A plug: The Green Arcade is the first San Francisco bookshop to sell my new book, Runaway! Buy it from them, to encourage the others.

The shirt says "Rad", not "Bad"

Climate Wars is an exciting new book by Gwynne Dyer, journalist and author. Climate Wars describes potential military conflicts as climate change “heats up” issues of water sharing, food security, and border control for countries worldwide. The book also, though, offers a snapshot of the current understanding of climate change and our future in top military, government, and scientific circles worldwide. It’s not a pretty picture.

Stewart Brand, famous for the Whole Earth Catalog in the 1960s and 70s, is head of Global Business Network (GBN) and the Long Now Foundation. Dyer provides analysis and consulting for GBN. So Brand hosted Dyer’s Q&A and book signing at The Green Arcade, the famous green and sustainability bookshop on the central part of Market Street, southwest of the Civic Center.

Dyer dialed into climate change about 3 years ago because he started hearing about it as an issue through Pentagon contacts. The world’s militaries are pretty much over terrorism as a major threat and see climate change as their next big focus. In the short term, there will be loss of food production in the tropics and subtropics, where two thirds of the world’s population is.

Today, we live in a historically peaceful world, but that will change. Loss of food production will cause hunger, possibly famine, and lead to great floods of refugees. India has built a fence around Bangladesh to trap potential refugees inside. Turkey has taken advantage of the Iraq war to dam the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, using it to water Anatolia, not central Iraq. Dyer anticipates the US-Mexico border being closed, hard, in 10-15 years, and unrest around the world.

He sees loss of control of warming at the widely described 2C barrier (we are at 0.8C already, with a further 0.6C of warming inevitable as of today.) Dyer sees emissions as out of control, and unable to be cut enough to stay under the barrier. The world got surprisingly close to agreement at Copenhagen, but must act before climate impacts make international cooperation impossible. Geoengineering will be needed to keep warming below 2C while emissions are cut.

Dyer sees the military as humanists and broad thinkers when they hang up their uniforms. He speculates that military influence is helping sell governments on the importance of holding warming to 2C.

Brand tends to emphasize positive scenarios. On nuclear power, they disagree, Dyer against and Brand for it.

While Dyer is a smart guy, as a journalist and analyst he will tend not get too far ahead of his sources. So it’s impressive, and depressing, that current top-level opinion seems to agree on the need to stay below 2C of warming, the unlikelihood of doing so without geoengineering, and the imminent dangers of both global instability and runaway climate change.

In my next posts I’ll review Climate Wars, which is a surprisingly (and frighteningly) right-on analysis of where the environment and the world political situation are today, and are likely to be tomorrow.

PS Monday, June 28th at The Green Arcade is a signing for Just Enough: Lessons in Living Green from Traditional Japan. Sounds fascinating!

MITers and "roulette wheel" of temperature increases

Total warming of 10F means a very different world, one in which the natural world is decimated and feeding current and projected populations is impossible.

The report, which was the subject of stories earlier this year, has just been published in the prestigious Journal of Climate. If the report is correct, the survival of most people on Earth is at risk. A 10F warmer planet will support many billions fewer people, and with a transition period quite possibly marked by massive war and conflict. Any steps that save many lives are likely to be so draconian as to feel like wartime, even if implemented as benignly as possible.

The natural environment would become unrecognizable and sparse, with no time available for migrations and evolution to preserve anything resembling current diversity.

The projected increase is much higher than projected in a 2003 study by the same group, which projected roughly half the warming. (Even the 2003 MIT results were higher than those used in the IPCC 2007 reports and Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth.)

What’s changed is a better understanding of how much CO2 growing economies are likely to emit (backed up by big recent increases from India and China), more knowledge of how some 20th century warming was actually masked by volcanoes – demonstrating high temperature sensitivity to greenhouse gas emissions – and a lowered projection of the rate of heat transfer to the deep oceans.

The warming predicted by the report is also likely to be an underestimate. That’s because the report doesn’t take into account many likely feedbacks from climate change, such as increased emissions of CO2 and methane from melting permafrost in the north. These emissions would likely increase temperatures several degrees further, as unimaginable as that is.

How will the world know whether the MIT report is an outlier, or a new basis for planning in reacting to climate change? Confirmation will require additional work, and new publications, from others. Fortunately, the report comes out in plenty of time to be included in the upcoming 2014 IPCC report, which represents the agreed view of the world’s governments. (Not the world’s scientists, as commonly believed.)

Though strongly conservative, and usually containing underestimates of both current emissions and near-future changes, the IPCC report at least brings together a range of views. In the next report, the MIT results should either be sharply criticized, or substantially confirmed.

If one has to start making bets today, though, the MIT projections are hard to contradict. The report takes into account a wide range of historical data and predictions of current effects that have been tested against emerging realities in recent years. Most climate feedbacks are turning out to be more strongly positive and faster-acting than previously predicted.

For instance, the North Pole’s ice cap was recently predicted to disappear at the end of the century. Scientists have been stunned by its recent collapse, with its disappearance in summertime now projected for perhaps 2030, or earlier. While it’s easy to identify carbon sources, damage to carbon sinks, and interactions that might make things worse, there’s very little that’s obvious out there that would lessen warming – no new carbon sinks that seem to be on the verge of activation, for instance.

In upcoming posts, I’ll discuss the range of policy actions still available and how they might possibly slow – not stop – warming, and how communicators and others should treat this report.