As has been widely reported (here and here) we have just past a symbolic milestone as the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has just reached 400 parts per million. This is definitely higher than at any time in the last 800,000 years, and probably higher than it has been for 15 million years. The first link from Climate Central makes the point that modern humans did not exist 800,000 years ago, while 15 million years is roughly twice the time since we split from the great apes. It’s not something to be particularly proud of, though I suppose at least we noticed it this time, as opposed to the passing of 300 ppm sometime during the early industrial revolution. The graph below shows the CO2 concentration over that shorter timeframe, with the periodic drops to below 200ppm showing ice ages, during which North America was covered in ice several kilometres thick. I find it difficult to believe that anyone looking at the graph in this context would not be horrified at the rate of recent increase and alarmed at what lies ahead.

US officials are being briefed (again) about the dangers of the rapidly disappearing arctic ice, though whether they will do anything serious about it is quite another matter, even though it seems to be driving a major unwelcome shift in the climate of their largest agricultural region. In response to the briefing a group of international climate scientists issued as blunt a warning as you are likely to see, stating:-

“The weather extremes from last year are causing real problems for farmers, not only in the UK, but in the US and many grain-producing countries. World food production can be expected to decline, with mass starvation inevitable. The price of food will rise inexorably, producing global unrest and making food security even more of an issue.”

A group at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research has analysed potential food production both now and in 2050, and shows that while only 16% of the world’s population currently live in countries that could not provide all the food needed to feed their populations, this was likely to rise to over 50% by 2050. Alarmingly this study only looked at land use, water and population and did not include any effects of climate change.

An interesting article in the Guardian discusses not only a recent paper which shows that while land, ice and air temperatures have not increased as quickly in the last 15 years as previously, the ocean, and especially the deep ocean temperature has increased more swiftly than before, and that the total warming continues to accelerate. This is probably due to the large number of La Nina events in this period, during which ocean currents tend to “bury” heat in the deep oceans. Another group showed that the slowdown can be accurately modelled. Given that these slowdowns come along reasonably often the article also shows an amusing graph detailing the different ways realists and “Skeptics” view global warming as a result, as shown below.

James Hansen has announced that this is retiring from NASA and focusing on communicating climate science. Looking back this man will be seen as a major catalyst in the change which is happening (just not fast enough). He has shown a steely determination to state the truth as he sees it, despite the harassment from vested interests in industry and government. An inspiration.

And we are changing. A Bloomberg study forecasts that 70% of new global generation capacity built between now and 2030 will be renewable, and the graph below (and this article) shows part of the reason; the price of solar electricity is dropping to “disruptive” levels, wind turbine prices have dropped 29% since 2008 and electric vehicle battery prices have dropped 40% since 2010. Wind is also going gangbusters accounting for more new generation capacity than gas, and a study showed that the utility servicing 13 states in the US could save $6.9 billion a year by doubling their planned wind power.

In Australia the Victorian department of health has dismissed suggestions that the noise from wind turbines is bad for health, stating that it was no worse than that from other rural environments.

However there is a long way to go. Industrialised nations emissions dropped a paltry 0.7% in 2011 mainly due to the US shift to gas and Europe’s economic slowdown. Europe at least is 18.5% under its 1990 level, and on track to fulfil its promised 20% cut by 2020. Worryingly China’s per capita emissions are now close to European levels.

And in definitely the best news I could find major pension funds are starting to pull their money out of fossil fuel projects.

It is well known that many of our traditional major industries, especially in the energy area, degrade the natural world without offering any compensation. For example fossil fuel pollution causes health and other risks to all people in the area, without paying for their mitigation or repair. However a new report has taken this to an interesting if very worrying extreme, by looking at the overall degradation of natural capital and trying to attach an annual cost to it. The report commissioned by the United Nations department of Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity suggests that we are destroying 7.3 trillion dollars per year or roughly 13% of the annual global economy (and that was 2009, so it’s probably worse now). That number is probably close to eating up any profit the system made that year, but the report, which is summarised at Thinkprogress, lists a number of large industries who would be completely unprofitable if they had to pay their full costs.

The report suggests that none of the top 20 regional industries would be profitable if their externalities were included. I found this quite frightening for two reasons; firstly that so much of our industry was affected (including farming and ranching) and secondly how unlikely this makes any serious response.

Staying on matters financial there has been a lot of media attention on another report called Unburnable Carbon 2013 which highlights the growing disconnect between the valuations of fossil fuels in the financial markets, and the promises by most governments to cap temperature rises at two degrees. Never mind the fact that we already have less than a 50-50 chance of capping warming at 2^o we are valuing fossil reserves as if we can burn them all when we must leave at least 60% of them in the ground to have any hope of staying under that level. This suggests that either there will be a massive write-down of the “carbon bubble” or that governments will ignore their 2^o promises. Being a somewhat cynical soul I know which I would put money on. However it has to be said that it is encouraging that the matter has been prominent in at least some major papers. Another article stresses the fact that many pensions and superannuation funds are heavy investors in these companies and suggests that we can all put a bit of pressure on them if we choose.

A recent report by the CSIRO and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory reviewed the changes in the water cycle which drives evaporation from the oceans and rainfall patterns. They determined that it increased by 4% between 1950 and 2000 and was driven by climate change, quoting “robust evidence of an intensified global water cycle at a rate of about 8% per degree of surface warming”. Given that projections for temperature increases this century are mainly upwards of 3 degrees (assuming business as usual) we can expect the intensity of rainfall and storms that we are already seeing to get considerably worse. We are seeing the results of 4-5% increases in the water cycle since 1950 and are facing 24% or more! The same Climate Commission report also states that these changed conditions are not going to revert to normal and its report author Professor Will Steffen states:-

“That tells us for the future that we would expect to see dry conditions more often, more droughts in the future and very importantly we don’t expect to see the previous pre-climate-change weather conditions come back… To a certain extent, for a long period of time the best we can hope for, at least in terms of our grandchildren, is to stabilise the planet and it will stabilise at a temperature which is probably 2 degrees or more above the pre-industrial… That means some changes in patterns will lock in probably for centuries.”

A report from the Center for American Progress has been reported on both sides of the Atlantic (for example here and here) and suggests that the changing climate, and specifically the changing water cycle have been a major stressor in the instability in the Middle east, including the “Arab Spring”. Drought and crop failure drove food prices sharply higher and left many in the region, who already spend much of their income on food in severe trouble. We are unfortunately likely to see this process repeated in the decades ahead, as populations increase and the climate instability limits the food supply.

Thinkprogress has a summary on a pair of reports to be published in the Journal of Climate show that global warming has been more intense in the Northern than the southern hemisphere (by almost half a degree Celsius) and that the difference is likely to grow. This is likely to move the tropical rain bands northwards, affecting India, the Amazon and Africa.

A new report shows that ice on the Antarctic Peninsula is melting more in summer than it has for at least the last thousand years. The region was coldest about 600 years ago, when 0.5% of the annual snowfall melted and refroze. The current figure is almost ten times as high, and most of the increase has happened since the mid-20^th century.

And the Arctic is not slowing down. Joe Romm has called it a “death spiral” and the figure below shows why, and he also publishes a video by Andy Lee Robinson which graphically shows the reduction in sea ice volume in only the last 30 odd years!

One of the old tropes about sustainable energy supplies is being questioned. It used to be considered a fact that a substantial element of baseload generation was a requirement for a workable electricity grid, and that none of the renewables would be likely to step up to the plate. This is starting to be gently undermined, firstly by the fact that Portugal has, for the last three months, supplied 70% of its total electricity usage from renewable sources. Only a couple of years ago such a suggestion would have been considered insane. Secondly a report by the University of New South Wales has analysed data from the Australian National Electricity Market (NEM), using actual hourly data on electricity demand, wind and solar power for 2010. They found that their ideal mix of currently available renewable sources could provide 100% of the demand that year with the same reliability as the current fossil fuelled grid. Their simulations concluded that (for Australia) the optimal mix should be 50-60% wind, 15-20% photovoltaic solar, 15-20% concentrated solar thermal with 15 hours of thermal storage and a small remainder supplied by existing hydro and gas turbines burning renewable gases or liquids. To me this suggests that Australia has no need to consider either nuclear or carbon sequestration, both of which are expensive and a long way off, and that any rational government should start by putting the screws on fossil fuels for local use by cutting the fossil fuel rebates and put all that money (and more) into renewables.

As I mentioned a few posts ago the whole subject of climate change has gone dark, and mainly ceased to be interesting in a newsworthy sense. However the scientists keep beavering away and mainly reporting that things are worse than we thought.

A recent report on permafrost shows that large amounts of methane would be released from the Siberian tundra when global temperatures reach 1.5 °C above pre-industrial. This is therefore virtually certain to happen as we have only (roughly) a 50-50 chance of keeping increases to 2°C. While the extra emissions will be significantly less than our own fossil fuel emissions they are another positive feedback that has been shown to be correct. Other major predicted feedbacks that have been shown to be true are the Arctic sea ice melting and exposing dark water (which increases the solar energy collected at high latitudes), and the prediction that the Amazon rainforest would turn from a carbon sink to a source as the heat drives a series of massive droughts and fires. Human deforestation doesn’t help of course but a major effect is that the trees make their own weather and as they die the lack of rain inhibits regrowth, leading to a downward spiral. NASA has recently reported that the situation there is worse than previously thought.

Another feedback that as far as I can see was not predicted is the increased growth of phytoplankton blooms in the Arctic as the ice thins, and allows more light into the water beneath. This is not likely to be very good for the ecosystem but may just sequester a bit of carbon, though it is unlikely to offset the albedo feedback which allows it to happen in the first place. It does show however that we are nowhere near understanding the climate system, and are acting like a problem gambler who takes more and more risks rather than stop and live within his means.

Another study shows that 80% of the recent spate of record hot temperatures would not have happened without human influence on the climate and predicts that things will get far worse, with heat records increasing 12 fold in the next 30 years. Note that this is considerably worse than 12 time more than at present as to qualify as a record in 30 years the temperature must be higher than any records set in the meantime.

Yet another study shows that the increasing extreme rainfall is also due to climate change, and predicts an increase of between 6% and 7.5% in rainfall intensity for every degree of global warming.

Ohio State University glaciologist Jason Box has calculated that we have already been responsible for an eventual 20m of sea level rise although it will probably take a couple of thousand years to get there. His point is that what we do now will decide whether the eventual rise is only 20 metres or whether it will be much higher.

Warnings from prominent folk continue to be voiced (and by and large ignored).

Nicholas Stern recently stated
“I got it wrong on climate change – it’s far, far worse” and “This is potentially so dangerous that we have to act strongly. Do we want to play Russian roulette with two bullets or one? These risks for many people are existential.”

World Bank President Jim Yong Kim says
“If There Is No Action Soon, The Future Will Become Bleak” and “we need to get serious fast”

IMF MD Christine Lagarde: “Unless We Take Action On Climate Change, Future Generations Will Be Roasted, Toasted, Fried And Grilled”

So I suppose it’s not surprising that more studies on geo-engineering are being published, given that we are more and more likely to have to resort to this sort of desperate action. The latest calculates that dumping truly massive amounts of silicate based olivine ground to a dust in the seas would not only allow more carbon dioxide to dissolve, but would also counteract the acidification that this causes. Of course this would have dramatic and unknown consequences on marine ecosystems.

Finally, as far as studies go, Greenpeace has commissioned a review of the most likely “Carbon Bombs” being those projects most likely to tip us over the edge. It makes depressing reading, but shows that northern China, Australia’s burgeoning coal export industry and fossil extraction in the Arctic and Canada and from unconventional gas worldwide are the major culprits.

Much as you may think this blog is a desert of unremitting gloom, I do try to end with an oasis of good news. This time, while the news is good, some of it points to more underlying bad news.

China is planning to introduce a Carbon Tax China’s actions in the last few years have been consistently commendable. Despite trying to improve the conditions of a massive population and the balancing act that this requires, they are addressing more than their share of the world’s problems. More shame on most of the “developed world” especially the US and Australia.

Researchers at Newcastle University may have found a more efficient way of capturing carbon dioxide from large static sites, using the sea urchin as an example. Urchins use a Nickel catalyst to help grow their calcium carbonate shells and spines. This is much more efficient than current methods and has the major advantage that the result is chalk which can be used as a building material and is much easier to dispose of than gaseous CO². Nickel is cheap and magnetic making recycling easier.

Cars (at least in Europe) keep getting more efficient much more quickly than the industry claimed was possible. Citroën’s new PureTech gasoline engines bring 15% more power and a 25% cut in fuel consumption, while if you want to get serious, Volkswagen has confirmed they will manufacture the XL1 diesel plug-in hybrid (albeit in very small numbers) which does 0.9 l/100 km (261 mpg US). The bad news in this last part is of course car manufacturers have for decades claimed no further gains could be made in their designs and squealed like stuck pigs every time any government has raised efficiency standards. This is a constant across industries and a clear demonstration that our capitalist economic system does not work as it is supposed to and as economists claim it does. The theory says that competition will inevitably drive manufacturers to constantly improve their products without the need for regulation. Obviously this does not happen in the real world until some exterior force is applied, either by Government or less often by a determined shift in public opinion. As corporations have grown larger (I would say beyond the point at which they can be controlled by government) they become less likely to react to either stimulus, and much more able to bully governments. A perfect example of this occurred here in Australia when the mining industry so frightened the Labor government that they rolled their leader and Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, and installed the current incumbent who promptly negotiated a modified mining tax which has recently been shown to have been completely gutted, and is unlikely to ever generate any significant income. Almost any aspect of US politics also demonstrates similar corporate influence and they are far from the only country to show the effect.

Unfortunately then, it seems to me that to fix our single largest existential problem (global warming) we need to dramatically modify our major trading methods. Neither, in truth is likely,

As I have repeated a number of times, I suspect that this will be (at least in the shorter term) the major effect of increasing global temperatures. James Hansen has shown that the extremes of heat, drought and rain are due to climate change; that extremes of heat have increased from affecting 0.1%-0.2% of the globe between 1951-1980 to 10% in the last 10 years, and they are obviously very likely to continue to worsen as global temperatures increase. So given that half a degree or so of warming has caused a 50 fold increase in extreme heat, I hate to think of what the projected 2-7 degrees of warming will do over the next 90 years. What is very clear is that we in Australia had better get used to these record breaking hot spells which are literally fanning the flames of bushfires in south east Australia. Given the large extent of forests and the deserts directly to the North West I would expect Victoria and southern NSW to be very vulnerable, but I would not have expected the devastation which was visited on Tasmania last week. The various fire authorities seem to have done a great job in hellish conditions, with no loss of life reported, though obviously hundreds of homes destroyed.

And it is having an effect, with worldwide polls on concern about climate change climbing again, albeit slowly, and at least the more liberal media giving the issue some coverage as in this piece from the Sydney Morning Herald trying to describe a 2100 with 6 degrees of warming. These are still outweighed by enough articles from the likes of Andrew Bolt to suspect that someone has their finger on one side of the scale.

And of course the usual suspects were out shortly after the fires. Warren Truss, the acting leader of the opposition (while Tony “climate change is crap” Abbot is volunteering at his local bush fire brigade), said it was “utterly simplistic” to link the heatwave and fires to climate change, and also that carbon dioxide emissions from bushfires over the past week would eclipse those from coal-fired power stations for decades. Fortunately he’s been quickly ridiculed and Philip Gibbons who is a Senior Lecturer at the Australian National University has debunked his second claim showing that emissions from the bushfires this year amount to only 2% of Australia’s annual emissions from coal fired power stations.

However the point is not a few pollies affected with foot in mouth disease, but the total lack of any meaningful response in the political sphere. Australia’s Carbon Tax, which Abbot has promised to dismantle if he gets elected this year, is totally inadequate when global emissions need to peak before 2020 to retain some slim chance of keeping warming under 2 degrees. Both sides of politics would rather ignore reality than the fossil fuel lobby. Most commentators from the scientific community seem torn; on the one hand they see that our chances are almost gone, while they feel they cannot be too negative or people will just give up completely. Ian Lowe’s article in the SMH last month is a case in point. He does however quote Professor Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, director of the Potsdam Institute, and former climate adviser to the German Chancellor and the EU “What is the difference between two degrees (of temperature increase) and four degrees? The difference … is human civilisation”.

Our emissions are currently rising just faster than the IPCC’ pessimistic projection which is expected to lead to warming of between 4.2 to 5 degrees. So that’s all right then. Back to worrying about whether I can afford a new iGadget.

I am afraid that these posts are becoming less and less frequent, as we settle in to this phase of our Climate journey, where increasing numbers of people support action on Climate, more and more traditional organisations like the World Bank and the IEA warn of the devastating effects, and we still insist that it mustn’t cost us anything. I will try and be more consistent than in the past few months, and report on significant events every month or two, but I no longer believe this issue will be solved at the political level (baring a major event). Given that the incredible weather the US has endured this year has had minimal effect it is clear that a “major event” will have to kill many thousands of people in a so called first world country to have any impact. We are, it seems, hard wired to assume the weather is random.

The latest and eighteenth “Conference of Parties” is meeting in Doha, which ironically has the world’s highest per capita carbon emissions of over 50 tons per person and is the place that plans to air condition every stadium for the planned soccer world cup. You may recall that this is the same place the World Trade Organisation spent much of the previous decade trying and failing to free up trade barriers that entrench the north/south rich/poor divide. So it’s a great way for our political leaders to signal that no significant change is expected.

This year has confirmed my fears that one of the major effects of climate change will be the weirding of the weather, as extreme heat, rain and drought become much more common. The US has been the poster child for this effect this year, with all of the above on prominent display. Munich Re reports that North America has seen the sharpest increase in natural disasters for the last 32 years with a nearly five-fold increase, and concludes that the growth is due to climate change as well as the larger number of people and infrastructure in venerable areas. The effect on agriculture is likely to be severe. Much of the weather seen is very consistent with predictions for a warmer globe, and the effects of the large blocking highs which seem to be exacerbated by the lack of Arctic sea ice appear to be very important. Note please that as well as reaching an all-time minimum this year Arctic sea ice extent has more than halved since satellite observations began (3.5 million sq km vs the 1979 to 88 average of 7.4). A recent study suggests that regional differences may be rather larger than previously thought, with some areas warming much more and other much less than the global mean. This is obviously not good news for some folk. I can’t help mentioning that there is a certain poetic justice in the way that the country most responsible for historical emissions and the one that has probably done the least to mitigate them is being so seriously affected.

RealClimate has an article on James Hansen et al’s clever paper which calculates a seasonal mean temperature and the standard deviation over a long period at multiple points and plot them as a departure from the mean you get the graph below, which clearly shows that not only is the mean increasing, but also that the extremes are becoming more extreme (shown by the width of the bell curves). They calculate that extremes with a standard deviation of over 3 (3 sigma +) were occurring over much less than 1% of the world’s area during the baseline (1951-1980) but are now occurring over more than 10%! They then say:-

“It follows that we can state, with a high degree of confidence, that extreme anomalies such as those in Texas and Oklahoma in 2011 and Moscow in 2010 were a consequence of global warming because their likelihood in the absence of global warming was exceedingly small.”

A number of traditionally conservative organisations (think the World Bank, the International Energy Agency, the American Economic Journal and others) are warning that our current emissions growth makes warming of 4 degrees likely this century, and that the minor warming so far is already costing the world economy trillions of dollars and 1.5% of its growth. It’s not going to be pretty.

Our mainstream media, now fully corporatized and monetized, is not helping. They report what sells, and what sells is stories of human love and hate, and not the destruction of our environmental support system. This despairing article is only a single example of world shaking events being trumped by trivial accounts of sex and violence. Unfortunately I don’t see that much will change here, though the traditional media is in rapid decline, and it is possible that as it dies aggregation engines such as Google News might start reporting on the most respected bloggers across a wide range of subjects. However I suspect it’s more likely that each demographic will be served by its own news service (the Fox News effect) which can present a view that suits the readers biases. It is certainly true that our liking for pictures and video means that YouTube videos of dancing cats and Hobbit themed aircraft safety instructions appear much more interesting than the many ways we are destroying our only available planetary environment. The old quote “Think of it as evolution in action” comes to mind, except for the fact that those who do get it are going to be as affected as those who don’t.

But it’s not all doom and gloom. China is making progress in decarbonising their economy, and many of their renewable energy companies are now world leaders. Suntech, the world’s largest PV manufacturer, has announced that its manufacturing costs will fall another 30% this year, on top of the 75% in the last 3 years. PV is becoming a mainstream cheap (from the householder’s perspective) energy source. It is now clear that, as climate hawks have been saying for years, that we can make the switch to renewables at reasonable cost with only the existing technologies. The main disappointment is in storage systems, where batteries have failed to keep up with the other technologies.

Two other stories are, I think, very important:-

An interesting combination of two groups, one strict environmentalists and the other much more commercial seems to have come up with a low energy way to grow high quality crops in the desert. Unsurprisingly the two groups have now fallen out, but the proof of concept called Sundrop Farms in South Australia is progressing much better than expected and construction of a full size 20 acre greenhouse is underway. Basically the technology uses sunlight and seawater. A solar trough heats seawater for desalination, for electricity generation, and to heat the greenhouses at night in cold weather. Evaporative or Desert coolers are used on a large scale, with sea water trickling over evaporative pads while air is blown through them, keeping the greenhouses cool and humid. The plants cannot be called organic in Australia as they are hydroponically grown, but they are pesticide free, as there are not many suitable pests in the desert and those that do make it in can be controlled naturally by farmed predator insects. Bees are also part of the system for pollination. All in all I came away with the feeling of a real potential breakthrough in vegetable production. If I had to look for weak points I would worry about how the nutrients are provided and whether pest control remains stable. Apparently there are plans to incorporate protein production. Definitely one to watch.

A longer term, but equally important development is the trend towards free online education. This is the Open University on steroids, where for example a Stanford University class in artificial intelligence CS221 was made available to anyone online. 200 enrolled on campus and 160,000 online from every country in the world except North Korea. 23,000 students graduated with all of the top 400 being online students. Much of the work happens in class forums where students ask and answer questions, with the hard ones being bubbled up to the lecturers. While it’s not possible to “prove” qualifications, a number of companies including Google are already creaming off the top students. Reputation based systems (similar to eBay seller feedback rating) look likely to minimise this problem. Udacity now has 33 partner universities and 1.8 million students and is attracting serious money. Given that this technique seems tailor made for the sort of engineering and technical skills we desperately need, and given the potential to engage keen and bright brains from all over the world in huge numbers this has the potential to revolutionise higher education.

So should we be pessimistic or optimistic? Neither. We should get off our collective backsides and try and minimise the damage that is and will definitely happen before it becomes “Evolution in Action “.

The recent hoopla surrounding Professor Richard Muller’s Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) research and his “conversion” have driven another nail in the coffin of deniers, dissentients or “sceptics” as far too many folk are still calling them. It’s well past time to start describing them more accurately as either paid for shills or poor deluded souls on the same level as those who believe that the Apollo moon landings were faked in some Hollywood studio.

The BEST review of temperature statistics was started by Richard Muller and team to review the concerns raised by sceptics and others that urban heat island effect, station quality, and the data selection bias had caused or exaggerated the warming trend shown in the other major temperature surveys. They were partly funded by the notorious Koch brothers, presumably in the hope that it would show that the warming was exaggerated. At the start of the study Anthony Watts, who popularized several of the issues addressed by the Berkeley Earth group study, stated:-

“I’m prepared to accept whatever result they produce, even if it proves my premise wrong. The method isn’t the madness that we’ve seen from NOAA, NCDC, GISS, and CRU. That lack of strings attached to funding, plus the broad mix of people involved especially those who have previous experience in handling large data sets gives me greater confidence in the result being closer to a bona fide ground truth than anything we’ve seen yet.”

The studies have now been completed and five papers submitted for publication, and Richard Muller who described himself as a climate sceptic, announced the full findings recently. The study shows slightly greater warming than the IPCC and other major surveys, 1.5 ^o C over the last 250 years, and 0.8^o C in the last 50 years. He says:-

“Call me a converted skeptic. Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I’m now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause. ”

Anthony Watts on the other hand claimed the methodology was flawed when the initial results came out and continues to dispute the issue, despite not providing any new peer reviewed information. He is picking at the spelling of the reports and pointing out that they have not yet been peer reviewed.

Thus Richard Muller can claim to be sceptical as he is clearly willing to change his mind publically on an issue which he has obviously invested a fair bit of his reputation. This is to be applauded, especially as many older scientists refuse to acknowledge that their pet theories, which were mainstream in their youth, have been overtaken by events. Science is as ever, our current best theory of how the world works and should always be up for revision.

Watts, the Potty Peer and many others merely write that line off and focus on something else. During most of the time we have been evolving, such failure to understand the environment would have led to a sharply diminished chance of survival. Our current kinder society, with its scarcity of large carnivores, food regulation and the hundreds of safety regulations which make up the nanny state does seem to allow even the weirdest of ideas to proliferate. The press have obviously been doing the rounds of deniers in the wake of the announcement, and the results are predictable (here and here)

Meanwhile in the real world the drought in the US continues to worsen, with July being the hottest month on record and two thirds of the country in drought, and more heat records set this year than the whole of last year, despite 2011 being a very warm year. Another excellent video by Peter Sinclair (below) explores the subject.

James Hansen has also published a new review of temperatures, focusing on the extremes; something that he has consistently warned is a major risk. In an opinion piece in the Washington Post he says:-

“When I testified before the Senate in the hot summer of 1988, I warned of the kind of future that climate change would bring to us and our planet. I painted a grim picture of the consequences of steadily increasing temperatures, driven by mankind’s use of fossil fuels.”

“But I have a confession to make: I was too optimistic.”

His study shows that extreme heat periods (more than 3 standard deviations above average) have become very much more likely. In his words “Extremely hot temperatures covered about 0.1 percent to 0.2 percent of the globe in the base period of our study, from 1951 to 1980. In the last three decades, while the average temperature has slowly risen, the extremes have soared and now cover about 10 percent of the globe.”

Other studies show that extreme rainstorms and snowstorms are getting more frequent and more intense. Over the mainland US the frequency increased by 30% and the intensity increased by 10% in the last 60 years.

More amusingly (at least to us Australians) is the news that the Hadley centre think British summers will become even wetter due to the additional warming in the Arctic. So much for the dreams of a warmer and sunnier climate!

However, be reassured that nothing is changing on the political front. It’s still business as usual. Neither of the two presidential candidates have had the guts to mention climate change, prompting Senator John Kerry to call it a “conspiracy of silence … a story of disgraceful denial, back-pedaling, and delay that has brought us perilously close to a climate change catastrophe.” Even worse the Obama administration is backing away from the commitment it made in 2009 /10 to keeping below the “dangerous warming” threshold of two degrees. The US chief negotiator Todd Stern said:-

“For many countries, the core assumption about how to address climate change is that you negotiate a treaty with binding emission targets stringent enough to meet a stipulated global goal – namely, holding the increase in global average temperature to less than 2° centigrade above pre-industrial levels – and that treaty in turn drives national action. This is a kind of unified field theory of solving climate change – get the treaty right; the treaty dictates national action; and the problem gets solved. This is entirely logical. It makes perfect sense on paper. The trouble is it ignores the classic lesson that politics – including international politics – is the art of the possible. . . .

Given that the largest contributor to the problem won’t take any significant action, it’s very likely that others will maximise the talk and minimise the action.

And the root of the problem also remains the same. George Monbiot details the money trail that leads from the old energy corporates to politicians, in this case James Inhofe, that well known denier of climate science, who has received half a million dollars of campaign funding from the oil and gas industry in the last 5 years. It seems clear that he is well rewarded for his opinions. Separately here in Australia two former resource ministers and several mining executives are to be investigated by the Independent Commission Against Corruption over the details of the granting four Hunter Valley mining licences potentially worth billions of dollars.

The clamour to get the money out of politics is growing everywhere, but with so many influential folk likely to be against the idea it’s not likely anything will happen soon enough to make much of a difference. So we continue our game of chicken with Gaia.

And it’s not just the US, floods in India (note the elephant in the picture above – ideally adapted) and China the worst droughts on record in North and South Korea, while in poor old England they have followed the driest winter on record with the wettest summer just as they try and host the Olympics. Speaking of which Marc Roberts cartoons are right on the money, even when he (and I are somewhat off topic)

Peter Sinclair has an excellent video (below) on the extremes, called Welcome to the rest of our lives. Well worth watching. Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research says

“You look out of the window and you see climate change in action”

And speaking of records, more Arctic sea ice melted this June since records began, and continues to trend below 2007, the year which saw the lowest ever sea ice extent at the end of the melting season.

More and more scientists are reporting that they have underestimated the effects of increasing greenhouse gas concentrations, including this study suggesting that the global water cycle of evaporation and rainfall has strengthened by 4% between 1950 and 2000 – twice as much as predicted. But again, we are worried, concerned, even sometimes panicked, but we are not addressing the issue. I am currently reading a very depressing book, Climate Wars which looks at the likely geopolitical and military outcomes, including reviews of a number of defence studies. It pulls no punches and I was surprised at both the severity and rapidity of the very unpleasant outcomes projected by defence analysts, several of whom believe that the IPCC “projections of both warming and attendant impacts are systematically biased low”, and proposes that 2.6 degree warming over 1990 levels is possible in only 30 years. They go on to stress that this would mean much higher warming in the centres of continents. Extreme weather is expected to be the most serious impact and widespread failures of agriculture in sub-tropical areas are likely with truly massive numbers of refugees on the move. Very scary stuff, and even more frightening, it looks all too plausible. This is fast changing from a problem out children and grandchildren will have to deal with, to something that is likely to ruin our prospects for a peaceful retirement.

More bad news, China’s per capita emissions have almost reached the European level (7.2 tons per person per year versus a European average of 7.5tons).

Sorry about all the doom and gloom, I do try and find something encouraging but there’s not much about at the moment. The best I could find is this article in the Wall Street Journal’s Market Watch. Entitled “Myth of Perpetual Growth is killing America” it’s not exactly great news, but it does show that even in the bastion of free market economics folks are starting to wonder how we are going to grow for ever on a finite planet.

Lastly I raised a minor chuckle for the following cartoon.

This is Christiana Figueres, Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change just after the latest UN climate conference in Bonn. I suspect that you can guess the outcome of the conference, which appears to be going backward as countries seek to renege on previous commitments. Basically we are believing the old David Letterman quip about solving the environment problem by reusing cocktail sticks. He ends his amusing rant with the words “We are screwed” … “We are walking dead people” … “We are dead meat”.

The politics around climate change has settled into a stable state in the last couple of years, basically since the debacle at Copenhagen. Politicians (with very few exceptions) do as little as possible, tell us what we would like to hear and we pretend to believe them. As usual, established commercial interests are prepared to pay handsomely to trump the public interest. This goes from buying political support to paying folk $50 to wear pro coal T shirts.

It is clear that, absent some major frightening disaster, we will continue in this quietly suicidal mode until things get so bad that they are unavoidable. At that point it is likely to be very much too late to do much more than to keep the bedclothes firmly up over the head and pretend it’s not real.

It’s also blindingly obvious that the world is still warming, and that we have not underestimated the future risk, which if anything looks worse than ever. A recent report from the University of Melbourne concludes that the last 60 years in Australasia has been the hottest in at least 1000 years and that it “cannot be explained by natural factors alone, suggesting a strong influence of human-caused climate change”. Those scientists who make public comment are sounding increasingly worried, and even the conservative IEA is sounding rather shrill in their executive director’s recent warning:-

“The world’s energy system is being pushed to breaking point… Our addiction to fossil fuels grows stronger each year. Many clean energy technologies are available but they are not being deployed quickly enough to avert potentially disastrous consequences.”

The conservative side of politics in the US and to a lesser extent in Australia are in complete retreat from reality; it’s now almost impossible to be selected as a republican candidate for anything unless you stridently deny the truth of at least climate change and evolution.

So what should you do about this? Basically it’s time to decide, do you sink back into the comfortable cocoon of ignorance, or do you do something yourself, as it’s clear that we cannot rely on governments, the international community, or any other sizable organisation to solve the problem.

Let’s be clear here, we are probably not facing an immediate catastrophe; it’s much more likely that things will get steadily worse over the next few decades. As such your reaction might sensibly depend on your age. The CSIRO says Australia will warm by 0.6 to 1.5 degrees by 2030 and by 2.2 to 5 degrees C by 2070 on our current emissions path. Five degrees would make many parts of the country uninhabitable, would destroy much of our agriculture and make extreme bushfires weekly events in summer. It is already clear that our weather patterns are already affected; leading to the sort of extreme weather we have seen in the last two years. If this happens due to a 0.75 degree warming in the last 100 years, what can we expect from several times that amount happening much more quickly?

Very roughly, I would guess that if you are over 70, you can help by keeping the pressure on the politicians, but the chances are you probably won’t be much affected.

If on the other hand you are under 50 then I suspect you will be materially affected during your lifetime and if I was under 20 then I would be very deeply concerned.

If you are between 50 and 70, as I am, then it’s a classic case of “do you feel lucky?”

A major outstanding question is “How will the global system react to the warming?” Will there be a linear reaction or will there be a state change to some new and significantly different condition. If the latter then it’s likely we are in for some very nasty times. However assuming a less drastic case, we face a combination of at least the following issues.

• Climate change leading to much more extreme weather, so more droughts and more floods and less of the comfortable bits in between. This dramatically increases agricultural risks, especially in a very variable Australian climate.
• Increasing energy costs or Peak Oil. We have pumped most of the cheap hydrocarbons, and the price of oil seems to peak every time the global economy starts to recover. I think we are close to the point where the price will then increase until the economy slows again. This makes it more and more difficult to fix any of our problems. I think most people already instinctively feel poorer than they did 20 years ago.
• Ocean acidification caused by increasing amounts of carbon dioxide dissolved in seawater is likely to badly damage reef systems, and could at worst destroy the plankton which is the base of the ocean food chain.
• Overuse of natural resources almost everywhere. This goes from over extraction of water from rivers and aquifers, to gross overfishing, to the damage caused to agricultural land by unsustainable industrial agriculture.
• Increasing population and the increasing prosperity of the poorer countries, on top of the western world’s increasing resource use will just make all of the above worse.

Thus food, water and energy are the key likely problems.

It’s worth discussing a blog which has come to the same conclusion from a different perspective. The Archdruid Report has been suggesting folk become more self-sufficient for years, and his latest comments are very well worth reading. Ignore the druid bit, here is someone who has been thinking about the problem for quite a while and has valuable things to say, even if he dresses them up a little. For example when he suggests that we need a convocation of “Green Wizards” he means we should learn to grow our own food, and research the simple sustainable “appropriate technology” that was last in vogue in the 1970′s. In my view he is mainly spot on.

Each of our individual circumstances are different, but I would recommend each of you look seriously at how you can best insure a long term, stable supply of food, water and energy. You might consider, as we did, a tree change, though many are constrained by their jobs. Regardless, there are actually many small steps in the right direction that will almost always improve your quality of life. Here are a few suggestions:-

• Start a veggie patch and learn to grow at least some of your own food. I think you will be surprised at how enjoyable, even addictive it is.
• Look at your energy usage in the home and understand what uses the most power. Most people can reduce their usage by 30% without affecting their quality of life, and once you know how much that old noisy fridge is using you are likely to look for a much more efficient one when the time comes.
• Look at your travel patterns. Are you one of those poor souls who are stuck in traffic for hours? Wouldn’t you be better finding a job closer to home or a home closer to job?

Obviously it’s rather more difficult to be self-reliant in the city, but remember this is a long term project. Do what you can now, and a bit more later. In fact It’s better not to try and do too much at once, but keep a list of things and work on a few at a time. For those that want to go the whole hog, there is a mass of information on the net, and I have described our major projects elsewhere on this website. Do your homework before you leap in the deep end.

When we moved into the bush I was very surprised at the sense of community in the valley, and I now think this is one of the most important elements of sustainability. Getting on with the people around you will be important if things get harder.

Lastly the more people start making a real change in their lives, the more likely it is to spread, and may even help put pressure on our recalcitrant politicians.

Firstly an article by George Monbiot on why libertarians (often Americans) have trouble with climate change and environmental issues in general. He argues that if you believe in absolute property rights (so if I own something I may treat it exactly as I wish without outside restraint) then you find yourself in a catch 22 when discussing almost any environmental issue. As a given example a coal-burning power station owner would have to obtain permission from all downwind for polluting their property with acid rain. However it is soon obvious that almost all activity would be impossible under these conditions. Even lighting a small wood fire in a log cabin in the woods will emit smoke and carbon dioxide, infringing on your neighbour.

Another common driver for denial is the obvious cost to our comfort and lifestyle. I have often been struck by the correlation between vehemence and potential costs, with the Koch Brothers just an outstanding example. More obvious however is this admission from Senator James Inhofe who is one of the more determined Republican Party deniers. In a recent TV interview he said (my emphasis):-

“I was actually on your side of this issue when I was chairing that committee and I first heard about this. I thought it must be true until I found out what it cost.”

And it’s clear we are as a whole weary of the entire affair, along with the fact that our political leaders are very aware of the pain involved in any adequate response drives the current situation, with at best token efforts to reduce carbon emissions being taken leaving the few climate scientists who speak out sounding increasingly worried, and almost everyone else steadfastly ignoring them. This analysis of media coverage shows that (in the USA) it has declined by over 80% in the last two years, and that scientists are increasingly ignored by the popular broadcast media.

Lastly, as Stephen Colbert explains, we are evolutionarily disposed to believe what our gut tells us, often what we and our peers want to believe, rather than what is supported by facts. He calls this Truthiness.

So do we still have our heads in the sand, or are we in the acceptance phase of the Hype Cycle and gradually getting used to the idea, as I discussed here? One good sign is that the current coverage of the weird weather in the USA is cutting through as this Yale report shows. Over 70% of Americans believe warming made the recent extreme weather events worse, while 82% said they had personally experienced extreme weather or a natural disaster in the past year. Unfortunately previous acceptance immediately declined once the weather went away. The other issue that seems to have hit a nerve is the rapidly increasing cost of electricity, especially here in Australia. Given the widespread winging you would think folk would at least take some basic steps to reduce usage, but despite increasing media attention and the fact that most households can simply reduce usage by a third, most are still content to complain. Prices in Australia have doubled in the last five years, and look likely to do the same in the next five. We know that humans can radically change our habits when things get really bad, but our evolutionary history has been rather more brutal than our current cosy life (at least in the west). I (and others) suspect we have to wait until it gets truly unpleasant before we panic and react.

That said things are changing, just not nearly fast enough. Many elements of business that are not bound up in the fossil fuel industry are looking ahead. Unfortunately any good they are doing is being drowned out by the fossil industry, which with much government support seem to be either pinning their hopes on natural gas, or switching to unconventional oil. The first is a distraction which at first seems to lower emissions but in fact almost certainly doesn’t (here and here), while the second is just a fast path increased emissions. I believe that the key to this lack of overall progress is the centralisation of the global economy. The Network of Global Corporate Control report shows that 40% of the global economy is controlled by just 147 companies, many of which will have major investments in the energy status quo.

A recent very detailed report in Nature just knocked another nail into the coffin of another denier favourite; the fact that warming seems to have happened slightly before CO² levels rose when emerging from ice ages. The new report completely debunks this, showing that while the temperature at the poles (which is where many climate records come from) did precede CO² rises by a couple of hundred years, global temperatures did not. This confirms the established view that relatively small releases of CO² from polar seas or permafrost caused by increases in solar radiation then drove global warming in a series of positive feedbacks.

Australia is doing better than the average westerner in ignoring climate change; a recent study shows we are less equipped to deal with a low carbon emissions world than we were in 1995, while the CSIRO 2012 State of the Climate contains no surprises, with the continent expected to warm and generally grow drier in the south. It is not yet clear if the north will get wetter or not, although its certainly been that way for the last few years.

Back to extreme weather. It’s becoming clear that this could well be the killer effect which most harms human society. Earlier commentary (including mine) focused on desertification and sea level rises, and possibly ocean acidification, but recent studies not only show that extreme weather is continuing, is being driven by climate change (here and here) and will have very unpleasant effects. Recent reports show the productivity of Asian rice and cassava crops is likely to decline by 50% over the next 30 years, due mainly to “weather whiplash” — back-to-back extreme weather events, and that already climate is the major influence on corm price volatility.

Finally Peter Sinclair of Climate Crock of the Week fame has two good videos on extreme weather posted on the Yale Climate Media forum, which are mainly interviews with climate scientists. Recommended.

More widely, the combination of recent observations and more detailed science is painting a fairly detailed picture of the major risks we face in the next few decades. Simply put extreme drought, extreme precipitation and flooding and Ocean Acidification.

All of the above affect our ability to feed ourselves, and I suspect that this will be the most important result of climate change in the near future. I am very aware that making predictions on the basis of only a few years is not scientific, but the extraordinary increase in extreme weather events over the last three years is surely more than an extreme outlier. I would predict that we have hit a tipping point which is driving the continuing abnormal weather.

The recent tornadoes in the US continue the trend, as does the flooding this week in Eastern Australia, described by NSW State Emergency Services commissioner Murray Kear as an ‘Unprecedented amount of rain’.

Meanwhile science is filling in the details on past extreme events. James Hansen and colleagues have published a report claiming that “Extreme Heat Waves … in Texas and Oklahoma in 2011 and Moscow in 2010 were ’caused’ by Global Warming”.

And all this variability will have a major effect on agriculture, remembering that we will need to feed an extra 3 odd billion people over the next 40 years.

Separately climate change is also helping to devastate the ocean ecosystems, the other significant food source. It is true that we are independently doing a great job of devastating virtually all fish stocks though overfishing, but ocean acidification is happening at a rate 10 times faster today than during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, or PETM, some 56 million years ago when a mass extinction of marine species occurred. This recent report published in Science makes truly frightening reading, raising the possibility of a rapid and devastating dieback.

Meanwhile the Arctic ice is still disappearing at a record rate; especially the thick multi year ice that persists over summer, lending even more weight to projections that we may see an Ice free Arctic in summer much sooner than believed just a few years ago. Even the staid IEA suggests this will happen during the 2020′s, and of course this will drive further warming as the dark water absorbs much more sunlight than the reflective snow and ice. There is also further confirmation that it is the warming arctic that is driving the run of cold and snowy winters that we are seeing in Europe and the US.

In relative desperation, I now resort to hoping for a large (but not too large) chunk of the West Antarctic ice shelf to fall into the sea and wake us up, but I am resigned to a slow decline in our capabilities while the environment becomes gradually more and more inhospitable.