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.