Humanity has less than a five year window to take decisive action on climate change, the UK’s former chief scientist told the opening session of the National Climate Emergency Summit in Melbourne.
“We have to move rapidly,” said Professor Sir David King, founder and chair of the Centre for Climate Repair at Cambridge University and a former advisor to both the Blair and Brown governments.
“What we do over the next three to four years, I believe, is going to determine the future of humanity. We are in a very very desperate situation.”
King had previously advised the UK government that limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees was vital to avoiding uncontrollable environmental changes in the polar icecaps and Himalayas, but said he now realised this was wrong and the crucial point had already been crossed.
“I am afraid the tipping point in that respect has been passed, and therefore we have to reverse these processes.”
He said emissions reductions, while imperative, could no longer control the crisis, and that radical geo-engineering interventions had become unavoidable.
Forget 2050, experts say it’s 2030 or bust for net zero emissions
Former UK chief scientist Sir David King pulled no punches beaming into Melbourne’s National Climate Emergency summit, arguing for a fast track to zero emissions and urgent deployment of carbon draw-down technologies. Benjamin Silvester reports.
by Benjamin Silvester
https://www.thecitizen.org.au/articles/forget-2050-experts-say-its-2030-or-bust-for-net-zero-emissions
Humanity has less than a five year window to take decisive action on climate change, the UK’s former chief scientist told the opening session of the National Climate Emergency Summit in Melbourne.
“We have to move rapidly,” said Professor Sir David King, founder and chair of the Centre for Climate Repair at Cambridge University and a former advisor to both the Blair and Brown governments.
“What we do over the next three to four years, I believe, is going to determine the future of humanity. We are in a very very desperate situation.”
King had previously advised the UK government that limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees was vital to avoiding uncontrollable environmental changes in the polar icecaps and Himalayas, but said he now realised this was wrong and the crucial point had already been crossed.
He said emissions reductions, while imperative, could no longer control the crisis, and that radical geo-engineering interventions had become unavoidable.
The bleak assessment came in the opening forum of the 2021 summit, a panel session in which King was joined by Australian climate policy analyst David Spratt and University of New South Wales climate scientist Dr Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick to explore questions around whether enough was known about the climate emergency to set the right goals and timeframes for action.
The panellists agreed that the science was disturbingly clear and that a failure by key decision makers to acknowledge the depth of the crisis was preventing adequate goals and timeframes being set.
In his presentation, David Spratt, research director at Breakthrough National Centre For Climate Restoration, said climate tipping points had already been crossed in the Arctic, the Great Barrier Reef, and a significant section of Antarctica, meaning that current greenhouse gas levels had already pushed these ecosystems beyond the “point of no return”.
As Australian government leaders continued to debate whether to commit to a zero-carbon target by 2050, Spratt said it was critical to reach net zero by 2030.
“A 2050 timeframe will not prevent catastrophic outcomes,” he said, decrying the “profound ignorance” of key decision makers in government and industry.
“There is not a single federal MP, a single ASX200 director, or a single person at APS executive level who acknowledges the full reality of the crisis.”
On 1 February, Scott Morrison told the National Press Club the government’s goal was to reach “net zero emissions as soon as possible”, though he stopped short of committing to a 2050 target. Whether he commits to a mid-century target will depend on his ability to quell a vocal group of Nationals MPs and senators, who have declared they will “cross the floor” should the government move to legislate a 2050 deadline.
Spratt said that while the earth is 1.2 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial average, the current level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere will lead to 2 degrees of warming in the long run, even if global emissions were cut to zero overnight.
“So when people talk about carbon budgets for 1.5 or 2 degrees of warming, just don’t believe them.”
Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick, an expert on extreme weather events, explained that even half a degree of global warming put “certain types of events on steroids”, fuelling longer droughts, more violent storms, and larger, hotter, more frequent bushfires.
Charting heatwaves in Australia over the past 70 years, she presented data showing how they have become hotter, longer and more frequent because as the average temperature has risen, previously normal weather fluctuations suddenly became extreme.
“Over the last 40 years these trends have really started to ramp up.”
Perkins-Kirkpatrick also discussed improvements in the science of attribution – identifying how much climate change has influenced extreme weather events as opposed to natural climate variations.
Climate scientists can now examine an extreme weather event, such as Australia’s 2019-20 “Black Summer” bushfires, and run it through climate models to see how often they would expect it to occur with climate change as well as at pre-industrial temperatures. The difference between the two probabilities is called the “anthropogenic signal” in the extreme event.
Perkins-Kirkpatrick said while the signal is difficult to find in some kinds of extreme weather, it is easy to identify when it comes to extreme heat.
But it was Sir David King, the founder and chair of the Cambridge Centre for Climate Repair, who offered the most confronting assessments around the extent of the problem and the potentially powerful solutions.
He recalled that in 2015 he led a risk analysis project with China and India, which together account for over a third of the global population. “What we concluded from this is really quite frightening.
“Five or ten years from where we are now, we [could] see major unexpected risks emerging such as rice crop failure causing massive problems feeding the populations of South East Asia and China.”
China’s biggest concern in the study was the risk its national rice crop would fail, putting hundreds of millions of people on the brink of famine.
“[In 2015] that risk was as low as your house burning down,” he said, “but it becomes very likely it will happen every year with a two to three degree temperature rise.”
He also displayed new flooding projections for the Mekong Delta in southern Vietnam, the world’s largest rice farming region, which showed the entire area would be flooded annually by 2050.
“Of course, if the rice paddy fields suffer sea incursion they will no longer be productive for rice.”
The same projections also showed large areas of Jakarta, Mumbai and Kolkata, home to 70 million people, becoming largely uninhabitable because of inundation.
King said emissions reduction alone would not be enough to avoid catastrophic ecological and agricultural destruction and that radical greenhouse gas removal and geo-engineering techniques would also be required.
One of the key functions of the Centre for Climate Repair, which King founded in 2019, is studying and developing these new techniques, with the aim of removing 30 to 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide annually.
One promising new technique was ocean surface iron fertilisation, which stimulates the growth of phytoplankton, a key building block of ocean ecosystems and the global carbon cycle. The phytoplankton have the dual benefit of removing carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere, as well as stimulating “a massive increase in ocean fish stocks”.
“We believe [it] would take up about 30 billion tons of greenhouse gases a year, so this one technique could deliver a very big part of what we are aiming for,” said King.
Asked about concerns large-scale geoengineering could have harmful unintended consequences, King assured the audience that no technique would be used unless negative side effects had been ruled out.
“Let me say it once: there is no technology we would roll out that would cause any significant damage anywhere in the planet.”
While such emerging technology provided a glimmer of hope, King said it would mean nothing without extreme emissions reduction and an almost immediate global transition to green power.
The Climate Emergency
UNEP
https://www.unep.org/climate-emergency
The science is clear. The world is in a state of climate emergency, and we need to shift into emergency gear. Humanity’s burning of fossil fuels has emitted enough greenhouse gases to significantly alter the composition of the atmosphere and average world temperature has risen between 1.1 and 1.2°C.
And for every degree in rising temperatures, the cost of adaptation will rise exponentially. GHG emission must peak now yet the gap between ambition and action is growing.
We have the solutions we need and many will reduce emissions, contribute to climate adaptation, create jobs, restore the natural environment and encourage good investments.
You can Act Now and Speak Up. You can urge people to join you in pushing for the societal change we need.
Guest article by Sir David King: Climate crisis – The need for action now
by Sir David King
https://privatebank.barclays.com/ideas/2022/april/2022-sustainable-portfolio-management-report/sir-david-king-climate-crisis-actions-needed-now/
It is now indisputable that we are in a climate emergency. Soaring levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, particularly methane, with combined atmospheric concentrations of more than 500 parts per million today, put the future of humanity at extreme risk. Global heating is already resulting in more extreme weather events at greater frequency, and some irreversible changes have now been triggered in our climate systems as tipping points are exceeded.
The first such tipping point is the Arctic Circle region. This region is warming four times faster than the global average, resulting in rapid and irreversible sea ice loss, and ice loss from the Greenland ice sheet. Arctic Sea ice loss is accelerating global warming via the reduction in albedo as the blue sea absorbs the sunlight, rather than ice reflecting the sun’s heat back out into space. Ice loss from the Greenland ice sheet is accelerating sea level rise, and is now irreversible. In addition, the Arctic region holds vast amounts of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, locked within permafrost, which is now starting to thaw, with potentially disastrous consequences.
Loss of ice in the Arctic is accompanied by significant changes across the globe as weather systems react. The amplification of Arctic warming is disrupting the normal functioning of the Jet stream (i.e. the narrow band of strong winds that generally blow from West to East), which has in the past separated the cold air in the Arctic region from the rest of the Northern hemisphere. As a result, the Jet stream starts to meander over large distances (see Figure 1) and causes extreme weather events around the Northern hemisphere.
The result of this was temperatures being observed along the West Coast of America that were more than 5oC above previous records in those regions, during the summer of 2021. Some of the largest wildfires ever recorded burned in the forests of North America and South-East Australia, some with such fierce power that they were comparable to a moderate volcanic eruption. Such events are already costing us over $100 billion per year in loss and damage.
Once the ice on Greenland is gone, global sea levels will be up to 7.4 metres higher. A rise of just 0.5m-1m will be disastrous, rendering a number of cities on coastlines unliveable8.
Huge populations in locations including Kolkata and Jakarta will become homeless, forced to move to higher ground.
Every society is acclimatised to, and built on (literally and metaphorically), historical climatic conditions. Every society will suffer terribly as these changes happen and everyone will be affected by them.
What are the solutions?
The only way to reverse some of these catastrophic patterns, and to regain some stability in our climate and weather systems, is “climate repair” – a strategy we call “reduce, remove, repair” – which demands that we make very rapid reductions to achieve net-zero global emissions; that there is massive, active removal of excess greenhouse gases from the atmosphere; and that we undertake to repair some of our most damaged climate systems.
We must quickly refreeze the Earth’s poles and glaciers to correct these wild weather patterns, slow down ice-melt, stabilise sea level, and break the feedback loops that relentlessly accelerate global warming. This will “buy us time” while we bring atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations down to safer levels.
This strategy for creating a manageable future for humanity, while clear, is by no means straightforward.
1. Reduce
Emissions reduction at the scale and pace required is fraught with challenge. The biggest industry in the world is the energy industry – very largely fossil-fuel driven since the Industrial Revolution – with a massive transition required. Nonetheless, this represents considerable economic potential for those companies that recognise the financial opportunity in developing and taking new post-fossil-fuel technologies to market.
Financial incentives are required to fast track the transition. Mission Innovation – a group of 22 countries and the European Union, representing 90% of global GDP, formed at the 2015 Paris Climate Conference – represents one model for creating the necessary ecosystem. This group made a voluntary commitment to spend $30 billion per annum of public money by 2020 on the development of post-fossil-fuel technologies, in order to de-risk their development and enable them to get into the marketplace more efficiently and more quickly. They have now agreed to raise this to $35 billion per annum by 2025.
We urgently need more private sector understanding of these opportunities. Investment that is fit for purpose in the 21st century is the only investment that should be countenanced. This means focusing on those companies taking us safely into this future, and not on those that are creating the stranded assets of the future.
2. Remove
Greenhouse gas removal at scale requires considerably more research funding to enable the development of the safe technologies that are needed to remove tens of billions of tons of excess greenhouse gases from the atmosphere per annum. A carefully valued carbon price is required to incentivise the development of a greenhouse gas removal industry. A combination of different solutions – from nature-based through to bio-mimicry – will be needed to meet the removal requirements already baked into countries’ net-zero commitments.
3. Repair
Climate repair requires significantly more research and investment. “Repairing” systematically seeks to draw the Earth back from climate tipping points, buying time during which reduction and removal can happen. Political, financial, and societal will is needed, with the right incentives in place to enable rapid research and deployment.
The most urgent effort is to refreeze the Arctic. Marine cloud brightening, in which floating solar-powered pumps spray salt upwards to brighten clouds and create a reflective barrier between the Sun and the ocean, is known to cool ocean surfaces and is a promising way to promote Arctic summer cooling. It mimics nature, and can be scaled up or down in a flexible way. Studies of marine cloud brightening, its climate impacts, and interactions with human systems, are underway.
Research is critical, to ensure the solutions in question do not bring with them unintended consequences, which could be unleashed if these techniques were deployed in an emergency. Public engagement is needed, to understand which solutions are publicly acceptable, and which are not.
The time to act is now
“Nowhere is safe.” As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned in a recent report, climate change and its consequences are here to stay. The challenge of surviving the next 50 years is a planet-wide existential crisis; we need to work together urgently. What we do in the next five years will determine humanity’s fate.