Why aren't we panicking?

 I ended this post by asking why we weren't panicking.

There is clear evidence that the rate at which global temperatures have been rising is speeding up.    This massively reduces the time we have left to slash emissions before we are hit by catastrophic changes in the climate.   Already average temperatures have risen 1.5 degrees since pre-industrial times, defined as 1850-1900.   In the Paris Climate Accord, signed in December 2015, the world agreed to try to limit the rise in temperatures to 1.5 degrees.  We are already there.  Yes, I know, it's an El Niño year, and will be followed by La Niña years.  So temperatures will cool, somewhat.   But the trend, excluding the effects of El Niño/ La Niña oscillation (ENSO), volcanos, and the sunspot cycle, shows that temperatures are clearly accelerating: 

Source: Open Mind

It is possible that China's carbon emissions have peaked, given the extraordinary rapidity of its roll-out of renewables and the rapid expansion of EV sales.  China emits 25% of the world's CO2, and while the USA's and Europe's emissions have been falling for decades (the EU's peaked in 1979, and the USA's in 2005), China's have nearly tripled over the last 20 years.  If China's emissions have passed a structural peak, that will be very significant, and will mean that global emissions will have also peaked.  

The problem is, however, that it's not enough for emissions to start falling for temperatures to stop rising.  The rise in temperatures is proportional to the level of emissions.  In other words, to stop temperatures rising, we will have to cut emissions to zero, or as near as dammit.  (Note that "net-zero" involves using dodgy offsets to "remove" CO2 from the atmosphere.   Even if it worked, it's not going to happen on the scale we need to avoid temperatures rising.)  If we halved emissions over the next decade, yes, temperatures would rise more slowly.  Perhaps we might cut the rise in temperatures by half, to 0.15 degrees C per decade.  But they would still rise.  And halving the level of emissions over the next decade would require a 7% per annum compound cut in emissions.   That's not going to happen unless we go all out.

The public seems to be resigned to this catastrophe.  Where is the fear?  Where is the anger?  Why aren't we nagging the soulcase out of our elected representatives to enact measures which will slash emissions?  Why aren't we voting climate denialists out of office?  My theory is that people are in despair.  We know that disaster awaits, we feel powerless to help it, and it's too depressing to consider just how ghastly the world will be.  So we avoid the topic.  We get angry or irritable if others bring it up.  We prefer to look at pictures of kittens or obsess about Taylor Swift rather than face up to the facts. 

Suppose we did panic, and decided to take real action?  What would we do?

1.  We would set a target for 80% of electricity generation to be produced from renewables by 2030.   Why not 100%?  Because we're still not certain whether we can produce all the electricity we need from 100% renewables.  We may, for example, need peaking gas to back up a wind and solar grid for a few weeks a year.  Countries in high latitudes might need nuclear.  When we get to 80% then we can reassess.  This will cut emissions by 24%.
2. We would immediately ban the sale of new petrol-only cars and trucks.  Hybrids use 40% less petrol than petrol-only cars in urban driving.  Plug-in hybrids use 80% less.  And obviously, EVs produce no direct tailpipe emissions.  Second-hand petrol-only cars will still be sellable, but as they age they'll be scrapped, and the average emissions of the car/truck fleet would fall.  After 5 years, we'd ban hybrids, leaving just plug-ins for sale.  This will cut emissions over 20 years by 20%.
3. We would dramatically improve public transport.   Instead of giant diesel buses coming every hour, we'd have small electric mini-buses coming every 5 or 10 minutes.  It'll take a long time to build out new electric long distance high-speed and short-distance commuter lines, but we'd start now, and move as fast as we can.
4. All air travel below a certain distance would be banned---unless the planes were electric.  Yes, flying from Sydney to Melbourne would involve three "legs" instead of a single jet-flight, but, hey, we've been here before.  And we could ban long-distance air travel too.  When I was a lightie, we didn't travel long distance by air, but by sea or train.  To spare climate catastrophe, we may have to go there again.
5. All steel will have to be produced without coal, using green hydrogen or methane.  (Cut emissions by 8%) 
6. We will have to ration red meat.  ~30% of emissions come from agriculture (including land clearing and methane from cows' burps and farts), and most of that comes from beef and mutton.
7. We would impose taxes on imports from countries who aren't also being serious about cutting emissions. 

Of course, none of this will happen.   People will go on thinking that all they need to do is to recycle their rubbish.  Give up beef?  Are you out of your mind?  Stop selling petrol cars?  Communism!  Give up my annual holiday in the Seychelles?  Good grief, is a person to have no fun at all?

So we will sleepwalk our way to catastrophe, because we are too fecking stupid to take the necessary steps to avoid it.  It's not that we don't have the technology to slash emissions.  It's that we don't have the will.  We are too comatose, too dumb, too feeble to take meaningful action.  

I have of late, (but wherefore I know not) lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises; and indeed, it goes so heavily with my disposition; that this goodly frame the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy the air, look you, this brave o'er hanging firmament, this majestical roof, fretted with golden fire: why, it appeareth no other thing to me, than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is a man, How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, In form and moving how express and admirable, In action how like an Angel, In apprehension how like a god, The beauty of the world, The paragon of animals. And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust?

Bringing back the woolly mammoth

 From Melbourne's The Age newspaper

Ten thousand years after woolly mammoths vanished from the face of the Earth, scientists are embarking on an ambitious project to bring the beasts back to the Arctic tundra.

The prospect of recreating mammoths and returning them to the wild has been discussed – seriously at times – for more than a decade, but on Monday researchers announced fresh funding they believe could make their dream a reality.

The boost comes in the form of $15m (£11m) raised by the bioscience and genetics company Colossal, co-founded by Ben Lamm, a tech and software entrepreneur, and George Church, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School who has pioneered new approaches to gene editing.

The scientists have set their initial sights on creating an elephant-mammoth hybrid by making embryos in the laboratory that carry mammoth DNA. The starting point for the project involves taking skin cells from Asian elephants, which are threatened with extinction, and reprogramming them into more versatile stem cells that carry mammoth DNA. The particular genes that are responsible for mammoth hair, insulating fat layers and other cold climate adaptions are identified by comparing mammoth genomes extracted from animals recovered from the permafrost with those from the related Asian elephants.

These embryos would then be carried to term in a surrogate mother or potentially in an artificial womb. If all goes to plan – and the hurdles are far from trivial – the researchers hope to have their first set of calves in six years.

“Our goal is to make a cold-resistant elephant, but it is going to look and behave like a mammoth. Not because we are trying to trick anybody, but because we want something that is functionally equivalent to the mammoth, that will enjoy its time at -40C, and do all the things that elephants and mammoths do, in particular knocking down trees,” Church told the Guardian.

The project is framed as an effort to help conserve Asian elephants by equipping them with traits that allow them to thrive in vast stretches of the Arctic known as the mammoth steppe. But the scientists also believe introducing herds of elephant-mammoth hybrids to the Arctic tundra may help restore the degraded habitat and combat some of the impacts of the climate crisis. For example, by knocking down trees, the beasts might help to restore the former Arctic grasslands.

Not all scientists suspect that creating mammoth-like animals in the lab is the most effective way to restore the tundra. “My personal thinking is that the justifications given – the idea that you could geoengineer the Arctic environment using a heard of mammoths – isn’t plausible,” said Dr Victoria Herridge, an evolutionary biologist at the Natural History Museum.

“The scale at which you’d have to do this experiment is enormous. You are talking about hundreds of thousands of mammoths which each take 22 months to gestate and 30 years to grow to maturity.”

Lamm said: “Our goal isn’t just to bring back the mammoth, but to bring back interbreedable herds that are successfully rewilded back into the Arctic region.”

Whether Asian elephants would want to breed with the hybrids is, for now, unknown. “We might have to give them a little shave,” said Church.

Gareth Phoenix, a professor of plant and global change ecology at the University of Sheffield, said: “While we do need a multitude of different approaches to stop climate change, we also need to initiate solutions responsibly to avoid unintended damaging consequences. That’s a huge challenge in the vast Arctic where you have different ecosystems existing under different environmental conditions.

“For instance, mammoths are proposed as a solution to help stop permafrost thaw because they will remove trees, trample and compact the ground and convert landscapes to grassland, which can help keep the ground cool. However, we know in the forested Arctic regions that trees and moss cover can be critical in protecting permafrost, so removing the trees and trampling the moss would be the last thing you’d want to do.”

What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form, in moving, how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?

Is it really the question?

A cartoon by Dan Piraro

Truth will out

Source: NOAA

From Open Mind, Tamino's climate blog:

The deniers lost.

Their credibility is so low that further efforts to deny the truth only make it more obvious. The only people who will buy their utter crap, are those who cannot be reasoned with.

For twelve years I’ve been blogging, mainly to prove how utterly wrong, how empty-headed, how gullible are the “arguments” from climate deniers. I followed others, yet more joined later, and together we did it. They got pwned.

Problem is: in the decades it took to accomplish this, our society, our governments, our world, has not faced the real problem. The problem they were trying so hard to deny all along. Yes, truth will out, but it can take its time getting its shoes on.

Deniers of the crisis of man-made climate change: you have done wrong. You have done evil. Foul deeds will rise, though all the earth o’erwhelm them, to men’s eyes.

Most people aren't convinced, emotionally, by numbers and statistics.  The steady rise in average global temperatures is visible on charts, in the data tables.  But it was only when it started to impact our everyday lives that ordinary people started to believe.  When 100-year floods start happening every couple of years, they notice.  When 100-year droughts happen often, everywhere, they notice.  When heatwaves start killing people in their thousands, they notice.

It's only going to get worse.  The level of CO₂ in the atmosphere keeps on rising, at an accelerating rate.  Global temperatures keep on rising.  Climate extremes are just going to get worse.  The politics of global warming are only going to get more fractious.  The Green New Deal, the 'Stop Adani' caravans—these are just the beginning.  The pressure to do something to reduce carbon, methane and nitrous oxide emissions isn't going to get less.  It's going to intensify.  No country not pulling its weight in this struggle will be allowed to get away with it.  The denialists have lost.