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Abrupt changes

Sea Level Rise Scenarios Starting to Catch Up With Prehistory

By Abrupt changes, Climate Reform, CO2 Removal and Sequestration, ice sheets, modeling, Negative emissions, Sea Level Rise, Solutions, Strategy, West Antarctic Ice Sheet

McClatchy reported on a new NOAA sea level rise impact report and made some very good points. But a lot of the true meaning is left out. I like to use well publicized journalism like this to be able to quickly get to the most important pieces of the science being reported on, that are…

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Climate Change: What Should We Do?

By Abrupt changes, Climate Catastrophes, Climate Policy, Climate Reform, CO2 Removal and Sequestration, Emissions Scenarios, forest health, Forest Mortality, ice sheets, Myths, Negative emissions, pine beetle, Scenarios, What we can do

One of the biggest myths about climate change is that emissions reductions cool Earth. This is nowhere close to reality. Even the Paris Commitments of 80 percent emissions reductions by 2050 allow warming to triple by 2050 and quintuple by 2100.  We (the royal we) have great challenges as climate reform decision makers. If our…

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Fundamental Climate Science:  Time Frames, Net Warming and Implications for Strategy

By Abrupt changes, Climate Reform, CO2 Removal and Sequestration, Emissions, Emissions Scenarios, Legacy Policy, Negative emissions, Scenarios, Solutions, Strategy

The IPCC changed their fundamental philosophy on how they evaluate scenarios of our future climate in their 2013 reporting, but they have yet to acknowledge the most common and meaningful way our climate usually changes, implying negative consequences for traditional climate reform strategies. Popular science however, continues on the path of traditional climate reform strategies…

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Global Warming vs. Abrupt Change — What’s the Difference?

By Abrupt changes, Glaciers, Gulf Stream, ice sheets, modeling, Sea Level Rise, West Antarctic Ice Sheet

Something that is not clear in the overall climate discussion is that global warming is a radically different beast from abrupt change.  We hear abrupt change bandied about, but often it is not well defined. It appears to many that global warming is abrupt change simply because the warming we are experiencing, and that is…

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Ice Loss During Antarctic Cold Reversal May Spell Trouble for WAIS Collapse

By Abrupt changes, Glaciers, Gulf Stream, ice sheet, Oceans, underice, West Antarctic Ice Sheet

Fifty-two feet of sea level rise occurred in 400 years, 14,500 years ago with ocean and collapse conditions similar to today. We were coming out of the last ice age then, but then, forcing was thousands of times less than today. Our climate’s most meaningful and common changes are classified as abrupt changes in climate…

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Climate Intervention: NAS DAC Review — Atmospheric CO2 Removal and Sequestration Costs

By Abrupt changes, CO2 Removal and Sequestration, Negative emissions, Solutions, Strategy

A quick note on the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine’s review of climate pollution reform technologies: Climate Intervention — Carbon Dioxide Removal and Reliable Sequestration, June 2017. Theoretical academic publishing on the current state of direct air capture technologies, continues to color academic literature with very dated and inaccurate statements.  Part of the challenge…

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Fairness Bias: Big Misstatements in NYT Antarctic Ice Article

By Abrupt changes, ice sheet, Impacts, Oceans, Sea Level Rise, underice, West Antarctic Ice Sheet

This New York Times article from May has compiled the best of current Antarctic science images into a huge three-part piece, but some of the most important reporting is completely wrong. And most importantly, the way it is wrong exemplifies the impacts of the Climate change Counter Movement and how they have influenced the media’s…

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Sea Level Rise: IPCC Averages, Extremes From Latest Publishing, and Ice Sheet Collapse

By Abrupt changes, adaptation, Climate Policy, Climate Reform, CO2 Removal and Sequestration, Extreme Weather, global warming psychology, Gulf Stream, ice sheet, ice sheets, Impacts, Legacy Policy, Messaging, Negative emissions, Psycho, Sea Level Rise, Solutions, Strategy, West Antarctic Ice Sheet

It’s not the averages that are troublesome. The understating reporting of scientists, journalists and climate science consensus organizations is one of the most confounding parts of climate change today. It’s the extremes that matter, yet extremes are viewed as “uncertainty” in a way almost entirely related to written grammar, rather than the statistical uncertainty of when,…

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Warm Winter, Early Spring: Is Climate Change a Mixed Bag or are we Kidding Ourselves?

By Abrupt changes, adaptation, Beaches coastal, Climate Catastrophes, Climate Policy, Climate Reform, Deniers and Delayers, Drought, economics, Emissions, Emissions Scenarios, Extreme Weather, forest health, Forest Mortality, Glaciers, Gulf Stream, ice sheet, ice sheets, Impacts, in-depth and Popular Press, modeling, Negative emissions, Oceans, pine beetle, politics, Psycho, Scenarios, Sea Level Rise, Shifting Ecology, West Antarctic Ice Sheet, Winter Weather

President Trump it seems, has given us permission to backslide with our thinking about climate change. Until we have rule or law that tells us we must do something about climate pollution, “those that would rather it not be real” have won. This allows the debate to rage encouraging doubt. The Clean Power Plan and…

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We Can Have a Healthy Climate With Zero Warming in Our Lifetimes, by Bruce Melton

By Abrupt changes, Drought, forest health, Forest Mortality, Impacts, in-depth and Popular Press, pine beetle, Shifting Ecology, Truthout.org

  We can have a healthy climate — a climate with zero warming — in our lifetimes. The message for the last 20 years has been that we have to reduce emissions drastically to prevent dangerous climate change of more than 2 degrees C (3.6 F). This strategy would have likely worked when it was…

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West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) Collapse: The Latest Case for Zero Warming

By Abrupt changes, Climate Policy, Climate Reform, ice sheet, Oceans, Sea Level Rise, Strategy, underice

New research has for the first time defined the tipping point between a stable WAIS and an Antarctica that collapses uncontrollably. Potsdam Institute researchers (Levermann and Feldmann) tell us is that if we do not return our oceans to their preindustrial temperature by 2050, we will see out of control collapse of the WAIS and…

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Climate Control Moon Shot: Do We Have the Technology Already?

By Abrupt changes, Climate Policy, Climate Reform, CO2 Removal and Sequestration, economics, Negative emissions, Psycho, Solutions, Strategy

We have entered the non-linearly increasing phase of climate change impacts. This is pretty much standard climate science that climate scientists said we would endure if we delayed action. Could they have imagined that we would delay for 20 years? What would they have said 20 years ago about what we should expect if the had…

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2 Degrees C., 1 Degree C. or 0 Degrees C.?

By Abrupt changes, Climate Policy, Climate Reform, economics, Forest Mortality, Legacy Policy, Strategy, Temperature

Two degrees C was first suggested as an upper limit to where we should allow our climate to warm by Nordhaus (Yale) in the American Economic Review in 1977 with the justification that this amount of change would exceed the temperature envelope where our mature civilization has developed. Nordhaus cites Sellers 1974 and NCAR 1974…

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Critical Climate Time Frames: New Strategy is Needed

By Abrupt changes, alternatives, Climate Policy, Climate Reform, Negative emissions, Sea Level Rise, Solutions, Strategy

Scientists have been planning for how to implement a transformation to an alternative energy infrastructure for more than several years now. Jacobson 2013, represents years of effort and others have been doing the same. We know how to evolve our energy infrastructure, how long it will take, how much it will cost, and how efficient…

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An Easier Solution to Climate Change

By Abrupt changes, adaptation, aerosols, alternatives, Climate Policy, climate pollutants short-lived, Climate Reform, CO2 Removal and Sequestration, economics, Extreme Weather, in-depth and Popular Press, Sea Level Rise, Shifting Ecology, Strategy, Temperature, What we can do

The driver of our climate system has changed in the last two decades from one that is controlled by annual emissions, to one that is controlled by already emitted CO2. This means that previous strategies to control annual emissions are no longer meaningful and we must now turn our attention to the already emitted climate…

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What is Important and Why? A Zero-Warming Healthy Climate

By Abrupt changes, aerosols, alternatives, Climate Policy, Climate Reform, CO2 Removal and Sequestration, economics, Emissions, Negative emissions, Solutions, Strategy

For 24 years we have been attempting to implement climate reform, but because strategies are complex, controversial and inequitable, we have nothing to show for this effort save a near-failing carbon credit program in the EU. By giving ourselves permission to seek zero warming, we go beyond the failed strategies of the past into a…

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NOAA — Ice Sheet Collapse in Our Time: Zero Warming Climate Solution

By Abrupt changes, adaptation, Climate Policy, CO2 Removal and Sequestration, Emissions, Emissions Scenarios, ice sheets, in-depth and Popular Press, modeling, Negative emissions, Sea Level Rise, Solutions, West Antarctic Ice Sheet

We have delayed too long and now must urgently reduce the load of warming gases already emitted to our sky. We have been warned this would happen for decades, we just didn’t think it would happen so soon. This is exceedingly bad news, though the good news with climate change is very good indeed. The…

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Sea Level Rise 500 BC to 2000: The Sea Level Rise Hockey Stick

By Abrupt changes, Beach Report, Beaches coastal, Oceans, Sea Level Rise

The Devil’s Elbow, Padre Island National Seashore. This is that point where the Texas Coast trends from Northeast to south; the big bend of coastal Texas. “The oceans are rising the beaches decree. Gonna get covered up by the sea. Tide gauges say what we can’t see. The oceans are rising the beaches decree.” Beaches…

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The Beetles: 6,000 Miles of Climate Change — Long Version

By Abrupt changes, Drought, forest health, Forest Mortality, Impacts, pine beetle, Shifting Ecology, Vegetation Response

This is the original long version with much more detail and all of the destinations and forest health descriptions along the 6,000 mile route. The abbreviated  2,000 word version was published on Truthout on February 16, 2016 is here. We were awash for 19 days in a tumultuous sea of mountains and forests, drifting a course through the heart…

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