The amount that’s already occurred
More on this we’re definitely going to pass a lot of tipping points story today:
The drought- and flood-stricken summer of 2022 has shown the impact of 1.1° Celsius of global warming — the amount that’s already occurred since pre-industrial times. Now a major scientific reassessment finds that several critical planetary systems are at risk of breaking beyond repair even if nations restrain warming to 1.5°C, the lower threshold stipulated by the Paris Agreement.
At that level of warming, coral reefs may die off, ice sheets in Greenland and the West Antarctic may melt and permafrost may abruptly thaw, according to a new paper in the journal Science.
Which will cause a whole lot more critical planetary systems to break beyond repair.
At about 1.5°C some tipping points may be reached, including for the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, accelerated thawing of boreal permafrost, and die-off of tropical coral reefs. But the authors “cannot rule out” that ice-sheet tipping points have already been passed and that some other tipping elements have minimum thresholds in range of 1.1°C to 1.5°C of warming.
…
“Our assessment provides strong scientific evidence for urgent action to mitigate climate change,” the scientists write in a summary. “We show that even the Paris Agreement goal of limiting warming to well below 2°C and preferably 1.5°C is not safe as 1.5°C and above risks crossing multiple tipping points [CTPs]. Crossing these CTPs can generate positive feedbacks that increase the likelihood of crossing other CTPs.”
Meanwhile we do nothing. We can’t. We didn’t evolve to do the kind of thing that needs to be done.
Accprding to the Conservatives that I’ve been reading on Twitter during the heatwave, the solution is to use the A/C more and drive gasoline cars because liberals like electric cars and we have to own the libs.
I just saw some Arkansas R on Twitter pushing the “how dare PG&E tell people to cut back on AC during a heatwave” line. Sure let’s deliberately knock out the whole grid.
A silver lining:
Diablo Canyon Nuclear plant is to be kept open.
So California keeps some reliable non-emitting electricity on the grid.
To bad the anti-nuke useful idiots for the coal & gas companies shut down a bunch of other generators
Jim: there is that. it still scares me a bit because of seismic risk, but no energy sources are problem free.
I agree that irreversible tipping points (spontaneous trajectories) cannot be immediately stopped or turned around.
“But we will continue to do nothing about it.” (https://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2022/tipping-2/)
“Meanwhile we do nothing. We can’t.”
I don’t fully agree that we continue to do nothing. For examples:
Transition to “green hydrogen” has begun in Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania as a Hydrogen Hub
https://www.pennfuture.org/Blog-Item-Pennsylvania-as-a-Hydrogen-Hub
inter alia
and elsewhere assuming the electricity to drive the electrolysis is “green” (wind, solar …) and cost will decrease as technology improves (https://youtu.be/2XhsQ7nuoRo). As of July 2022 Germany had 91 ‘hydrogen stations’ for fuel cells of trucks (probably not ‘green’ hydrogen).
The One Sun One World One Grid (another acronym OSOWOG https://ukcop26.org/one-sun-declaration-green-grids-initiative-one-sun-one-world-one-grid/) has the backing of more than 80 countries including Australia, U.K. and U. S., part of a movement to create regional and, eventually, global “supergrids”, long-distance, high DC (rather than AC which has greater transmission losses) voltage cables linking each country’s renewable power output. Local weather makes the power generated by wind and solar variable and location intermittent, but this becomes less of an issue if the grid is larger and distributed over a wider geographical area. High voltage, long distance electricity cables linking renewable energy projects in Morocco to the UK, and Austrailia to Singapore, are already being planned. 2022 may see progress to build an “energy island” of wind farms in the North Sea. In 2022 UK startup Xlinks will try to persuade the UK government to guarantee a minimum price for electricity generated at a mega wind and solar farm in Morocco that could power UK homes via a 3800 km undersea cable). Xlinks is also working with Australian Sun Cable tp build the world’s largest solar farm in northern Australia and connect it wih Singapore through a 4200 km cable. A 720 km subsea North Sea Link from Kvilldal near Stavanger, Norway to Blyth, Northumberland, UK will reach 1400 MW for 1.4 million homes.
There are ambitious plans and research underway to use direct carbon capture of atmospheric CO2 for utilization (CCU e.g. https://verdox.com/), not storage (CCS), as feedstock to replace fossil carbon to synthesize, for example, methane (i.e. natural gas replacement).
At the same time I agree that the solution is not merely technical (e.g. geoengineering) as several books have suggested, such as Hope Jahren’s Story of More, Ellen LaConte’s Life Rules and–I haven’t read it–George Monbiot’s recent Regenesis: Feeding The World Without Devouring The Planet on Regenerative Organic Agriculture connecting food, ecology and climate. This is already underway in Finland.