Creeping Towards Annhilation: The IPCC Report and Beyond
Richard Gale and Gary Null
Progressive Radio Network, October 15, 2018
Seven years ago, Guy McPherson, a University of Arizona professor emeritus in environmental science, shared his analysis and insights about global warming and its likely impact upon the planet’s future during the next 15 years. After taking a broad, systematic review of many atmospheric and geological factors now contributing to the warming of the planet, McPherson’s forecast gave humanity a very narrow window to get its act together and reduce its greenhouse gas emissions. He derived his conclusions from consistent trends that show successive scientific updates of earlier reports for Arctic ice melt, the loss of glacial sheets in Antarctica, Greenland and mountain glaciers, thawing of northern permafrost and methane release, and other tipping points become more dire. In addition, McPherson observed large discrepancies between the conservative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports and the actual observations and measurements of climate events. Last January, the IPCC had already stated that keeping below 1.5 degrees, the lower limit set by the Paris Agreement, was “extremely unlikely.” That earlier report placed 2040 as the threshold. Now this month the IPCC is predicting the earth will reach a 1.5 degree warming a decade earlier.[1]
McPherson was not exclusively concerned about global warming reaching 1.5 degrees C and beyond. The planet is currently hovering around a 0.9 degree increase. He also took into account other tipping points: the acidification of the oceans and growing dead zones, the bleaching and death of the Great Barrier Reef, global deforestation, degradation of land from factory farming and over-development, encroaching desertification in Africa, Australia, China, the Middle East and the Western US, extreme hurricanes and typhoons, and the acceleration of an ever-increasing number of identifable positive feedback loops. Global warming’s environmental evidence is clear. Droughts and heatwaves are longer, wildfires are more frequent, storms are more severe, deserts are expanding and modern civilization continues to push forward with its habitual business-as-usual speed. In the US alone, temperatures have reached 1.9 degrees hotter since 1970.[2]
Upon the conclusion of our own review of the scientific literature on climate and environmental change, we became convinced that McPherson was largely correct, although the threshold point of no return remains uncertain. Five years later, McPherson returned to be interviewed for our international audience. By then, he was not alone in addressing worst case scenarios. A small group of climate scientists with distinguished credentials were also concurring with various parts of McPherson’s hypothesis, including Peter Wadhams at Cambridge University, Paul Beckwith at the University of Ottawa, Henry Pollack at the University of Michigan, Jason Box in Denmark and others. Many scientists were already saying we have run out of time and it would be impossible to switch from fossil fuels to renewable, green energies in a timely manner. However, to McPherson’s dismay, the larger scientific community, although acknowledging anthropogenic climate change, denied the severity of the crisis according to his timeline. In addition, McPherson and others such as Russian permafrost expert Natalia Shakhova and Australian climatologist Andrew Glikson were being accused of fear-mongering. In the meantime, the year 2100 has remained the repetitive mantra as the threshold for predicting when catastrophic events would threaten humanity’s very existence.
The mainstream climate institutions’ contempt towards scientists willing to break their silence and speak their personal truths shows signs of a post-modern environmental McCarthyism. Michael Mann, director of at Penn State’s Earth Systems Science Center, tried to equate the adverse societal impact upon the public that McPherson and others who share his predictions have on the public with climate change denialists.[3] Mann is a very valuable public voice in the climate movement, however, his refusal to even consider the possibility of worst-case scenarios is unscientific and nothing more than institutional hubris. For McPherson, speaking openly about his assessment of the available climate research destroyed his career and he had to move overseas.
This past August, Prof. McPherson visited New York and joined us for a two hour interview. He now says we have about seven years before the tipping points of negative feedbacks enter hyperdrive and become irreversible. During our conversation, he said, “Look around you. Look at the world. See how many significant weather events have occurred during the past 12 months. California and British Columbia are repeatedly experiencing their worst wildfires. Colorado now has tsunami fires, perfect fire storms reaching 300 feet in height. These were never seen before.”
But for most of the world’s population, they do not have twelve years before feeling global warming’s impact on smaller crop yields, droughts, food and water shortages, and the rise of diseases associated with climate change. For millions of people, the IPCC forecast is happening right now. They haven’t time to wait for developing nations to pull their resources together and act. After Hurricane Maria slammed into Puerto Rico in 2017, a million citizens were displaced and over 300,000 fled to Florida. Hundreds of thousands of people are dying annually due to events directly contributed to climate change. After considering a study published in Nature Climate Change, 30 percent of land that is now home to 1.5 billion people may experience desert-like conditions. Reporting about the future migrations of a vast numbers of people directly due to climate change, Jeff Goodell, the award-winning environmental and energy editor for Rolling Stone, writes, “In the not so distant future, places like Phoenix and Tucson will become so hot that just walking across the street will be a life-threatening event. Parts of the upper Middle West will become a permanent dust bowl.”[4] An additional 13.1 million Americans living along the coasts will also be forced to migrate as ocean waters rise.[5] And it will be far worse in developing countries that sadly are not as responsible for the larger percentage of fossil fuel emissions.
Nevertheless, the IPCC report has reached a critical benchmark for the international community. It permits us to finally acknowledge and confirm that the pace of climate change is accelerating far more rapidly than we have been led to believe. For the first time, intergovernmental climatologists are having a “Jesus moment.” We do not have until 2100 to launch a massive planetary Marshall Plan to quickly revert to renewable energies; instead, we only have twelve years at best. That is now the official international word. Finally, viable solutions, which we have been writing and reporting about for a decade, such as a multinational reforestation initiative and switching to a plant-based diet, can be discussed honestly and respectfully.
Shortly after the release of the IPCC report, a senior engineer at MIT, Howard Herzog, reported that we cannot reverse climate change with “negative emissions technologies (NETs)” in response to the solutions presented in the IPCC report. NETs include biochar, CO2 capture and storage, direct air capture, geoengineering, ocean fertilization, and chemical alkalinity of the oceans. Herzog argues that the benefits of NETs, without immediately weening ourselves off of fossil fuels, “is more hope than reality.”[6] It will not be the development of new innovative technologies, which are extraordinarily costly, economically unfeasible on a mass scale, and would require enormous rapid deployment, that will reduce carbon emissions to meet the IPCC’s deadline. Instead, a new intellectual framework, a new paradigmatic mindset, is demanded.
Other critics of the IPCC report argue that the situation is far worse. Janie Henn from 350.org charges that it is “a watered down consensus version. The latest science is much, much, much more terrifying.” In short, the report is still dangling a carrott of imaginary timeline for governments to alter their course. The sharpest criticism came from Mario Molina, recipient of the Nobel Prize in chemistry for his research into the depletion of ozone. In his statement Molina writes that the IPCC ignores the fundamental risks for runnaway climate change: “the self-reinforcing feedback loops [that] could push the climate system into chaos before we have time to tame our energy system, and the other sources of climate pollution.”[7]
As severe climate events increase, scientists continue to discover further atmospheric and geological mechanisms contributing to rising temperatures and the warming effects from greenhouse gas emissions. There is still much to learn. The University of New South Wales, along with researchers from 17 other nations, published a study in Nature Geoscience in July 2018 warning that current long-term warming trends “could be twice as bad as climate models project.”[8] The study is more worrisome than the latest ICPP report, and predicts that a 2 degree rise is much nearer than expected. Only three times during the past 3.5 million years has the earth reached 2 degrees and higher.[9]
Already the Earth is warmer than it has been for the last 120,000 years. However, when these same models introduce greenhouse gases into their equations, they accurately correlate with the actual temperature trends being witnessed. Long-term, 90% of planetary warming is linked to the actions of our species. The remaining 10%, according to Konrad Steffen, director of the Swiss Polar Institute, is “unexplained.”[10] For several decades, scientists the world over have been running simulated climate models repeatedly to determine whether increased warming is anthropogenic, caused by human activity or part of a natural cycle. And repeatedly whenever human-generated greenhouse gases–CO2, methane, nitrous oxide, water vapor, dust, etc.– are removed from their equations, they are unable to account for the sudden rise in the Earth’s temperature as the result of natural phenomena alone.
As stated above, the IPCC’s timeline gives us 12 years beore 1.5 degrees is upon us. However, IPCC reports and forecasts have been criticized for a variety of reasons over the years. Foremost, climate models are based upon mathematical representations of estimated trends and not actual climate events. Climate models also need to be tested to determine their accuracy, and we don’t have decades to test them thoroughly. For example, IPCC projections for the net positive feedback of Arctic sea ice loss were grossly understated compared to the observed evidence. Every IPCC Arctic model since 1980 underrated the extent of the amount of ice loss that was actually measured. [11]
An analysis in Arctic News based upon estimates of the different greenhouse gas emissions since 1900, assuming nothing substantial changes to reduce emissions, suggests the global temperature could theoretically reach 10 degrees C by 2026.[12] Scientists still debate whether humanity could survive a 4 degree increase. A 10 degree increase is certain extinction. Yet as earlier as 2003, a tiny group of climate scientists were giving extremely pessimistic prognoses. That year, Cambridge University astrophysicist and philosopher Martin Rees released his influential Our Final Hour warning that the pace of humanity’s destructive activities presents a 50:50 chance for our civilization to survive past the end of the 21st century. At the time, the book was considered extreme. Today, Rees’ prediction might be regarded as exceedingly optimistic.
It is time that governments, corporations and citizens, and more crucially our entire species, accept the fact that climate change is the single most important threat to the survival of our species. Certainly, Trump’s build up of high tech weapons to threaten any nation that defies Washington’s devotion to national exceptionalism is a horrifying scenario. However it is within humanity’s means to avoid military and even nuclear confrontation. On the other hand it is highly improbable whether we can do very much to deter climate change. Natural forces are far beyond our technological know-how, including geoengineering and global-wide carbon sequestering, to control planetary forces. There is another fact for those who question climate change would do well to be reminded by. The Earth’s history is one of numerous species birthing, evolving and later going extinct. There is no manifest destiny for our species. There is no divine promise that humanity may not in the future follow in the footsteps of the dinosaurs. Our lives are not transcendent to Nature nor the multitude of other natural forces, animals, plants, microbes and other life forms and molecules upon which our existence depend. This is a simple truth we must learn. And it must be learned quickly and without further delay.
NOTES
1 Russell, Ruby. “1.5C degree goal ‘extremely unlikely’ – IPCC” DW. January 15, 2018 https://www.dw.com/en/15c-degree-goal-extremely-unlikely-ipcc/a-42154601
2 Richardson, John. “When the end of human civilization is your day job,” Esquire. July 20, 2018. https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a36228/ballad-of-the-sad-climatologists-0815/
3 Michael E. Mann, Susan Joy Hassol and Tom Toles. “Doomsday scenarios are as harmful as climate change denial,” Washington Post. July 12, 2017. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/doomsday-scenarios-are-as-harmful-as-climate-change-denial/2017/07/12/880ed002-6714-11e7-a1d7-9a32c91c6f40_story.html?utm_term=.cd60fee19117
4 Goodell, Jeff. “Welcome to the Age of Climate Migration,” Rolling Stone. February 25, 2018
5 University of Georgia. “Migration from sea-level rise could reshape cities inland,” Science Daily. April 17, 2017. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/04/170417115236.htm
6 Herzog, Howard. “Why We Can’t Reverse Climate Change With ‘Negative Emissions’ Technologies,” The Conversation. October 9, 2018. https://theconversation.com/why-we-cant-reverse-climate-change-with-negative-emissions-technologies-103504
7 Queally, John. “What’s Not in the Latest Terrifying IPCC Report? The “Much, Much, Much More Terrifying” New Research on Climate Tipping Points,” Commondreams. October 9, 2018 https://www.commondreams.org/news/2018/10/09/whats-not-latest-terrifying-ipcc-report-much-much-much-more-terrifying-new-research
8 Cox, Lisa. “Global temperature rises could be double those predicted by climate modelling,” The Guardian. July 5, 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jul/06/global-temperature-rises-could-be-double-those-predicted-by-climate-modelling
9 Radford, Tim. “Past warming shows 2°C brink may be close,” Climate News Network, 10 July, 2018. https://climatenewsnetwork.net/past-warming-shows-2c-brink-may-be-close/
10 Konrad Steffan. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNrLlgso3bs
11 “Sea Ice Prediction,” Skeptical Science. https://skepticalscience.com/graphics.php?g=35
12 “Warning of mass extinction of species, including humans, within one decade,” Arctic News. February 8, 2017. https://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2017/02/warning-of-mass-extinction-of-species-including-humans-within-one-decade.html
