Survivable IPCC projections are based on science fiction - the reality is much worse

The IPCC's 'Representative Concentration Pathways' are based on fantasy technology that must draw massive volumes of CO2 out of the atmosphere late this century, writes Nick Breeze - an unjustified hope that conceals a very bleak future for Earth, and humanity.

by Nick Breeze, Ecologist, February 27, 2015

It is quite clear that we have no carbon budget whatsoever. The account, far from being in surplus, is horrendously overdrawn. To claim we have a few decades of safely burning coal, oil and gas is an utter nonsense.

The IPPC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) published in their latest report, AR5, a set of 'Representative Concentration Pathways' (RCPs).

These RCPs (see graph, right) consist of four scenarios that project global temperature rises based on different quantities of greenhouse gas concentrations.

The scenarios are assumed to all be linked directly to emissions scenarios. The more carbon we emit then the hotter it gets. 

Currently humanity is on the worst case scenario of RCP 8.5 which takes us to 2 °C warming by mid century and 4 °C warming by the end of the century.

As Professor Schellnhuber, from Potsdam Institute for Climate Research (PIK) said, "the difference between two and four degrees is human civilisation."

In 2009, the International Union of Forest Research Organisations delivered a report to the UN that stated that the natural carbon sink of trees could be lost at a 2.5 °C temperature increase.

The ranges for RCP 4.5 and RCP 6 both take us over 2.5 °C, and any idea that we can survive when the tree sink flips from being a carbon sink to a carbon source is delusional.

Where does this leave us?

Of the four shown RCPs, only one keeps us within the range that climate scientists regard as survivable. This is RCP 2.6, which has a projected temperature range of 0.9 °C to 2.3 °C.

Considering we are currently at 0.85 °C above the preindustrial level of greenhouse gas concentrations, we are already entering the range, and as Professor Martin Rees says: "I honestly would bet, sad though it is, that the annual CO2 emissions are going to rise year by year for at least the next 20 years and that will build up accumulative levels close to 500 parts per million."

The recent US-China agreement supports Rees's contentions. But even if Rees is wrong and we do manage to curtail our carbon emissions, a closer look at RCP 2.6 shows something much more disturbing.

In his image (see graph, right), IPCC SMP Expert Reviewer David Tattershall has inserted vertical red lines to mark the decades between the years 2000 and 2100. Within this 21st century range he has also highlighted a steep decline in atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases (shown by the steeply declining thick red line).

It is interesting that concerted action for emissions reductions is timed to occur just beyond the date for the implementation of a supposed legally binding international agreement.

Stopping emissions does not reduce atmospheric carbon. The emissions to date are colossal, and the warming effect is delayed by around 40 years. Therefore, even if we halt emissions, we know there is much more warming to come. That will also set off other positive feedbacks along the way that will amplify the warming further, stretching over centuries.

So how does the IPCC achieve these vast reductions in greenhouse gases?

If we look at the vertical red lines, at around 2025, the steep decline in atmospheric greenhouse gases begins. Accumulated emissions not only are reduced to zero in 2070 but actually go negative.

This chart shows that carbon is removed from the atmosphere in quantities of hundreds of billions of tons, for as far ahead as 2300, in order to sustain a temperature increase beneath 2 °C.

What makes this idea of projected large-scale Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) even more perverse is the talk by policymakers of a "carbon budget." This refers to the amount of fossil fuel that can be burned before we are at risk of reaching a 2 °C rise in global mean temperature.

It is quite clear that we have no carbon budget whatsoever. The account, far from being in surplus, is horrendously overdrawn. To claim we have a few decades of safely burning coal, oil and gas is an utter nonsense.

Sequestering billions of tons of carbon for centuries

If all of the above has not raised any alarm bells then perhaps it is time to consider the proposed methods for sucking the billions of tons of carbon out of the atmosphere.

In February 2015, the National Research Council in the United States launched their two reports on "climate interventions." Dr Nutt concluded with this statement on CDR:

"Carbon Dioxide Removal strategies offer the potential to decrease carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere, but they are limited right now by their slow response, by their inability to scale up, and their high cost."

Dr Nutt's conclusion points to a very important factor that we can elaborate on with a rare case of certainty. There is no proposed CDR technology that can be scaled up to suck billions of tons out of the Earth's atmosphere. It simply does not exist in the real world.

This is reiterated by Dr Hugh Hunt in the Department of Engineering, at the University of Cambridge, who points out:

"10 billion tons a year of carbon sequestration? We don't do anything on this planet on that scale. We don't manufacture food on that scale, we don't mine iron ore on that scale. We don't even produce coal, oil or gas on that scale. Iron ore is below a billion tons a year! How are we going to create a technology, from scratch, a highly complicated technology, to the tune of 10 billion tons a year in the next 10 years?"

Science fiction

It is not just that there are currently no ideas being researched to such a degree where they are likely to be able to bring down atmospheric carbon to a safe level of around 300 parts per million. It is also that the level of funding available to the scientists doing the research is woefully inadequate.

These RCPs are used by policymakers to decide what actions are required to sustain a safe climate for our own and future generations. The information they are using, presented by the IPCC, is nothing more than science fiction.

It makes for sober thinking when glossy images of President Obama and the Chinese Premier, Wen Jiabao, are presented to the world shaking hands on global emissions reductions by 2030 that we know will commit us to catastrophe.

Nick Breeze is a film maker and writer on climate change and other environmental topics. He has been interviewing a range of experts relating to the field of climate change and science for over five years. These include interviews with Dr James Hansen, Professor Martin Rees, Professor James Lovelock, Dr Rowan Williams, Dr Natalia Shakhova, Dr Michael Mann, Dr Hugh Hunt, among others.

Additional articles can also be read on his blog Envisionation.

http://www.theecologist.org/blogs_and_comments/commentators/2772427/survivable_ipcc_projections_are_based_on_science_fiction_the_reality_is_much_worse.html

Nick Breeze: [Gavin Schmidt] Tweeting on Thin Ice - Reflecting on the Arctic Sea Ice Meeting at the Royal Society

by Nick Breeze, Envisionation, September 30, 2014

When it comes to changes in the global climate, one of the most visible and disturbing sites is the data that shows the diminishing state of sea ice in the Arctic region. It is both dramatic and symbolic, with known and unknown consequences. As someone who has been following the scientific literature on this for a few years now, I cannot help feeling that our collective societies, and especially those with real power, will rue the days they turned their backs on this dynamic and important component of our climate.

With this in mind, I was positively excited to attend the two-day event at the Royal Society on the 22nd and 23rd of September, titled, ‘Arctic sea ice reduction: the evidence, models, and global impacts.’ The list of scientists attending read like a dream team of big brains on Arctic sea ice matters:

Dr Julienne Stroeve, University of Colorado, USA; Reduction of summer sea ice extent
Professor Mark Serreze, National Snow and Ice Center, USA; Changes in Arctic sea ice and the polar atmosphere
Professor Peter Wadhams, University of Cambridge, UK; Sea ice thickness from submarines
Professor Ronald Kwok, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, CALTECH, USA; Satellite observations of sea ice thickness
Dr Andrey Proshuntinsky, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, USA; Arctic circulation regimes
Dr Helene Hewitt, Met Office Hadley Centre, UK; Using models to understand and predict Arctic Sea Ice
Professor John Turner, British Antarctic Survey, UK; Why is sea ice increasing in the Southern Ocean?
Dr Marika Holland, National Center for Atmospheric Research, USA; The capabilities and limitations of Arctic sea ice ocean climate models
Professor Daniel Feltham, University of Reading, UK; Sea ice mechanics and the next generation of sea ice physics
Dr Dirk Notz, Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, Germany; Processes controlling the Arctic sea ice mass balance
Professor Don Perovich, Dartmouth College, USA; Field studies of sea ice melt
Professor Grae Worster, University of Cambridge, UK; Sea ice thermodynamics and brine drainage
Dr Gavin Schmidt, NASA, USA; Atmospheric composition and radiative impacts of Arctic sea ice loss
Professor Jennifer Francis, Rutgers University, USA; The impact of Arctic sea ice loss on extreme weather
Dr Sheldon Bacon, National Oceanography Centre, UK; The Arctic Ocean freshwater budget and implications for climate

One of the most striking debates in the discussion of Arctic sea ice is the rate of loss and risk of feedbacks, such as large-scale methane release. The large-scale methane releases are a feature of the Earth’s history, where huge amounts of this deadly gas are released at a rate where they cannot be broken down, and therefore overwhelm the atmosphere. This heating effect, in turn, creates amplified heating making it difficult for life to survive. It is estimated that when the last big methane burst occurred, millions of years ago, 90% of life on Earth died and the recovery rate for biodiversity was millions of years more.

Russian scientist’s, Dr Natalia Shakhova and Dr Igor Semilitov have been conducting annual trips to the East Siberian Arctic Shelf for over ten years and are reporting an increased destabilisation of the permafrost on the shallow Arctic ocean floor in the region. The loss of ice has meant that significant heating has occurred this sensitive region, causing the frozen seabed to rise from -7 degrees centigrade to between -1 C and +3 C. Obviously, above zero, the seabed changes state from ice to water and releases methane from the rotting organic debris that has been frozen for thousands, or millions of years.

More importantly, this permafrost layer acts as a seal over an enormous store of methane hydrates conservatively estimated to be around 1,500 gigatonnes. To put this in perspective, there is currently about 5.5 gigatonnes of methane in the Earth’s atmosphere. A release of a small percentage of 50 gigatonnes has been cited as a risk. Wadhams and his colleagues used the Stern model to calculate that such a release would have the equivalent economic value of $50 trillion USD (roughly the same as global GDP). That is obviously much more than we could ever afford and the world, post-release, would look vastly different, with hardly any humans, or other species, remaining compared to what we see today.

Professor Wadhams gave his talk at the Royal Society focusing on the behaviour of sea ice, using submarine data to back up previous estimates of sea ice decline in volume over multi decades. As these are observations, it is not really something that can be contested. Wadhams has been going on trips to the Arctic aboard military submarines for many years, collecting data to feed into the models, calculating volume in addition to the ice area (extent) shown from the satellites. This has shown a dramatic drop in sea-ice volume by 40% since the late 1970s. The implications are that we are risking setting off a feedback process of methane release that could cause a huge boost to global warming. That is the view from those collecting data from the region.

On the other side of the debate stands the modellers. David Archer (not present at the event) is referred to as the “go to man” on Arctic methane. Archer says that no risk is posed from methane releases from Arctic shelves such as the one in Eastern Siberia. To represent this view at the Royal Society meeting was Dr Gavin Schmidt, the newly positioned Director of NASA’s Goddard Institute For Space Studies. Dr. Schmidt presented his modelling data, positing that there is no evidence such a risk exists. This is as a result of his examination of the data record of the Holocene period; a period of climate stability in which we and many other species have flourished. There are other scientists who look at our unprecedented climate situation and conclude that this is the beginning of the “Anthropocene”; a period of climate driven by human activity.

Schmidt does acknowledge there was a huge methane release way back in the geological record but states that the world was a very different place then and we cannot draw conclusions from it. Schmidt’s view is based much more on modelling data and theory, which is viewed with suspicion by some, due to the inability of the models to keep pace in real-time with the rapid decline of Arctic sea ice. The argument goes that if you cannot get the model to reproduce what is happening today, how can you draw conclusions of what the sea ice will do in 10, 20 or 100 years? All scientists use models, and they are very useful in looking at climate and their results are always getting better, as both the technological capacity, and the scientists understanding of Earth system processes gets better.

Dr Schmidt’s presentation was especially crafted to dispel the idea of a risk from methane releases and to directly discredit the work of Shakhova et al. Even when he mentioned the word methane, he did so encouraging the audience to make horror noises. This seems to me a thoughtless act, considering people are risking their lives to collect the data on the subject. I interviewed Shakhova in June and she gave examples of other expeditions that have had fatal outcomes for those involved. Also, considering Professor Wadhams was sat in the audience and held a different view, it seemed divisive and childish. Schmidt presented in his summary that there was no risk of a methane “bomb,” or other large-scale multi-gigatonne release from hydrate stores in the Arctic.

Although he didn’t explicitly say it, the implication was that the work of those saying “there is a risk” is rubbish. He showed models developed by Archer to prove it. However, I failed to draw a similar conclusion as Schmidt, because the scientists telling us there IS an issue, are the only ones actually visiting the region and collecting data. Shakhova said in June, when we spoke, that a decade ago there were hardly any bubbles coming out, and the ice pack on top was frozen solid. They could drive heavy vehicles out on the ice. Due to global warming, it has vanished, and now the dark open water is absorbing the sun's heat energy, and the waves that occur during intensifying storms (a new phenomenon for the Eastern Siberian Arctic Shelf) are transporting this heat down to the seabed, where the melting occurs. Thus, their observations show plumes of methane pouring off the seabed, from melting permafrost and over a kilometre wide.

The opposing views portended to set up a scenario for great discussion and perhaps, potentially, collaboration on how scientists could move forward to get to the bottom of what is happening in the volatile polar region. However, what really transpired was that Dr Schmidt was not that interested in any serious consideration of views outside those of his colleagues and had come here to only try and discredit what he might call “opponents.” Even when Professor Wadhams asked him a serious question at the end of his presentation, about what sea water temperature data is feeding Archer’s model (as it was being shown as evidence), he simply replied that “it’s [the answer] in the paper.” Conversely, when Wadhams was on the stage, Schmidt only raised his hand to ask “Is any of this based on physics?” to which Wadhams replied “no,” referring to the fact that it is collected, observational data.

Although having two opposing camps adds a bit of flavour to the proceedings, what soured the taste afterwards was Schmidt’s insulting tweeting during Wadhams' presentation. Probably aware that an older professor is not so likely to be microblogging during a serious conference on his main subject of expertise, Schmidt released the following tweets in reference to him:

"Some anticipation for Peter Wadhams. Audience members already crying," "Wadhams still using graphs with ridiculous projections with no basis in physics," "Wadhams now onto methane pulse of 50 GT. But no better justified than his previous statements," and "Wadhams clearly states that there is no physics behind his extrapolations.”

There is no doubt that such “tweets” must resonate with his own choir of over 5,800 followers on Twitter, but does it add anything whatsoever to the meeting in the room? In terms of credibility alone, it should be highlighted that Wadhams has been studying the sea ice for over 40 years and published over 300 papers on the subject. He has made countless voyages to both polar regions and even the Prime Minister of the day, Margaret Thatcher was heard to shout out in Downing Street, “Dennis… The ICE MAN is here!”, having previously telephoned him during an expedition to the Antarctic ahead of a conference in the 1980s. Even if Professor Wadhams was not a person of such high stature, Dr Schmidt’s treatment of him does sully a framework for finding answers to serious questions that science has always been so good at. It undermines the purpose of the meeting hosted by the Royal Society and also the reputation of his current position at Goddard (a position held by one of the most excellent and modest of climate experts we have seen, James Hansen, whom I was fortunate to meet and interview in 2012).

To conclude, the opportunity to discuss in depth the opposing views was squandered in place of a shallow and degrading barrage of Tweets. These were designed to undermine and dismiss a growing field of research that is being published around the world by many institutions, such as the United Nations Environment Programme, as well the peer-reviewed literature. Instead of an arena of informed and intellectual discussion, this behaviour is more akin to playground politics blended with egotistical nastiness.

On a completely different level altogether, one major triumph of the event was the presentation given by Professor Jennifer Francis from Rutgers University, USA, titled, ‘The impact of Arctic sea ice loss on extreme weather.’ Francis has been regularly cited by the mainstream media in recent months when we have experienced extreme weather events.  Her teams work has produced evidence linking the decline in Arctic sea ice to the changes in the oscillation of the jet stream, that delivers our weather and is now being affected by man-made climate change. Such work has been picked up by President Obama’s Chief Science Advisor, Dr John Holdren who is thus briefing the President. I was lucky enough to catch up with Professor Francis later in the week and conduct an interview. We’ll be posting this very shortly.

http://envisionation.co.uk/index.php/blogs/98-tweeting-on-thin-ice-reflecting-on-the-arctic-sea-ice-meeting-at-the-royal-society

Dr. Natalia Shakhova interviewed by Nick Breeze on recent studies of destabilized subsea permafrost off the coast of northern Siberia

June 20, 2014, Dr. Natalia Shakhova interview by Nick Breeze: Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQDVr1eMLK8



Part 2:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BVsS6vo60Y



Part 3:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80ooWqpCdZE

Peter Wadhams, Hugh Hunt, Martin Rees (Astronomer Royal), interviewed by Nick Breeze

Interviews by Nick Breeze, published on January 15, 2014

This video is part of an article responding to the Met Office presentation/lecture given by professor Dame Julia Slingo at the Royal Geographic Society, London, January 2014

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-PITZo7qOY

The View From The Met Office: Super Models and Climate Change Customers ... Welcome To Planet “B”

by Nick Breeze, Envisionation, January 16, 2014

It is reassuring to see the Royal Geographic Society kicking off the new year season of Monday night lectures with one on the subject of climate change, delivered by the newly ennobled and eminent Dame Julia Slingo, the chief scientist at the UK Met Office.

Guardian headline warning: UK Storms Batter Coast During Christmas 2013
 

Professor Slingo is an establishment figure who has worked tirelessly in developing the worldwide reputation of the Met Office, as a leading institution with the ability to analyse both regional weather and develop our understanding of climate change. In this lecture, she set out to explain how her stable of over 500 scientists have been working to build powerful computer models that can simulate climate and tell us what the far reaching effects of climate change are going to be.
 

After several demonstrations of how the models have performed compared with actual observations in recent years, Professor Slingo then vented her annoyance when people criticise the models and the results that they produce, describing them as her “laboratory,” where she and her colleagues go to study the climate. There is a direct correlation between the accuracy of the models and the computing power driving them. Recent years have seen enormous advances in the ability to model our atmosphere in much greater detail. The models rely on data from many sources, such as atmospheric greenhouse gases, moisture in the air, the movement of the thermohaline circulation, storm tracks and intensity, and so on. The more data fed into the model (and computing power available to process it), the better the results.
 

In terms of the IPCC report published every 7 years, Professor Slingo reassuringly made the point that this is not frequent enough in terms of being able to inform policy, as the weather and climate operate in real time, constantly responding to an almost endless number of feedbacks that cause changes. The need for ongoing analysis and developing intelligence is vital.
 

This neatly set the stage for the main core of the lecture: the growing need for understanding of climate change for everyone from policy makers, farmers, vulnerable populations, insurance companies and, as most of us around the world have recently experienced in various forms of extreme weather events, us the public. We are all, she says, potential climate “customers” of the Met Office. This concept has led to greater collaboration with the UK government who are funding the development of the models, based on a principal that money can be made from the creation of such valuable knowledge (which is true!).

Professor Peter Wadhams, Professor Martin Rees And Dr Hugh Hunt discuss emissions, temperature and carbon dioxide removal.

But is there a fly in the ointment? The IPCC report has set a “target” of 2 degrees centigrade as a safe level of warming that human civilisation can go to before climate change becomes dangerous. Having myself interviewed many scientists working on Earth’s sensitivity to temperature, it seems that this figure of 2C has very little grounding in climate science at all. The Earth, as Professor Slingo pointed out, has warmed 0.8C since preindustrial times. We know that the planet takes many years to catch up with the level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, so the 0.8C we are experiencing now (coupled with ever increasing extreme weather events) are just the beginning of what we have in store.

Temperature will keep rising even if we manage to stop emitting gases such as carbon dioxide and methane right away. The other trouble on the horizon is that as the Earth warms, it triggers other feedbacks within the system that then accelerate the warming further. These feedbacks are many and still not fully understood. However, what we do know is that many of them are not included in the models and scientists doing work in this area are concluding that even warming of 1.5C is likely to trigger feedbacks that could accelerate warming to more like 4-5C and rising. A good example is the warming of the Arctic and the loss of sea ice. The rapidity of the loss of sea ice was predicted by scientists such as Professor Peter Wadhams who had been studying the thinning of the sea ice volume, in addition to the reduction in area (satellites only capture the extent/area, but the volume has been measured from submarines able to move beneath the ice) over several decades. Strangely the models disagreed with what the eye could see and were still predicting a much more gradual loss, leading to an ice-free Arctic somewhere around 2080. These figures have been revised back to about midcentury but still seem to lag what is actually being seen with first hand observations.
 

The main point here seems to be that the principals by which the Met Office is getting ready to inform policy and global awareness of climate change are seemingly very flawed. There was a sense in the audience that 2C was a target that we are going to achieve and that as long as we have the models to guide us through then we will be able to adapt. Professor Slingo produced a slide with the words “mitigation and adaptation.” In other words, let's stop producing greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels and agriculture, combined with accepting a certain level of climate change that we’ll adapt to. Various photographs of farmers and people in worst affected areas were shown to reinforce this point. Perhaps worrying to me is the fact that these images make climate change appear as if it is a problem for the rest of the world and that we, crammed into the Kensington auditorium, have quite a lot less to worry about.
 

Part of the IPCC discussion has centred around the idea of an “emissions budget,” which equates to how much more carbon dioxide we can emit before we have to stop, in order to avert dangerous climate change. Dates are being set a decade or two from now as the timeline that we have to work to. It would be interesting to know how these figures are reached because, again, climate scientists looking at the level of warming we are due from what we have already pumped into the atmosphere, know all too well that there is no budget left. We are way past the level of safe concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Mitigation is a must, but it will not be enough. Adaptation to extreme weather events and destabilisation of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets mean that we are moving into a very different planetary system. For many people around the world surviving, let alone adapting, is going to be a very serious challenge. Those of us in more temperate climates will face the knock-on effects of unstable climate, resource shortages and climate refugees.
 

Another hot topic that is now being discussed by many scientists and engineers is the need to start drawing carbon dioxide down from the atmosphere. If we could extract the gases from the atmosphere, bringing the concentrations down from the current 400 parts per million (ppm) to somewhere near 320 ppm (preindustrial levels were 280 ppm), then we would stand a better chance of restoring the climate to something like that which we’d be happy to call “home.” This is no easy task, as the amount of gases we currently put up into the atmosphere is far greater than any other material we handle on the planet. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try, but it does mean it won't happen over night. Carbon dioxide removal is the essential third title to add to “mitigation and adaptation.” However, mitigation itself is currently a pipe-dream as humanity is ramping up its emissions, as opposed to bringing them down. Even the IPCC “business as usual” scenario for greenhouse gas emissions states that we will hit 4C warming by the end of the century. Add in accelerated heating from multiple feedbacks (many are absent in the climate models) and this figure doubles and then triples. Welcome to the inferno!

To return to the Met Office climate modeling, it seemed more clear that this talk was about selling to us, the public, the idea that somehow the models are going to navigate us through this climate change challenge. I don’t personally find it very reassuring. The fact that an impaired and approximate simulation of our hugely complex planetary system becomes the bedrock of reality from which we plan our futures in the real world seems more like a form of escapism. Models are vital but they must be much more powerful than they currently are and much more detailed. They must also not seek to downplay what is going on in the real world which we know from observation. If we go down this route, then we are really entering the world of fantasy, and there does seem to be much of it around at the moment.
 

In a discussion with friends who have no special interest in climate change, after the lecture, they seemed a little vague as to what they were meant to have taken away. The subject seemed so vast that it was best left to the experts. This again is great mistake. Climate change is an issue that is effecting us now and will continue to do so in ever greater ways. It is essential that we demand robust information and effective policy from those who are in a position to deliver it. Of course, the old adage said by many environmentalists that there is no “planet B” could be wrong. The Met Office models may be a far safer place to live than down here on Planet A... let’s hope so!

http://envisionation.co.uk/index.php/blogs/83-the-view-from-the-met-office-super-models-and-climate-change-customers-welcome-to-planet-b