As I suspected, a 2C safe warming is a dangerous delusion created by man-made agreements when it’s more likely that any more warming is unsustainable. Our planet’s environment is far too complicated and sensitive to think we can safely put any more greenhouse gases into it. We are not going to tinker our way out of Climate Change; we need a full-court press by all nations to address this crisis—and even our major climate studies are bursting with this truth.

Warming of 2C ‘substantially’ more harmful than 1.5C – draft UN report Latest version of major UN science report concludes the upper temperature goal of the Paris Agreement does not represent a climate safe zone A leaked draft of a major UN climate change report shows growing certainty that 2C, once shorthand for a ‘safe’ amount of planetary warming, would be a dangerous step for humanity. The authors make clear the difference between warming of 1.5C and 2C would be “substantial” and damaging to communities, economies and ecosystems across the world. In 2015, the Paris Agreement established twin goals to hold temperature rise from pre-industrial times “well below 2C” and strive for 1.5C. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has since been working to assess the difference between those targets, with a view to publishing a sweeping analysis of all available research in October this year. The report summary, which Climate Home News published on Wednesday, is a draft and subject to change. The IPCC said it would not comment on leaked reports. An earlier draft from January was also published by CHN. CHN has compared the January and June drafts. The new version builds a stronger case for governments to rapidly cut carbon pollution. It also strikes a marginally more optimistic tone on the attainability of the 1.5C target. (June 22, 2018) Climate Home News [more on Climate Change in our area]

I’m not a fan of using carbon budgets because they encourage the belief that we can burn any more fossil fuel, though I understand their power in negotiations and Climate Change communications. Carbon budgets seem to promise there’s still a while yet before we must get our act together, shift our economy around, and get on a sound, sustainable footing. This message may placate but also strips the ending the fossil fuel era of its urgency.

As scientists learn more about how sensitive our environment is to temperature changes, they keep noticing new phenomena. For example, Climate Change is turning the Arctic Sea into part of the Atlantic Ocean.

A huge stretch of the Arctic Ocean is rapidly turning into the Atlantic. That’s not a good sign Scientists studying one of the fastest-warming regions of the global ocean say changes in this region are so sudden and vast that in effect, it will soon be another limb of the Atlantic Ocean, rather than a characteristically icy Arctic sea. The northern Barents Sea, to the north of Scandinavia and east of the remote archipelago of Svalbard, has warmed extremely rapidly — by 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit just since the year 2000 — standing out even in the fastest-warming part of the globe, the Arctic. “We call it the Arctic warming hot spot,” said Sigrid Lind, a researcher at the Institute of Marine Research in Tromso, Norway. Now Lind and her colleagues have shown, based on temperature and salinity measurements taken on summer research cruises, that this warming is being accompanied by a stark change of character, as the Atlantic is in effect taking over the region and converting it into a very different entity. (June 26, 2018) The Washington Post {more on Climate Change in our area]

These climate changes, many of which hit home when extreme weather fueled by warming waters occur, should remind us that even when we have a known terminal disease, how that disease actually unfolds is of the most immediate interest to us. It is the daily symptoms of cancer, for example, that concern a patient just as much as the fear of the possible outcome. Humanity knows Climate Change is something ominous threating our existence and some of us are already experiencing it more than others—for now. Because we’re talking physics, everyone eventually cooks in a heated pot.

Although Climate Change is a moral and existential issue, it’s the changes along the way that will throw our future into turmoil—unless we act quickly to adapt and mitigate this disaster.

Thinking we can still put greenhouse gases into our climate system seems absurd.


Time passes.