tingilinde

414

Maua Loa observatory CO2 readings are well over 400 .. well over 410ppm

The last time in human history they were this high was...   well  never... humans wouldn't evolve for a long time.

 

 

polarization

 

latest on climate models

New results from the latest round of improvements are disconcerting.  It's early though.  The lack of a serious attack on carbon emissions may turn out to be the greatest failure of humanity.

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In earlier models, doubling atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) over preindustrial levels led models to predict somewhere between 2°C and 4.5°C of warming once the planet came into balance. But in at least eight of the next-generation models, produced by leading centers in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and France, that “equilibrium climate sensitivity” has come in at 5°C or warmer. Modelers are struggling to identify which of their refinements explain this heightened sensitivity before the next assessment from the United Nations’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). But the trend “is definitely real. There’s no question,” says Reto Knutti, a climate scientist at ETH Zurich in Switzerland. “Is that realistic or not? At this point, we don’t know.”

That’s an urgent question: If the results are to be believed, the world has even less time than was thought to limit warming to 1.5°C or 2°C above preindustrial levels—a threshold many see as too dangerous to cross. With atmospheric CO2 already at 408 parts per million (ppm) and rising, up from preindustrial levels of 280 ppm, even previous scenarios suggested the world could warm 2°C within the next few decades. The new simulations are only now being discussed at meetings, and not all the numbers are in, so “it’s a bit too early to get wound up,” says John Fyfe, a climate scientist at the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis in Victoria, whose model is among those running much hotter than in the past. “But maybe we have to face a reality in the future that’s more pessimistic than it was in the past.”

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kathy hayhoe on dealing with polarization

Climate deniers won't change their minds when presented with science.  Kathy Hayhoe has been fighting the battles in Texas and notes some of the techniques sociology suggests.  

 

red hats in finland

I thought they were smarter than that..  Anti-immigration and fight climate change action are major selling points.

 

why green pledges are broken

They were supposed to be a powerful way to sequester a lot of carbon, but they're problematic.

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Such forests would often decrease biodiversity rather than increase it, and would only ever hold a small fraction of the carbon that could be captured by giving space for natural forests. Another 21 percent of the “reforestation” would plant fruit and other trees on farms as part of agroforestry programs; just 34 percent would be natural forests.

“Policymakers are misinterpreting the term forest restoration [and] misleading the public,” the study’s two main authors, geographer Simon Lewis of Leeds University and tropical forest researcher Charlotte Wheeler of Edinburgh University, commented in a blog. It is, they say, a “scandal.”

Forestry and climate experts say that monoculture timber plantations have their place, but that they must be in addition to the 1.35 million square miles of restored natural forests, not instead of them. These experts also say that an important component of reforestation is supporting policies that help trashed forests and degraded lands regenerate naturally into jungle or woodlands, thus promoting significant carbon storage and fostering biodiversity. Richard Houghton, an ecologist at the Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts, has estimated that if degraded tropical forests were allowed to regrow, they could capture up to 3 billion tons of carbon annually for as much as 60 years, potentially “providing a bridge to a fossil fuel-free world.”

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entanglement

A curious proxy for ocean-plastic pollution.

The paper in Nature Communications. (open)

 

The rise in ocean plastics evidenced from a 60-year time series

Clare Ostle 1, Richard C. Thompson2, Derek Broughton1, Lance Gregory 1, Marianne Wootton1 & David G. Johns1

Plastic production has increased exponentially since its use became widespread in the 1950s. This has led to increased concern as plastics have become prevalent in the oceanic environment, and evidence of their impacts on marine organisms and human health has been highlighted. Despite their prevalence, very few long-term (>40 years) records of the distribution and temporal trends of plastics in the world’s oceans exist. Here we present a new time series, from 1957 to 2016 and covering over 6.5 million nautical miles, based on records of when plastics have become entangled on a towed marine sampler. This consistent time series provides some of the earliest records of plastic entanglement, and is the first to confirm a significant increase in open ocean plastics in recent decades.

 

vehicle pollution and asthma

A continuing problem - diesels are a major issue.

 

is mass timber part of a solution?

Is using wood to replace concrete and steel an answer to carbon emissions?  Proponents say yes, but not much work has been done.

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The move to mass timber is even farther along in Europe. That’s because mass timber – large structural panels, posts, and beams glued under pressure or nailed together in layers, with the wood’s grain stacked perpendicular for extra strength – is not only prized as an innovative building material, superior to concrete and steel in many ways, it is also hoped it will come into its own as a significant part of a climate change solution.

Among architects, manufacturers, and environmentalists, many want nothing less than to turn the coming decades of global commercial construction from a giant source of carbon emissions into a giant carbon sink by replacing concrete and steel construction with mass timber. That, they say, would avoid the CO2 generated in the production of those building materials and sequester massive amounts of carbon by tying up the wood in buildings for decades or even longer, perhaps in perpetuity.

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drought and air pollution

A connection one usually doesn't think about.

a tip of the at to Sukie