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!

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.

Now a large “unknown unknown” has reared its very ugly head. The oceans of the world routinely release methane, from a variety of processes, as do the soils. A new paper, published today in the journal Science, reports that the East Siberian Arctic Ice Shelf, a 2 million square mile area of the Arctic Sea north of Siberia, is releasing as much methane as the rest of the world’s oceans combined. According to Dr. Natalia Shakhova, lead author of the paper, the release is about 7 teragams, or about 7 million tonnes, of methane annually.

Dr. Shakhova continues: “Our concern is that the subsea permafrost has been showing signs of destabilization already,” she said. “If it further destabilizes, the methane emissions may not be teragrams, it would be significantly larger.” The release of less than 1% of the methane trapped in this one area could lead to a tripling or more in the methane in the Earth’s atmosphere, strongly contributing to global warming.

Such a release would also cause heightened warming in its local region, accelerating methane releases from this shelf, and likely increasing permafrost degradation right across this very sensitive area. This would probably put the Earth’s climate firmly into runaway climate change, and might even cause abrupt climate change – a sudden temperature increase of several degrees Celsius in just a few years.

It’s worth reading the press release from the US National Science Federation (NSF) announcing the work. It calls the methane release “alarming”, and even mentions abrupt climate change as a possible outcome. Methane levels in “hotspots” are hundreds or a thousand times more than background levels, and the entire region has a “bubble” of elevated atmospheric methane. While theoretically possible, it’s hard to believe that these releases have been going on for a long time. This is just one of the determinations that urgently need to be made. However, the initial implications of this work are very bad.

Links (which have further links):

- The UN Environmental Program ice shelf map and NSF press release mentioned above.

- Climate Progress, which is usually on the optimistic side, has the best summary I’ve seen so far, with strong links, a video of the lead scientist on the issue speaking, and useful comments as well. (As much to capture the zeitgeist as for specific information.)

- The New York Times has a low-key article that summarizes, and somewhat downplays the results.

- Andy Revkin of the Times’ flawed Dot Earth blog emphasizes only the comments of scientists who call this a preliminary result.

* A half-humorous reference to the REM song, “It’s The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)“.