Without Drastic CO2 Cuts Immediately, the World Faces a Massive 'Oh Shit' Moment

via AlterNet:



Without Drastic CO2 Cuts Immediately, the World Faces a Massive 'Oh Shit' Moment

By Mark Hertsgaard, The Nation. Posted October 15, 2009.

A frightening new climate change study says the United States must eliminate its enormous rate of carbon emission within ten years.




Editor's Note: This is the kickoff to a series of pieces as a Copenhagen Primer about climate change that we will be running in the lead up to the international climate talks in Copenhagen beginning on December 7. Stay tuned.


They say that everyone who finally gets it about climate change has an "Oh, shit" moment -- an instant when the full scientific implications become clear and they suddenly realize what a horrifically dangerous situation humanity has created for itself. Listening to the speeches, ground-breaking in their way, that President Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao delivered September 22 at the UN Summit on Climate Change, I was reminded of my most recent "Oh, shit" moment. It came in July, courtesy of the chief climate adviser to the German government. Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, chair of an advisory council known by its German acronym, WBGU, is a physicist whose specialty, fittingly enough, is chaos theory. Speaking to an invitation-only conference at New Mexico's Santa Fe Institute, Schellnhuber divulged the findings of a study so new he had not yet briefed Chancellor Angela Merkel about it. The study, Solving the Climate Dilemma: The Budget Approach, has now been published here. If its conclusions are correct -- and Schellnhuber ranks among the world's half-dozen most eminent climate scientists -- it has monumental implications for the pivotal meeting in December in Copenhagen, where world leaders will try to agree on reversing global warming.

Schellnhuber and his WBGU colleagues go a giant step beyond the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN body whose scientific reports are constrained because the world's governments must approve their contents. The IPCC says that by 2020 rich industrial countries must cut emissions 25 to 40 percent (compared with 1990) if the world is to have a fair chance of avoiding catastrophic climate change. By contrast, the WBGU study says the United States must cut emissions 100 percent by 2020 -- in other words, quit carbon entirely within ten years. Germany and other industrial nations must do the same by 2025 to 2030. China only has until 2035, and the world as a whole must be carbon free by 2050. The study adds that big polluters can delay their day of reckoning by "buying" emissions rights from developing countries, a step the study estimates would extend some countries' deadlines by a decade or so. .........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/environment/143256/without_drastic_co2_cuts_immediately%2C_the_world_faces_a_massive_%27oh_shit%27_moment

And I really don't think they will, at least not the majority alive today. Many people aren't capable of seeing the environment as something we can really harm. And they aren't willing to give up anything, so they refuse to believe it. I really don't think anything can be done to move people.

There's a shiny balloon up in the sky

we have entered into the "we are fucked" era.

but what needs to be determined is "just how fucked are we?"


CLIMATE CHANGE: Four Degrees of Devastation
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=48791

UXBRIDGE, Canada, Oct 9 (IPS) - The prospect of a four-degree Celsius rise in global average temperatures in 50 years is alarming - but not alarmist, climate scientists now believe.

Eighteen months ago, no one dared imagine humanity pushing the climate beyond an additional two degrees C of heating, but rising carbon emissions and inability to agree on cuts has meant science must now consider the previously unthinkable.

"Two degrees C is already gone as a target," said Chris West of the University of Oxford's UK Climate Impacts Programme.

"Four degrees C is definitely possible...This is the biggest challenge in our history," West told participants at the "4 Degrees and Beyond, International Climate Science Conference" at the University of Oxford last week.

The Oceans are Coming

by Keith Farnish and Dmitry Orlov
19 October 2009

This article is the first part of a three-part series, which considers the effect of global warming on ocean level rise, and examines life with constantly advancing seas from two perspectives: that of the landlubber and that of the seafarer.

Part I: The Global Mistake
In September 2009 the latest global temperature rise projections released by the Hadley Centre, part of the British Meteorological Office indicated an average rise of 4 degrees Celsius (that’s a balmy 7.2°F) by 2055 given a business as usual scenario. Some places will be a bit more stable, but the places that particularly matter – the ice caps, the methane-rich permafrosts in northern Canada and Siberia, and the Amazon rainforest -- will be melting, off-gassing, and burning, respectively. The report offers some detail on what that would feel like:

In a 4°C world, climate change, deforestation and fires spreading from degraded land into pristine forest will conspire to destroy over 83 per cent of the Amazon rainforest by 2100… in a 4°C world there will be a mix of extremely wet monsoon seasons and extremely dry ones, making it hard for farmers to plan what to grow. Worse, the fine aerosol particles released into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels could put a complete stop to the monsoon rains in central southern China and northern India... the people most vulnerable to a 4°C rise are also least able to escape it. At 4°C, the poor will struggle to survive, let alone escape.

{snip}
http://www.culturechange.org/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=533&Itemid=1

In my environmental science course in college. I've been frustrated at how long it's taken anyone else (or much of anyone else) to even admit there was a problem--which has essentially been 2 decades of continuous, never-ending "Oh, shit" moments.

expecting the US to go first.
and be the only country to reduce,

on an issue that the majority of US voters oppose,


isNOT going to work

of the solution.

And the whiney-assed argument that "Johnny is doing it, too" doesn't hold water any more now than it did in third grade.

green energy would mean more jobs and cheaper fuel...but it might take a bite out of fossil fuel profits. Can't have that now, can we? Let life on earth be snuffed out so a few fat billionaires can get even richer in the short term. What a trade off.

Waxman stacks the deck, so California will make money
at the expense of other states.

(California does not have to do anything to be in compliance,
in addition, they can sell their excess to other states)
(the Waxman-Markey climate bill HR 2454)
I will look up my OP on that, if anyone is interested.

two wrongs don't make a right.

The tough part is watching it happen, knowing that it's going to happen and also knowing that there's about two chances in hell that anybody is going to do anything real about it.

Realistically, figure the odds. Maybe a couple of panic-driven token efforts when it's obviously too late. Ironically, it may indeed be the other "carbon twin" -- peak oil -- that does the most good as far as mitigating our toasty future.

Our species has been through bottlenecks before, and chances are it will survive. It'd have to be a pretty thoroughgoing cataclysm to kill off all seven billion of us. But it's going to be a whole 'nother game, for sure.

Move north, stay off the coast, and prepare for the worst.

Because it's gonna start getting really expensive at the grocery.

http://www.carlaemery.com/country-living-book.htm