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Negative emissions

Advancing Beyond the Moral Imperative Challenge

By alternatives, Climate Reform, climate solutions, CO2 Removal and Sequestration, Legacy Policy, Messaging, Negative emissions, Psycho, Solutions, Strategy, Uncategorized

The “moral imperative challenge” is that thing where we feel it is our duty to create a fossil fuel extinction in order address climate change. This is something our climate culture has been striving for since about 1990. It is ingrained in our emissions reductions psyche and emblazoned across our foreheads. For a generation, emissions…

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Very Large Negative Emissions: Beyond Paris Emissions Reductions to a Safe and Healthy Climate

By Abrupt changes, Climate Catastrophes, Climate Policy, Climate Reform, climate solutions, CO2 Removal and Sequestration, Emissions Scenarios, Extreme Weather, Impacts, modeling, Negative emissions, Scenarios, Sea Level Rise, Strategy, West Antarctic Ice Sheet

James Hansen, 32 year director of the U.S. national climate modeling agency, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (1981-2013, now retired), has had a new fundamental piece of climate work published. His team looks at the negative emissions required–in addition to various scenarios for emissions reductions–that are needed to achieve “non-dangerous” warming. Under Hansen’s…

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New Climate Culture

By Abrupt changes, alternatives, Climate Culture, Climate Policy, Climate Reform, climate solutions, Emissions, Emissions Scenarios, global warming psychology, Legacy Policy, Messaging, Negative emissions, politics, Psycho, Scenarios, Solutions, Strategy, What we can do

  New Climate Culture Our climate culture of the last two or three decades, very bluntly, not working out . Yes, carbon emissions are decreasing, or at least they are not increasing as fast a they were or as fast as projected. Possibly, they are even decreasing. But the bottom line is that current warming…

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Falling Emissions: With Offshored Goods and Fugitive Emissions — Not So Much

By Climate Policy, climate pollutants short-lived, Climate Reform, CO2 Removal and Sequestration, Emissions, Emissions Scenarios, Legacy Policy, Negative emissions, politics, Scenarios, Solutions, Strategy, What we can do

Observations on Declining U.S. Emissions: It’s a widely held belief that the U.S. has been reducing emissions since the peak  2005-2007 before the recession. This is just barely valid today, but several years back it was not. The last time we reported on this, U.S. emission had not fallen as the EPA had insisted, but…

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Large Negative Emissions of 80 Gt Annually Allow Dangerous Warming

By Abrupt changes, CO2 Removal and Sequestration, Emissions, Emissions Scenarios, Legacy Policy, Negative emissions, Scenarios, Sea Level Rise, Solutions, Strategy, Temperature

The greatest climate dude of all time has done it again. James Hansen, 32 year director of the U.S. national climate modeling agency, the NASA Goddard institute for Space Studies, published a new fundamental piece of climate work last month. He looks at the additional negative emission on top of Paris reductions that are needed…

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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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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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Paris Warms, Not Cools, for Thousands of Years

By Climate Policy, Emissions, Emissions Scenarios, Legacy Policy, Myths, Negative emissions, Scenarios, Strategy, Temperature

It’s a widely held misconception that implementation of Paris Climate commitments would tame the climate beast. This has no more been the case in the past than it is today. Our culture of climate policy has always relied on overshoot, or additional increase in temperature as we implement greenhouse gas regulations and reduce the amount…

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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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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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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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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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Saved They Say: Emissions Have Flattened — Climate Mirage

By aerosols, Climate Policy, CO2 Removal and Sequestration, Emissions, ice sheets, Negative emissions, Sea Level Rise, West Antarctic Ice Sheet

And they also say that Elvis is not dead. But alas… the answer is no, we are not saved. Things are actually getting worse because of the so-called “flattening emissions.” This needs to be said over and over: the only way to treat the vast amount of long-lived warming pollutants already emitted into our sky…

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Climate Change 2015: The Latest Science

By aerosols, Climate Policy, climate pollutants short-lived, CO2 Removal and Sequestration, Emissions, Gulf Stream, ice sheet, in-depth and Popular Press, Negative emissions, Solutions, submarine channel, underice, West Antarctic Ice Sheet

First published on Truthout December 26, 3015, by Bruce Melton. Climate science is way out in front of climate policy. Commitments at the United Nations Climate Conference in Paris pale in comparison to those from the Kyoto Protocol with its beginnings in the Rio Earth Summit in 1992. The cheap and unambiguous solution of removing CO2…

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A Generation of Delay: Climate Policy Is 20 Years Behind

By Abrupt changes, aerosols, alternatives, Climate Policy, CO2 Removal and Sequestration, Deniers and Delayers, in-depth and Popular Press, Negative emissions, Psycho, Solutions

First Published on Truthout, December 4, 2015 The perceived debate on climate change has discredited traditional climate science communications to such an extent that we are just now implementing policies developed during the Kyoto Protocol era that began in 1992. New climate science knowledge is simply not making it out of academia and into public…

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Legacy Climate Policy: The Scale of the Current Science and Need for DAC

By Climate Policy, CO2 Removal and Sequestration, Emissions, in-depth and Popular Press, Myths, Negative emissions, Solutions, Uncategorized

In the run up to the Paris climate talks, current policy is far behind. Virtually unknown is science stating that the solutions to treating climate pollution are simple, cheap and radically change a generation of policy we are currently trying to implement. Legacy climate policy being enacted today, and proposed at the Paris climate talks is…

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