Climate Progress

One of the main purposes of this blog is to save you time.  As the Washington Post labels its TV columns on American Idol, “We watch … so you don’t have to.”

Nature has devoted much of its April 30 issue to “The Coming Climate Crunch” (subs. req’d).  Sadly, after sitting through pretty much the whole thing, I can’t actually recommend anybody else see buy it. Any regular reader of this blog will learn very little new from the dozen or so articles — and the issue fails utterly to provide its readers with the two must-haves in any comprehensive coverage of the issue:

1. A clear and specific understanding of the plausible worst-case scenario impacts facing the world post-2050 on our current emissions path.
2. A clear and specific understanding of the core climate solutions, policies for their rapid deployment, and an understanding of why the total cost of action is so darn low — one tenth of a penny on the dollar.

What is particularly embarrassing for Nature, whose coverage of this issue has been second to none, is that they don’t even bother with #2 — even though they have a full article devoted to geo-engineering (a puff piece by someone who “now participates in scientific research on the topic”), another full article on adaptation, and yet another full article just on capturing CO2 from the air, which even one of its major proponents is quoted as saying is “the most expensive climate-mitigation technology.”  What were the editors thinking?

The most useful thing in the entire issue is part of one of the figures in the article “Greenhouse-gas emission targets for limiting global warming to 2 °C” — which I’ve extracted and added to my must-have Powerpoint collection:

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This must-have slide (click to enlarge) comes from a 2005 study, “Regional vegetation die-off in response to global-change-type drought.” I first saw it in a powerful 2005 presentation by climatologist Jonathan Overpeck, “Warm climate abrupt change–paleo-perspectives,” that concluded “climate change seldom occurs gradually.”

Overpeck noted that the 2005 study, together with the recent evidence that temperature [in red] and annual precipitation [in blue] are headed in opposite directions in the U.S. Southwest, raises the question of whether we are at the “dawn of the super-interglacial drought.”

Before explaining why I like this slide and how it shows the future of extreme weather, I need to review the conclusion of the study, which was led by the University of Arizona, with Los Alamos National Laboratory and the U.S. Geological Survey:

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I am starting a new feature and a new category here on Climate Progress for Must-have PowerPoint Slides. I’ll begin with my favorite new slide, which shows just how stable the climate has been over the 10,000-year period that allowed modern human civilization to develop and flourish (click figure for larger version):

The slide is a must-have because it captures the risk we are taking while also providing a quick visual rebuttal to a very common denier talking point, one that NASA administrator Michael Griffin of all people repeated last year (see “And the Moon is Made of Green Cheese“):

To assume that [global warming] is a problem is to assume that the state of Earth’s climate today is the optimal climate, the best climate that we could have or ever have had and that we need to take steps to make sure that it doesn’t change…. I guess I would ask which human beings — where and when — are to be accorded the privilege of deciding that this particular climate that we have right here today, right now is the best climate for all other human beings. I think that’s a rather arrogant position for people to take.

Seriously! Needless to say, his employee, James Hansen rightly called those remarks “ignorant and arrogant.” He might have added “suicidal.”

So I had to have this slide after I saw it in a recent presentation from my friend Bob Corell, chair of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment and now Director of Global Change Programs at the Heinz Center.

And it’s not just Griffin pushing this nonsense. One of the Cato Institute climate experts currently debating the online, Indur Goklany, just advanced the following argument against my call to stabilize at 450 ppm or less:

… there is no guarantee that stabilizing CO₂ at 450 ppm would optimize human or environmental well-being. For all we know, stabilizing at 750 may be more optimal.

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