Humanity’s Choice (via M.I.T.): Inaction (“No Policy”) eliminates most of the uncertainty about whether future warming will be catastrophic. Aggressive emissions reductions greatly improves humanity’s chances.

In this post, I will summarize what the recent scientific literature says are the key impacts we face in the coming decades if we stay anywhere near our current emissions path. These include:

• Staggeringly high temperature rise, especially over land — some 10°F over much of the United States
• Permanent Dust Bowl conditions over the U.S. Southwest and many other regions around the globe that are heavily populated and/or heavily farmed.
• Sea level rise of some 1 foot by 2050, then 4 to 6 feet (or more) by 2100, rising some 6 to 12 inches (or more) each decade thereafter
• Massive species loss on land and sea — perhaps 50% or more of all biodiversity.
• Unexpected impacts — the fearsome “unknown unknowns”
• Much more extreme weather
• Food insecurity — the increasing difficulty of feeding 7 billion, then 8 billion, and then 9 billion people in a world with an ever-worsening climate.
• Myriad direct health impacts

Remember, these will all be happening simultaneously and getting worse decade after decade. Equally tragic, a 2009 NOAA-led study found the worst impacts would be “largely irreversible for 1000 years.”

The single biggest failure of messaging by climate scientists (until very recently) has been the failure to explain to the public, opinion makers, and the media that business-as-usual warming results in simultaneous, ever-worsening impacts that, individually, are each beyond catastrophic, but combined are unimaginablly horrific. For these impacts, terms like “global warming” and “climate change” are essentially euphemisms. That is why I have preferred the term “Hell and High Water.”

By virtue of their success in promoting doubt and inaction, the climate science deniers and disinformers have, tragically and ironically, turned the worst-case scenario into business as usual.

Business as usual typically means continuing at recent growth rates of carbon dioxide emissions, which we now know would likely take us to atmospheric concentrations of CO2 greater than 850 ppm if not above 1000 ppm (see U.S. media largely ignores latest warning from climate scientists: “Recent observations confirm … the worst-case IPCC scenario trajectories are being realised”). Annual emissions now exceed 10 billion metric tons of carbon (~37 billions metric tons of CO2). Emissions have been rising about 3% per year for the past decade.

What is less well understood is that even a very strong mitigation effort that kept carbon emissions this century to 11 billion tons a year on average would still probably take us to 1000 ppm (A1FI scenario) — a little noted conclusion of the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report (see “Nature publishes my climate analysis and solution“).

Until recently, the scientific community has spent little time modeling the impacts of a tripling (~830 ppm) or quadrupling (~1100 ppm) carbon dioxide concentrations from preindustrial levels. In part, I think, that’s because they never believed humanity would be so self-destructive as to ignore their science-based warnings and simply continue on its unsustainable path. In part, they lowballed the difficult-to-model amplifying feedbacks in the carbon cycle.

So I pieced together those impacts from available studies and from discussions with leading climate scientists for my 2006 book, Hell and High Water. But now the scientific literature on what we face is much richer — as climate scientists have sobered up to their painful role as modern-day Cassandra’s (see Lonnie Thompson on why climatologists are speaking out: “Virtually all of us are now convinced that global warming poses a clear and present danger to civilization”).

In a 2010 AAAS presentation, the late William R. Freudenburg of UC Santa Barbara discussed his research on “the Asymmetry of Scientific Challenge“: New scientific findings since the 2007 IPCC report are found to be more than twenty times as likely to indicate that global climate disruption is “worse than previously expected,” rather than “not as bad as previously expected.”

This post will review the latest findings. It will serve as a foundation for a multi-part series that attempts to clear up some of the confusion over the supposed high degree of “uncertainty” surrounding climate impacts. That series will make clear that we have an unusually high degree of certainty around future climate impacts if we stay anywhere near our current emissions path.

This post — an update — covers more than 60 recent scientific studies along with numerous review pieces that themselves each cover a large segment of the recent literature. Please add links to more studies in the comments.

We will see why inaction on climate change is “incompatible with organized global community, is likely to be beyond ‘adaptation’, is devastating to the majority of ecosystems & has a high probability of not being stable (i.e.  4°C [7F] would be an interim temperature on the way to a much higher equilibrium level),” according to Professor Kevin Anderson, director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change in Britain (see here).

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by Steve Horn, via DeSmogBlog

A storm is brewing in Buffalo and it’s not the record snow storm typically associated with upstate New York. Rather, it’s taking place in the ivory tower of academia and revolves around hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” for unconventional gas in the Marcellus Shale basin.

Public funding has been cut to the tune of over $1.4 billion over the past five years in the State University of New York (SUNY) public university system under the watch of current Democratic Party governor and 2016 presidential hopeful Andrew Cuomo and his predecessor, David Paterson.

These cuts have created new opportunities for the shale gas industry to fill a funding vacuum, with the SUNY system’s coffers hollowed out and starved for cash.

“It’s a growing problem across academia,” Mark Partridge, a professor of rural-urban policy at the Ohio State University, said in an interview with Bloomberg. “Universities are so short of money, professors are under a lot of pressure to raise research funding in any manner possible.”

The oil industry’s eagerness to fill the void for its personal gain can be seen through the case study of what we at DeSmog have coined the ongoing “Shill Gas” study scandal at the State University at Buffalo (SUNY Buffalo).

Among other findings, a DeSmog investigation reveals that one of the lesser-known offshoots of the Scaife family foundations, key bankrollers of the climate change denial machine, may potentially soothe SUNY Buffalo’s budget woes with funding for the university-connected Shale Resources and Society Institute.

The Prelude to the Storm

A prelude for what’s now transpiring occurred in Spring 2011, when SUNY Buffalo played host to the Marcellus Shale Lecture Series. Throughout the eight-part series, not a single speaker was a university-based scholar and all speakers but one were employed by some element of the oil and gas industry. The Shale Resources and Society Institute (SRSI) arose out of the series, as Daniel Robison of WBFO in Buffalo wrote in a recent article:

The decision to greenlight SRSI came after SUNY Buffalo hosted the Marcellus Shale Lecture Series in mid-2011… Last fall, enthusiasm stemming from the lecture series grew into informal discussions among the speakers, natural gas industry representatives and members of SUNY Buffalo’s geology department.

by Cara Pike via Climate Access

Last week was an exciting one at SXSW Eco in Austin (the second annual gathering of 2,500 plus eco-pioneers, tech mavens, foodies and artists), where I had a chance to check out colleagues from Climate Nexus, Union of Concerned Scientists, and Talking Climate discussing trends in climate science communications, and hear a feisty debate between Ted Nordhous, Bill McKibben, Larry Schweiger and Bryan Walsh on new approaches in environmental problem solving and movement building.

I was there to talk about one of the common threads underlying many of the sessions at SXSW Eco – the efficacy gap that blocks public engagement in addressing complex challenges such as climate disruption. (Thanks to Pete Rafle from Spitfire Communications, Sabrina Hersi Issa from Be Bold Media and Alex Bosmoski from the Energy and Enterprise Institute for joining me for the SXSW Eco session.)

I’ve been thinking about the efficacy gap for some time now. For at least a decade, public opinion on global warming has been consistent with the majority of Americans being aware of global warming and feeling the issue requires significant attention. The problem is that few people have confidence that either the challenge can be addressed or that we have the collective/political will do it. (See the Climate Change in the American Mind survey – “Humans can reduce global warming and we are going to do so successfully.” Only 4% thought so in March 2012.) Unpacking how to close the efficacy gap is critical and something we will be addressing again at the upcoming Climate Access roundtable: Climate Policy Push and Pull: Building a Sense of Efficacy while Calling for Change, Pre- and Post-Election (on Tuesday October 16 from 1-2 pm EDT featuring panelists Betsy Taylor of Breakthrough Strategies and Solutions, Kevin Curtis of The Climate Reality Project and Angus Duncan of the Oregon Global Warming Commission).

Experiencing tension around climate issues without having a way to resolve it creates an uncomfortable dissonance that makes many of us want to run the other way. Most public discourse on climate issues has focused on the long list of global impacts and more recently on the increasing number of extreme weather events in the United States. The tension dial has definitely been ratcheted up yet we still do not have a clear sense of the best, most scalable solutions to prioritize and the most efficient, responsible ways to pursue them.

With a challenge as immense as global warming, the efficacy gap grows when citizens do not see national or global government action. Can it be such a big problem if it is not even mentioned in presidential debates? Is it something that can be addressed given the scale and influence of the fossil fuel industry? At the same time, the efficacy gap may also exist in part due to the ways citizen organizations advocate for change by focusing on policy and leadership failures. What groups ask of their bases can also contribute to the efficacy gap when actions do not seem on scale with the problem (i.e. solve a global problem by changing a light bulb), when guilt appeals or individual actions are over-emphasized and not reinforced (i.e. lists of the 50 things we can do to save the planet), or when commitment is minimized (i.e. save the world from the comfort of your home via Facebook).

What seems to be lacking is a sense that significant, collective solutions are possible to achieve.

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by Michael Beck, via Planet Change

As a marine scientist, and surfer, I’m always initially surprised when I hear that many island folks, like most of my friends in Eleuthera (Bahamas, 25° 8′ 22″ N;  76° 8′ 59″ W), are scared of the sea. That’s of course before I quickly remind myself that people on Eleuthera (an island that averages about 2 miles wide across its 90 mile length), have survived one too many storms – like Hurricane Irene, whose eye gazed directly on them last August 25.

Indeed, like my friends in the Bahamas, billions of people around the world are exposed to risks from coastal storms and flooding – risks that are causing more costly damage to people and property than ever before. In fact, Munich Re estimated that the total cost of all natural disasters globally in 2011 reached an all-time high of $380 billion – almost double the previous record of $220 billion, set in 2005.

But not all storms and other natural hazards need to turn in to disasters. That is a core message of the just released 2012 World Risk Report, led by the Alliance for Development Works, United Nations University, and The Nature Conservancy.

In addition to assessing the countries most at-risk globally through the World Risk Index, this year’s report focuses on the role of the environment in reducing risk and the effects of environmental degradation on increasing risk to people.

The report also comes two days before the UN’s International Day for Disaster Reduction.

Reefs and Mangroves Are Cost-Effective for Risk Reduction.

In the Report, my Conservancy colleague, Christine Shepard and I highlight the incredible role that reefs and wetlands can play in helping to reduce risks for people from natural hazards (see “Coastal Habitats and Risk Reduction”).

Coral reefs, oyster reefs and mangroves offer flexible, cost-effective, and sustainable risk reduction benefits. Reefs have a huge impact on the force of waves reaching coasts –reefs reduce wave energy by more than 85 percent – making them natural breakwaters and the first line of coastal defense for communities. In addition, reefs and marshes offer other benefits like healthy fisheries and tourism that sea walls and artificial breakwaters will never provide.

Figure 1: Healthy and Degraded Coral Reef

What’s more, the number of people that potentially benefit from coral reefs is huge. Some 200 million people live in low and exposed villages, towns, and cities (below 10 meters elevation) AND near a reef (within 50 kilometers) that may offer them direct and indirect benefits (see Fig 1).

These are also the communities and municipalities that might bear coastal defense costs or other development costs if reefs are degraded and more artificial barriers and hardened shorelines (“gray” infrastructure) must be developed.

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