Keeping global warming to within 1.5-2 degrees C may be more difficult than previously assessed, according to researchers. An international team of scientists has published a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) showing that even if the carbon emission reductions called for in the Paris Agreement are met, there is a risk of Earth entering what the scientists call “Hothouse Earth” conditions.
“Human emissions of greenhouse gas are not the sole determinant of temperature on Earth. Our study suggests that human-induced global warming of 2 degrees C may trigger other Earth system processes, often called feedbacks, that can drive further warming—even if we stop emitting greenhouse gases,” says lead author Will Steffen from the Australian National University and Stockholm Resilience Centre. “Avoiding this scenario requires a redirection of human actions from exploitation to stewardship of the Earth system.”
Currently, global average temperatures are just over 1 degrees C above pre-industrial and rising at 0.17 degrees C per decade.
The authors of the study consider 10 natural feedback processes, some of which are “tipping elements” that lead to abrupt change if a critical threshold is crossed. These feedbacks could turn from being beneficial, by storing carbon, to a source of uncontrollable emission in a warmer world. These feedbacks are permafrost thaw, loss of methane hydrates from the ocean floor, weakening land and ocean carbon sinks, increasing bacterial respiration in the oceans, Amazon rainforest dieback, boreal forest dieback, reduction of northern hemisphere snow cover, loss of Arctic summer sea ice, and reduction of Antarctic sea ice and polar ice sheets.
“These tipping elements can potentially act like a row of dominoes. Once one is pushed over, it pushes Earth toward another. It may be very difficult or impossible to stop the whole row of dominoes from tumbling over. Places on Earth will become uninhabitable if ‘Hothouse Earth’ becomes the reality,” adds co-author Johan Rockström, executive director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre and incoming co-director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.
Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, says, “We show how industrial-age greenhouse gas emissions force our climate, and ultimately the Earth system, out of balance. In particular, we address tipping elements in the planetary machinery that might, once a certain stress level has been passed, one by one change fundamentally, rapidly, and perhaps irreversibly. This cascade of events may tip the entire Earth system into a new mode of operation.”
“What we do not know yet is whether the climate system can be safely ‘parked’ near 2 degrees C above preindustrial levels, as the Paris Agreement envisages. Or if it will, once pushed so far, slip down the slope towards a hothouse planet. Research must assess this risk as soon as possible.”
Cutting greenhouse gases is not enough
Maximizing the chances of avoiding a “Hothouse Earth” requires not only reduction of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions, but also enhancement and/or creation of new biological carbon stores, for example, through improved forest, agricultural and soil management; biodiversity conservation; and technologies that remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store it underground, the paper says. Critically, the study emphasizes that these measures must be underpinned by fundamental societal changes that are required to maintain a “Stabilized Earth” where temperatures are ~2 degrees C warmer than the pre-industrial era.
“Climate and other global changes show us that we humans are impacting the Earth system at the global level. This means that we as a global community can also manage our relationship with the system to influence future planetary conditions. This study identifies some of the levers that can be used to do so,” concludes co-author, Katherine Richardson from the University of Copenhagen.
“… the climate system can be safely ‘parked’ near 2 degrees C above preindustrial levels”
What a load of BS, especially since we’ve been told all sorts of terrible consequences will occur at 2C and it is “officially unsafe“. Now apparently it’s “safe”. Got that folks? The climate pays attention to our history and the whims of the Schellnhuber pronouncements.
Note to my Internet stalker “Sou” aka Miriam O’Brien: I know you’ll want to jump all over this, please, be my guest. Make my day.
Of course they don’t bother to give a link to the paper in PNAS, and given the absurdity of the press release, I’m not going to bother looking for it. It’s not worth reading.
Here is the LINK to the PNAS paper.
Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/07/31/1810141115
The abstract is politically charged.
In case some user is interested in the full: https://workupload.com/file/rKyCzu9
The authors include Will Steffen, Johan Rockström, Katherine Richardson, Timothy M. Lenton, Diana Liverman and Hans Joachim Schellnhuber. They have published together variously on this theme for some time, common to all is Schellnhuber and his Potsdam Institute. The list is not exhaustive. Rockström is now taking over as Co-Director of Potsdam with Ottmar {Climate Change is now Wealth Distribution] Edenhofer.
February 2005
Breaking News – Only huge emissions cuts will curb climate change
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn6964-only-huge-emissions-cuts-will-curb-climate-change/
“To have half a chance of curbing global warming to within safe levels, the world’s greenhouse gas emissions need to fall dramatically to between 30% and 50% of 1990 levels by 2050, a new study suggests.” This was actually Meinshausen, who then joined Potsdam in 2006. Formerly worked for Greenpeace and WWF as a “consultant”, has been the Director of the Australian-German College [Potsdam] at The University of Melbourne since 2012
February 2008
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18258748
Lenton TM, Held H, Kriegler E, Hall JW, Lucht W, Rahmstorf S, Schellnhuber HJ.
“Here we introduce the term “tipping element” to describe large-scale components of the Earth system that may pass a tipping point. We critically evaluate potential policy-relevant tipping elements in the climate system under anthropogenic forcing, drawing on the pertinent literature and a recent international workshop to compile a short list, and we assess where their tipping points lie. An expert elicitation is used to help rank their sensitivity to global warming and the uncertainty about the underlying physical mechanisms”.
March 2009 Pre-Copenhagen
https://www.pik-potsdam.de/news/press-releases/files/synthesis-report-web.pdf
Rapid, sustained, and effective mitigation based on coordinated global and regional action is required to avoid “dangerous climate change” regardless of how it is defined.
Weaker targets for 2020 increase the risk of serious impacts, including the crossing of tipping points, and make the task of meeting 2050 targets more difficult and costly.
Authors include: Katherine Richardson, Will Steffen, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, Diana Liverman
April 2009
Climate chaos predicted by CO2 study
“If we continue burning fossil fuels as we do, we will have exhausted the carbon budget in merely 20 years, and global warming will go well beyond 2C,” said Malte Meinshausen of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, who led the study, published in Nature.
More pre-Copenhagen – September 2009
A safe operating space for humanity
https://www.nature.com/articles/461472a#author-information
Authors include:
Rockström, Johan
Steffen, Will
Lenton, Timothy M.
Schellnhuber, Hans Joachim
Hansen, James
Liverman, Diana
Richardson, Katherine
Anthropogenic climate change is now beyond dispute, and in the run-up to the climate negotiations in Copenhagen this December, the international discussions on targets for climate mitigation have intensified. There is a growing convergence towards a ‘2 °C guardrail’ approach, that is, containing the rise in global mean temperature to no more than 2 °C above the pre-industrial level.
Now Only Two Years Left
July 2017 – “Three years to safeguard our climate”
http://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/research-news/2017-07-02-three-years-to-safeguard-our-climate.html
Johan Rockström, Christiana Figueres, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, Gail Whiteman, Anthony Hobley and Stefan Rahmstorf
They will never give up as long as the funding is there.
They are a dearh cukt like Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge ir Jonestown’s Jim Jines.
Only much more dangerous since they are lustened to by Popes and Presidents.
Yet there is no such thing as the “Anthropocene”, according to geologists who are in charge of naming geological periods.
Maybe I should buy a house near the California coast so I can watch people surfing on the “progressively” higher waves coming in.
Would that near Al Gore’s sea-front property he paid $4M for?
From the Stockholm Syndrome Center and the mind of Hans Joachim Schellnhuber .
Here is the link and guess what: we need to pay for it… $10 to read about the end of the world… LOLBut thanks to the MSM, they got it and publish it all over the world…
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/07/31/1810141115
This is terrifying. May the gods protect our little children 🙁
You are trying to be funny, no?
Maybe if they typed in all caps and added more exclamation points we’d understand the urgency better.
A Real improvement would be to leave out all the ”could” ”may” inserts, they really take the edginess away.
Oh just call co2 Carbon,
Carbon pollution ………………..
These people really believe humans are Carbon pollution.
It is a sickness, co2 is the genesis molecule, 1 part human 2 parts human sustenance.
An oldie, but goodie. The domino effect. Isn’t that how we got into Viet Nam? And trying to breathe new life into an issue I thought was dead… tipping points! Any day now the cheese is going to slip off the cracker and raise sea levels by meters!!! I’m holding my breath!! It’s going to happen any second —10 years ago now. I just know it!!!
How many ppm/v does it take to raise the temperature 1 C? Let’s not forget about the exponential rise in temperatures from increasing amounts of co2.
Lead author Will Steffen from the Australian National University and Stockholm Resilience Center: “Avoiding this scenario requires a redirection of human actions from exploitation to stewardship of the Earth system.”
___________________________________________________
nurses and caretakers are searched everywhere. That would be a job for Will Steffen, and co-author Johan Rockström, executive director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre and incoming co-director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research –
but maybe they would do too much harm in a hospital or nursing home.
The hurricane is approaching Hawaii.
Better take the deck chairs in ren.
That will be a co2 enhanced special, i will bet the lads at Potsdam are chuffed, wild fires hurricanes heat waves etc.
2018 has it all and i already know Gavin cant wait till december to anounce hottest year eva! eva eva!, so he will tell us in october.
Even if it recurves north seawater temperatures around the islands are to low to maintain hurricane-strength winds.
The same goes for the hurricane off Baja. It will weaken before it reaches California.
””. It will weaken before it reaches California.””””
Now that’s a crying shame.
Schellnhuber has it all wrong, he must listen to Mann:
“The price on carbon needs to be set such that it leads to a reduction in carbon emissions of several percent a year for the next few decades. If we do that, we can avoid a catastrophic 2C (~3.5 F) warming of the planet.””
See that, Hansie? 2C is catastrophic, it is too late by then, forget your cascades, you are already on the tip.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/08/06/michael-mann-wants-to-give-capitalism-a-chance-to-solve-climate-change/
“Currently, global average temperatures are just over 1 degrees C above pre-industrial and rising at 0.17 degrees C per decade.”
Looking at the most recent 2 decades of satellite data from RSS and UAH, the trend is closer to about 0.06° C per decade, about 1/3 of the quoted 0.17° C per decade. We’re still essentially in a global warming hiatus.
The quotation is actually “What we do not know yet is whether the climate system can be safely ‘parked’ near 2 degrees C above preindustrial levels”
Why don’t they just say:’cutting greenhouse gasses is not enough, most of us have to die’. Not will die, but have to. Then at least the agenda would be clear.
BBC radio 4 in the UK are promulgating this fake science as the top news item and stating ‘we’ now need to suck Carbon (not Carbon Dioxide) out of the atmosphere!
Champagne Socialism at its dangerous deviousness! Mother Nature rules not Climate Change grant grabbers.
Nutball bull—t from an environmentalist nutjob!
“Such action entails stewardship of the entire Earth System—biosphere, climate, and societies—and could include decarbonization of the global economy, enhancement of biosphere carbon sinks, behavioral changes, technological innovations, new governance arrangements, and transformed social values.”
Yeah, yeah.
The ABC in oz are really promoting this as well. I listened to the news this morning about the current drought in NSW which is allegedly the worse since the 1960s ( l personally think that the millennium drought was far worse) but the BOM are saying that there is a 50 percent chance that this coming summer will be dryer than average. They are really ‘half glass full’ people! I would interpret tis as there is a good chance that this summer’s rain could be wetter or normal.
Gosh, tipping points, dominoes falling, aggravating feedbacks. It all sounds so 1990’s. I thought we had all moved on from this sort of nonsense. Still there has been a hot summer in parts of the Northern Hemisphere so let’s use that as a prop for our alarmism.
“It all sounds so 1990’s. I thought we had all moved on from this sort of nonsense”
We have moved on….. this is all a re-hash for the youngsters.
Kietho,
It does seem like ’90s TV reruns’, doesn’t it?!
“Avoiding this scenario requires a redirection of human actions from exploitation to stewardship of the Earth system.”
Tell it to Xi.
I hope your ‘stalker’ Sou does jump over you on this Eric – as you full deserve it. This report has a lot of merit to it and its forecasts should be paid attention to. Yet again you like to ridicule a scientific study that fails to fit in with your sceptic view. Its obvious that this planet is steadily warming in line with increased anthropomophic CO2 emissions but the sceptic community continues to deny this correlation. Global heat temperature records have been broken in many locations around the world, wild fires are devastating many countries, oceans are warming, severe and more intense droughts are causing devestation to farmers who require compensation – when are you and the sceptics going to get real?
“Global heat temperature records have been broken in many locations around the world”
That’s hardly surprising:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/08/06/laughable-weather-station-maintenance-causes-highest-ever-temperature-record-in-spain/
Try reading the later comments by N Stokes, and a comment by someone saying that he’s the only one keeping the place sane.
In short, that is not the reporting station. It reports hourly which thermometers in Stevenson screens do not. Also it has very resiliant grass.
“Its obvious that this planet is steadily warming in line with increased anthropomophic CO2 emissions but the sceptic community continues to deny this correlation.”
No it doesn’t. It doesn’t deny AGW, just CAGW.
There is no correlation Roger, ……….. None,………. both you and he need to get real.
“There is no correlation Roger”
Of course there’s a correlation—they’re both moving up. As for causation, the prominent skeptical scientists concede that man’s CO2 emissions have played some role in the rise in temperature, and maybe even a major role. Their objection is to the positive feedback hypothesis of the warmists, which converts AGW into CAGW. See Dr. David Evans’ 12-minute YouTube presentation on this point, here: https://youtu.be/0gDErDwXqhc
Would you like an escrow wager on ”negative” correlation Roger ?.
I wouldn’t do any private-party wagers. I used to make lots of climate-related bets on the Intrade site when it was operating.
As for correlation, I realize that there is no close correlation between CO2 levels and temperatures, as warmist theory says there should be. CO2 is supposed to have an instantaneous effect. But there is a gross correlation over the decades, which lukewarmers concede (perhaps in some cases only for the sake of argument).
“CO2 is supposed to have an instantaneous effect. ”
Not on surface temperature it’s not, due the thermal inertia imparted by the oceans, where 93% of absorbed solar energy is stored.
If you look here you can see that ….
Another sane person.
“CO2 is supposed to have an instantaneous effect. ”
“Not on surface temperature it’s not, due the thermal inertia imparted by the oceans,”
How about on the land temperatures?
They forgot the negative feedbacks including cloud cover (ask Willis) and more greenery from increased CO2.
As usual, everything is bad and always “worse than we thought” and “more difficult than previously assessed”.
Why would we listen to any of these ‘experts’ who got it so wrong in the past?
First they tried to scare us with “Global Warming”. When that didn’t work they changed it to “Climate Change”. As we have steadfastly refused to be scared the latest tactic is now “Hothouse Earth”. What will follow in a year or two?
dunny pixels;-)
steffen an absolute gem aint he?
and were stuck with him it seems
abc will be all over this like a rash!
This must be “send us more money” paper. We are more likely to have a super volcano eruption or get hit from large meteorite.
BBC is having a Field day with this,
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0bd6y5p
Starts with the god slot at 1:48:15 ; leading to ….
Hothouse earth at 1:51:05
If the Atlantic will still be so cold, the Thames can freeze. Winter will be dry in the UK .
