How climate change feeds off itself and gets even worse: Axios

(Pics by this blog)

We want climate action now.

Climate change is like a snowball effect, except, well, hot. 

Why it matters: Like a snowball begins small and grows larger by building upon itself, numerous feedback loops embedded in our atmosphere and society are exacerbating climate change.

Driving the news: Scientists are well acquainted with feedback loops, but the often wonky topic doesn’t break through into the mainstream despite its importance to how much the world warms and how much we respond to that warming.

• As we soak up the last of these hot summer days, and extreme weather hits parts of the country, today seems a fitting time to break this down for those of us without a Ph.D.

Here are seven feedback loops in science and beyond.

Air conditioning

How it works: Climate change is making our summers hotter, so we use more air conditioners, which emit greenhouse gases, which heats up our planet more, so we use even more AC, which heats up our planet even more ... You get the cycle.

* This is an easy-to-understand feedback loop, but it’s not going to

Heatwaves will kill.

have a big impact on our emissions, says Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at the research group Breakthrough Institute. 

* The bigger impact is likely to be population growth in developing countries in hot parts of the world, like India, getting AC to survive their ever-hotter weather.

Water evaporation

This one’s more technical but far more consequential for Earth’s temperature than the AC example.

How it works: The atmosphere heats up as we emit heat-trapping greenhouse gases.

* This warmer air leads to more water evaporation from water 
 “Those decomposition processes emit greenhouse gases,” Duffy said.

* Scientists estimate that there's twice as much carbon locked up in permafrost as is already in the atmosphere, Duffy says. "The potential to amplify warming is huge.”

Melting Land Icesheets

Albedo feedback

This is similar to permafrost. It’s why you feel hotter in black clothes compared to white clothes.
How it works: Lighter surfaces reflect heat more, so as ice and other cold places get warmer (i.e., the Arctic and other permafrost), their ability to reflect heat diminishes and they soak up more heat.

• “As the world warms, expect a lot of ice and snow to melt, which uncovers darker surfaces, which will result in more warming,” said Hausfather.

Between the lines: This phenomenon, combined with the permafrost one, helps explain why the planet's poles warm faster than the rest of the world.

Wildfires

How it works: Trees, by definition, embody carbon. So when

Californian Wildfires

wildfires burn them down, carbon dioxide is emitted. 

* As the world warms, temperatures get hotter and places get drier, creating tinderboxes for when wildfires do start.
* The hotter the world gets, the bigger wildfires will be (in some places like California), the more CO2 emitted into the atmosphere, which heats up the world more, which will exacerbate wildfires more ...

Policy and economic paralysis

Unlike most policy challenges, climate change gets worse the longer we take to address it.

How it works: The longer we wait to address climate change with major government action, the bigger the policy needed and the bigger economic impact that policy will have.

• But the bigger the policy and economic hit get, the harder the politics get.
• So we wait longer still, making the required policy and economic impact ever bigger, which makes the politics even more difficult.

Yes, but: Plausible future scenarios also exist where the impacts of a warming world grow so intense and/or clean-energy technologies become so cheap that eventually these aforementioned feedback loops are broken.

Geopolitics

Carbon tariffs require geopolitical agreements.

How it works: It takes global cooperation to address climate change, given its global nature. But climate change impacts different countries differently, so they're more likely to act on their own, and in their own self-interest.

• But if there's no global cooperation, climate change continues to get worse — prolonging the adverse impacts on different countries, and giving them even less incentive to cooperate with other countries and more incentive to act on their own.

The bottom line:

“The possible scenario that is a real nightmare is if we don’t control human emissions, nature takes over and we lose control of the warming, because of these emissions from natural systems.”

— Philip Duffy, climate scientist

By Amy Harder, author of Generate  

Go to Axios

Related: East Antarctic Melting Hotspot Identified by Japanese Expedition – Ice Melting at Surprisingly Fast Rate: SciTechDaily

airconditioning, carbon tariffs, feedback loops, tipping points, permafrost, polar ice melt, #jailclimatecriminals, 

If the Climate Change Crisis were World War II, it’s 1939: Medium

"The question is really, as Superchunk observed, “how fast?” Can we make this transition in time to prevent clathrate collapse or the popping of Yellowstone park? How many billions will die from famine, disease, water-shortages and toxic air pollution before we clean up the place? How many need to die before head-in-the-sand deniers get out of the way of those of us trying to make a difference?

To me a “climate emergency” means a war footing; and that means waging war against the deniers first, as they are the real obstacle. I’d be very happy to see a lot of our current senior political and corporate leaders hauled up in The Hague and charged with crimes against humanity, and I’d regard that as entirely appropriate. But that’s a fantasy and is, alas, unlikely to happen.

In various countries citizens are resorting to the courts to force their governments into action, and that’s certainly a pathway to progress in places where laws are designed to enforce the rights of ordinary people, rather than simply there to block action against climate change.

The sad truth is that almost no-one really believes that global warming, and the myriad other issues that stem from humanity’s abuse of the planet, are truly anything to get too worried about.

Most people I know, even those who completely accept that climate change is real and happening, continue to act as if they believe, deep-down, despite what they say, that the risks are overstated and, if impacts are going to be felt, they’ll be felt by other people and way in the distant, to them, future.

People may say that they accept the science, but they act as if they

don’t. A lot of people subscribe to a kind of magical thinking, wherein some hitherto undreamed of technological fix will just make the whole problem go away, so we can just continue polluting.

The emergency is upon us. We must urgently and radically change the way we generate power, fuel, and food, while putting in place adaptation measures to deal with the global warming already locked into the planetary system. If we do hit the runaway global warming tipping point, then no amount of adaptation will be possible. But simply explaining the facts clearly is usually written off as being alarmist. And that’s the core of the climate crisis."

 Read the much larger Medium article

See also

Climate change is a health emergency, RACGP declares: News GP

You Can't Say You Haven't Been Warned: Green Market Oracle

Despite an unremitting stream of warnings and studies we still are not doing what we must to protect the natural world and keep temperatures from warming beyond critical upper temperature limits. We were warned about our impact on nature seven years ago in the GEO-5 report. Undeterred we continued to perpetrate genocide against nature.  In 2012 scientists warned us that our oceans are dying but we did not respond.  We have now decimated entire aquatic ecosystems and all around the world coral reefs are dead or dying.
We were warned not to surpass 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial norms. We ignored these warnings and we keep pumping climate change causing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at record breaking rates. We are now at 1 degree C above preindustrial norms, two thirds of the way to the point of no return.
Everyone from Stephen Hawkings to President Obama have warned us of the urgent need to act on climate change. The world's leading scientific organizations have also repeatedly warned us about climate change. This includes the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Royal Society, the Royal Institution, NASA, the US National Academy of Sciences, the US Geological Survey, and the national science bodies of dozens of countries.
We have amassed an unparalleled body of research that convincingly demonstrates we are on the cusp of an apocalypse. "By now, we know all we need to know" Anne Olhoff said recently. Olhoff is the head of strategy, climate and planning and policy for the UNEP DTU (Technical University of Denmark) Partnership. "The science is pretty clear, and very frightening," she said. 


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These warnings are not new. A half century ago climate models accurately predicted global warming. A brief review of climate science shows us that we have known about the dangers of a warming planet since the 1950s. In the last couple of decades scientists have added to these warnings. In 2006 the Stern Review warned us that we had to urgently reduce our emissions to avoid the worst impacts of climate change. By 2012 dozens of studies made the case for anthropogenic climate change including a report from UNEP that warned that we are on the brink of a climate catastrophe. In 2013 The U.S. National Climate Assessment (NCA) report and an IPCC study reaffirmed that anthropogenic climate change is a real and growing problem.
PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) issued a climate warning in 2012 and so did the World Bank. We have seen countless scientific warnings including reports from PwC, AGU and the WMO, all of which have told us that we are are running out of time. Seven years ago the IEA and the WRI warned that we need to stop burning fossil fuels. Investors are continually being warned about the dangers of hydrocarbons and even oil companies have issued their own climate warnings. In fact, in the 1960s the fossil fuel industry's own science revealed that they are causing global warming.
We fail to act despite the preponderance of economic evidence indicating that the benefits of climate action far outweigh the costs. According to the Global Energy Transformation report, there are 160 trillion dollars worth of savings from climate action. Five years ago the wisdom of action was explained in the Risky Business Report.  Climate change has also been the hot topic at the World Economic Forum (WED) in Davos Switzerland.
In 2017 two scientific warnings stand out, the U.S. Global Change Research Program's fourth National Climate Assessment (NCA4) and an open letter from the Alliance of World Scientists. The letter is titled "Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice" and it was published in BioScience. It was signed by more than 15,000 scientists from 184 countries. It warned humanity about the dangers of climate change. The warning specifically said that humanity must change its ways in order to protect the planet. It specifically points to rising greenhouse gas emissions and deforestation.
A 2018 UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) study reaffirmed that we are teetering on the cusp of a man-made climate calamity. The  IPCC report warned that governments must take urgent action to avoid "rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society". The report warned that by 2030 we will will breech the upper threshold limit (1.5 C). A 2019 IPCC report warned that we are seeing accelerated ice melt and sea level rise. 


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In 2019, more than 10,000 scientists from 153 countries declared a "climate emergency". The study is called "World scientists' warning of a climate emergency". The seriousness of the threat was addressed by biologist Jesse Bellemare who said "the climate crisis is real, and is a major, even existential, threat to human societies." Bellemare is an associate professor of biology at Smith College who is a signatory of the study’s emergency declaration.
Researchers have warned us that we are facing the end of civilization. The well documented effects of catastrophic warming includes cataclysmic flooding from sea level rise, more frequent and devastating extreme weather, massive wildfires, and chronic food shortages. But there may be an even worse fate awaiting us in a world ravaged by runaway climate change. Simply put, if we fail to act we are headed for a horrific disaster that will adversely impact life on Earth.
Climate change is here and the only question that remains is just how bad it will get. That is still up to us, but with each passing year we ebb ever closer to tipping points from which we may not be able to recover.  The window of opportunity to act is closing  and the longer we wait the harder it will be. 

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