooling recovery phase lasting as much as 100,000 years.
Much of Greenland and western Antarctica's ice will melt into the oceans over millennia, lifting sea levels several meters
higher than today before slowly receding.

On the other hand, if we burn through all remaining coal reserves before switching to alternative energy sources, then a
far more extreme scenario will result. In one computer simulation of what could follow a 5000 gigaton emission (Figure 3;
Schmittner et al. 2008), airborne CO2 concentrations reach 1900–2000 ppm, roughly five times greater than today, by
2300 AD. Global mean temperature jumps 6–9 °C above today's average and remains artificially high for much longer
than it does in the more moderate scenario, with the warmest part of the broad maximum lasting from 3000 AD to 4000
AD. Atmospheric CO2 concentrations and temperatures then fall relatively steeply for several thousand years after the
peak and whiplash phase, but they don't return to today's levels for at least 400,000 years. All land-based ice eventually
melts, raising sea levels by as much as 70 meters until the world cools enough for large polar ice sheets to form again,
roughly half a million years from now.

Life in a Hothouse
What might life on Earth be like under such conditions? Although no examples from the past perfectly illustrate the
warmest phases of these two scenarios, several of them are nonetheless informative.

Immediately before the last ice age-between 130,000 and 117,000 years ago-a natural warming episode known in
Europe as the Eemian Interglacial produced global average temperatures 2–3°C higher than those of today, much like
what would be expected in our more moderate scenario. The surface area of the Greenland ice sheet shrank by at least
a third, the Arctic Ocean lost some summer ice-cover but retained enough for ringed seals and polar bears to survive,
elephants and water buffalo migrated northward into Britain and Europe, and trees that are now more typical of the
southeastern United States, such as black gums and hickories, thrived in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York
(Stager 2011). Although it was caused by cyclic changes in the orientation of the Earth relative to the sun rather than
greenhouse gases, the Eemian example nonetheless shows that even a relatively moderate warming can melt enough
land-based ice to raise sea levels by 6–9 meters if it persists long enough, which in this case was 13,000 years (Figure
4).
The more extreme of the two emissions scenarios is better illustrated by a super-hothouse that occurred 55 million years
ago-roughly 10 million years after the demise of the dinosaurs. Geo-historical evidence shows that the Paleocene-
Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) was triggered by greenhouse gas buildups, most likely from the release of icy
methane hydrates or other carbon compounds buried in marine deposits (Katz et al. 1999). Global mean temperatures
rose 5–6°C within several thousand years and did not fully recover for 100,000–200,000 years (Zachos et al. 2003,
Rohl et al. 2007, Jaramillo et al. 2010). Both polar regions were completely ice-free, the Arctic Ocean was a warm,
brackish pond rimmed by deciduous redwood forests, Antarctica was covered by beech trees, and carbonic acid burned
a discolored, carbonate-free band into ocean sediments worldwide (Zachos et al. 2005). Some species became extinct
during the PETM, especially in the most heavily acid-impacted portions of the oceans (Gibbs et al. 2006), but many
others thrived, sometimes spreading so rapidly between latitudes and continents that they seemed to appear
simultaneously in fossil records all over the world (Smith et al. 2006, Jaramillo et al. 2010).
In both of these cases, free migration seems to have been an important key to the survival of animals and plants of the
time, and the lack of human-made barriers in the distant past made it easier for species to adjust to large climatic shifts.
Unfortunately, our settlements, roads, and farms can make such migrations more difficult today, and will probably do so
in the future as well.

Climate Ethics
Such long-term perspectives are not only scientifically interesting and important, they also raise new ethical questions,
simply because human beings are now in the picture. Our carbon emissions will influence countless generations, as well
as many species other than our own, in future versions of the world that will differ markedly from the one we know now.
This realization may force us to weigh the needs of some generations against those of others.

For instance, having the Arctic Ocean become ice-free in summer may seem outlandish to us, but it may instead seem
normal to people who will be born into a warmer world thousands of years from now. When the global cooling recovery
sets in, the open-water ecosystems and human cultures that will by then have become dependent upon warmer climates
could be threatened as the polar ocean begins to re-freeze. Will global warming seem preferable to cooling then?

Another potentially confusing situation arises when we consider that atmospheric CO 2 concentrations will still be high
enough in 50,000 AD to prevent the next ice age, which natural cyclic processes would normally be expected to trigger
then (Figure 5; Berger & Loutre 2002, Archer & Ganopolski 2005). The next major cyclic cool period is due in 130,000
AD, by which time a moderate carbon emission will have dissipated. This suggests that preventing an extreme 5000
Gton hothouse scenario now could leave Canada and northern Europe vulnerable to being bulldozed by gigantic ice
sheets in the deep future. How do we weigh the winners and losers in such a far-sighted view?

Fortunately, long-term perspectives may also suggest possible win-win situations, as well. For instance, leaving most
remaining coal untouched rather than using it all up now would reduce the severity of climate change in the near-term,
and would also leave large stores of burnable carbon in the ground that later generations could use as a source of
greenhouse gases for the prevention of future ice ages, should they so desire.

Whichever emissions scenario we choose-be it moderate or extreme-one thing is now clear. Our influence on the
climatic future of the world is geological in scope. Little wonder, then, that many scientists are now referring to our
chapter of Earth history with a term coined by ecologist Eugene Stoermer-the "Anthropocene Epoch" or the "Age of
Humans" (Crutzen & Stoermer 2000, Stager 2011).

nature.com

We Can't Stop the Climate Change Apocalypse Through

Individual Action Alone
By Rob Rousseau | October 18, 2018 | 10:23am
Photo by Jason Kempin/GettyPOLITICS FEATURES CLIMATE CHANGE
If you’ve glanced at a newspaper, or even looked out a window at some point over the
last year or two, you may have noticed that extreme, deadly weather events seem to
be happening more and more frequently throughout the world. This summer a heat
wave in Quebec killed over 90 people. 200 were killed in flooding in Japan.
Devastating hurricanes are ravaging coastal cities in the west, while record typhoons
are battering the east. There are wildfires burning from Southern California to the
arctic circle. It’s starting to look like the opening montage to an apocalyptic disaster
movie out there.

If for some reason you missed all this stuff, or aren’t sure how you should fit these
events into a broader context with regards to the Earth’s climate, you might be
interested to hear that the heavily researched, two-years-in-the-making IPCC
report on climate change was released last week, and it really helps to put everything
into the proper perspective. And since it would be understandable if you hadn’t seen
it, as it barely made a blip in the vapid, nightmarish vortex that is the American news
cycle, here’s a little summation for you: things are looking pretty grim!

It turns out we’ve only got about a decade and change left to avert the absolute worst
case climate scenario of two degrees global warming, which is going to drown
coastlines all across the planet, displacing millions of people (mainly the developing
world’s poorest citizens), creating a crisis that will make the worldwide refugee
situation in 2018 look like a mild conflict in comparison, and give rise to even more
cruel, xenophobic far right authoritarian governments. And that’s without taking into
account the crop failures, famines, water shortages, mass extinctions, and other
horrors that the coming generations are almost certainly going to be dealing with.

Obviously, this is very scary stuff. But it’s important not to panic. All is not lost. Some
of the news organizations that have bothered to cover this have offered up some
helpful tips on things we can do as individuals to possibly make an impact and do our
part to turn the tide, so to speak.

Scared by that new report on climate change? Here's what you can do to help:

• Eat less meat (about 30%)

• Swap your car or plane ride for a bus or train

• Use a smart thermostat in your home, and upgrade to more efficient appliances

Now, it is absolutely true that ditching your gas-powered car in favor of public
transportation, cutting out factory-farmed meat, switching to more energy-efficient
light bulbs, or smashing your air conditioning unit with a sledgehammer would limit
your personal carbon footprint. That’s good! We should be doing these things (though
it’s probably a good idea to hang on to that AC). But it’s important that we also
recognize that changing our individual consumption patterns is more about achieving
a form of personal catharsis or an act of self-care than something that’s actually going
to make an iota of difference in averting the horrifying future we’re currently faced
with.

That’s because any conversation about what we can do to slow down or stop the
devastating effects of climate change has to begin with an understanding of exactly
what that means: dismantling the broken economic system that has led us to this
point, and the institutions whose very existence are based on this very system
growing exponentially until it consumes us all. Whether you spend the remainder of
your life eating factory farmed steaks and spraying aerosol cans into the ozone layer
for 40 hours a week, or you drive your car into the ocean and only survive on locally
sourced greens and nuts, we must all confront a very stark reality. Otherwise,
personal sacrifice won’t make any difference.

Because no matter how much you as an individual do or do not consume, or how

relatively big or small your carbon footprint is, it doesn’t change the very simple
arithmetic that only 100 companiesare responsible for 71% of global emissions. That
the United States military is one of the world’s biggest polluters. That the entirety of
what we think of as modern civilization is based on an increasingly chaotic death
spiral of fossil fuel addiction. Yes, solving this problem will require a massive scaling
back of many of the comforts that we have spent entire lives enjoying. But this has to
be a collective, not individual, effort—the likes of which has not been attempted in the
entirety of human history.

We also need to clearly understand that there is an entrenched political and media
class that is not only declining to even attempt to solve this problem in any
meaningful way, but doing everything they can to make it worse. The Trump
Administration made leaving the “very unfair” Paris Agreement a centerpiece of their
first two years (and is being closely followed by Jair Bolsonaro, the fascist about to
take over the Brazilian government). Recent changes to US auto emission
standardsessentially add up to an admission that global climate change is indeed
happening, but it’s just so hopeless that taking steps to reduce emissions (and thus,
energy industry profits) are so inadequate so to not even be worth doing.

In Canada and Australia, conservative parties backed by the energy industry are
arguing against even instituting a carbon tax, a market-based solution that, though a
half measure, has been proven to help decrease carbon emissions. This is all backed
 up by a massive conservative media machine that is deliberately lying to their
audiences to provide cover for their partners in the business sector and the politicians
carrying out their preferred policies.

This all means that in the coming years, we must prioritize climate justice, ideally in
the form of punitive measures towards the energy executives, politicians and media
figures who knowingly deceived people about the terrifying seriousness of this
problem until it was, barring an unprecedented miracle, too late. No, making sure
these people are held to some kind of account isn’t going to decrease the warming of
the planet, but it will send a message that this kind of behavior won’t be tolerated any
further as we set about the very difficult work of undoing the damage that has been
done.

Though they seem to be at least demonstrating an understanding of the seriousness

of the issue and are taking large steps to address it, the Communist Party of China is
responsible for the majority of global carbon emissions, so it’s not simply about
dismantling capitalism (though that would be a start). It’s about radically rethinking
and reorganizing our society and drastically restructuring our priorities and values.
It’s about recognizing that the billions of people that are going to be adversely
affected by climate change in the coming decades are much stronger and more
powerful than the relatively few elite figures who are insisting that we continue to
ride the free market directly off the cliff.

It’s a monumental task, but if we continue approaching it as something that can be

addressed through individual actions, we might as well just begin preparing for our
inevitable future in Beyond Thunderdome.

Pastemagazine.com

We Can’t Stop Global Warming Without

Reducing Driving
 By Angie Schmitt

Electric vehicles aren’t going to cut it, emissions-wise. That’s one alarming finding in
a new report from Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The estimates vary. But one important finding estimates [PDF, page 65] that about 20
percent of emission reductions needed to limit temperature rise need to come from
trips avoided or trips shifted — from cars to trains, buses and bikes.

Meredith Hankins, an environmental law fellow at UCLA notes in an article for Legal
Planet that this has been soft-pedaled in discussions about decarbonizing the transportation
sector.

But as transport emissions make up a greater and greater portion of overall

emissions, it’s time we started discussing our strategy for reducing driving miles more
seriously and openly, she says.

How do we ensure the owner of that non-zero emission vehicle that’s going to be on
the road for the next decade can afford to live close enough to their workplace to
make commuting by car an option, rather than a requirement? How do we provide
safe, convenient, and affordable low or zero-carbon modes of transport like public
transit, walking, biking, and scooting to get that non-ZEV owner to and from their
child’s school? To the grocery store, the library, the movies? How do we retrofit our
cities to create dense, walkable, transit-oriented neighborhoods where residents don’t
need to own cars at all? Can we do any of this in an equitable way that avoids
displacement? Can public transit systems be designed to get middle class drivers out
of SUVs while still fulfilling their social service need to help a city’s most vulnerable
populations? Should they be?

There are no easy, cookie-cutter answers to these questions. Decisions about land
use, housing, and transportation require difficult choices and a lot of political will by a
lot of different levels of government.

There still aren’t very many public agencies that have made reducing vehicle miles
traveled a policy priority. Minneapolis deserves especial credit for its newest
comprehensive plan, which proposes an 80 percent reduction in transport emissions
by 2050. In order to meet that goal, the city estimates it needs to reduce driving miles
by 40 percent. The city has proposed reducing the number of parking spaces
required, increasing the walkability of neighborhoods by allowing more dense
housing and even banning new gas stations within city limits in service of that goal.

At the state level, California has been perhaps the boldest with policies aimed at
limiting driving miles — however so far they have not had much success. Driving
miles have escalated in recent years. Here’s what the California Air Resources Board
has proposed:

 Quadrupling the number of trips made by walking

 Limiting urban growth boundaries
 Instituting congestion pricing, parking pricing
 Prioritizing transit, walking and biking projects for state infrastructure funding

Patrick Sisson at Curbed pointed out recently that some studies have estimated that
large global cities could cut their emissions by a third based on improvements in
housing density alone.
We have to start talking about these solutions and making them part of mainstream
environmental policy, Hankins says. Time is running out.

“We can’t afford to ignore significant climate mitigation measures just because they
are politically difficult,” she writes.

usa.streetsblog.org

We’re on mission
impossible to solve global
warming
U.N. report: Temperatures to rise 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2030-2052
The United Nations panel on climate issued a report warning of unprecedented temperature
rise between 2030 and 2052 if global warming continues. (Reuters)
By Robert J. Samuelson

Columnist

October 14, 2018

If there were any doubt before, there should be none now. “Solving” the global climate change
problem may be humankind’s mission impossible. That’s the gist of the latest report from the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the U.N. group charged with monitoring
global warming.
Unless we make dramatic reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions (carbon dioxide, methane and
others), warns the IPCC, we face a future of rapidly rising temperatures that will destroy
virtually all the world’s coral reefs, intensify droughts and raise sea
levels. We need to take action immediately, if not sooner.
The IPCC says emissions need to be cut 45 percent from present levels by 2030 and virtually
eliminated by 2050. This would keep the projected increase in global temperatures since the early
1800s to 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit. We would escape the worst
consequences of global warming.
It’s not clear how this would be done. The reality is that global carbon emissions are rising, not
falling. Emissions today are about 60 percent higher than in 1990, according to the
World Bank.
There are at least three obstacles frustrating the IPCC’s agenda.

First, we don’t have the technologies to reduce and eventually eliminate emissions from fossil
fuels (oil, coal and natural gas). Yes, solar and wind power have made advances, but they still
provide only a tiny share of the world’s total energy, about 4 percent. Electric
vehicles don’t solve the problem, because natural gas and coal are the underlying energy sources
for much of the electricity.
Opinion | Climate change is political — when you deny it's happening
More powerful hurricanes are one of many signs of climate change, and those who deny it
are complicit in the destruction, meteorologist Eric Holthaus says. (Gillian Brockell, Kate
Woodsome, Adriana Usero/The Washington Post)
Second, even if we had the technologies to replace fossil fuels, it’s doubtful that we have the
political will to do so. Democracies — or, for that matter, dictatorships — have a difficult time
inflicting present political pain for future, hypothetical societal gains. Voters abhor higher
gasoline and heating-oil prices, which are an integral part of most proposed solutions for global
warming. They would dampen demand for fossil fuels and spur investment in substitutes.

The clearest proof of the United States’ political bias against the future is the treatment of Social
Security and Medicare. For decades, we have known that an aging population would significantly
boost spending for these programs. What did we do to prepare for this inevitability? Not much.

Finally, assuming (unrealistically) that today’s advanced societies — led by the United States —
overcome these obstacles, it’s unclear whether poorer and so-called emerging market countries
would follow suit. These countries represent the largest increases in fossil-fuel demand, as they
attempt to raise living standards. Already, China is the world’s largest source of carbon-dioxide
emissions, nearly twice as high as the United States.
Economic and population increases boost energy demand. Consider air conditioners. The world
now has 1.6 billion air-conditioning units, reports the International Energy
Agency. By 2050, that could triple to 5.6 billion units. People in advanced societies won’t
abandon air conditioning, and people in poorer countries won’t surrender the chance to enjoy it.
Much of future demand will come from three countries — China, India and Indonesia.
What is to be done?

Maybe nothing. This seems to be the choice made by many Republicans and the Trump
administration, which is withdrawing from the Paris agreement’s commitments to reduce
emissions. Trump’s hostility is not as crazy as it sounds. If suppressing global warming is as hard
as I’ve argued, one likely response is a series of half measures that don’t much affect global
warming but do weaken economic growth. The politicians’ real aim is to brag that they have “done
something” when all they have really done is delude us. Trump would skip this stage.

My own preference is messier and subject to all the above shortcomings. I would gradually
impose a stiff fossil-fuel tax (producing not a 10 or 15 percent price increase but a doubling or
maybe a tripling of prices) to discourage fossil-fuel use and encourage new energy sources. In
addition, some of the tax revenue could reduce budget deficits and simplify income taxes. With
luck, a genuine breakthrough might occur: perhaps advances in electric batteries or storage. That
would make wind and solar power more practical.

There are risks. It can be argued that this sort of policy, aside from relying on unpopular energy
taxes, would represent a triumph of hope over experience. In the name of fighting global
warming, we might justify a host of energy boondoggles.

Combating global warming is a noble crusade, but it’s much harder than the rhetoric implies. If
we were serious about cutting greenhouse gases, we could adopt comprehensive wartime controls
that empower the government to mandate changes. Or we could accept a worldwide depression as
a way to quash job growth and greenhouse gases. Obviously, neither is in the cards.

Washingtonpost.com
Climate change is essentially irreversible, according to a sobering new
scientific study.
As carbon dioxide emissions continue to rise, the world will experience more and
more long-term environmental disruption. The damage will persist even when, and if,
emissions are brought under control, says study author Susan Solomon, who is
among the world's top climate scientists.

"We're used to thinking about pollution problems as things that we can fix," Solomon
says. "Smog, we just cut back and everything will be better later. Or haze, you know,
it'll go away pretty quickly."

That's the case for some of the gases that contribute to climate change, such as
methane and nitrous oxide. But as Solomon and colleagues suggest in a new study
published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, it is not true for the
most abundant greenhouse gas: carbon dioxide. Turning off the carbon dioxide
emissions won't stop global warming.
"People have imagined that if we stopped emitting carbon dioxide that the climate
would go back to normal in 100 years or 200 years. What we're showing here is that's
not right. It's essentially an irreversible change that will last for more than a thousand
years," Solomon says.

This is because the oceans are currently soaking up a lot of the planet's excess heat —
and a lot of the carbon dioxide put into the air. The carbon dioxide and heat will
eventually start coming out of the ocean. And that will take place for many hundreds
of years.

Solomon is a scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Her new study looked at the consequences of this long-term effect in terms of sea
level rise and drought.

If we continue with business as usual for even a few more decades, she says, those
emissions could be enough to create permanent dust-bowl conditions in the U.S.
Southwest and around the Mediterranean.

"The sea level rise is a much slower thing, so it will take a long time to happen, but we
will lock into it, based on the peak level of [carbon dioxide] we reach in this century,"
Solomon says.

The idea that changes will be irreversible has consequences for how we should deal
with climate change. The global thermostat can't be turned down quickly once it's
been turned up, so scientists say we need to proceed with more caution right now.

"These are all ... changes that are starting to happen in at least a minor way already,"
says Michael Oppenheimer of Princeton University. "So the question becomes, where
do we stop it, when does all of this become dangerous?"

The answer, he says, is sooner rather than later. Scientists have been trying to advise
politicians about finding an acceptable level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The
new study suggests that it's even more important to aim low. If we overshoot, the
damage can't be easily undone. Oppenheimer feels more urgency than ever to deal
with climate change, but he says that in the end, setting acceptable limits for carbon
dioxide is a judgment call.

"That's really a political decision because there's more at issue than just the science.
It's the issue of what the science says, plus what's feasible politically, plus what's
reasonable economically to do," Oppenheimer says.

But despite this grim prognosis, Solomon says this is not time to declare the problem
hopeless and give up.

"I guess if it's irreversible, to me it seems all the more reason you might want to do
something about it," she says. "Because committing to something that you can't back
out of seems to me like a step that you'd want to take even more carefully than
something you thought you could reverse."

Npr.org

Why we won't stop global

warming
Unless our short- and long-term interests align, it's
unlikely that we'll ever do anything about climate
change.
by Harvey Young
20 Jan 2013

If you've ever seen a person purchase a pack of cigarettes featuring an image

of a blackened, cancerous lung, then you probably understand that big
issues like global warming may never be solved. The cause of inaction: an
inability to stop future dangers for want of short-term pleasures. Pleasure
almost always trumps long-term self-interest.

It is difficult to contest the fact of rising temperatures and their volatile

effects. The oceans are a bit warmer. Polar ice is melting at a faster rate each
year. There's less snow on certain mountains. The evidence is everywhere.

Among those who recognise the realities of global warming and climate
volatility, some dismiss them as part of the Earth's natural temperature
cycle. As we've learned from school textbooks, science fiction novels, and
even children's television cartoons such as Dinosaur Train, our world used
to be a lot warmer. The extra heat then was and, perhaps, now is simply a
part of our planet's normal climate cycle. Call it the divine plan of Mother
Nature.

Others urge us to acknowledge that we are the cause or, at least, the
accelerants of the Earth's heating cycle. We pollute the air, the land, the seas
and then we shrug when asked to identify the causes of climate change. Just
hop on a plane to any major industrial city and you'll see that we're not
entirely without fault as you descend through a layer of rust-coloured smog.

There is not consensus, not even among environmentalists, on whether

global warming can be stopped. However, there is agreement that the levels
of pollutants released can be reduced and a widespread belief that the
resulting decrease could create climate stability.

We can lessen our future impact on the environment. Certainly, nations

need to agree to reduce the amount of pollutants that they emit. There's also
a role for each of us to play. Recycling, planting trees, reducing our energy
consumption, and carpooling are just a few of the available options.

Unfortunately, it is unlikely that the majority of us will apply ourselves to

this cause. Here's why.

Struggling for motivation

It is extraordinarily difficult to find the motivation to act now to prevent

something that possibly, maybe, just might occur 100, 250, or 1,000 years
from now. Although the effects of global warming can be felt today - an
increasing frequency of hurricanes, heat waves and droughts, the truly
spectacular consequences such as the rising of the oceans to the point that
they envelop islands or droughts that transform farmlands into permanent
deserts are unlikely to occur in this millennium. When the consequences of
global warming are so far beyond the horizon, there seems to be little
incentive to act.

Even efforts to try to encourage people to preserve the world for their
descendants, their children's children's children rarely succeed. Our sense
of time spans two generations back in the past and two generations forward
into the future. That's it. Most people cannot name a single great-
grandparent. Few parents can conceive of the possibility of their child
someday becoming a grandparent. It's our historical and future-looking
myopia that makes it pretty much impossible to for us to even imagine the
distant future.

Also, let's admit that some of the short-term effects of global warming can
be outright pleasant. In my hometown, Buffalo, New York, a city notorious
for blizzards and winter storms, last week the temperatures briefly climbed
high enough that residents could leave their coats at home for a few days.
The ability to play golf rather than shovel snow in January can make climate
volatility seem more like a gift than a curse.

It's human nature to struggle with temptation and to not always act in our
long-term best interest. It is self-evident that many of our personal health
problems and social ills - from obesity to random murders - could be
eliminated or drastically reduced if people could manage to resist that urge
to eat that extra slice of cheesecake or buy that assault weapon which was
meant to be deployed in war zones and not in movie theatres or classrooms.
Nevertheless, we indulge and bad things happen.

We, especially in the US, like big cars and we like to own more than one of
them. We, by the tens of thousands, go to racetracks and watch for hours as
cars circle the speedway. We go to arenas, also by the thousands, to see
Monster Jam events, cars and trucks outfitted with giant wheels crushing
normal size vehicles. This is not a critique. These events are a lot of fun...
but they also are an anathema to people who campaign against global
warming since they make entertainment out of excessive fuel consumption
and unnecessary carbon emissions.

In this increasingly fast paced world, we struggle to keep up and, for that
reason, we may not be inclined to slow down in order to sort and recycle.
How many times have we, in a rush, elected to throw everything in the trash
even when a recycling bin stood next to the rubbish container? How many
times have we requested plastic bags simply because they can make it easier
to unload the car quickly after an outing to the grocery store?

It's not that we're anti-environment. It's just that we think of ourselves as
being too busy to be actively in favour of it. Carpooling is a great idea - but it
often takes longer to travel to where you want to go. Planting a tree sounds
very environmentally friendly, but how many people do you know who have
actually planted a tree and, besides, who has the time to go tree planting?
We could give money to a service that will hire someone to plant a tree for
us somewhere in South America... but that sounds like a scam.

When interests align

As unlikely as it seems that people will apply themselves to this cause to

create climate stability, history tells us that people will work in their long-
term best interest when it aligns with their short-term self-interest. We can
see examples of this today.
Governments often motivate its citizens to act responsibly by threatening
them with fines. We buckle our seatbelts or wear helmets because those acts
are mandated by law. In some cities, local governments charge to collect
trash but not recycling - thus incentivising (or penalising) certain
behaviours.

A desire to be seen as trendy can motivate action on a large scale. Within

certain income brackets, a hybrid car, solar panels and LEED certified
homes are must-haves. It's environmentally friendly peer pressure. All the
cool people are doing it.

Local disasters - the devastation left in the wake of increasingly frequent

hurricanes, respiratory problems caused by the combination of high heat
and smog, the pollution of well water - help people to see that some of those
long-term effects are happing nearby and right now and that they need to be
challenged and corrected.

It may be difficult to imagine the world in which your children's children's

children might live but it's pretty obvious that there's a problem when you
(and your child) can't go outside because of poor air quality and can't swim
in the local lake or river because of elevated bacteria levels.

Rather than appealing to a person's good nature and sense of moral

responsibility, the campaign to slow down global warming and bring about
climate stability might be better served to appeal to their baser instincts. If a
person can be convinced that acting in the long-term interests of others will
immediately improve their lot, then they probably will do so.

Harvey Young is an Associate Professor at Northwestern

University and a Fellow at the Charles Warren Center for
Studies in American History at Harvard University. A cultural
historian, he is the author of Embodying Black Experience:
Stillness, Critical Memory and the Black Body.

aljazeera.com

The idea that Global Warming is a natural cycle is well understood from paleo data covering the past 1 million

years. Is there a difference between current climate, and the natural cycle? For the past million years the natural

climate has oscillated between warm periods and ice ages. This shifting in and out of warm periods and ice ages

is correlated strongly with Milankovitch cycles. In order to understand the difference between natural cycle and

human-caused/influenced global warming, one needs to consider changes in radiative forcing and how this

affects systems on Earth such as the atmosphere, vegetation, ice and snow, ocean chemistry and ocean heat

content overturn cycles and related effects. The current radiative forcing levels are clearly outside of the natural
cycle range.
Is global warming a natural cycle? Or is global warming affected by human influence? What does the
science say? Both are true. In the natural cycle, the world can warm, and cool, without any human
interference. For the past million years this has occurred over and over again at approximately
100,000 year intervals. About 80-90,000 years of ice age with about 10-20,000 years of warm period,
give or take some thousands of years.

The difference is that in the natural cycle CO2 lags behind the warming because it is mainly due to
the Milankovitch cycles. Now CO2 is leading the warming. Current warming is clearly not natural cycle.

Where are we currently in the natural cycle (Milankovitch cycle)? The warmest point of the last cycle
was around 10,000 years ago, at the peak of the Holocene. Since then, there has been an overall
cooling trend, consistent with a continuation of the natural cycle, and this cooling would continue for
thousands of years into the future if all else remained the same. But since 1750 however, the
CO2 content of the atmosphere has deviated from the natural cycle. Instead of decreasing, it has
increased because of the fossil-fuel burning. Methane and nitrous oxide have also increased
unnaturally because of agricultural practices and other factors. The world has also warmed
unnaturally. We are now deviating from the natural cycle.

The natural cycle is understood by examining the paleo records. The fact that the earth goes in and
out of ice ages distinctly outlines the natural cycles of Earth's climate. This occurs about every
100,000 years. We are currently in a warm period. Generally, Earth spends about 80-90,000 years in
an ice age and around 10-20,000 years (or so) in a warm period.

The Holocene temperatures peaked around 8,000 years ago. This temperature peak was associated
with the perihelion phase of the Milankovitch cycles. That was when it is estimated that the natural
cycle climate forcing was at maximum, including associated climate feedbacks. Since then the forcing
levels have been slowly dropping and the temperature has been following the slope of forcing in line
with the changes in the Milankovitch cycle forcing combined with system feedbacks.

Recent significant changes in climate forcing due to human cause factors have produced a net
positive forcing causing temperatures to rise. This is a departure from the natural cycle.

 Holocene Temperature Variations

 Holocene Temperature Variations Sources

The current global mean temperature (GMT) is above the temperature peak associated with the
forcing imposed on the climate system when we came out of the last ice age.

Source: http://www.globalwarmingart.com/wiki/Image:Holocene_Temperature_Variations_Rev_png