Showing posts with label local people's court. Show all posts
Showing posts with label local people's court. Show all posts

Tuesday, April 4, 2023

IPCC keeps downplaying the danger even as reality strikes

Record hot sea surface


The daily sea surface temperature (SST) between 60°South and 60°North was at a record high on April 2, 2023, i.e. the highest temperature in the NOAA record that started in 1981, as illustrated by the above image. The black line shows this year's SST, up to April 2, 2023. The orange line shows last year's SST, i.e. 2022. The thicker grey line shows SST in the year 2020, when annual temperatures on land and ocean reached a record high, since 2020 was an El Niño year. 

This record high sea surface temperature comes as we're moving into a new El Niño, as illustrated by the image on the right, adapted from NOAA.

There are further reasons why this uptick doesn't come unexpected. The emerging El Niño looks set to coincide with high sunspots, while the 2022 Tonga submarine volcano eruption did add a huge amount of water vapor to the atmosphere, as discussed in an earlier post. 

Greenhouse gas concentrations keep rising

Reducing emissions is the right thing to do, even though it comes with loss of the aerosol masking effect that causes a rise in temperatures, as discussed in an earlier post. Moreover, greenhouse gas levels aren't falling.

Global monthly nitrous oxide rose to 336.33 ppb in December 2022, as illustrated by the image on the right. A recent study found that atmospheric abundances and emissions of five CFCs (CFC-13, CFC-112a, CFC-113a, CFC-114a and CFC-115) increased between 2010 and 2020.

Carbon dioxide (CO₂) broke three records recently at Mauna Loa, Hawaii, as illustrated by the image on the right. 

The daily mean (green points) rose to 423.23 ppm (parts per million) on April 12, 2023, a record high in the NOAA record for in situ measurements. The weekly mean CO₂ (red lines) was 422.54 ppm in the week that started April 2, 2023, and the monthly mean CO₂ (blue lines) was 421.00 ppm in March 2023.

Furthermore, CO₂ was as high as about 424.5 ppm in a flask measurement at Mauna Loa, Hawaii recently, as illustrated by the image on the right.

Monthly methane recently rose to above 1950 ppb at Mauna Loa, Hawaii, as illustrated by the image on the right underneath.

Globally, methane rose to 1924.99 ppb in December 2022, the highest in the NOAA globally averaged marine surface monthly mean methane record that goes back to July 1983.

The image below has a polynomial trend added based on April 2018 to December 2022 NOAA global methane data and pointing at 1200 ppm CO₂e (carbon dioxide equivalent) getting crossed in 2027.

The Clouds Tipping Point, at 1200 ppm CO₂e, could be crossed and this on its own could result in a further rise of 8°C. This tipping point could be crossed as early as in 2027 due to forcing caused by the rise in methane alone. When further forcing is taken into account, this could happen even earlier than in 2027.


NOAA's 1924.99 ppb for the December 2022 global methane mean translates into 385 ppm CO₂e when using a 1-year GWP of 200 for methane.

So, adding this 385 ppm CO₂e to 424.5 ppm CO₂ would leave just 390.5 ppm CO₂e for further forcing, before the Clouds Tipping Point would get crossed, as the image on the right illustrates.

Methane at higher altitude can reach even higher levels than NOAA's global marine surface data. As the image further above shows, monthly methane recently rose to above 1950 ppb at Mauna Loa, Hawaii.

Further changes such as caused by sea ice loss and changes in aerosols can also speed up the temperature rise.

[ see the Extinction page ]
Vast amounts of ocean heat are headed to invade the Arctic. Last year, North Atlantic sea surface temperatures reached a record high of 24.9°C in early September. The continuing rise of ocean heat threatens to trigger massive loss of sea ice and eruptions of methane from the seafloor of the Arctic Ocean, as has been described many times before, such as in this post and in this post. 

All this is pushing up temperatures and will likely keep pushing up temperatures even further over the next few years. To say that the situation is dangerous is a vast understatement.

Politicians keep downplaying the danger

Meanwhile, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is reading the Synthesis Report of its 6th Assessment Report line by line, asking for approval from politicians who seek to downplay such dangers. "There are multiple, feasible and effective options to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to human-caused climate change, and they are available now" says the IPCC in an earlier news release with the title Urgent climate action can secure a liveable future for all.

The IPCC was created in 1988 by politicians and set up under the UNEP and WMO to provide politicians with the best-available scientific analysis on climate change. Yet, emissions have kept rising ever since, even accelerating, and the situation has continued to become ever more dire. 

Let's face it, the IPCC is an instrument used by politicians to keep downplaying the danger, even as reality strikes it in the face as to how dire the situation is. Politicians control the IPCC and politicians have proven to be prone to make deals in which they sell out climate action. Politicians have forfeited their chance to influence the process.

Climate action flowchart

In conclusion, politicians should be kept as much as possible out of the climate picture. We, the people, should support communities seeking effective climate action. Below is a flowchart showing how climate action can be achieved without politicians.

[ click on images to enlarge ]


Links

• Climate Reanalyzer - Daily sea surface temperatures
https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily

• NOAA - Climate Prediction Center - ENSO: Recent Evolution, Current Status and Predictions
https://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/lanina/enso_evolution-status-fcsts-web.pdf

• Sea surface temperature at record high

• Global increase of ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons from 2010 to 2020 - by Luke Western et al. 

• NOAA - greenhouse gases at Mauna Loa, Hawaii 

• NOAA - Recent Daily Average Mauna Loa CO2
https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/monthly.html

• NOAA - global methane 
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Wednesday, July 13, 2022

Human Extinction by 2025?

Most important metric

Kevin Trenberth et al. suggest in a recent article that Earth's energy imbalance, defined as the absorbed solar radiation minus the net outgoing longwave radiation, is arguably the most important metric related to climate change. Of the extra heat from Earth's energy imbalance, about 93% ends up in the ocean as increasing ocean heat content (see image below), 3% goes into melting ice, 4% goes into raising temperatures of land and melting permafrost, and less than 1% remains in the atmosphere. 


One could also argue that the most important metric related to climate change is the monthly mean surface temperatures on land, as illustrated by the image below that was created with a July 16, 2022 screenshot from NASA customized analysis plots and shows that the February 2016 (land only) anomaly from 1886-1915 was 2.94°C or 5.292°F. 


Land only anomalies are important. After all, most people live on land and humans will likely go extinct with a rise of 3°C above pre-industrial, as illustrated by the image below, from an analysis in earlier post.


Note that in the above plot, anomalies are measured versus 1886-1915, which isn't pre-industrial. The image raises questions as to what the temperature rise would look like when using a much earlier base, and how much temperatures could rise over the next few years.  

Potential for temperature rise on land

The image below shows land only surface temperature anomalies, similar to the above image but further adjusted by almost a degree to reflect a pre-industrial base, ocean air temperatures and higher polar anomalies, as discussed at the pre-industrial page.


The image features two trends. The blue trend is based on January 1880-June 2022 land only data and shows the potential for 3°C to be crossed on land and to drive humans into extinction by 2025. The green trend is based on January 2010-June 2022 land only data and shows the potential for 5°C to be crossed on land by 2026, which will likely drive most life on land into extinction. 

A temperature rise of 3°C would likely stop all activities by humans, including their emissions, yet temperatures could keep rising.

Could temperatures keep rising?

In the video below, Guy McPherson discusses Abrupt, Irreversible Climate Change to Cause Planetary Extinction.




Concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere constitute yet another important metric related to climate change. Carbon dioxide at Mauna Loa in June 2022 was 420.99 ppm, a joint record high with May 2022, as illustrated by the above image. Methane and nitrous oxide concentrations are also at record high since 1750, as illustrated by the image on the right, from an earlier post. 

Greenhouse gas concentrations this high are likely to keep adding ocean heat for some time, causing further melting of sea ice, etc.

All these metrics are important, including Earth's energy imbalance, concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and monthly land only surface temperature anomalies.

Greenhouse gases remain in the atmosphere for many years, so even if emissions by people's activities stop now, concentrations of greenhouse gases that have a long lifetime are unlikely to fall much over the next few years, while there would be additional emissions (such as carbon monoxide) from decomposing biomass, forest fires and waste fires globally that would also make it hard for concentrations of shorter-lived methane to fall, as also discussed here.

We're also moving into a new El Niño, as illustrated by the image on the right. The difference between the top of El Niño and the bottom of La Niña could be more than half a degree Celsius, as the NOAA image below shows. The upcoming El Niño may well coincide with a peak in sunspots in 2025, further pushing up temperatures, as also discussed in the post Cataclysmic Alignment, which also mentions a recent study that warns that the combined impact of aerosols and nitrogen fertilizers can contribute much more strongly than previously thought to the formation of cirrus clouds that contribute to global warming. 


The resulting heatwaves and fires could trigger massive blackouts and, as civilization grinds to a halt, this could cause much of the sulfate masking effect to fall away almost instantly, resulting in further acceleration of the temperature rise. 

All this looks set to contribute to keep temperatures rising for years to come, with the danger of increasing ocean temperatures to the point where there would be massive eruptions of seafloor methane that contribute to the clouds tipping point at 1200 ppm CO₂e to be crossed, which in itself would push up temperatures by a further 8°C and cause rapid extinction of most life on Earth, as this 2019 analysis and this and this more recent analyses warn.

[ from earlier post ]

The clouds tipping point could be crossed as a result of seafloor methane releases. There is potential for such releases, given the rising ocean heat and the vast amounts of methane present in vulnerable sediments at the seafloor of the Arctic Ocean, as discussed in posts such as this one. If methane concentrations would increase in line with the trend in the above mage, i.e. methane reaching 780 ppm CO₂e by 2028 using a 1-year GWP of 200, this plus a concentration of carbon dioxide of 420.99 ppm as in the image further above would suffice to cause the clouds tipping point to be crossed. When adding further forcers, this could happen even earlier.

[ click on images to enlarge ]
Altogether, the global temperature could rise by more than 18°C above pre-industrial within a few years, as also discussed at the Extinction page. Even the longer-term outlook doesn't look promising. A 2020 analysis by Jorgen Randers et al. points out that, even if all greenhouse gas emissions by people could stop immediately and even if the temperature anomaly could fall to 0.5°C above pre-industrial, greenhouse gas levels would start rising again after 2150 and keep rising for centuries to come, while, as discussed in an earlier post, a 2016 analysis by Ganapolski et al. suggests that even moderate anthropogenic cumulative carbon dioxide emissions would cause an absence of the snow and ice cover in the next Milankovitch cycle, so there would be no buffer at the next peak in insolation, and temperatures would continue to rise, making the absence of snow and ice a permanent loss for millennia to come.

Conclusion

In an earlier post, the following question was also discussed: Could temperatures keep rising? This post concludes that surface temperatures on land could rise strongly over the next few years and drive humans into extinction as early as in 2025. Temperatures could continue to rise afterwards and drive most life on Earth into extinction soon thereafter, making it the more important to do the right thing now and help avoid the worst from happening, through comprehensive and effective action as described in the Climate Plan.

Our duty to support local people's courts that administer local feebates 

The disregard for science and democracy by those in power has now become so apparent and appalling that we, the people, must agree that the best way forward is to institute Local People's Courts in which randomly-chosen residents administer local feebates, as a superior form of democracy and decision-making.

Elections do allow people to participate in decisions regarding their own lives and future, but elections only give people a single choice every few years between representatives who then take decisions of importance for them. While this can be regarded as a shallow form of democracy, it is now sufficiently clear that elections effectively remove people's participation in such decisions and deteriorate the outlook and future for people and the environment locally and globally.

Residents should participate in decisions regarding their own lives and environment by supporting Local People's Courts that administer local feebates, with fees added to the sales price of polluting products and to rates on degraded land, and with revenue of fees used to fund support for improvements, such as through rebates on cleaner products sold locally or rebates on local rates on improved land. Local People's Courts can best ensure that choices regarding percentages and eligibility of fees and rebates are science-based, while feebates leave the choice as to what to buy or sell to individuals.

[ image from earlier post ]


Links

• A perspective on climate change from Earth's energy imbalance - by Kevin Trenberth et al. 
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/2752-5295/ac6f74

• Another Record: Ocean Warming Continues through 2021 despite La Niña Conditions - by Lijing Cheng et al. 
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00376-022-1461-3

• Improved Quantification of the Rate of Ocean Warming - by Lijing Cheng et al. 
https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/clim/35/14/JCLI-D-21-0895.1.xml

• NASA - GISS Surface Temperature Analysis 


• An earth system model shows self-sustained thawing of permafrost even if all man-made GHG emissions stop in 2020 - by Jorgen Randers et al.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-75481-z

• Could temperatures keep rising?

• Critical insolation–CO2 relation for diagnosing past and future glacial inception - by Andrey Ganapolski et al. (2016)
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature16494

• NOAA - Trends in Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide - Mauna Loa, Hawaii 
https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/graph.html

• Will COP26 in Glasgow deliver?
• Impact of interannual and multidecadal trends on methane-climate feedbacks and sensitivity - by Chin-Hsien Cheng et al.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-31345-w

• NOAA - ENSO: Recent Evolution, Current Status and Predictions
https://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/lanina/enso_evolution-status-fcsts-web.pdf

• NOAA - Monthly Temperature Anomalies Versus El Niño

• Cataclysmic Alignment 
https://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2022/06/cataclysmic-alignment.html

• Sunspots
https://arctic-news.blogspot.com/p/sunspots.html

• Methane rise is accelerating
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