by Moisha Blechman
In the film, “Chasing Ice,” a mountain of ice calved from a glacier. Its estimated size was almost two cubic miles, higher than the Empire State building, and as long as Manhattan up to 34th Street. That calving was a demonstration of how Earth’s new heat has reached the deep recesses of Greenland ice, releasing it from its ancient moorings.
Witnessing such unprecedented and monumental ice decay should strike everyone as overwhelming evidence of an impending climate tragedy.
If, at the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) conference in Lima, Peru, the calving portion of the film had played repeatedly behind the lectern as each delegate spoke, would the delegates shed their narrow, nation-centered prejudices and see universal climate disaster? Would they get to work cooperatively and do their job?
The IPCC’s fifth Assessment Report (AR5) says climate change is a collective-action problem. Since the planet functions as one system, so must the nations of the world. Could this truth lead to a global government as the only effective way to move forward on climate change? The AR5’s summary for policymakers hints at that solution. Outside the United Nations, the people of the world are impatient. They demand collective action on an effective emissions-reduction plan, and they demand it now.
Renowned climate scientists are invited by the UN to investigate every aspect of how every part of our planet is changing due to elevated greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Their report provides an integrated view of climate change and represents the consensus of the scientists. But their views do not determine the final report. The member nations are gatekeepers of the final message. The public needs to be aware that the final report is tainted by political influence.
The importance of the report lies in providing all the delegates with the same source of information, which then provides a uniform basis for their talks. At the same time, the report is disseminated to the media throughout the world. Coming as it does from the UN, the report is eagerly awaited by the press as the consensus of the best scientists and receives unquestioned respect. We have seen from the past decade how it enters the culture and effectively becomes an unassailable climate Bible.
The most important example is the goal set by the IPCC at the Copenhagen Accord in 2009 to limit the mean temperature of the planet to 2 degrees C above the historical mean temperature. It was a bold and simple goal thought to fulfill the IPCC’s mission to “prevent dangerous, anthropogenic interference with the climate system.” The 2 degrees C goal has been repeated endlessly in every publication discussing the topic not only since 2009, but earlier when it was first suggested. But the goal of 2 degrees C is arbitrary and not rooted in science.
Yet the summary report predicts dire consequences with continued warming; many of them, the report says, will occur at 2 degrees C. These include the loss of food security, as fisheries, wheat, rice and corn are negatively impacted at 2 degrees C. Amazingly, the report admits that the irreversible loss of Greenland’s ice is set in motion at just 1 degree C.
The report details basic losses of everything that constitutes a healthy planet with continued warming. Warming to 2 degrees C and beyond is now understood to be inevitable. The IPCC even makes a point of warning that “climate change associated with high emission scenarios poses an increased risk of abrupt and irreversible regional-scale change in the composition, structure and function of marine, terrestrial and fresh water ecosystems.” And, “A reduction in permafrost extent is virtually certain with continued rise in global temperature.” For this reason, the AR5 seems to contradict itself, perhaps because of the input from differing scientists, plus assessment pressures from such nations as the United States, Canada and India.
■ The first voice questioning the IPCC comes from Bill McKibben who says that the “IPCC is stern on climate change, but it still underestimates the actual severity of the situation.”
■ A second voice of dissent came December 1 in The New York Times in a front-page article on the climate talks in Lima. In only the second paragraph it said, “Even with a deal to stop the current rate of greenhouse gas emissions, scientists warn, the world will become increasingly unpleasant. Without a deal, they say, the world could eventually become uninhabitable.” Later in the article, “Recent reports show that there may be no way to prevent the planet’s temperature from rising given the current level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and the projected rate of emissions.”
In other words, the idea that the planet can rise 2 degrees C and then stop makes no sense, given the physics of a buildup of atmospheric greenhouse gases. That fact is recognized by dissident climate scientists, although ignored by the IPCC. For these climate scientists, it is certain that the mission statement of the IPCC to prevent “dangerous interference with the climate system” is over. The planet is moving into the unchartered waters of climate dysfunction.
■ A third voice came from an article last October in the science journal, Nature: “Ditch the 2 Degrees C Warming Goal.” This paper has been published in the UK’s Guardian and in The National Geographic. In it, the authors, Victor and Kennel, say that average global temperature is not a good indicator of planetary health. One reason is that the oceans have absorbed 90 percent of the heat. They write that the 2 degrees C goal is wrong-headed and that “Politically, it has allowed some governments to pretend that they are taking serious action to mitigate global warming, when in reality they have accomplished almost nothing.”
■ A fourth strong voice of dissent came back in 2006. James Hansen wrote, “Further warming of less than 1 degree C will make the Earth warmer than it has been in over a million years. If fossil fuel emissions continue to increase, it will yield additional warming to 2-3 degrees C this century, and imply changes that constitute a different planet. I believe the evidence shows with reasonable clarity that the level of additional warming that would put us into dangerous territory is about 1 degree C, not 2 or 3. I am very confident about that.” But he was ignored by the IPCC and, therefore, ignored by everyone, especially the media. Not following the climate Bible, Hansen’s prediction was marginalized to obscurity.
It is eight years later. We find that even a 1 degree C rise is too high. We have already activated unstoppable climate change. The Golden Rule should have been, Respect Earth’s systems, or pay.
The crucial mistake the IPCC made was to use temperature as a measure for climate change and to identify a temperature limit. Instead, knowing what causes the temperatures to rise is what is important. We know that the ideal climate for life on Earth comes with 280 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere. It was the atmospheric base for at least 12,000 years of a working climate system. Only industrialization disturbed it. It needs to be recognized in the public mind that CO2 and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are the baseline control of life on the planet, not the misleading 2 degrees C limit.
The IPCC scientists must be aware that the worst, and almost total, extinction event was at the end of the Permian period 255 million years ago when there were 400 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere—exactly the number in the atmosphere right now. Since the daily measurement of atmospheric CO2 must be known to all scientists because of its importance in determining climate, why did the IPCC abandon that precise CO2 tool for measuring climate change vulnerability and replace it with a temperature goal?
That substitution effectively hid the planet’s real vulnerability. Why was that idea ratified by a vote of about 200 member nations in 2009? And why does the IPCC continue to insist on the 2 degrees C measure as a limit when its own report indicates that goal needs to change?
Other voices consider 2 degrees C unacceptable and are pressing for a goal of 1.5 degrees C. From the calving of the gigantic iceberg in Greenland, it is clear that using temperature is irrelevant in measuring risk. The melting of Arctic ice may be telling us that we are now at the threshold beyond which we dare not raise the planet’s CO2 levels.
But the IPCC’s AR5 does note the following: “Globally, economic and population growth continued to be the most important driver of increases in CO2 emissions from fossil fuel emissions.” Embedded in this statement is a solution. The best way to reverse climate change is to reverse economic and population growth. Although this idea is tantamount to heresy, it is an evident necessity. Another and immediate necessity is a carbon tax, effective immediately.
Moisha Blechman chairs the Chapter’s climate crisis and publication committees.