'No Ambiguity' on Climate Change, UN Says in IPCC Report

Associated Press
Published: November 2, 2014

Climate change is here and human caused and the time to act is now, the U.N.'s panel on climate science said Sunday.

The fourth and final volume of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's giant climate assessment didn't offer any surprises, nor was it expected to since it combined the findings of three earlier reports released in the past 13 months.

But it underlined the scope of the climate challenge in stark terms. Emissions, mainly from the burning of fossil fuels, may need to drop to zero by the end of this century for the world to have a decent chance of keeping the temperature rise below a level that many consider dangerous. Failure to do so, which could require deployment of technologies that suck greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere, could lock the world on a trajectory with "irreversible" impacts on people and the environment, the report said. Some impacts are already being observed, including rising sea levels, a warmer and more acidic ocean, melting glaciers and Arctic sea ice and more frequent and intense heat waves.

"Science has spoken. There is no ambiguity in their message. Leaders must act. Time is not on our side," U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said at the report's launch in Copenhagen.

Amid its grim projections, the report also offered hope. The tools needed to set the world on a low-emissions path are there; it just has to break its addiction to the oil, coal and gas that power the global energy system while polluting the atmosphere with heat-trapping CO2, the chief greenhouse gas.

"We have the means to limit climate change," IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri said. "All we need is the will to change, which we trust will be motivated by knowledge and an understanding of the science of climate change."

The IPCC was set up in 1988 to assess global warming and its impacts. The report released Sunday caps its latest assessment, a mega-review of 30,000 climate change studies that establishes with 95-percent certainty that nearly all warming seen since the 1950s is man-made.

Today only a small minority of scientists challenge the mainstream conclusion that climate change is linked to human activity. [And most receive money from fossil fuel companies.]

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"Rising rates and magnitudes of warming and other changes in the climate system, accompanied by ocean acidification, increase the risk of severe, pervasive, and in some cases irreversible detrimental impacts," the report said.

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Meanwhile, emissions have risen so fast in recent years that the world has already used up two-thirds of its carbon budget, the maximum amount of CO2 that can be emitted to have a likely chance of avoiding 2 degrees of warming, the IPCC report said.

"This report makes it clear that if you are serious about the 2-degree goal ... there is nowhere to hide," said Alden Meyer of the Union of Concerned Scientists, an advocacy group. "You can't wait several decades to address this issue."

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Pointing to the solution, the IPCC said the costs associated with mitigation action such as shifting the energy system to solar and wind power and other renewable sources and improving energy efficiency would reduce economic growth only by 0.06 percent annually.

And Pachauri said that cost should be measured against the implications of doing nothing, putting "all species that live on this planet" at peril.

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The biggest hurdle is deciding who should do what, with rich countries calling on China and other major developing countries to take on ambitious targets, and developing countries saying the rich have a historical responsibility to lead the fight against warming and to help poorer nations cope with its impacts. The IPCC carefully avoided taking sides in that discussion, saying the risks of climate change "are generally greater for disadvantaged people and communities in countries at all levels of development." [Much of the power used by China is to produce products for other countries, including the U.S.]


http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=2849

By: Dr. Jeff Masters , 3:08 PM GMT on November 02, 2014

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Despite growing efforts to slow them down, CO2 emissions increased by 2.2% per year between 2000 - 2010, hitting the equivalent of 38 Gigatons (Gt) of CO2 per year in 2010. If we continue to follow this "business as usual" course, we will reach the 2,900 Gt limit just 17 years from now, in 2031, according to an analysis done by the Carbon Tracker Initiative. The International Energy Agency warned in 2012 that "almost four-fifths of the CO2 emissions allowable by 2035 are already locked-in by existing power plants, factories, buildings, etc. If action to reduce CO2 emissions is not taken before 2017, all the allowable CO2 emissions would be locked-in by energy infrastructure existing at that time."

The combined value of all fossil fuel reserves is $27 trillion, as estimated by The Capital Institute. According to three groups who have done carbon budget analyses, the IPCC, the International Energy Agency, and the Carbon Tracker Initiative, between 66% - 86% of those proven fossil fuel reserves must stay in the ground if we are to have at least a two-in-three chance of keeping warming below 2°C. The fossil fuel companies, whose stock value is based on burning all of those $27 trillion worth of reserves, are fighting very hard to keep to preserve their stock value, and plan to burn all of those unburnable fossil fuel reserves.

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Our current business-as-usual emissions path (RCP 8.5) is more likely than not to cause 4°C (7°F) warming by 2100. That amount of warming is expected to result in "substantial species extinction, global and regional food insecurity, consequential constraints on common human activities, and limited potential for adaptation in some cases (high confidence). "

In a world that is 4°C warmer, the regional summertime temperatures in the continental United States will be of order 6°C (11°) hotter, wunderground's climate change blogger Dr. Ricky Rood pointed out in a 2012 post, The World Four Degrees Warmer: A New Analysis from the World Bank. Think about the crazy hot summer of 2012; now add ten degrees. It's going to be tough to grow crops in that kind of heat, and provide water to all 450 million Americans. The past 12 months--October 2013 through September 2014--was Earth's warmest consecutive 12-month period among all months since records began in 1880, said NOAA's National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) on October 20. We are on pace for 2014 to be the warmest calendar year on record, and many more warmest years on record are on the way.

Even an increase in Earth's temperature below the agreed-upon definition for the threshold of dangerous climate change, 2°C above pre-industrial levels, carries huge risks. As of 2014, the 0.85°C (1.5°F) of global warming that has occurred since 1880 has likely contributed to deadly and destructive heat waves, droughts, and heavy precipitation events that have killed tens of thousands of people and caused hundreds of billions of dollars in damage. Further warming to the "dangerous" 2°C threshold will be capable of provoking unprecedented droughts and storms that could challenge civilized society, leading to the conflict and massive suffering that go with failed states and mass migrations. There is no “critical threshold” that will be crossed when warming exceeds 2°C, sending us into a dangerous climate regime with greatly increased risks. Given the wildly erratic behavior of our jet stream in recent years, I believe we have already crossed one critical threshold into a more dangerous climate. The 2°C limit is more like a speed limit--a convenient mark to set, above which the dangers are much greater. A more reasonable speed limit for the climate is 350 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, a level we passed back in 1987.

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