Climate scientist calls for 'world war type mobilization' to combat climate change

Authored by thehill.com and submitted by mvea

Climate scientist Michael Mann is calling for a “world war-type” mobilization to address climate change.

“We do need a world-war type mobilization and that means putting in place incentives to move our economy as quickly as we can away from fossil fuels to renewable energy,” Mann, a scientist at Pennsylvania State University who is known for taking on climate skeptics, told Hill.TV in an interview that aired Wednesday.

“Now how we do that, there’s a legitimate policy debate to be had about how we do that but there isn’t a legitimate debate to be had anymore about the need to do that,” he added.

Mann warned that lawmakers should take immediate action, arguing that the Trump administration is actively seeking to dismantle 50 years of environmental protections put in place by both Democratic and Republican administrations.

He pointed to Trump’s rollback of the Clean Power Plan, a 2015 Obama-era policy aimed at combatting greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, as an example.

Mann also argued that Trump is "committed to denying" climate change and has pushed to prevent the government from taking the issue into account when making policy decisions.

The Department of Agriculture (USDA) reportedly opted against publicizing dozens of peer-reviewed studies on climate change while Trump has been in office. Politico reported last week that the studies all point to the potential effects of climate change on everything from allergies to crops.

A USDA spokesperson told The Hill that there were no directives to limit the spread of climate-related research.

During his interview, Mann voiced support for a number of Democrats seeking to take on Trump in 2020, arguing that any of the Democratic hopefuls would prove to be a better alternative on the issue of climate action than the current administration.

“There’s a world of difference of where the Trump administration is and all of the Democrats and I would hate to see too much infighting at this point,” Mann told Hill.TV. “Let's make sure that we elect a president who’s not going to continue to lead us backward and defy the rest of the world as we try to work on this existential threat.”

Mann’s comments come amid calls for a standalone climate debate for Democratic primary candidates.

The Democratic National Committee (DNC) is considering two measures related to holding such a debate and the two proposals could be voted on as early as August.

Battlenyegeneralguy on July 4th, 2019 at 17:42 UTC »

I thought the war against the environment was going pretty good. I mean it's almost defeated now isn't it?

christophalese on July 4th, 2019 at 16:41 UTC »

What is the Aerosol Masking Effect?

We've landed ourselves in a situation of harrowing irony where our emissions have both risen CO2 and bought us time in the process. This is because dirty coal produces sulfates which cloud the atmosphere and act as a sunscreen. This sunscreen has prevented the level of warming we should have seen by now, but have avoided (kinda, keep reading). Here’s good example of this on a smaller scale:

In effect, the shipping industry has been carrying out an unintentional experiment in climate engineering for more than a century. Global mean temperatures could be as much as 0.25 ˚C lower than they would otherwise have been, based on the mean “forcing effect”

Much has been done in the way of researching the extent of this effect. Currently it is understood that Anthropogenic aerosols have already brought about a decrease of ∼2.53 K, Experiments based on the Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 4.5 given in IPCC AR5 shows the dramatic decrease in three anthropogenic aerosols in 2100 will lead to an increase of ∼2.06 K

That's not to say that we have truly avoided this warming. We simply "kick the can" down the road with these emissions. The warming is still there waiting, until the moment we no longer emit these sulfates.

Just 35% reduction in industrial output(emissions) would lead to 1C temperature rise. Depending on which scientist you ask, it could be as little as a week, or it could be up to 6 weeks. Regardless though, the warming is still there on the horizon.

Worse though, It's been recently discovered this effect is actually more potent than we previously had estimated, by twice as much. Life on Earth cannot adapt to abrupt warming like this. The Arctic: Earth's Refrigerator

The ice in the Arctic is the heart of stability for our planet. If the ice goes, life on Earth goes. The anomalous weather we have experienced more notably in recent years is a direct consequence of warming in the Arctic and the loss of ice occurring there. Arctic ice and the Aerosol Masking Effect are the two key "sunscreens" protecting us from warming.

Loss of this ice (which will likely occur next year) will result in 1˚C warming. On top of our 1.75˚C current warming above pre-industrial, and on top of the 2˚C+ rise when we can no longer keep up the Aerosol "sunscreen".

Only 2C temperatures are needed to exponentially increase likelihood of ice free summers

The Head of the Polar Ocean Physics Group at Cambridge says IPCC grossly underestimates blue ocean event frequency and timeline

The Methane Feedback Problem

Methane is a greenhouse gas like Carbon. When it enters the atmosphere, it has capability to trap heat just like carbon, only it is much, much better at doing so. It can not only trap more heat, but it does so much quicker. Over a 20-year period, it traps 84 times more heat per mass unit than carbon dioxide, as noted here. * It is a natural gas that arises from dead stuff. Normally, it has time to "process" so that as it decays, something comes along and eats that methane. In this natural cycle, none of that methane is created in amounts that could enter the atmosphere.

The problem is in the permafrost and Arctic sea ice. Millions of lifeforms were killed in a "snap" die off and frozen in time in these cold places, never to be available for life to eat up the methane. This shouldn't be problematic because these areas insulate themselves and remain cold. Their emissions should occur at such a slow rate that organisms could feed on the methane before it escapes. Instead, these areas are warming so fast that massive amounts of this methane is venting out into our atmosphere.

It's known as a positive feedback loop. The Arctic warms > in permafrost microbes in the sediment of the permafrost and beneath the ice become excited, knocking the methane free > the Arctic warms even more > rinse and repeat.

This is an alarming issue because the less ice and permafrost that there is, the more "open doors" there are for immense amounts of this methane to be released. In our Atmosphere, there are roughly 4 gigatonnes of methane, in the Eastern Siberian Arctic shelf alone, there are 1500+ Gt. The referee journal literature noted years ago that a 50 burst Gt of predicted amount of hydrate storage is highly possible for abrupt release at any time and would cause ∼12-times increase of modern atmospheric methane burden with consequent catastrophic greenhouse warming. Limits to Adaptation

All of the above mechanisms bring about their own warming sources, and it may be hard to conceptualize what that would mean, but the web of life is quite literally interwoven, and each species is dependent on another to survive. Life can adapt far, but there are points at which a species can no longer adapt, temperatures being the greatest hurdle. When it is too hot, the body begins to “cook” internally. A species is only as resilient as a lesser species it relies upon.

This is noted in a recent-ish paper "Co-extinctions annihilate planetary life during extreme environmental change" from Giovanni Strona & Corey J. A. Bradshaw:

Despite their remarkable resistance to environmental change slowing their decline, our tardigrade-like species still could not survive co-extinctions. In fact, the transition from the state of complete tardigrade persistence to their complete extinction (in the co-extinction scenario) was abrupt, and happened far from their tolerance limits, and close to global diversity collapse (around 5 °C of heating or cooling; Fig. 1). This suggests that environmental change could promote simultaneous collapses in trophic guilds when they reach critical thresholds of environmental change. When these critical environmental conditions are breached, even the most resilient organisms are still susceptible to rapid extinction because they depend, in part, on the presence of and interactions among many other species.

It would be unrealistic to expect life on Earth to be able to keep up, as seen in Rates of Projected Climate Change:

Our results are striking: matching projected changes for 2100 would require rates of niche evolution that are >10,000 times faster than rates typically observed among species, for most variables and clades. Despite many caveats, our results suggest that adaptation to projected changes in the next 100 years would require rates that are largely unprecedented based on observed rates among vertebrate species.

Going Forward

What this culminates to is a clear disconnect in what is understood in the literature and what is being described as a timeline by various sources. These feedbacks have been established for a decade or more and are ignored in IPCC (among others') timelines and models.

How can one assume we can continue on this path until 2030,2050,2100? How could this possibly be?

We need to act now or humans and the global ecosystem alike will suffer for it.

Benedict_ARNY on July 4th, 2019 at 15:03 UTC »

I wish America would just say they are for saving the earth and then ignore their own regulations like Europe. Then we could all contribute to positive change.