I think that climate change is going to become a much bigger issue in the next few years, and that it will affect the economy, business, politics, and society much more than it has to date. In doing so, it will affect the mission of most nonprofits – and funding prospects for all nonprofits.

Why Al Gore Was Wrong

A few years ago, Al Gore came out with An Inconvenient Truth – a presentation, book, and movie about climate change. He said that we have to cut CO2 emissions to keep climate change within a limit of 2C (3.2F) of warming. If we didn’t, the world would go into “runaway climate change” – fast, out-of-control warming, melting of the polar ice caps, sea level rise, and extreme weather.

But Al Gore was wrong – and not because he was too pessimistic. He was too optimistic. I believe that future research will show that climate change was already runaway when Gore came out with his book, in 2006. And people around the world, starting in the US, have shown that they’re simply not ready to make the changes needed to cut CO2 emissions.

Today, the US has no major climate change legislation in place; no new, major treaties or agreements are even being considered; and CO2 emissions are accelerating upward.

The environment is showing the strain. The last decade was the warmest on record. Record-setting droughts have affected Australia, the American Southwest, Texas in particular, and the Southeast as well. Extreme weather – stronger hurricanes like Katrina, other storms, and flooding – are being recognized as effects of climate change.

What Happens Next

People haven’t really absorbed Al Gore’s message, especially in the US – where some Republican presidential candidates claim that climate change is a lie. President Obama didn’t make it a priority, even when Democrats controlled both the House and Senate.

This is too bad, because some people are starting to realize that Al Gore’s message wasn’t nearly strong enough.

Scientists are starting to project climate change in this century, with emissions not stopping anytime soon, and with the environment reacting. We’ll see much hotter temperatures, melting ice caps, burning forests, advancing deserts, and acidifying oceans.  Current projections from leading institutions – for instance, MIT and the Hadley Center in the UK – are for roughly seven to 10F of warming in this century(!).

Most scientists still believe that rapid action on emissions can cut warming. However, very importantly, those projections don’t include feedback from the environment. The models that scientists use just aren’t up to the job. With those feedbacks included, the chance of avoiding catastrophic warming is very low.

This news has hardly gotten any attention, possibly because it’s just too dire to absorb easily. However, the IPCC – the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – is preparing its next report, due in 2014. As this approaches, early drafts will get publicity. And people will begin to realize what’s happening.

What You Need to Do

To begin with, you need to have a few people in your organization who are up on the latest science about climate change. Or, you need to tap into outside experts who can advise you. Such people are hard to find – most of us, even experts, are still stuck in the comforting world of An Inconvenient Truth, not the severe changes that are already beginning to occur.

You also need to begin assessing the effects on your organization. The news about climate change will affect you well before the actual changes in the climate have much impact. That’s the topic of my next posting.

P.S. I’m asking that friends of mine send comments to me by email, if possible; if you’re new to this blog, please comment below!

The paper is only available to people with access to scientific journal articles. Fortunately, Hansen has provided a publicly accessible brief online.

Sadly, though, the brief is very hard to understand. It’s probably only comprehensible to those who have a scientific background and a good working knowledge of recent work in climate science, including Hansen’s own work.

A typical working journalist would tend to either not understand Hansen’s brief at all, or misunderstand the points Hansen is trying to make. Climate science skeptics and deniers could easily use the brief to make claims of their own, undermining Hansen’s work.

Hansen says that there are three main ways to understand climate change trends of today:

1. Observations of current trends based on past and current observations.
2. Comparisons of current and expected conditions to conditions earlier in the Earth’s history.
3. The use of complicated models that incorporate trend data and scientific theory to project climate change in the decades and centuries to come. These models can be used to estimate the impacts of different steps people take in the near future, such as higher or lower CO2 emissions.

A 2C increase in temperature meant big sea level rises

CO2 levels in the atmosphere have been quite steady since the end of the last Ice Age, 10,000 years ago. This is the period in which civilization developed. Our current state of civilization, marked by the Industrial Revolution, the emergence of CO2-spewing factories, then power plants, cars and airplanes, plus paving over lots of land, has seen CO2 levels rapidly  increase from a previous level around 280ppm to around 390ppm today. Emissions are steadily increasing, currently adding about 2ppm each year to the level of CO2 in the atmosphere.

At this rate – which shows no sign of slowing – we will double the overall CO2 in the atmosphere to double the pre-industrial level, about 560ppm, in this century. (If emissions keep accelerating, doubling could happen closer to mid-century.) Hansen states that this would result in an increase of about 3C – almost 5F – in average global temperatures. He further states that a smaller rise of 2C – about 3.2F – has been seen as an acceptable increase.

His paper holds that an 2C increase is “a prescription for disaster”. In earlier times, an increase of just 1-2C saw sea levels rise to about 15-25m (50-80 feet) higher than today. So, to prevent such a huge rise in sea levels, it’s necessary to hold emissions much lower; in other papers and statements, Hansen has stated that a drop in atmospheric CO2, to 35oppm, is needed to keep ice sheets from melting much further and causing large increases in sea level.

Hansen also points out a difference between fast and slow feedbacks in the climate system. Fast feedbacks are quick changes such as changes in clouds, which increase the effect of CO2 changes by trapping heat. Slow feedbacks are slower changes such as melting sea ice, which replace surface areas of white ice – which reflects sunlight away from Earth before much warming happens – with dark ocean water, which trap nearly all of the sunlight, absorbing its hear. So, as CO2 levels increase, some change will happen in a few years, but more change will come over the following decades.

Hansen doesn’t mention the way in which these feedbacks interact, nor can he say how fast all this might occur.

Unfortunately, even the points Hansen does make are stated in a confusing way. Also, much of the overall point Hansen is making relates to other papers that he’s co-authored in the past, as well as other work that he’s cited approvingly. So Hansen, in the brief, is implying more than he’s actually saying. And, sadly, the implications as well as the conclusions are all knotted together in a way that’s hard to understand.

Hansen fails to state his core conclusions clearly and leaves what he does say open to misinterpretation, whether accidental or deliberate. Unfortunately, his valuable work is not presented in a way that helps the cause of understanding, let alone acting on, current levels of climate change.

SPUR planner cites 5M sea level rise

Today I began researching news about runaway climate change on the Web – and the bad news is, there is no news.

A search on the term “runaway climate change” for the last 24 hours, using Google News, yielded no results. None. Zip. Nada.

This is sad. Runaway climate change means that human-generated warming has set off new processes in nature. These processes, if the “runaway” assertion is true, have their own momentum. Warming from these processes will continue, whether human-generated warming continues or not.  The Earth will warm by at least several more degrees, with huge consequences for humanity, no matter what. (Slowing or stopping human-generated warming would still slow warming in the coming years, greatly easing sustainability crises, and perhaps limiting the ultimate extent of warming that occurs.)

The question as to whether this is happening or not is of huge importance to humanity. I liken it to finding out that a swarm of meteors is heading straight toward Earth. Finding out just which meteors would hit, or miss, the planet, when they would hit, and what damage they would do, would be the most important task imaginable. Climate change is like that meteor shower; finding out whether it’s runaway – and, if so, the details – is the most important question we face.

So no news is not good news.

Checking the sources in the blogroll next to this post, I did find some relevant news – just not from the last 24 hours, and not dealing with runaway climate change directly. Highlights:

• China carbon emissions could peak by 2025-2030. Projections are that China may have outfitted most of its people with “first world” basics like cars, refrigerators, air conditioning and larger homes in 15 to 20 years, and green power’s growth will start to cut into the use of fossil fuels, according to US researchers. At this time, emissions might be about double current US emissions – a huge addition to current global emissions, but less than the four-fold increase that population comparisons alone might indicate. India is also due to add its own emissions, of perhaps roughly the same magnitude as China’s, as it develops economically. However, any lessening in future emissions projections is a welcome contribution.
• A group of scientists critical of mainstream climate change projections, backed by the Koch brothers, did their own study – and ended up agreeing with the mainstream results. This eliminates a major support for climate change skepticism.
• The US will only act on climate change when some kind of disaster occurs, says Harvard economist Robert Stavins. While I happen to agree that this is likely, any such statement can only be speculation, until the US does in fact wake up.
• Leading climate change blog Climate Progress points out that tornado forecasting saved many lives this week – but that the budgets that fund this work are being cut. I see this as a small parallel to the need to energetically investigate runaway climate change so as to save many, many lives using the results.
• Gabriel Metcalf of the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR) wants lower planning requirements for planning in SF development – but also points out that a 5-meter increase in sea levels is on the way, and we haven’t started plans for protecting some places and “withdrawing from the places we don’t armor”.  I would only add that we don’t know that it will stop at 5 meters, without sorely needed research.

NCAR 2030-2039 drought projection

During the Cold War, one of the leading ideas and acronyms was MAD: Mutually Assured Destruction. The idea was for both sides (the US and the then-USSR) to have so many nukes that it would be, well, MAD for either side to start anything serious. A nuclear exchange would utterly destroy both sides.

Today, we have a MAD-type situation with carbon emissions. The major polluters – the US and China in the first rank – are each emitting enough CO2 to put us beyond the “safe” limit of +2C of total warming. (We’ve already had +0.8C, and are starting to suffer serious consequences, with at least +0.6C in the pipeline if emissions stopped tomorrow.) Europe and European Russia, together, make up a third major player that roughly equals the US and China in CO2 emissions.

Now, let’s play a MAD-type game: In a full-on, unrestricted exchange of CO2 emissions, as we are currently seeing, who suffers least?

For reference, I’ll introduce a chart from the US National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR): as the name implies, the leading, non-partisan center of its type. They’ve used current projections of CO2 emissions to project drought severity throughout this century. (I’d argue that the CO2 projections are low, and they don’t include the impact of possible feedbacks from northern permafrost melting and so on.) For more on this series of charts, visit here.

Here’s a quick summary of projected conditions in the three major polluting regions in the 2030s:

• US: Severe drought (Palmer -3 or greater, pink to red to purple) over much of the US. Mexico faces severe drought everywhere. Canada, though, sees increased precipitation in the north.
• China: Severe drought in major agricultural regions in south and east; increased precipitation in northeast and parts of west.
• Europe: Severe drought throughout Spain, Italy, and Greece as well as Turkey; increased precipitation in Northern Europe and most of Russia (European and Asian).

The US, China, and southern Europe all face severe drought problems in the 2030s. For perspective, the US Dust Bowl of the 1930s, which was hugely disruptive, averaged a -3 on the Palmer Scale. Only Canada and Russia have overall increases in precipitation that could maintain or even possibly increase agricultural production. (Barring the effects of unstable weather and the potential for political disruption and war.)

NCAR’s projections have not yet been converted into projections of agricultural production. However, a quick look at the chart argues for the following coping options for each country:

• US: Go north. The US will face severe immigration pressure from Mexico, to the south, and needs to help increase agricultural production in its own north and in Canada. The US needs to lock up agricultural projection from Canada, which could be accomplished by some combination of spending money and applying military pressure.
• Europe: No good answer. The rich agricultural areas in southern and central Europe will be severely impacted, while the smaller areas of land in the north will gain some precipitation. (The mapping style of the NCAR maps greatly exaggerates the land area of far northern regions.) Russia will gain precipitation, but militarily can overpower Europe. So Europe may be dependent on Russia for food tomorrow in the same way it is for natural gas today.
• China: No good answer. The country is hit almost as hard as the US by drought, but with many more people to support. Going north into Siberia is not an option – nuclear-armed Russia is already resisting immigration and investment into Siberia from China. (I saw a surprising influx of Chinese nationals in Siberia on a visit a few years ago.)

So, ironically, the US – which owns the lion’s share of historic CO2 emissions – seems to have the best options for coping with severe impacts from global warming up to the 2030s. Russia, with emissions at the same per capita level as the US, could benefit greatly from food sales. Europe – at half the US’ emissions levels – and China, still below even Europe in per capita emissions, look to suffer most.

The bottom line is that the US “wins” the MAD race. With better options than other major emitters, from a national power point of view, the US could come out “ahead” by suffering somewhat less. It won’t be much fun to be an American through the rest of this century – but it may be even less fun to be a citizen almost anywhere else.

There is a kind of climate change, though, that would be far more immediate in its impact. Abrupt climate change (Wikipedia entry here) is a sudden increase of anywhere from 2C to, perhaps, 10C of warming – that’s 3F to 16F – in about one to three years. Even at the low end, abrupt climate change would disrupt rainfall and change temperatures so much that getting the harvest in at today’s levels would be impossible, and widespread starvation would be almost impossible to avoid. Wars and more or less widespread breakdowns of order would probably ensue. At the higher end of the scale, the impact would be many times worse.

Unfortunately, ice core records seem to show abrupt climate changes of about 4C to 10C occurring about 11,000 and 22,000 years ago. The reason for the warming is disputed, and may have to do with the sudden release into the environment of CO2 and methane that had previously stored in permafrost. The idea is that gradual warming caused this stored carbon to quickly erupt in a kind of chain reaction of warming that was local at first, quickly becoming global.

We have a potential “time bomb” of this type today in the yedoma, a region of permafrost that has huge amounts of carbon stored in it, and that may not be as “perma” as we hope . Another candidate is a sudden “burp” of carbon stored deep in seawater. or of methane clathrates that are currently frozen under frigid waters.

We know that the previous abrupt climate change events occurred even without the human-caused pressure of greenhouse gas emissions that’s the main cause of the warming we’re seeing today. So, with rapid warming already underway, abrupt climate change now should be urgently studied. This research would probably tell us a lot about today’s ongoing climate change, and the odds that it might be runaway – even if not actually abrupt – as well.

Abrupt climate change, though, is what’s called a HILF – a high-impact, low-frequency event, also called a “black swan“. The 9/11 terrorist attacks of 2001 were a HILF, as was the 2008 financial crisis. HILFs, almost by definition, tend not to get much attention until they actually occur.

With even the most seemingly clear conclusions of climate science being disputed, though – at least in the US – it seems highly unlikely that the study and preparations that would do so much to help will be undertaken until after it’s too late.

It occurs to me that it’s hard to see how an American, at least, can maintain a skeptic’s position in the face of these plans. Mablus, a former governor, stated these plans as unexceptional. They’re reviewed, and must be approved, by congressmen and senators of both parties. If any of them believe that climate change is not real, they are seriously derelict in approving Navy budgets of many tens of billions of dollar that are based on such considerations – and in not making these actions by the Navy a campaign issue.

The alternative explanation is that all these representatives believe what the Pentagon is telling them about climate change impacts, and their public skepticism or denial of it is simply pandering to voter segments whom they actually believe to be ignorant, and aggressively so. (Which is why the pandering is necessary.)

For myself, I find the realism (in supporting the budgets) reassuring, but the lack of public courage dismaying.

I also note that former skeptics in the UK are starting to come around. I’m hopeful that the same will begin to happen in the US in the next few years as well.

If you’re a skeptic, how do you square the rest of your political positions with the Navy’s planning? If not, try this on your skeptic friends; I’d love to hear any coherent responses.

(Full disclosure: I see the world as made up of a small number of my allies who correctly understand the situation now, and a large number of future allies who will understand it in time, and will then do all they can to help. To me, the only really evil action here is actively undermining the advancement and dissemination of scientific work in this area – a level to which, as with the tobacco wars, many who have economic interests in fossil fuel use etc. have already stooped.)

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.

Let’s see – this is the only large representative, rather than parliamentary, democracy; and, it’s the greatest country in the world. Coincidence?

The Dems were brave today. Whether they were also smart remains to be seen. But if you note the vociferous defence of every last dime of Medicare and Medicaid spending by Republicans (!) just lately, you have to guess they were smart indeed.

Originally posted as a comment
by floydsm8
on The Atlantic using DISQUS.

The theme was the Evolution of Eco-Activism, “Following the compelling shift from conservation to environmentalism to environmental/social justice over the last half-century”, with Jerry Mander (International Forum on Globalization), Karen Pickett (Bay Area Coalition for Headwaters), and Carla Pérez (Movement Generation).

Chris showed an evocative new 10-minute film, then there was a valuable panel talk. Jerry Mander said that things have gone so far that we need systemic changes and worldview changes, but that localization and sufficiency will be crucial. Karen Pickett talked about the Headwaters campaign and the importance of direct action.

Carla Perez then answered a question of mine from the floor about where are the opportunities for near-term progress. She gave a very Transition-friendly answer – Resiliency; work with your neighbors, not your Facebook friends spread all over; understand that economy is local first. Her group, Movement Generation, refers to it as translocal solutions. Carla went on to say that the upcoming crises will see many lives lost – and an amazing outpouring of creativity.