From the University of Exeter , more Durban PR rampup:
Limited options for meeting 2°C warming target, warn climate change experts
We will only achieve the target of limiting global warming to safe levels if carbon dioxide emissions begin to fall within the next two decades and eventually decrease to zero. That is the stark message from research by an international team of scientists, led by the University of Exeter, published today (20 November) in the journal Nature Climate Change.
The research focuses on the scale of carbon emission reduction needed to keep future global warming at no more than two degrees Celsius over average temperatures prior to the Industrial Revolution. This target is now almost universally accepted as a safe limit.
The team examined the extent to which carbon emissions should be reduced, how steep this reduction needs to be and how soon we should begin. They used mathematical modelling techniques to construct a number of possible future scenarios, based on different assumptions on emissions reduction. They accounted for a likely range of climate sensitivities: the amount of warming for a given increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide.
The research shows how quickly emissions need to drop in the next few decades. It also highlights how remaining emissions could cause the two-degrees target to be exceeded in the long term, over the next few hundred years.
The researchers found that zero or negative emissions are compatible with this target if we reduce our global carbon emissions by at least three per cent per year within the next two decades.
In a worst-case scenario of high climate sensitivity, we need to work towards negative emissions if we are to have a chance to keeping temperatures within the two-degrees target. This would mean using carbon-capture-and-storage technology combined with aggressive mitigation rates starting in the coming decade. The best-case scenario of low climate sensitivity allows longer delays and more conservative mitigation rates, but still requires emissions to be eventually cut by at least 90%.
The results clearly show that if we delay reducing global emissions by just ten or twenty years we will then need to make much steeper reductions in order to meet a two-degrees warming target.
Lead author Professor Pierre Friedlingstein of the University of Exeter said: “When I analysed these results, I was surprised to see so few options available to us. We know we need to tackle global warming, but our research really emphasises the urgency of the situation. The only way for us to achieve a safe future climate will be to reduce emissions by at least three per cent, starting as soon as possible. The longer we leave it, the harder it will be.”
Countries currently have different targets for carbon emission reductions. For example, the US proposes a 17 per cent reduction by 2020, the EU has set a target of a 20 to 30 per cent reduction by 2020 and Australia has an objective of a five to 25 per cent reduction by 2020, depending on other countries commitment.
“The good news is that it’s not too late,” said co-author Professor Susan Solomon of the University of Colorado. “The interesting news is that we really need to think in the very long-term as well as the near-term. Even a small amount of remaining emissions would eventually mean exceeding the target so we need to ensure that technologies are available to make our world carbon-free in the long run.”
The research was carried out by the University of Exeter (UK), University of Colorado (USA), University of Bern (Switzerland), ETH (Switzerland), CEA-CNRS (France) and CSIRO (Australia).
Isn’t Madam Susan Solomon the prominent scientist featured in Donna Laframoise book? My suggestion is not to ask her for more or clarifying info. She will expel you on the spot for daring to doubt the findings of her “research”
Not just any buffered system… but the largest buffered system in the known universe! GK
When are plants going to start negating the increase in CO2? After all CO2 levels just keeps increasing. We hear that plants are going to take care of it, but there’s a little hitch: they haven’t. There’s all sorts of reasons, of course. CO2 is only one constituent of the equation. Water availabilty. Genetic limits. Consumption by pests. Fire. Land use conversion. Agriculture and forestry products consumption. (And, ironically, flood: Pakistan last year and Thailand this year.) Excess CO2 getting taken up by plants is like Lindzen’s Iris Effect. It sounds almost plausible, but the problem is it just never happens.
Ed Reid says:
November 21, 2011 at 8:58 am
——————————-
Here is how the math works.
We are emitting about 9.5 billion tons Carbon per year. Plants and Oceans are absorbing 4.0 billion tons of that. Therefore the concentration of Carbon is rising at about 4.5 billion tons or 2.0 ppm per year.
The amount that Plants and Oceans absorb each seems to be closely related to the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. The absorption rate is consistently about 1.7% per year of the excess CO2 above the equilibrium level of 280 ppm.
If we cut our emissions by 40% down to 5.7 billion tons per year by 2040, plants and oceans will then be absorbing the same 5.7 billion tons per year and CO2 will stabilize at 440 ppm (just below the 450 ppm, 2.0C “magic” level proposed).
A little background on the “2 degree target” from the man who came up with the figure in the first instance!
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,686697-8,00.html
……. a group of German scientists, yielding to political pressure, invented an easily digestible message in the mid-1990s: the two-degree target. To avoid even greater damage to human beings and nature, the scientists warned, the temperature on Earth could not be more than two degrees Celsius higher than it was before the beginning of industrialization.
It was a pretty audacious estimate. Nevertheless, the powers-that-be finally had a tangible number to work with. An amazing success story was about to begin.
Rarely has a scientific idea had such a strong impact on world politics. Most countries have now recognized the two-degree target. If the two-degree limit were exceeded, German Environment Minister Norbert Röttgen announced ahead of the failed Copenhagen summit, “life on our planet, as we know it today, would no longer be possible.”
But this is scientific nonsense. “Two degrees is not a magical limit — it’s clearly a political goal,” says Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). “The world will not come to an end right away in the event of stronger warming, nor are we definitely saved if warming is not as significant. The reality, of course, is much more complicated.”
Schellnhuber ought to know. He is the father of the two-degree target.
“Yes, I plead guilty,” he says, smiling. The idea didn’t hurt his career. In fact, it made him Germany’s most influential climatologist. Schellnhuber, a theoretical physicist, became Chancellor Angela Merkel’s chief scientific adviser — a position any researcher would envy.”
Political junkie,
Your post is interesting, but “recognize” is not the same thing as “bring about policies to implement”. As noted earlier, 2C is a misleading number since it would be impossible with current technologies to stabilize there. At 2C, even if human emissions were 0, atmospheric concentrations of GHGs would continue to grow. At the same rate that they are now.
So, right now we’re in a situation a bit like the last scene of the Michael Caine version of The Italian Job.
M.A.Vukcevic says:
November 21, 2011 at 5:14 am
2 degrees C, yes at a stretch, but that is 2C down
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/CET-NVa.htm
______
Very very unlikely.
Gail Combs says:
November 21, 2011 at 9:01 am
“The climate changes naturally and an insignificant effect from a minor component of the atmosphere is not what is causing it. Heck 95% of the greenhouse gas effect is from WATER VAPOR not CO2. Mankind’s contribution to Green House Gases” (total) is about 0.28%. Also the effect is not linear. Most of the effect is from the fist couple of 100 ppm and then saturation is achieved so the effect declines rapidly after that (logarithmic).”
___
Oh my, this nonsense again? Please, for your own education, see:
http://scienceofdoom.com/2009/11/28/co2-an-insignificant-trace-gas-part-one/
Read all 8 of the very detailed (full of maths and science) overview…and perhaps you’ll stop spewing this kind of dribble.
Robert S says:
November 21, 2011 at 9:37 am
“Not that an increase in emissions matters anyway as CO2 apparently does not cause global warming because spectral overlap with H2O reduces the latter’s effective emissivity/absorbtivity leading to a cooling effect.”
____
Have you ever actually looked at a spectral absorption chart of CO2 & H2O and compared it to the LW coming from the earth? The area around 15 microns should be especially interesting to you.
To Bill Illis,
Try this mass balance approach instead of the IPPC model. Click on my name.
Look at the energy flows and you will see that this is doable if we are ready to return to the world much as it was in the 1850’s, with a mostly dispersed agrarian society, extremely limited travel, a 50 year average lifespan (Longer than the actual for 1850, but allowable with STRICT birth controls – i.e. extra births carry the death penalty.) and a global population of approximately 1 billion people. All within a single generation.
Some of the true believers in ‘global warming’ may be able to qualify exterminating 5.5 billion people to prevent global warming as something other than genocide, but I cannot. Inevitably it will turn into a ‘them vs. us’ issue and ethnic cleansing will commence. I’ll leave it to the reader to speculate on who the cleansed and the cleansers will be.
That is what the media either cannot, or willfully refuses to, understand and report.
R. Gates says:
November 21, 2011 at 11:18 am
Very very unlikely
Hi Gates
Long time no see.
2C down, happened before, 1670 – 1690, and no reason why not again:
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/CET-100-150-100.htm
I can explain (my article is nearly ready) both 2C down followed by 3C up, all in 50 years.
Can you?
2 degrees of sense – 358 degrees of non-sense
Nice pie-chart! GK
Earth 2011 does not equal Earth 1670, or more importantly, Earth 1790, as I believe we’re more likely to see a Dalton type solar minimum rather than a Maunder. We may drop 0.5C during this at the very most, but it will be up up and away for temps over the course of the 21st Century. A 2C drop would take a serious re-write of atmospheric physics…not that it couldn’t happen, but it would be very very unlikely. But even in your scenario you see us as 1C higher in 50 years, and I’d put us just a bit ahead of that, but close enough to call us even in the net result after 50 years.
Henry@R.Gates
Why don’t you actually spend some trying to understand what other people say about what you want to understand….
http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/the-greenhouse-effect-and-the-principle-of-re-radiation-11-Aug-2011
>> we need to ensure that technologies are available to make our world carbon-free in the long run.
>>
Carbon is the very base of life on Earth. The whole of organic chemistry, that is LIFE, is based around the carbon atom.
Do these idiots even think about what they are proposing?
China is increasing emissions by an amount equivalent to 2-2.5% of the global number, India another .5%
R. Gates says:
November 21, 2011 at 12:16 pm
, as I believe we’re more likely to see a Dalton type solar minimum rather than a Maunder.
If you really carefully study the CET records than you may find out that the CET does not agree with the solar minima. Around 1710 temperature has already shot up by more than 2C, while the Maunder was approaching its end. Similarly with the Dalton, average of the CET around 1810 was higher than average around 1840 (not to mention 1890s) but by then Dalton was well over.
Calling on the Maunder and Dalton minima, unless is supported by data and explainable in terms of the TSI, does not resolve the dilemma.
Either debating sceptic or the AGW believer, you should be able to support the argument by reliable data, and facts as they are imbedded in the data.
If you take a good look at last graph in
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/CET-100-150-100.htm
in the UK we are already 1.5C down on the peaks of two previous decades; who says that it will not oscillate around its new low, but go back to the old peaks?
Gate I suggest to anyone interested in the climate change:
the past is behind, learn from it
the present is here, understand it
the future is ahead, prepare for it.
Gates, get yourself a warm woolly jumper.
the good news is that the world is waking up to the global warming fraud
R. Gates says:
Very very unlikely.
Say, aren’t those the latest odds on the doomsday climate sensitivity scenarios of the last IPCC report (3C or more from 2X CO2)? Why yes, I think they are … Tho actually, I think the technical term used was “implausible”.
Talk fast, sweetheart. Your window for pushing this crap is being walled up with implausibility. Brick, by brick.
We may drop 0.5C during this at the very most …
LOL. That is a keen admission. 0.5C is the entirety of all warming since 1940, if you buy into the overly adjusted GISTEMP rererevisionist history. Now you postulate that all of it, even that pesky little anthropogenic bit, might be completely erased. *POOF* – global warming is gone.
You are becoming something of a mason yourself. Not a bad idea for you to have an alternate career awaiting the point when your position as Pullman Porter on the ‘global warming’ gravy train goes away.
Speaking of points, whatever happened to that “tipping point” that we were supposed to be only ten years away from, about 6 years ago? The only thing that has been tipping during that timeframe has been the slope of the surface temp curve – tipping over flat. Those several very scary uncontrolled feedback loops we were warned about should have us staring across the threshold of Hell by now – but you are saying that it might all just go away? Huh. Sounds like anthropogenic climate change change to me.
You know they are talking rubbish when they say
“They used mathematical modelling techniques to construct a number of possible future scenarios, based on different assumptions on emissions reduction.”
This is simplistic reporting of modelling and we all know how that has worked out.
Mathematics can be said to be” infallible” but GIGO still applies. If the model is flawed who cares what results bad logic fed into a microprocessor returns.
“The research shows how quickly emissions need to drop in the next few decades. It also highlights how remaining emissions could cause the two-degrees target to be exceeded in the long term, over the next few hundred years.”
I thought we were all doomed in about 89 years not a few hundred more.
Well that is good news – we have some breathing space at last.
M.A.Vukcevic,
How closely does your CET correlate with the rest of Europe, and then how well does Europe correlate with the rest of of N. Hemisphere, and then how does the N. Hemisphere correlate with the rest of the globe in terms of the temperatures during the time frames you’ve given? Here is the best recent summary that I’ve seen recently on solar-climate interactions, given recently at the Sante Fe conference. There’s lots the look at here, so take your time.
http://curry.eas.gatech.edu/santafe/papers/Sun_climate_SantaFe.pdf
Mike Bentley says onNovember 21, 2011 at 6:37 am:
“Would someone kindly explain to me, a dumb ol’ engineer what “negative emissions” means?????”
It means the opposite of “positive emissions” and new studies show they are far worse than we previously thought!
You stupid boy. – Fall into line – And pay more attention from now on!!!!
Conclusions from “an international team of scientists”?
Are these “scientists” aware that photosynthesis would cease at levels below 100 ppm, only 290 ppm below where we are now, and this lush world would be turned into a ball of ice?
Are these “scientists” aware that this planet has endured CO2 levels 18 times higher than today without hardly a notice? (GEOCARB)
Are these “scientists” aware that in 1825 CO2 was 425 ppm, 35 ppm higher than today?
Are these “scientists” aware that for the last 6E8 years our planet has varied in temperature from 12C to 22C, being 22C 46% of the time and 12C only 6% of the time (PALEOTEMP), and that we are now just 2.5C above the low point of the range?
Are these “scientists” aware of the above, or are they just drowning in their dogma?
Charles S. Opalek, PE says:
November 21, 2011 at 6:41 pm
“Are these “scientists” aware that in 1825 CO2 was 425 ppm, 35 ppm higher than today?”
——
I don’t mind that they aren’t aware of nonsense like this…or if they are aware that some poor unfortunate soul such as yourself actually believe this, they can only realize how much ignorance is out there.