It may be presumptuous to comment on anything Greta Thunberg says but here she gives an excellent example of how the affluent are destroying the climate – even the more well-meaning ones.
Greta beats the boring numbers below.
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I have struggled to make what follows both simple and clear so first here is a summary:
Consumption causes greenhouse gas emissions
Greenhouse gas emissions cause climate change
Climate change means consumption must be reduced
The affluent consume far more than the poor
The affluent must reduce their enormous consumption
The poor should be supported
There is an appendix on worries about the state of climate science.
The floods in Mozambique are another call to wake us to the destruction of climate change.
The Pollution Tax Association, a small group of York residents, worried about similar floods in 2000, saying in a press release:
The York Branch of the Pollution Tax Association today donated £750 to the Oxfam Mozambique Appeal Fund.
“The human and environmental catastrophe in Mozambique is a result of climate change caused by pollution” said the Chair of the Pollution Tax Association. “We in the west need to give careful thought as to how we can reduce environmental pollution. Local actions, such as using your car when you don’t need to, have global consequences”.
At the time the link between climate change and the floods was considered speculative. Now Channel 4’s report points to a clearer link with climate change:
Climate scientists have been warning the world for decades that manmade climate change would do two things it would mean that hurricanes and cyclones will become more and more intense and that therefore some of the people with the world’s smallest carbon footprints would pay the heaviest price.
The key point in my objection is that the proposed York Central development would be responsible for substantial emissions of greenhouse gasses, which may not been properly assessed.
According to the IPCC , we are less than 12 years away from not being able to undo our mistakes. In that time, unprecedented changes in all aspects of society need to have taken place, including a reduction of our CO2 emissions by at least 50%.
And please note that those numbers do not include the aspect of equity, which is absolutely necessary to make the Paris agreement work on a global scale.
Nor does it include tipping points or feedback loops like the extremely powerful methane gas released from the thawing Arctic permafrost.
I enjoy the view from the top of the Clapham Omnibus.
I’m in the middle of writing a piece on Green Settlements and just realised that some of the argument is driven by the urgency of climate change but the mainstream media and many scientists – who tend to be media favorites – won’t tell us the awful truth. Politicians speak to issues that they hear on the doorstep or get from focus groups – focus groups that will be unaware of the urgency.
This is a placeholder for a more considered piece – If I ever get around to it.
Agrees further that an equitable sharing of the environmental costs and benefits of economic development between and within countries and between present and future generations is a key to achieving sustainable development;
One of the consequences of the UN resolution is: One nation must not have a high carbon lifestyle and rely on other nations to have low carbon lifestyles. That’s not “equitable sharing”.
Global Carbon Budgets and Wildfires
(with added RCP 2.6)
I’ve tried to keep this post understandable.
For those that don’t like too many numbers, sorry.
Sometimes the small print is important.
Carbon Budgets for 2015 and 2016
I’ve been comparing the Global Carbon Project‘s Carbon Budgets for 2016 and 2015 and found two useful diagrams. Here are the diagrams, with a little bit of extra annotation to avoid the confusion that I had to start with.
Figure A: From Carbon Budget 2015: Heading “The total remaining emissions from 2014 to keep global average temperature below 2°C (900 GtCO2 ) will be used in around 20 years at current emission rates”.
Figure A:The remaining carbon quota for 66% chance <2°C : From the end of 2014
I wrote this months ago but held off posting it after a discussion with an advisor as to whether referencing Wikipedia was good enough. I have disputes with Wikipedia but I still rely on it – after exercising my own judgement . That is what I do when I read peer reviewed stuff – use my judgement. So does Eziekiel the Alien.
Leon Festinger and the Aliens
Drifting to sleep last night listening to the radio, a mention of one of my heroes woke me with a start.
In 1950, Leon Festinger had showed that people tend to befriend their neighbours. It was a brilliant piece of work which I read when I was a Research Fellow at Leeds School of Architecture. I must have read it in 1971 or 1972 because, it guided us in choosing a house to live in: We moved into a co-operative housing development in 1972. Using Festinger’s book we chose the house positioned to make it easier to know our neighbours. It was a good choice.
This is a minor rewording of a submission to Tom Watson’s Commission on the future of work. It introduces an extra element to discussions about the robot revolution: Climate change.
Scene from Karel Čapek’s Rossum’s Universal Robots
In Robot wars – Automation and the Labour Market, Adam Corlett asks, ‘Should we be concerned that robots will ‘take all the jobs’?’ He contrdicts Frey and Osborne who, in The Future of Employment, claim that, ‘as many as 47 per cent of jobs in the US are susceptible to automation over the next two decades’. Corlett points to OECD research, which suggests, ‘in the US only 9 per cent of jobs are threatened over the next 20 years’.
The RealClimate website (“Climate science from climate scientists”) has a moderated discussion at the end of each article so that readers can ask questions and make comments. These are sometimes answered by the climate scientists that run the site. In the July Unforced variations, which allows any relevant topic to be broached, I responded to a comment by Bill Henderson, who said
Recent advances in the carbon budget science over the past year have now shrunk this budget to now much less than 1000 Gt, to somewhere closer to 600-800Gt.
The Rogelj et el paper is the main paper quantifying this lower carbon budget but the budget is shrinking because the climate science is also getting much more dire.
It may be even worse
My reply may be of interest, as it contains an interesting quote from a leading climate scientist:
This study shows that, in some cases, we have been overestimating the budget by 50 to more than 200%. At the high end, this is a difference of more than 1,000 billion tons of carbon dioxide.
Including all greenhouse gases and using methods based on scenarios that avoid instead of exceed a given temperature limit results in lower carbon budgets.
Below there is a reply about how the IPCC’s “remaining carbon budgets” should be modified: There are climate feedbacks missing from the CMIP5 models used in calculating the original budgets . Parliamentary POSTnote 454, “Risks from Climate Feedbacks” (Jan 2014) also acknowledges this. The reply is remarkably straightforward answer for a government department. Thanks to all concerned.
The Department of Energy and Climate Change, Whitehall
Dear Geoff,
You spoke to Pete Betts at the LSE, and subsequently via email, during which you raised several thoughtful points on the science of feedbacks, and their potential policy implications. With thanks to several of my colleagues, I’ve tried to answer your questions to Pete below.
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