"A collision course with extreme weather ..."
I thought this was a timely read:
Strategies for a Changing Planet: AwarenessWe're on a collision course with extreme weather -- it's time to acknowledge that, and to prepareBy David RobertsPosted 06.08.2012 at 11:29 am
http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2 ... -get-readyClimate change is already happening, and it's time to get ready. Here's how we could adjust our most basic needs--food, water, shelter--to survive.There is no longer any question of preventing climate change. Some 98 percent of working climate scientists agree that the atmosphere is already warming in response to human greenhouse-gas emissions, and the most recent research suggests that we are on a path toward what were once considered “worst case” scenarios.
How much warmer must it get before things really go to hell? “Climate sensitivity” remains a subject of intense investigation, and what counts as hellish is a matter of judgment, but United Nations climate negotiators have settled on a goal to limit atmospheric carbon dioxide to 450 parts per million, which would cause the global mean temperature to peak no more than 3.6°F above preindustrial levels. If it gets much hotter than that, we will most likely be confronted by levels of drought and severe storms for which humanity has no precedent. That sounds bad enough—and indeed, postindustrial temperatures have already risen by as much as 1.6°—but there’s increasing reason to believe, as James Hansen and many other climate scientists do, that severe effects will arrive well below 450 ppm, and possibly below today’s level of 396 ppm. Danger is much closer than we thought.
We will almost certainly blow past 3.6° in any case. One recent study found that the average global temperature would rise another 3.2° by the end of the century even if human carbon emissions dropped to zero tomorrow, a scenario that is, of course, extremely unlikely. Simply limiting the temperature rise to twice the “safe” level would require heroic, sustained global effort, a level of ambition that appears nowhere in evidence. And if humanity does nothing to restrain climate pollution, the trajectory it’s on right now could carry the rise to as much as 10° within the century.
We no longer have a choice about whether to confront major changes already in the works. By the end of this century, sea levels will rise, drought will spread, and millions of animals, human and otherwise, will be driven from their homes. Scientists call the process of preparing for these changes “adaptation,” but a more apt term can be found in the tech world: ruggedizing. Greater extremes require tougher, more resilient societies.
In 2009, researchers from the University of Oxford, the Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research and the U.K. Met Office Hadley Center organized a conference on what a change of 7.2° or greater might look like—oddly, one of the first concerted scientific examinations of the impacts of temperatures that high. Here are some of the results: 7.2°, which could conceivably arrive as early as 2060, would mean a planet that was hotter than at any time in the past 10 million years. By 2100, sea levels would rise by as much as six feet, leaving hundreds of millions of the world’s coast-dwellers homeless, even as huge swaths of the ocean itself became “dead zones.” Glaciers and coral reefs would largely vanish from the planet.
It may be possible to weather this onslaught if we begin preparing now, by building low-carbon, high-density cities away from the coasts, radically improving the efficiency of water and energy systems, boosting local and global emergency-response capacities, and adjusting to a less consumption- and waste-oriented lifestyle. But although humans are an ingenious species, some changes simply exceed any realistic capacity for adaptation. The real threat, the existential threat, is that climate change will gain so much momentum that humanity loses what remaining power it has to slow or stop it, even by reducing carbon emissions to zero. If change becomes self-sustaining, our children and grandchildren will inherit an atmosphere irreversibly out of control, with inexorably rising temperatures that could, according to one recent study, render half of Earth’s currently occupied land uninhabitable—literally too hot to bear—by 2300.
These are only scenarios spit out by climate models; there’s no way to predict exactly what will happen. It might be tempting to seize on uncertainty as reason to wait and see. Why prepare if we don’t know exactly what we’re preparing for? But the uncertainties in the science of climate impacts—and they are legion—make the future more perilous, not less. Things look bad, and if there’s a chance they could turn out better than expected, there’s also a chance they could turn out worse. Out on the “long tail” of the probability curve, there are small but not insignificant chances for damages that are, for all practical purposes, unlimited. For instance, if several of the world’s major land-based ice sheets melt, we could see a 40-foot rise in sea levels within centuries.
These are stark and discomfiting findings. Above all, they suggest that global temperature should be held as low as is still possible, at virtually any cost. But they also make clear that some changes are inevitable. We no longer have a choice between mitigating climate change and adapting to climate change. We must do both.
When we talk about adaptation, we often imagine accommodating a specific new set of conditions; a temperate place gets too hot, a cold place gets temperate, so we move our farms around and get on with it. But we simply do not know, and most likely will not for some time, what particular temperature we are bound for, or whether there will ever again be a stable temperature. It is not a specific set of conditions but uncertainty itself to which we must adapt.
Even as we remain flexible, we will have to think and work on a very large scale. Major infrastructure projects—highways, dams, levies, electrical transmission lines, trains and subways—represent investments meant to pay off over generations. The New York City subway system is more than 100 years old. Today there’s a nontrivial chance that much of Manhattan will be under water in 100 years. How do we invest in the future when it has become so cloudy and threatening? As the stories in this series report, scientists and engineers already have many excellent (and some less than excellent) answers. It can be done. But the time to do it is now.
But of course we know it isn't going to be done "now," or even any time soon.
What's striking to me about this piece is the revelation that climate experts and researchers from the University of Oxford, the Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research and the U.K. Met Office Hadley Center organized a conference in 2009 on what a change of 7.2° or greater might look like—oddly, one of the first concerted scientific examinations of the impacts of temperatures that high, which begs the question, do they know something we don't?
Why would these people think it necessary to examine the effects of such a gargantuan increase in Earth's mean annual temperature? Keep in mind that the IPCC's
worst case scenario for the year 2100 was a SIX degree rise over the preindustrial norm in their last Assessment Report, AR4, published in 2007.
I don't know about others, but I follow this stuff pretty closely and have for the past 20-odd years and I seem to be seeing a trend in what climate scientists are telling us, a trend toward the worse. This appears to be driven by the fact that things are unfolding at a much more rapid pace than anyone thought they would ten years ago, or even five years ago. There have been a number of reports in recent months that point in this direction, first by the Club of Rome, which predicted that temps projected by the IPCC for the year 2100 could actually be upon us as early as 2050 or 2060, and second by a report that came out of Australia some weeks past in which climate researchers at the University of New South Wales predicted that the Earth will become largely uninhabitable by humans within 300 years.
Those are stark projections, they mean that a) we might see something far greater than the 3.6 degrees C that United Nations climate negotiators have settled on as a goal and b) that toasty time could be sufficiently severe as to become an extinction event for Homo Sapiens.
Whoa! 
Something is happening, Mr. Jones, but you don't know what it is.
We may get some answers in the IPCC's 5th Assessment Report, which is currently being developed and written and is slated for publication next year and in early 2014 (this is a multiple volume report and one volume at least will be published in late 2013, with the remaining volumes following in early 2014). This will be a momentous report in any case but if the IPCC's process leads to similar conclusions it'll be a blockbuster without question.
It does sort of figure that a blockbuster of that kind is in the works and in our future's, because things will continue to go downhill and at some point the news is just going to be flat devastating.
UN SECGEN Ban Ki Moon said three years ago that we'll have to go to a "war footing" if we hope to reduce emissions by any appreciable degree. What does "war footing' mean? It means governments taking over their economies and running them on a single-issue dedicated basis, which could well include nationalization of energy production.
Interestingly, there is precedent for this kind of thing because the US did exactly this when it came into War II, it took command of the economy and ran it for one purpose
... to win the war. The law was called "total conscription" and it made any economic activity that didn't contribute to the war effort illegal. In effect, the government drafted the economy.
And this is what Ban Ki Moon meant.
And it might well come to this again sometime in the next several years (I'd say by 2020) if we continue to ignore the problem and persist in doing next to nothing about it. A moment will come when leaders are presented with the cold hard facts and evidence that a disaster of historical proportions looms on the not too distant horizon if they don't act to cut emissions to near zero and do so within a decade or less.
It's hard to imagine them deciding to do nothing when faced with that kind of scenario.
The coming decade is going to prove to be the most interesting decade in the entire history of our species. I don't see how it could be anything less. Things are building to a head and that head is going to be unlike anything we've ever seen or even contemplated or dreamed of, an entirely new world could emerge as we get dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century.
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