Global Warmings Terrifying New Math. If the pictures of those towering wildfires in Colorado havent convinced you, or the size of your AC bill this summer, here are some hard numbers about climate change June broke or tied 3,2. United States. That followed the warmest May on record for the Northern Hemisphere the 3. Meteorologists reported that this spring was the warmest ever recorded for our nation in fact, it crushed the old record by so much that it represented the largest temperature departure from average of any season on record. The same week, Saudi authorities reported that it had rained in Mecca despite a temperature of 1. Not that our leaders seemed to notice. Last month the worlds nations, meeting in Rio for the 2. Unlike George H. W. Bush, who flew in for the first conclave, Barack Obama didnt even attend. It was a ghost of the glad, confident meeting 2. British journalist George Monbiot wrote no one paid it much attention, footsteps echoing through the halls once thronged by multitudes. Since I wrote one of the first books for a general audience about global warming way back in 1. Ive spent the intervening decades working ineffectively to slow that warming, I can say with some confidence that were losing the fight, badly and quickly losing it because, most of all, we remain in denial about the peril that human civilization is in. When we think about global warming at all, the arguments tend to be ideological, theological and economic. But to grasp the seriousness of our predicament, you just need to do a little math.
Latest breaking news articles, photos, video, blogs, reviews, analysis, opinion and reader comment from New Zealand and around the World NZ Herald. Canada k n d listen French is a country in the northern part of North America. Its ten provinces and three territories extend from the. For the past year, an easy and powerful bit of arithmetical analysis first published by financial analysts in the U. K. has been making the rounds of environmental conferences and journals, but it hasnt yet broken through to the larger public. The culture of Canada is a term that embodies the artistic, culinary, literary, humour, musical, political and social elements that are representative of Canada and. This analysis upends most of the conventional political thinking about climate change. And it allows us to understand our precarious our almost but not quite finally hopeless position with three simple numbers. The First Number 2 Celsius. If the movie had ended in Hollywood fashion, the Copenhagen climate conference in 2. The worlds nations had gathered in the December gloom of the Danish capital for what a leading climate economist, Sir Nicholas Stern of Britain, called the most important gathering since the Second World War, given what is at stake. As Danish energy minister Connie Hedegaard, who presided over the conference, declared at the time This is our chance. If we miss it, it could take years before we get a new and better one. If ever. In the event, of course, we missed it. Copenhagen failed spectacularly. Neither China nor the United States, which between them are responsible for 4. Amid considerable chaos, President Obama took the lead in drafting a face saving Copenhagen Accord that fooled very few. Its purely voluntary agreements committed no one to anything, and even if countries signaled their intentions to cut carbon emissions, there was no enforcement mechanism. Copenhagen is a crime scene tonight, an angry Greenpeace official declared, with the guilty men and women fleeing to the airport. Headline writers were equally brutal COPENHAGEN THE MUNICH OF OUR TIMESThe accord did contain one important number, however. In Paragraph 1, it formally recognized the scientific view that the increase in global temperature should be below two degrees Celsius. And in the very next paragraph, it declared that we agree that deep cuts in global emissions are required. Celsius. By insisting on two degrees about 3. Fahrenheit the accord ratified positions taken earlier in 2. G8, and the so called Major Economies Forum. It was as conventional as conventional wisdom gets. The number first gained prominence, in fact, at a 1. Angela Merkel, then the German minister of the environment and now the center right chancellor of the nation. Some context So far, weve raised the average temperature of the planet just under 0. Celsius, and that has caused far more damage than most scientists expected. A third of summer sea ice in the Arctic is gone, the oceans are 3. Given those impacts, in fact, many scientists have come to think that two degrees is far too lenient a target. Any number much above one degree involves a gamble, writes Kerry Emanuel of MIT, a leading authority on hurricanes, and the odds become less and less favorable as the temperature goes up. Thomas Lovejoy, once the World Banks chief biodiversity adviser, puts it like this If were seeing what were seeing today at 0. Celsius, two degrees is simply too much. NASA scientist James Hansen, the planets most prominent climatologist, is even blunter The target that has been talked about in international negotiations for two degrees of warming is actually a prescription for long term disaster. At the Copenhagen summit, a spokesman for small island nations warned that many would not survive a two degree rise Some countries will flat out disappear. When delegates from developing nations were warned that two degrees would represent a suicide pact for drought stricken Africa, many of them started chanting, One degree, one Africa. Despite such well founded misgivings, political realism bested scientific data, and the world settled on the two degree target indeed, its fair to say that its the only thing about climate change the world has settled on. All told, 1. 67 countries responsible for more than 8. Copenhagen Accord, endorsing the two degree target. Only a few dozen countries have rejected it, including Kuwait, Nicaragua and Venezuela. Even the United Arab Emirates, which makes most of its money exporting oil and gas, signed on. The official position of planet Earth at the moment is that we cant raise the temperature more than two degrees Celsius its become the bottomest of bottom lines. Two degrees. The Second Number 5. Gigatons. Scientists estimate that humans can pour roughly 5. Reasonable, in this case, means four chances in five, or somewhat worse odds than playing Russian roulette with a six shooter. This idea of a global carbon budget emerged about a decade ago, as scientists began to calculate how much oil, coal and gas could still safely be burned. Since weve increased the Earths temperature by 0. But, in fact, computer models calculate that even if we stopped increasing CO2 now, the temperature would likely still rise another 0. That means were already three quarters of the way to the two degree target. How good are these numbers No one is insisting that theyre exact, but few dispute that theyre generally right. The 5. 65 gigaton figure was derived from one of the most sophisticated computer simulation models that have been built by climate scientists around the world over the past few decades. And the number is being further confirmed by the latest climate simulation models currently being finalized in advance of the next report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Looking at them as they come in, they hardly differ at all, says Tom Wigley, an Australian climatologist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Theres maybe 4. 0 models in the data set now, compared with 2. But so far the numbers are pretty much the same. Were just fine tuning things. I dont think much has changed over the last decade. William Collins, a senior climate scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, agrees. I think the results of this round of simulations will be quite similar, he says. Were not getting any free lunch from additional understanding of the climate system. Were not getting any free lunch from the worlds economies, either. With only a single years lull in 2. In late May, the International Energy Agency published its latest figures CO2 emissions last year rose to 3. America had a warm winter and converted more coal fired power plants to natural gas, so its emissions fell slightly China kept booming, so its carbon output which recently surpassed the U. S. rose 9. 3 percent the Japanese shut down their fleet of nukes post Fukushima, so their emissions edged up 2. There have been efforts to use more renewable energy and improve energy efficiency, said Corinne Le Qur, who runs Englands Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research. University of California Press on JSTORFounded in 1. University of California Press, Journals and Digital Publishing Division, disseminates scholarship of enduring value. One of the largest, most distinguished, and innovative of the university presses today, its collection of print and online journals spans topics in the humanities and social sciences, with concentrations in sociology, musicology, history, religion, cultural and area studies, ornithology, law, and literature. In addition to publishing its own journals, the division also provides traditional and digital publishing services to many client scholarly societies and associations.