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The worst news possible about the IPCC comes in the form of a new report. Does this one claim that the IPCC made some newly discovered trivial mistake? No. Unlike the plethora of barely there (or wholly imagined) “-gates” we’ve all read so much about in recent weeks that say nothing about the underlying science or the overall IPCC process, this one suggests a true nightmare scenario…
Charles H. Greene, Cornell professor of Earth and atmospheric science, has published in the peer-reviewed journal Oceanography (March 2010). Greene is joined on the paper, “A Very Inconvenient Truth,” by his colleagues D. James Baker of the William J. Clinton Foundation, and Daniel H. Miller of The Roda Group, Berkeley, Calif.
The scientists conclude that the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2007 4th assessment report underestimates the potential dangerous impacts that man-made climate change will have on society.
The full paper is at: http://www.tos.org/oceanography/issues/issue_archive/issue_pdfs/23_1/23-1_greene.pdf
Greene says:
“Even if all man-made greenhouse gas emissions were stopped tomorrow and carbon-dioxide levels stabilized at today’s concentration, by the end of this century the global average temperature would increase by about 4.3 degrees Fahrenheit, or about 2.4 degrees centigrade above pre-industrial levels, which is significantly above the level which scientists and policy makers agree is a threshold for dangerous climate change.
“Of course, greenhouse gas emissions will not stop tomorrow, so the actual temperature increase will likely be significantly larger, resulting in potentially catastrophic impacts to society unless other steps are taken to reduce the Earth’s temperature.
“Furthermore, while the oceans have slowed the amount of warming we would otherwise have seen for the level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the ocean’s thermal inertia will also slow the cooling we experience once we finally reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. This means that the temperature rise we see this century will be largely irreversible for the next thousand years.
“Reducing greenhouse gas emissions alone is unlikely to mitigate the risks of dangerous climate change. Society should significantly expand research into geoengineering solutions that remove and sequester greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere. Geoengineering solutions must be in addition to, not replace, dramatic emission reductions if society is to avoid the most dangerous impacts from climate change.”
I’ve pointed out far more times than regular readers (or I) would like to remember that we’ve been deluged with “it’s worse than we thought” discoveries in the last couple of years. That, coupled with the hideous implications of the timing of our climate situation[1] explains why I’ve been saying for some time that I think it’s virtually assured we will have to resort to one or more geoengineering techniques to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.
To be clear, this paper doesn’t “prove” that my view is correct, but it certainly doesn’t fill me with optimism. I’m increasingly convinced–call it a hunch, if that characterization makes you feel better–that we’ve wandered so far down this path that it will take heroic measures to prevent widespread human suffering from climate change. And right now, as I look around, I don’t see many heroes waiting to leap into action, just an awful lot of people with lots of “good reasons” to do little or nothing.
If anyone here wants to prove me wrong, please do it. I’m begging you.
Finally, let me point out that despite my snarky title and presentation of this post, I’m not, in any way, criticizing the IPCC. Climate scientists have been extremely conservative in making projections about where we’re headed under various scenarios, which is exactly as it should be.[2] The problem is that if too many of us choose not to listen to and understand what they’re saying, then they will be ignored and yet more time will be squandered, leaving us with ever less desirable and more expensive options in the coming decades.
[1] The timing is so perverse it’s hard to believe we managed to do this to ourselves, but we did. There is the public policy latency (the delay before we can change policy), which we’re seeing is much longer than we need; there is the implementation latency (the time for a new policy to actually take effect), which can be very long for some parts of the infrastructure changes we need to make, like cleaning up or abandoning coal-fired electricity plants; there is the enormous inertia of the earth system, as Greene, et al., point out in the paper linked above. On top of that we have the immense uncertainty of feedbacks, including the ever-terrifying release of methane and CO2 from permafrost and undersea deposits, which could mean we have far less time to respond than even the most pessimistic of us thought.
[2] The nature of the IPCC process has made it even more conservative than normal for scientists wrestling with an immense problem. Anyone remember the infamous “burning embers” issue?
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