Grim reports on climate change say act now or be ready for catastrophe

[webfact]

Four years is all we have

By PRATCH RUJIVANAROM 
THE NATION

 

Climate activists hold banners during a demonstration outside the United Nations (UN) Centre during the first day of the UN Climate Change Negotiating sessions in Bangkok, Thailand, 04 September 2018. // EPA-EFE PHOTO

 

Grim reports on climate change say act now or be ready for catastrophe.

 

HUMANITY HAS only about four years left to stabilise global temperatures and save the world from environmental catastrophe stemming from extreme climate change, scientists have warned.

 

After negotiations at this month’s Bangkok Climate Change Conference ended in failure, the world’s leading scientific agencies, the United Nations and environmentalists are urging governments to show greater determination.

 

They want to see more ambitious action to rapidly de-carbonise the global economy and stabilise the temperature at the safest possible level of 1.5 degrees Celsius.

 

They also identified Southeast Asia as a strategic area in the mission to reverse climate change, calling the region not only a major front in the battle against the spreading use of fossil fuels but also one of the locales most vulnerable to the detrimental impacts.

 

 

An analysis by an organisation called Carbon Brief on “carbon budgets” in 2016 sounded the alarm. If the world continues to release greenhouse gases (GHG) at the current rate, the carbon budget for maintaining the global temperature rise at 1.5 degrees would expire in “four years and one month”.

 

Another group, Climate Action Tracker (CAT), in May assessed different countries’ levels of commitment to climate-change mitigation as set out in the Paris Agreement. It revealed that the current pledged commitments were too weak to achieve the agreement’s ambitious aims. It said many rich nations were also unable to honour their pledges, known as Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs).

 

Even if all countries reduced GHG as projected in their NDCs, total global emissions would still reach the equivalent of 52-55 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide (GtCO2e) in 2025 and 54-58 in 2030. Those figures are significantly higher than the emission goals established in Paris. To hold at 1.5 degrees, GHG emissions would have to be cut to 38 GtCO2e by 2025 and to 32 by 2030.

 

UN Environment in its latest “emissions gap” report said that, unless the gap is closed by 2030, it will be extremely hard to reach the goal of holding global warming to well below 2 degrees.

 

The emissions gap refers to the GHG reduction shortfall compared to goals. CAT estimates that, in order to hold at 1.5 degrees, the gap would have to be around 17 GtCO2e in 2025.

 

“Despite political, industrial and civic leaders strengthening and implementing the Paris Agreement, current state pledges cover no more than a third of the emission reductions needed, creating an ever-growing dangerous gap,” UN Environment chief Erik Solheim warned.

 

CAT assessments of NDCs for the European Union and 30 countries elsewhere showed the commitments of wealthy developed countries were “very weak and highly insufficient” to reach the Paris climate-stabilisation goal. Developing countries, on the other hand, were pursuing much more ambitious goals for cutting GHG and more pronounced climate-change mitigation commitments.

The findings suggest that the richer countries are “losing interest” in the Paris Agreement, even though they emit the most greenhouse gases.

 

Long-term mitigation strategies

 

Solheim and CAT emphasised that every signatory to the agreement had to urgently scale up both policies and targets and to develop long-term mitigation strategies to stay on target for holding the temperature rise to 1.5 degrees.

 

Environmental activists and supporters take part in a demonstration in front of the United Nations building,  in Bangkok on September 8, 2018. // AFP PHOTO

 

“If we cannot strengthen our mitigation commitments in time, we will miss the final opportunity to prevent the global temperature from rising beyond 2 degrees and fail to avoid catastrophic outcomes of extreme climate change,” Solheim said.

 

Some hope can be found in a Climate Analytics report on limiting the temperature rise. It said the 1.5-degree goal was achievable by transitioning towards becoming low-carbon societies and ceasing the use of fossil fuels by 2050.

 

“Climate stabilisation is an important technical and political challenge,” the report said. “Many solutions and technologies represent many wedges to achieve the required emission reduction. No further delay in mitigation action is allowed, as the global emissions must decline rapidly and steadily after 2020.”

 

Greenpeace International executive director Jennifer Morgan, speaking at the Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco on Friday, urged all nations to get more ambitious, chart clear paths to net-zero emissions by mid-century and empower “bottom-up” climate action.

 

“We have arrived at the moment of truth,” she said. “Climate change is here and it’s big and dangerous. Super-typhoon Mangkhut and Hurricane Florence are the latest grim examples of the dangers the changing climate might pose.

 

“We’ve lost precious time through denial and insufficient action from political leaders and companies and we’re now running up against the clock. We’re at the 11th hour and in urgent need for climate leadership and action before it truly is too late.”

 

Many studies and analyses concur that mitigation efforts in Southeast Asia will be much harder. The International Energy Agency (IEA) expects the region to keep up “very high demand” for fossil fuels because they’re the cheapest sources of energy.

 

According to the IEA report “Southeast Asia Energy Outlook”, energy demand here will grow by two-thirds by 2040. Even though all 10 countries in the region signed the Paris accord, the IEA expects coal consumption to continue to rise, making Southeast Asia the fossil-fuel industry’s last stronghold on Earth.

 

The IEA said strong growth in consumption would lead to a rise in GHG emissions from the energy sector of more than 70 per cent. That was in clear contravention of the mitigation aims of theParis Agreement, it said, and would make the region all the more vulnerable to severe natural disasters. 

 

The IEA said energy-use transition and de-carbonisation remained possible in the region, but policymakers clearly faced tough decisions.

 

Somporn Chuai-Aree, a science and technology lecturer at Prince of Songkla University, noted that the fossil-fuels industry has strong influence in the region and over governments, so he was pessimistic that Southeast Asia and especially Thailand could move away from carbon by 2050.

 

“In my opinion, successful energy transformation requires governments that cherish the interests of their citizens more than big fossil-fuels conglomerates,” Somporn said.

 

Source: http://www.nationmultimedia.com/detail/national/30354597

 

-- © Copyright The Nation 2018-09-17

[VincentRJ]

Climate stabilisation is an important technical and political challenge, the report said.

 

For the past thousands of years, during the entire history of mankind and well before, we know that the climate has been continuously changing, sometimes so drastically in a particular region that entire civilizations have been wiped out.

 

Have we now discovered the secret ingredient that enables us to stabilize the climate? All we have to do is reduce our CO2 emissions, and the climate will become benign? No more extreme weather events, such as hurricanes, floods and droughts?

 

Wow! What a magical power we now have! ?

[overherebc]

9 minutes ago, VincentRJ said:

 

 

 

For the past thousands of years, during the entire history of mankind and well before, we know that the climate has been continuously changing, sometimes so drastically in a particular region that entire civilizations have been wiped out.

 

Have we now discovered the secret ingredient that enables us to stabilize the climate? All we have to do is reduce our CO2 emissions, and the climate will become benign? No more extreme weather events, such as hurricanes, floods and droughts?

 

Wow! What a magical power we now have! ?

I have a plan somewhere on how to stop a volcano from releasing CO2.

When I can dig it out I'll post it.

[zzaa09]

The end is near.

Best be getting one's final affairs in order. 

 

 

 

I'm having a lovely beer with my fag this morning.

?

[Ossy]

Failed climate talks? Probably because it's like an ant trying to stop a juggernaut. 'Too late and no-one wants to be first to change their ways!' was the cry.

[neeray]

_{But but but. The Donald says it's all a hoax started by the Chinese.}

[Cadbury]

And how many of those protesters outside the UN on 8th September got there by cars and motorbikes which emit CO2.

Do as I speak and not as I do they chant!

[Bob12345]

CO2 levels are at their highest levels resulting in the best crop yields ever as CO2 is what plants and trees need to grow.

[YetAnother]

4 hours ago, webfact said:

save the world from environmental catastrophe

imagine trying to get countries like china and india to sacrifice some of their own interest for all our greater good; good luck with that

[fantom]

2 hours ago, zzaa09 said:

The end is near.

Best be getting one's final affairs in order. 

 

 

 

I'm having a lovely beer with my fag this morning.

?

As we are all doomed and need to get our final affairs in order, I hope you gave your fag a beeer too?

[Scotssing]

We are way beyond the tipping point already and the catastrophe will happen. Just not in most TV members lifetime

[SoilSpoil]

2 hours ago, Bob12345 said:

CO2 levels are at their highest levels resulting in the best crop yields ever as CO2 is what plants and trees need to grow.

More plant grow (with lower nutrient density btw) leads to more burning, which leads to more co2 and so on. Kind of a vicious cycle.

[SoilSpoil]

1 hour ago, YetAnother said:

imagine trying to get countries like china and india to sacrifice some of their own interest for all our greater good; good luck with that

Or the biggest polluter per capita, the US.

[NCC1701A]

"Four years is all we have"

 

[BritManToo]

15 minutes ago, NCC1701A said:

"Four years is all we have"

 

I'm old, doubt I have more than 4 years left, so it won't affect me.

[NCC1701A]

3 minutes ago, BritManToo said:

I'm old, doubt I have more than 4 years left, so it won't affect me.

i just now divided the amount of cash I have in the bank by 4 years instead of 20.

 

[Vacuum]

6 hours ago, webfact said:

HUMANITY HAS only about four years left to stabilise global temperatures and save the world from environmental catastrophe stemming from extreme climate change, scientists have warned.

  Says it all about the intellect of these "scientists".

[Catoni]

5555555 ?     I had to check the calendar and make sure it wasn't April 1.   Ha, ha, ha....  So funny.. . ? 

   Some previous hilarious predictions made aound the first Earth Day, 1970:

 

1. Harvard biologist George Wald estimated that “civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”

2. “We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation,” wrote Washington University biologist Barry Commoner in the Earth Day issue of the scholarly journal Environment.

3. The day after the first Earth Day, the New York Times editorial page warned, “Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.”

4. “Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make,” Paul Ehrlich confidently declared in the April 1970 issue of Mademoiselle. “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.”

5. “Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born,” wrote Paul Ehrlich in a 1969 essay titled “Eco-Catastrophe! “By…[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.”

6. Ehrlich sketched out his most alarmist scenario for the 1970 Earth Day issue of The Progressive, assuring readers that between 1980 and 1989, some 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would perish in the “Great Die-Off.”

7. “It is already too late to avoid mass starvation,” declared Denis Hayes, the chief organizer for Earth Day, in the Spring 1970 issue of The Living Wilderness.

8. Peter Gunter, a North Texas State University professor, wrote in 1970, “Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions….By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.”

9. In January 1970, Life reported, “Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support…the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half….”

10. Ecologist Kenneth Watt told Time that, “At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable.”

11. Barry Commoner predicted that decaying organic pollutants would use up all of the oxygen in America’s rivers, causing freshwater fish to suffocate.

12. Paul Ehrlich chimed in, predicting in 1970 that “air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.” Ehrlich sketched a scenario in which 200,000 Americans would die in 1973 during “smog disasters” in New York and Los Angeles.

13. Paul Ehrlich warned in the May 1970 issue of Audubon that DDT and other chlorinated hydrocarbons “may have substantially reduced the life expectancy of people born since 1945.” Ehrlich warned that Americans born since 1946…now had a life expectancy of only 49 years, and he predicted that if current patterns continued this expectancy would reach 42 years by 1980, when it might level out. (Note: According to the most recent CDC report, life expectancy in the US is 78.8 years).

14. Ecologist Kenneth Watt declared, “By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate…that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, `Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, `I am very sorry, there isn’t any.'”

15. Harrison Brown, a scientist at the National Academy of Sciences, published a chart in Scientific American that looked at metal reserves and estimated the humanity would totally run out of copper shortly after 2000. Lead, zinc, tin, gold, and silver would be gone before 1990.

16. Sen. Gaylord Nelson wrote in Look that, “Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.”

17. In 1975, Paul Ehrlich predicted that “since more than nine-tenths of the original tropical rainforests will be removed in most areas within the next 30 years or so, it is expected that half of the organisms in these areas will vanish with it.”

18. Kenneth Watt warned about a pending Ice Age in a speech. “The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years,” he declared. “If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”

 

  A few more failed predictions:     Enjoy ? 

1. 2015 is the ‘last effective opportunity’ to stop catastrophic warming

World leaders meeting at the Vatican last week issued a statement saying that 2015 was the “last effective opportunity to negotiate arrangements that keep human-induced warming below 2-degrees [Celsius].”

Pope Francis wants to weigh in on global warming, and is expected to issue an encyclical saying basically the same thing. Francis will likely reiterate that 2015 is the last chance to stop massive warming.

But what he should really say is that the U.N. conference this year is the “last” chance to cut a deal to stem global warming…  since last year when the U.N. said basically the same thingabout 2014’s climate summit.

2. France’s foreign minister said we only have “500 days” to stop “climate chaos”

When Laurent Fabius met with Secretary of State John Kerry on May 13, 2014 to talk about world issues he said “we have 500 days to avoid climate chaos.”

Ironically at the time of Fabius’ comments, the U.N. had scheduled a climate summit to meet in Paris in December 2015 — some 565 days after his remarks. Looks like the U.N. is 65 days too late to save the world.

3. President Barack Obama is the last chance to stop global warming

When Obama made the campaign promise to “slow the rise of the oceans” some environmentalists may have taken him quite literally.

In 2012, the United Nations Foundation President Tim Wirth told Climatewire that Obama’s second term was “the last window of opportunity” to impose policies to restrict fossil fuel use. Wirth said it’s “the last chance we have to get anything approaching 2 degrees Centigrade,” adding that if “we don’t do it now, we are committing the world to a drastically different place.”

Even before that, then-National Aeronautics and Space Administration Goddard Space Flight Center head James Hansen warned in 2009 that Obama only “has four years to save Earth.” I wonder what they now think about their predictions?

4. Remember when we had “hours” to stop global warming?

In 2009, world leaders met in Copenhagen, Denmark to potentially hash out another climate treaty. That same year, the head of Canada’s Green Party wrote that there was only “hours” left to stop global warming.

“We have hours to act to avert a slow-motion tsunami that could destroy civilization as we know it,” Elizabeth May, leader of the Greens in Canada, wrote in 2009. “Earth has a long time. Humanity does not. We need to act urgently. We no longer have decades; we have hours. We mark that in Earth Hour on Saturday.”

5. United Kingdom Prime Minister Gordon Brown said there was only 50 days left to save Earth

2009 was a bad year for global warming predictions. That year Brown warned there was only “50 days to save the world from global warming,” the BBC reported. According to Brown there was “no plan B.”

Brown has been booted out of office since then. I wonder what he’d say about global warming today?

6. Let’s not forget Prince Charles’s warning we only had 96 months to save the planet

It’s only been about 70 months since Charles said in July 2009 that there would be “irretrievable climate and ecosystem collapse, and all that goes with it.” So the world apparently only has 26 months left to stave off an utter catastrophe.

7. The U.N.’s top climate scientist said in 2007 we only had four years to save the world

Rajendra Pachauri, the former head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said in 2007 that if “there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late.”

“What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment,” he said.

Well, it’s 2015 and no new U.N. climate treaty has been presented. The only thing that’s changed since then is that Pachauri was forced to resign earlier this year amid accusations he sexually harassed multiple female coworkers.

8. Environmentalists warned in 2002 the world had a decade to go green

Environmentalist write George Monbiot wrote in the UK Guardian that within “as little as 10 years, the world will be faced with a choice: arable farming either continues to feed the world’s animals or it continues to feed the world’s people. It cannot do both.”

In 2002, about 930 million people around the world were undernourished, according to U.N. data. by 2014, that number shrank to 805 million. Sorry, Monbiot.

9. The “tipping point” warning first started in 1989

In the late 1980s the U.N. was already claiming the world had only a decade to solve global warming or face the consequences.

The San Jose Mercury News reported on June 30, 1989 that a “senior environmental official at the United Nations, Noel Brown, says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels if global warming is not reversed by the year 2000.”

That prediction didn’t come true 15 years ago, and the U.N. is sounding the same alarm today.

https://dailycaller.com/2015/05/04/25-years-of-predicting-the-global-warming-tipping-point/

  

[NCC1701A]

 

[beavenlen]

the end of the world is nigh, repent your sins , how many years more must we here this stuff. i have heard the same dribble since i started school,6 decades ago. Mother nature is just continuing on her centorial rotation, as she has done since before any of us were even a twinkle.Doom And Gloom Doom and Gloom,

[marko kok prong]

too late already,not that we will all die in 4 years,i think what they are trying to say if we don't do anything within these 4 years then it is unstopable,i think it already is.

[neeray]

1 minute ago, marko kok prong said:

too late already,not that we will all die in 4 years,i think what they are trying to say if we don't do anything within these 4 years then it is unstopable,i think it already is.

Thank you. It took a long time for someone to clarify "4 years".

[overherebc]

18 minutes ago, neeray said:

Thank you. It took a long time for someone to clarify "4 years".

So now I have to re-write my daily beer can consumption AGAIN.

Trouble is now I only re-write it after a few beers and then spend a couple of days trying to decipher what I've written.

Get back to you in a couple of beers sorry 'days.'

Just thought, if Grim had two M's it might be more fitting???

[connda]

"Lions and Tigers and Bears, oh my!"

-- Judy Garland, The Wizard of Oz

"I find it really incredible how these people promote that everything on the planet is somehow our fault. Most of the ancient city of Alexandria, Egypt, from the time of Cleopatra is under water. Sure, that must have been caused by too many chariots in rush hour and the farting of horses like cows that the EU regulates.

The rise and fall of land have been going on for millions of years. It is part of the ecosystem itself and we are a bunch of narcissists to think that we are somehow even capable of changing the climate. We are no more than a flea on the back of a dog that can be shaken off when we become too annoying."

-- Martin Armstrong

[RickTik]

Stock up on cannabis seeds.

Also, property values in Siberia might go up.

Other than that, don't sweat the fearmongering.

[cmsally]

4 hours ago, Cadbury said:

And how many of those protesters outside the UN on 8th September got there by cars and motorbikes which emit CO2.

Do as I speak and not as I do they chant!

Bet the whole conference hall was air conditioned !

[BEngBKK]

Do not worry.
The planet will survive and regenerate it self durring some 10000 of years, after we are destinct....
The dinosaur died out and the planet survived.....

 

Humans are not nessasery for the planet to survive...

 

So...  no global problem.. 

[simoh1490]

2 minutes ago, BEngBKK said:

Do not worry.
The planet will survive and regenerate it self durring some 10000 of years, after we are destinct....
The dinosaur died out and the planet survived.....

 

Humans are not nessasery for the planet to survive...

 

So...  no global problem.. 

So your love affair is with the planet itself, even if it is devoid of all life forms, that's odd. If that's the case then the planet has a finite lifespan, at some point it will once again become cosmic dust so no, it won't survive.

[MaxYakov]

Max - 2.0 degree compatible (at least). And when my body permanently reaches ambient I'll be 100% compatible.

 

Yeah, and I probably don't have four years left either (as a previous replier has already stated).

[Jai Dee]

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