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True grimness of IPCC’s report still misunderstood

Climate News Links on April 18, 2022

Most media concluded that emissions could go on rising until 2025 and the world could still stay under 1.5C. A potentially lethal error.

by Matt McGrath, 16/03/2022 in BBC News

Climate change: Key UN finding widely misinterpreted: A key finding in the latest IPCC climate report has been widely misinterpreted, according to scientists involved in the study:

A major challenge in communicating complex messages about climate change is that the more simplified media reports of these events often have more influence than the science itself.
This worries observers who argue that giving countries the impression that emissions can continue to grow until 2025 would be a disaster for the world.
“We definitely don’t have the luxury of letting emissions grow for yet another three years,” said Kaisa Kosonen from Greenpeace.
“We have eight years to nearly halve global emissions. That’s an enormous task, but still doable, as the IPCC has just reminded us – but if people now start chasing emissions peak by 2025 as some kind of benchmark, we don’t have a chance.”
Read the complete article….

Editor’s note: Based on my rigorous evaluation of the IPCC’s scientific methodology and writing processes, even the corrected understanding of the IPCC report STILL UNDERSTATES the likelihood of the risk from, and the magnitude of consequences of failures or even delays in stopping the progress of global warming. In reality, the report says it is already too late to avoid global average temperatures rising more than 1.5 °C. By reaching net zero in 2030 AND extracting and sequestering most of the excess CO₂ already in the atmosphere we might be able to bring temperatures back down to 1.5 °C or less. Continuing with business as usual keeps us on the road to runaway warming to Earth’s Hothouse Hell and social collapse leading towards global mass extinction of humans and most other large and complex organisms on the planet.

Featured Image: A dried out reservoir in Chile where drought has forced the government to take emergency measures. / Getty Images / from the article.

Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.

Global warming report for March 2022 shows rise

Climate News Links on April 17, 2022

James Hansen’s March 2022 global average temperature still trending up (close to all-time record for the month) when temps normally drop

By Hansen et al., 15/04/2022 from Climate Science, Awareness and Solutions, Columbia Univ,

March Temperature Update & Butterfly Report

March was notably warm (Fig. 1), more than 1.3°C warmer than the average March in 1880-1920, despite continued La Nina cooling of the Pacific. Because of the present planetary energy imbalance – discussed in prior posts – we expect 2022 to be substantially warmer than 2021. [my emphasis] The imbalance is due to surging growth rates of GHGs (greenhouse gases), solar irradiance rising from its recent minimum, and perhaps the aerosol forcing becoming less negative, although the latter remains speculative given the absence of measurements of the global aerosol forcing.
The imbalance – excess energy coming in – is not enough to push the 2022 annual temperature above the 2020 record, but it will soon do that. Meanwhile, models forecasting the tropics favor continuation of the La Nina this summer, which favors strong tropical storms.
Read the complete article….

Editors note: Hansen’s Climate Science, Awareness and Solutions Lab in the Earth Institute at Columbia University is an excellent source of graphics summarizing the current state of global warming and the climate emergency

Featured Image: Fig. 1. Monthly global surface temperature anomaly (°C) relative to 1880-1920 mean. / From the article.

Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.

Famine is a likely result if global warming not stopped

Climate News Links on April 16, 2022

Genetically restricted cultivars of major food crops likely to be early casualties of extreme temps and weather as world continues warming

Top: Cavendish banana plants infected with Panama 4 in the Philippines where the fungus has destroyed tens of thousands of acres of plantations. Below: on the left is the Cavendish plant root infected with the pathogen Panama 4, on the right is a healthy root. Photographs: Fernando Garcia-Bastidas / from the article

by Nina Lakhani, et al., 14/04/2022 in The Guardian

Our food system isn’t ready for the climate crisis: The world’s farms produce only a handful of varieties of bananas, avocados, coffee and other foods – leaving them more vulnerable to the climate breakdown

The climate breakdown is already threatening many of our favorite foods. In Asia, rice fields are being flooded with saltwater; cyclones have wiped out vanilla crops in Madagascar; in Central America higher temperatures ripen coffee too quickly; drought in sub–Saharan Africa is withering chickpea crops; and rising ocean acidity is killing oysters and scallops in American waters.
All our food systems – agriculture, forestry, fisheries and aquaculture – are buckling under the stress of rising temperatures, wildfires, droughts, and floods.
Even in the best-case scenario, global heating is expected to make the earth less suitable for the crops that provide most of our calories. If no action is taken to curtail the climate crisis, crop losses will be devastating.
Read the complete article….

Featured Image: A corn crop blighted with Southern corn leaf blight and stalk rot (Bipolaris maydis), by J.C. Wells, North Carolina State University, Bugwood.org / licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 License. / via Forestry Images

Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.

As bad as it is, IPCC Report likely understates reality

Climate News Links on April 10, 2022

Saudi Arabia, India, China, (Australia) and a few other countries have sought to make changes that would weaken the final warnings.

Students protest in Toulouse, France, on 25 March, about government inaction on climate change. Photograph: Alain Pitton/NurPhoto/REX/Shutterstock / from the article.

by Fiona Harvey, 02/24/2022 in The Guardian

Dire warning on climate change ‘is being ignored’ amid war and economic turmoil: The third segment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report is being overshadowed, just like the previous one

…
Saudi Arabia, India, China and a few other countries have sought to make changes that would weaken the final warnings, the Observer understands. Some governments are anxious to avoid policy advice such as cutting subsidies to fossil fuels, even though these are widely espoused by leading authorities.This process of refinement – which has also been a complaint in the previous chapters of the IPCC assessment – is defended by some, as producing a document that all governments must “own”, as they have all had input. But many scientists are growing increasingly f
rustrated, as it produces a conservative and sometimes watered down document that many feel does not reflect the urgency and shocking nature of the threat.
Read the complete article….

Featured image: An earlier report streamed to a press conference at the Swiss Academy of Sciences in Bern last August. Photograph: Alessandro Della Valle/EPA / from the article.

Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.

IPCC: Summary of importance of 3 part AR6 Report

Climate News Links on April 10, 2022

Following up on my comprehensive post, The Guardian succinctly explains why the 3 parts of the complete AR6 need to be considered by everyone.

The latest report said that temperatures could rise by as much as 3C, a catastrophic level. Photograph: Mario Hoppmann/AFP/Getty Images / From the article

by Fiona Harvey, 05/04/2022 in the Guardian

Why are the three IPCC working group reports significant? Explainer: The IPCC has now published all parts of its landmark review of climate science.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), made up of the world’s leading climate scientists, has now published all three sections of its landmark comprehensive review of climate science.
…
Yet the picture could already be even worse than the IPCC has presented. The IPCC data took in research papers published from 2014 up to last year, but since then the world has experienced even more extreme weather. The IPCC reports are regarded as cautious and conservative by many scientists, and the summary for policymakers that sets out the key messages of each working group are subject to inputs from governments that some regard as watering down.
Read the complete article….

Featured Image: IPCC Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) – complete. From the IPCC Web site.

Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.

We ignore those who know most about land we occupy

Climate News Links on March 31, 2022

The world’s first nations people have been surviving since the ice ages on lands we occupy. We ignore their knowledge at our perils.

Calgardup Bushfire burning in Margaret River. DFES Incident Photographer Sean Blocksidge/AAP Image/ / from the Article.

by Janine Mohamed, et al., 29/03/2022 in The Conversation

Indigenous peoples across the globe are uniquely equipped to deal with the climate crisis – so why are we being left out of these conversations?

The urgency of tackling climate change is even greater for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, and other First Nation peoples across the globe. First Nations people will be disproportionately affected and are already experiencing existential threats from climate change.
The unfolding disaster in the Northern Rivers regions of New South Wales is no exception, with Aboriginal communities completely inundated or cut off from essential supplies.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have protected Country for millennia and have survived dramatic climatic shifts. We are intimately connected to Country, and our knowledge and cultural practices hold solutions to the climate crisis….
Read the complete article….

Castlemaine (Vic.) author Lynne Kelly explains how Aboriginal song lines and similar tools in other primary oral cultures accurately preserve and transmit survival knowledge down through hundreds of generations.

Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.

Last Horseman: warming & near-term mass extinction

Climate News Links on March 29, 2022

A 2016 article lays out where we were then compared to past extinctions. We are now closer to point of no return. Warming must be stopped!

Coral bleaching in March 2016. Rapid rises of greenhouse gases in the past have been linked to major extinctions in the oceans. XL Catlin Seaview Survey / via the article.

by Katrin Meissner & Kaitlin Alexander , 24/03/2024 in the Conversation

Mass extinctions and climate change: why the speed of rising greenhouse gases matters

[G]reenhouse gases are rising faster than at any time since the demise of dinosaurs, and possibly even earlier. According to research published in Nature Geoscience this week, carbon dioxide (CO₂) is being added to the atmosphere at least ten times faster than during a major warming event about 50 million years ago.
We have emitted almost 600 billion tonnes of carbon since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and atmospheric CO₂ concentrations are now increasing at a rate of 3 parts per million (ppm) per year.
With increasing CO₂ levels, temperatures and ocean acidification also rise, and it is an open question how ecosystems are going to cope under such rapid change.
Read the complete article….

Featured image: Moschorhinus kitchingi with Lystrosaurus. Basal Triassic of South Africa. Lystrosurus was one of the few large animals that survived the Permian-Triassic global mass extinction event anywhere on the planet. Source: Creator:Dmitry Bogdanov / Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts.

Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.

Following today’s Apocalyptic topic back to last year

Climate News Links on March 29, 2022

Considers the grim Apocalyptic Horsemen of too many people and too much consumption in a world approaching runaway global warming

by Corey J. A. Bradshaw, et al., 13/01/2021 in The Conversation

Worried about Earth’s future? Well, the outlook is worse than even scientists can grasp

Anyone with even a passing interest in the global environment knows all is not well. But just how bad is the situation? Our new paper shows the outlook for life on Earth is more dire than is generally understood.
The research published today reviews more than 150 studies to produce a stark summary of the state of the natural world. We outline the likely future trends in biodiversity decline, mass extinction, climate disruption and planetary toxification. We clarify the gravity of the human predicament and provide a timely snapshot of the crises that must be addressed now.
The problems, all tied to human consumption and population growth, will almost certainly worsen over coming decades. The damage will be felt for centuries and threatens the survival of all species, including our own.
Read the complete article….

The article here is based on the reserch paper, Underestimating the Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future by Bradsaw et al., 13/01/2021 in Frontiers in Conservation Science.

Featured image: Said to be the longest traffic jam in the world — in China (https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/worlds-worst-traffic-jam-drone-6594560): Source: unknown, but appearing in many places.

Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.

The EU’s satellite monitoring program is tracking the accelerating frequency and intensity of wildfires around the Mediterranean and elsewhere in the world

William P. Hall on February 5, 2022

by Adam Gristwood, 03/02/2022 – in EUMETSAT Science Blog
Southern Europe battles increases in major wildfires: As climate change drives longer heatwaves, experts say that strategies to prevent and suppress wildfires are increasingly important

Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.