Climate endgame
Speaking truth to power: 1, 2 , 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 8a, 8b, 8c, 8d, 8e, 9, 10, 11 & 12
After the original ‘global warming’ (timeline here) and ‘climate change’ in my previous post, ‘climate breakdown’ heralded by George Monbiot and ‘climate and ecological emergency’ by Extinction Rebellion, we have now ‘climate endgame’. This was taken from the Independent, which touts the Cambridge University interdisciplinary group Centre for the Study of Existential Risk: they have outflanked climate apologists Cambridge Zero; and remember “[this] university’s CASP, BP Centre and Schlumberger Research attest[ing] to oil&gas ties” (previous post 2nd last paragraph).
Update 1: see at the bottom some reprising and extending of this, um, hot topic.
Update 2: see next installment in this series here.
The banner picture shows the ruins of the Khmer civilisation, wrecked by poor water management and possibly tipped over by climate change, as did others like the Ancestral Pueblans in SW USA, whose corn agriculture gone wild was killed by sudden drying of the climate (here) . What I’m saying is that climate swings and civilisation practices conjugate to bring oft catastrophic disruption: that is what we’re witnessing now at a global scale, and it’s no more reversible than these examples (go here in a previous series for my primer on climate change).
Salim Ali’s Earthly Order goes into great detail on the interaction of climate physics and society dynamics. Bill McGuire’s Hothouse Earth note on terminology says:
‘Global warming’ has a cosy feel to it that is far from justified in reality, while the rapidly increasing incidences of extreme weather show that our once stable climate is simply not changing, but well on its way to failing.
If anything, the heat waves in the last couple of years highlights this issue. And this video echoes what I said above that “practices conjugate to bring […] disruption”, in addition to adding a real-time angle via so-called “rapid attribution studies”.
Real-time social media interaction also worked as I helped from Cambridge UK former colleagues in Houston TX during Hurricane Harvey exactly 5 years ago:
In other words, this is not restricted to the academic realm as open data, public education and affordable software platforms become available: that is the bulk of what my blog is about…
… As well as a paper on story maps — telling stories via maps to make complex data interactions more palpable to public and government stakeholders alike.
If you look at the timeline on climate warnings in my second last post, and how obfuscation cloaked my entire career in my last post, you can see why it takes our youth to shake things up, as here recently and here earlier!
As a geologist, I’m convinced we’re heading to the next extinction event (here). And Bill McGuire whose book mentioned earlier is also a geologist, this is what this last post had to say about geologists:
A purported sixth extinction is therefore neither unique to the Anthropocene, nor an outlandish suggestion given the history of reported phenomena pointing to this. Bjornerud stated last year that geology gives us a much-needed but largely unheralded perspective in such matters…
And in his afore-mentioned new book, this is what McGuire had to say:
As a trained geologist, I have always tended to set more store by observation and measurement than modelling or simulation, although both certainly have their place, particularly in trying to pin down future climate scenarios. Consequently, the content of this book is driven as much by current observation of climate trends and knowledge of past episodes of climate change as it is by model-based forecasts of what we might expect in the decades and centuries to come.
As an Extinction Rebellion scientist, I built a comprehensive set of maps for East Anglia, my region, as we as ad-hoc for campaigns in London and Herefordshire/Shropshire. In the process I posted a number of DIY instructions (here) to create your own maps of, say, sea level rise and flooding from rivers and from sea using freely available UK guv data. In turn, I documented the assumptions behind sea level rise calculations, and a brief attempt at explaining the uncertainties in the data — basically why are constraints in elevation far better than in time, using geological analogs from my previous career… when timing is as important if not more important than elevation!— these can be found here under Synopsis and Appendix.
This acceleration was recently confirmed by this news item here:
Sea levels have risen by around 16.5cm (6.5 ins) since 1900, but the Met Office says the rate of rise is increasing. They are now rising by 3–5.2mm a year, which is more than double the rate of increase in the early part of last century.
And the word acceleration is the key here: in a WhatsApp sub-group on Media Tell the Truth I posted this recently (emphasis added):
The powers-that-be don’t grasp that it’s not so much about the change but about the rate of change. […] the hardest hitting evidence we have to highlight should center around increased rate more that change per se:
- Arctic melt faster than predicted
- sea level rise increased rate wrt last century
- dry-wet season transition increasing in length
- flash floods & tornadoes increasing in frequency & intensity
- heat waves longer periods… etc., etc.
In closing, it’s an absolutely necessity we keep providing counterveiling evidence and civil action, such as the Extinction Rebellion UK’s Project 3.5 or September mobilisation, to keep pressure on governments and agencies to act rather than retreat into other current affairs, such as the pandemic or the war in Ukraine. Let me repost from earlier here my very favorite slogan:
Update 1: both ‘hothouse earth’ and ‘climate endgame’ are reprised in this hard-hitting story by Cambridge University Centre for Existential Risk. Let’s dig in…
Two recent articles here and here estimating the timing of catastrophic risk and of the next extinction event were lined up with previous data on sea level rise: The former moved up the danger zone to 2070 and the latter pushed it back to 2500, when the sea level rise scenarios had been moved up to 2150 — here is the diagram with the full text link below — but together with the difficulties in estimating sea levels with respect to timing explained here, it goes to show how difficult the science is with constant revisions… which don’t help the messaging!
Update 2: the evidence keeps mounting here… when will governments wake up?
Guardian analysis shows human-caused global heating is driving more frequent & deadly disasters across the planet, in most comprehensive compilation to date
Carbon Brief indeed posts a stark reminder like only a map can… as I’ve been telling all my mapmaking career as blogged here and published here!
