[“Experts” ~cr]
UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
Global heating could become “catastrophic” for humanity if temperature rises are worse than many predict or cause cascades of events we have yet to consider, or indeed both. The world needs to start preparing for the possibility of a “climate endgame”.
This is according to an international team of researchers led by the University of Cambridge, who propose a research agenda for facing up to bad-to-worst-case scenarios. These include outcomes ranging from a loss of 10% of the global population to eventual human extinction.
In a paper published today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers call on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to dedicate a future report to catastrophic climate change to galvanise research and inform the public.
“There are plenty of reasons to believe climate change could become catastrophic, even at modest levels of warming,” said lead author Dr Luke Kemp from Cambridge’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk.
“Climate change has played a role in every mass extinction event. It has helped fell empires and shaped history. Even the modern world seems adapted to a particular climate niche,” he said.
“Paths to disaster are not limited to the direct impacts of high temperatures, such as extreme weather events. Knock-on effects such as financial crises, conflict, and new disease outbreaks could trigger other calamities, and impede recovery from potential disasters such as nuclear war.”
Kemp and colleagues argue that the consequences of 3°C warming and beyond, and related extreme risks, have been under-examined.
Modelling done by the team shows areas of extreme heat (an annual average temperature of over 29 °C), could cover two billion people by 2070. These areas not only some of the most densely populated, but also some of the most politically fragile.
“Average annual temperatures of 29 degrees currently affect around 30 million people in the Sahara and Gulf Coast,” said co-author Chi Xu of Nanjing University.
“By 2070, these temperatures and the social and political consequences will directly affect two nuclear powers, and seven maximum containment laboratories housing the most dangerous pathogens. There is serious potential for disastrous knock-on effects,” he said.
Last year’s IPCC report suggested that if atmospheric CO2 doubles from pre-industrial levels – something the planet is halfway towards – then there is an roughly 18% chance temperatures will rise beyond 4.5°C.
However, Kemp co-authored a “text mining” study of IPCC reports, published earlier this year, which found that IPCC assessments have shifted away from high-end warming to increasingly focus on lower temperature rises.
This builds on previous work he contributed to showing that extreme temperature scenarios are “underexplored relative to their likelihood”. “We know least about the scenarios that matter most,” Kemp said.
The team behind the PNAS paper propose a research agenda that includes what they call the “four horsemen” of the climate endgame: famine and malnutrition, extreme weather, conflict, and vector-borne diseases.
Rising temperatures pose a major threat to global food supply, they say, with increasing probabilities of “breadbasket failures” as the world’s most agriculturally productive areas suffer collective meltdowns.
Hotter and more extreme weather could also create conditions for new disease outbreaks as habitats for both people and wildlife shift and shrink.
The authors caution that climate breakdown would likely exacerbate other “interacting threats”: from rising inequality and misinformation to democratic breakdowns and even new forms of destructive AI weaponry.
One possible future highlighted in the paper involves “warm wars” in which technologically enhanced superpowers fight over both dwindling carbon space and giant experiments to deflect sunlight and reduce global temperatures.
More focus should go on identifying all potential tipping points within “Hothouse Earth” say researchers: from methane released by permafrost melts to the loss of forests that act as “carbon sinks”, and even potential for vanishing cloud cover.
“The more we learn about how our planet functions, the greater the reason for concern,” said co-author Prof Johan Rockström, Director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.
“We increasingly understand that our planet is a more sophisticated and fragile organism. We must do the math of disaster in order to avoid it,” he said.
Co-author Prof Kristie Ebi from the University of Washington said: “We need an interdisciplinary endeavor to understand how climate change could trigger human mass morbidity and mortality.”
Added Kemp: “We know that temperature rise has a ‘fat tail’, which means a wide range of lower probability but potentially extreme outcomes. Facing a future of accelerating climate change while remaining blind to worst-case scenarios is naive risk-management at best and fatally foolish at worst.”
JOURNAL
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
DOI
ARTICLE TITLE
Climate Endgame: Exploring catastrophic climate change scenarios
ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE
1-Aug-2022
Experts? Huh! The self-appointed kind, no doubt…
The “Ive got a gender studies degree from Wellesley so I’m an expert at all things” crowd…
Eric Worrall posted an article here a couple of days ago on the BBC’s … “reporting” (?) of this paper, which is similar but different to the “EurekAlert” angle you point to here.
A selected extract I posted under Eric’s take on Kemp et al :
Go for it guys. Shred the last little bit of your credibility.
The CACW ship sailed a long time ago
If Dr. Kemp wants to study existential risk, all he has to do is look in a mirror.
Nothing more than the usual apocalyptic science FICTION…
The CCP is using this scam to empower themselves. All these maggot leftwits are going to hate it when their CCP over-lords put them in Nike factories 19 hours a day.
Referenced in Luke Kemp’s “Climate Endgame” paper is https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/ 2022EF002876 in which the abstract reads (my bold):
”We focus on how different global temperature increases represented in IPCC reports have shifted over time. While the first four assessment reports had a roughly equal focus on temperatures above and below 2°C, the more recent fifth and sixth assessment reports have a considerably stronger focus on warming below 2°C. This is concerning as warming above 2°C is more likely given current emissions trajectories and is more influential on climate risk assessments.”
It seems that even the IPCC is not being hysterical enough for these clown.
Also in that (Jehn et al, 2022) paper :
From the Liu & Raftery paper :
If they “concluded” that the USA has a 2% probability of “meeting their NDC” while China has a 16% chance of meeting theirs then I think their “methodology” needs to be checked by some other “peer reviewers” …
Yep, in the CliSciFi world China’s commitment to reducing greenhouse emissions intensity by 2030 means that “For China, this means reducing emissions by 60% from 2005 to 2030.” Do you wonder why I think our governments are lying to us?
From the article–
Fig. 2 “Fragile heat: the overlap between state fragility, extreme heat, and nuclear and biological catastrophic hazards. GCM model data……” I have engineer friends that provide me information. The Bent summer 2022 issue, from the Engineering Honor Society, in response to a previous article on “Decarbonizing the Atmosphere, despite one short letter on equity, similar one on a serious magnitude error, has a page long letter carefully destroying the narrative with factual material, along with two other shorter ones.
In contrast Civil Engineering, January/February issue, with a frightening cover of “Making Infrastructure Resilient to Climate Change” has ASCE (American Society of Civil Engineers) statement urging UN action on Climate Change, and an article on courses about solutions for global crises which ends in “Lives not grades…We want to be known for the lives of students we touched.” They have only one letter, that on the necessity of engineering educators to have practical experience. ASCE publications have been a valuable source to many disciplines, including environmental. I have used their publications a lot, maybe better recheck now.
I suppose that it is easy if you have nothing better to do than making heat fragile, but not so much if you actually have to engineer it.
[Global heating could become “catastrophic” for humanity if temperature rises are worse than many predict or cause cascades of events we have yet to consider, or indeed both. The world needs to start preparing for the possibility of a “climate endgame”.]
Please to stop lying to the public.
The planet warming has made climate less extreme with less deaths caused by severe weather, increased greening of the world and less winter deaths. That is huge benfit to us all and we should thank not having near dangerous low levels of CO2 that the planet had 1000’s of years ago before the interglacial period began.
What is the mechansim for climate endgame? None of the activists/alarmists have explained how this whould actually happen. Explantions like huge rises in sea levels are BS at the highest level. Arctic sea ice is not disapearing anytime in at least the next few decades and this still would not be a problem if it did.
The warmest climates in the world will have the least warming if any and the coldest regions that need the most warming for it to be bearable are having modest warming. Still far too cold for most of the planet away from the Tropics to live without clothing and shelter, risking death. No matter how much warming there will be it will never be as warm as the Tropics anywhere else. The planets average temeprature was around 14c before recent warming so the planet having an average temperature of 17c if even this was possible will not be a problem and actually be benificial. The planet warms in zones, meaning a 1c rise will move the climate zone North about 150 miles. Acticvists/alarmists calling out end of time, when it would be like moving South for a few hundred miles or so like on holiday, are seriously deluded.
The only dangerous endgame I see is the time running out for the activists and elite relying on huge amounts of money that is driven by greed. Hoping to dictate what the people should and shouldn’t do while being hypercrites themselves.
Funny, I keep hearing from one of our WUWT denizens that scientists don’t make claims like this.
“Dangerously unexplored”?!?!? HA! HA! That’s all they have been exploring for decades, they keep crying WOLF! WOLF! and we ignore them.
As they said in the Soviet Union: They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work. Nobody believes that climate disaster shit but they mouth it to support the narrative. Cynicism worldwide is on the rise and it will not end well. Especially since another huge recession is in the works.
It’s the butterfly effect. A butterfly flaps its wings causing a disastrous weather event on the opposite side of the Earth. The first sentence gives it away, they don’t know. So why publish such a thing? Now mild weather is to be feared. Coffee time.
Warming of 3 C at ground level requires 16 more watts of IR heat from somewhere. At present the net IR leaving the ground is about 50 watts. Increased CO2 back radiation can’t provide enough IR heat for that.
Plus increased evaporation of water provides more clouds, more albedo, that reflects incoming SW sunlight during the day while reducing heat loss from ground to outer space at night….in balanced proportions to maintain the planet’s heat balance and average surface temperature.
So Kemp, Rockstrom, et al are the usual technically challenged myth-believing paper-publishing- opportunists and doom-cultists.
DMackenzie, could you please show the S-B calculations for the 3 ℃ increase resulting in 16 W/m^2? I saw it somewhere but forgot where. Its pretty basic stuff to be ignored by CliSciFi practitioners.
Once upon a time, there was a little boy who cried “Wolf” …
…who then grew up to become an overpaid ‘climate scientist’. And he laughed and laughed all the way to the bank.
…and inspired others to become climate communication experts, climate psychologists, peer review manipulators, and climate priests.
English language a requirement for Cambridge journalists are not.
Seems like the news release was written by a student of Yoda. One wonders if any other Star Wars characters have professorships.
We are currently in an inter-glacial period right now. Future warmth is not the problem we are facing.
I can see it now. In a hundred years the Commie/Fascist left will demand everyone drive a 1973 Buick for at least 8 hours a day just to keep the temp from falling catastrophically.
Did these jokers present any real scientific work? All I saw was models and guessing, why on earth would someone get paid for this kind of lazy work?
Quality control is off in a lock box somewhere if it actually exists anymore.
Bob, did you ever work for the government?
No, unless you count the Army.
The Army is the lowest level Govt employee. You weren’t used to save your country you were used to enforce the wishes of the global elite.
This is impressive for its extreme level of stupidity and detachment from current disaster movie theme projecting on climate change.
This is during a land war in Europe, saber rattling in east Asia, much worry over threats in Scandinavia, and terror reorganizing in Afghanistan. No wonder every stick of property in America is overpriced by foreign investment and refugee running on the Mexican border is more lucrative than the million pills a week of fentanyl from the drug cartel affiliate operations and Biden working on new border wall sections.
how do I get a job at the Center For Study of Existential Risk ?
Meanwhile in Paris…..
Cold showers, no lights: Europe saves as Russian gas wanes | AP News
“…international team of researchers led by the University of Cambridge, who propose a research agenda….” i.e. Send us money
I think the change in average temperature of ale in English pubs due to Climate Change™ is dangerously underexplored.
This urgent. Where do I apply for a grant?
If there had been a prehistoric AOC running around 20,000 years ago she would have been screaming;CO2 is rising, the temperature is rising , ice is melting, we’re all gonna die. And she would have been right about the first 3. ( Although mankind did not cause any of those things. They were completely natural) But she would have been totally wrong about the dying part. Instead of death the warmer temperature ushered in the Holocene era which has been extremely beneficial for life and mankind in particular. Virtually all of civilization developed during the Holocene. The mile thick ice sheets that covered most of Canada and the northern part of the U.S. were replaced by lush green forests teeming with life and later fertile farmlands where much of the world’s food is grown.
How do functioning societies plan for a “climate endgame?” Especially given that the authors resort to intersectionality: Their “rising inequality and misinformation to democratic breakdowns” (all current Leftist buzzwords).
Any far-fetched worldwide disaster scenarios these amateurs can ejaculate from their mental masturbation pale in comparison to humanity’s long and fine tradition of fictional apocalyptic stories. I’ll go with authors and screenwriters paid to produce such crap, not low-rent bureaucrats on the government dole.
Notice how you never read stories saying “Man From New England flies to Phoenix and Immediately Dies Because He Changed Climate Zones”…
🤔
OTOH Global warming could become beneficial for humanity if temperature rises are less than many predict or cause cascades of (beneficial) events we have yet to consider, or indeed both. The world needs to start preparing for the possibility of a “climate paradise”.
We are in a climate paradise RIGHT NOW. The Commie/Fascist left cant allow that anymore.
I think l that is REALLY inadequately explored!