climate change

By Michael Roberts - Originally published at The Next Recession, September 28, 2013

The 5th report by the International Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) was released this weekend. The IPCC brings together hundreds of scientists in the field of climate change to cooperate in drawing up a comprehensive analysis of the state of the earth’s climate and forecasts about its future.  The IPCC report raised its estimate of the probability that human activities, led by the burning of fossil fuels, are the main cause of global warming since the mid-20th century to “extremely likely”, or at least 95 percent, from “very likely” (90 percent) in its previous report in 2007 and “likely” (66 percent) in 2001.

The IPCC said that short periods are influenced by natural variability and do not, in general, reflect long-term climate trends.  So the argument of those whom deny global warming is man-made or is not getting worse cannot rely on the recent slowing of the rise in average atmospheric temperatures in the last 15 years.  The IPCC went on to say that temperatures were likely to rise by between 0.3 and 4.8 degrees Celsius (0.5 to 8.6 Fahrenheit) by the late 21st century.  Sea levels are likely to rise by between 26 and 82 cm (10 to 32 inches) by the late 21st century, after a 19 cm rise in the 19th century.   In the worst case, seas could be 98 cm higher in the year 2100.

The IPCC estimates that a doubling of carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere would lead to a warming of between 1.5 and 4.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 and 8.1F), lowering the bottom of the range from 2.0 degrees (3.6F) estimated in 2007 report. The new range, however, is the same as in other IPCC reports before 2007.  It said the earth was set for more heatwaves, floods, droughts and rising sea levels from melting ice sheets that could swamp coasts and low-lying islands as greenhouse gases built up in the atmosphere.

The IPCC admitted that it was still unclear about the causes for the slowdown in climate change in the past 15 years, but insisted that the long-term trends were beyond doubt and that a decade and a half was far too short a period in which to draw any firm conclusions. The temperature rise has slowed from 0.12C per decade since 1951 to 0.05C per decade in the past 15 years – a point seized upon by climate skeptics to discredit climate science.  Professor Stocker said:

“People always pick 1998 but that was a very special year, because a strong El Niño made it unusually hot, and since then there have been a series of medium-sized volcanic eruptions that have cooled the climate.”

Explaining a recent slower pace of warming, the report said the past 15-year period was skewed by the fact that 1998 was an extremely warm year with an El Nino event – a warming of the ocean surface – in the Pacific.  It said warming had slowed “in roughly equal measure” because of random variations in the climate and the impact of factors such as volcanic eruptions when ash dims sunshine, and a cyclical decline in the sun’s output.

But the deniers of climate change and manmade global warming remain unconvinced. Professor Judith Curry of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta responded by saying that “Well, IPCC has thrown down the gauntlet – if the pause continues beyond 15 years (well it already has), they are toast.” But Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the IPCC, retorted that the reduction in warming would have to last far longer - “three or four decades” – to be a sign of a new trend.  And the IPCC report predicted that the reduction in warming would not last, saying temperatures from 2016-35 were likely to be 0.3-0.7 degree Celsius (0.5 to 1.3 Fahrenheit) warmer than in 1986-2005.

By Greenpeace - September 2013

This report describes organized attacks on climate science, scientists and scientific institutions like the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the IPCC), that have gone on for more than 20 years. It sets out some of the key moments in this campaign of climate denial started by the fossil fuel industry, and traces them to their sources.

The tobacco industry’s misinformation and PR campaign in the US against regulation reached a peak just as laws controling tobacco were about to be introduced. Similarly, the campaign against climate change science – and scientists – has intensified as global policy on climate change has become more likely. This time though there is a difference. The corporate PR campaign has gone viral, spawning a denial movement that is distributed, decentralized and largely immune to reasoned response.

Download a PDF Version to view the complete document.

By David Rosnick - Center for Economic and Policy Research, February 2013

As productivity grows in high-income, as well as developing countries, social choices will be made as to how much of the productivity gains will be taken in the form of higher consumption levels versus fewer work hours. In the last few decades, for example, western European countries have significantly reduced work hours (through shorter weekly hours and increased vacation time) while the United States has not. Western Europe had about the same hours worked per person as the U.S. in the early 1970s, but by 2005 they were about 50 percent less.

This choice between fewer work hours versus increased consumption has significant implications for the rate of climate change. A number of studies (e.g. Knight et al. 2012, Rosnick and Weisbrot 2006) have found that shorter work hours are associated with lower greenhouse gas emissions and therefore less global climate change. The relationship between these two variables is complex and not clearly understood, but it is understandable that lowering levels of consumption, holding everything else constant, would reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

This paper estimates the impact on climate change of reducing work hours over the rest of the century by an annual average of 0.5 percent. It finds that such a change in work hours would eliminate about one-quarter to one-half of the global warming that is not already locked in (i.e. warming that would be caused by 1990 levels of greenhouse gas concentrations already in the atmosphere).

It is worth noting that the pursuit of reduced work hours as a policy alternative would be much more difficult in an economy where inequality is high and/or growing. In the United States, for example, just under two-thirds of all income gains from 1973–2007 went to the top 1 percent of households. In this type of economy, the majority of workers would have to take an absolute reduction in their living standards in order to work less. The analysis in this paper assumes that the gains from productivity growth will be more broadly shared in the future, as they have been in the past.

The analysis uses four “illustrative scenarios” from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and software from the Model for the Assessment of Greenhouse-gas Induced Climate Change to estimate the impact of a reduction in work hours. As would be expected, the amount of global warming that could be mitigated by reducing work hours depends on the baseline scenario, as well as the range of sensitivity of global temperatures to greenhouse gas emissions.

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Friends of the Earth International, 2013 - copied according to Creative Commons License

The world’s current energy system – the way we produce, distribute and consume energy – is unsustainable, unjust and harms communities, workers, the environment and the climate. Friends of the Earth International's new report demonstrates why a just, sustainable, climate-safe energy system is more urgent than ever.

Key points

• Our current energy system is unsustainable, unjust, and harming communities, workers, the environment and the climate.  This is fundamentally an issue of power: of corporate and elite power and interests outweighing the power of ordinary citizens and communities.
• The destructive energy sources on which the world current relies are driving climate change and many social and environmental problems and conflicts, including land grabbing, pollution, deforestation and the destruction of ecosystems, human rights abuses, health problems and premature deaths, and unsafe, insecure jobs and the rupture and collapse of local economies.

Friends of the Earth International believes that it is possible to build a climate-safe, just and sustainable energy system which ensures the basic right to energy for everyone and respects the rights and different ways of life of communities around the world.  To get there we need to challenge corporate power and exert real democratic control over the energy decisions of our governments.

• We urgently need to invest in locally-appropriate, climate-safe, affordable and low impact energy for all, and reduce energy dependence so that people don’t need much energy to meet their basic needs and live a good life.
• We need to end new destructive energy projects and phase out existing destructive energy sources, all the while ensuring that the rights of affected communities and workers are respected and that their needs are provided for during the transition.
• To make the transition happen we also need to tackle the trade and investment rules that prioritise corporations' needs over those of people and the environment.
• Our vision is guided by an idea called energy sovereignty.  This is the right of people to have access to energy, and to choose sustainable energy sources and sustainable consumption patterns that will lead them towards sustainable societies.

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By Al Weinrub - Local Clean Energy Alliance, September 20, 2012

This paper sketches some of the implications of the world’s economic and climate crisis for the future of the international labor movement.

It contends that resolving this crisis requires a transition from the globalized capitalist economy based on fossil energy to local sustainable economic development made possible by decentralized renewable energy systems.

Furthermore, it posits that the labor movement, as the most organized expression of the working class around the world, can play a crucial role in this transition. Labor’s challenge is to represent the interests of the world’s working people in averting the economic and ecological collapse now underway and in developing the new economic models needed for our survival.

This is a new role for organized labor. It means breaking with old patterns. It means looking beyond labor’s traditional job-protection focus to join with other sectors within the 99% majority to actively participate in the creation of economic development models—based on decentralized renewable energy systems—that can help assure our survival.

Read the report (PDF).

By Glen Spain - Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations, January 2012

Its now time — perhaps long past time — for the world’s fishing industry to collectively take a firm stand against the economic and societal forces creating global warming and its related marine hazard of ocean acidification.

Both of these new phenomenon — rapidly changing climates and more acidic oceans — are expected to hit the world’s fishing industry especially hard. Indeed, they already are starting to do so. A collective response from our industry is much overdue.

What Causes Climate Change?

There is no mystery about how global warming actually works. In fact, it can be easily demonstrated in a high school science lab.

Certain naturally occurring atmospheric gases, including carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O) naturally trap heat from the sun near the Earth’s surface, helping to keep our climate hospitable to life. Without that “greenhouse effect” the Earth would be nearly as cold on its surface as the planet Mars, and we would be in a permanent Ice Age.

But when normal background concentrations of these “greenhouse gases” are greatly added to by human sources such as we see today, their natural balance gets out of whack as a result, they can trap too much heat — and over time, since this heating is cumulative, this can change the balance of the whole world’s climate in unpredictable ways.

This is precisely what has been happening since the widespread use of carbon-based fossil fuels such as petroleum and coal. This huge ancient carbon sink, long stored harmlessly in the Earth, is today being rapidly burned for energy — and its fossil carbon pumped into our Earth’s atmosphere at an increasing rate. Nearly all this excess carbon dioxide can be traced by its isotopic fingerprints right back to the burning of fossil fuels.

What this global “greenhouse heating” leads to in the long-term, in addition to the heating itself, is the heat-driven disruption of normal weather patterns. Even small net heating changes in the atmosphere can lead to extreme weather disasters.

In some places this weather disruption means excessive and more frequent widespread flooding. In other places this can mean long-term or near permanent droughts in places which rarely experienced such problems in the past. In yet other places, bitter cold waves can last far longer than in the past. This plays hell with key agricultural areas all around the world.

This is why this phenomenon is more correctly called “climate change” rather than just “climate warming.” Some places will warm, others will cool, others will dry out — and most of these changes will occur in the future around statistical “means” that are quite a bit different than what these regions normally experienced in the past. When the annual weather pattern statistical “mean” changes, this is a change in climate itself. Weather is what happens in the single instance or year — climate is what happens statistically most often, described by “mean,” over many years.

Severe Weather Links Are Becoming Plainer: And the linkage between these global heating mechanisms and disastrous droughts, floods, severe weather events and climate extremes is also becoming much clearer, and much easier to statistically distinguish from normal ranges of variation in the past. These last two years, 2010 and 2011, have seen record-breaking extreme weather events worldwide, costing many billions of dollars in economic damages from record floods and droughts, tornadoes and hurricanes, including massive crop failures in many areas. Not surprisingly, 9 out of the world’s 10 hottest years on record have occurred since 2001, and all 12 of the world’s hottest years on record since 1997.

Worse, global CO2 emissions in 2010 were recorded by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) (www.wmo.int, Press Release No. 934) to have jumped upwards by the highest one-year rate ever recorded — about 1.4 percent — since 2009. Record rates of increase also includes two other greenhouse gases — methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O), both of which are even more powerful greenhouse gases than CO2, but typically occur at much lower concentrations. Yet even small additional inputs of these more powerful non-carbon greenhouse gases can have exacerbating effects on climate.

But CO2 still accounts for about 80 percent of all observed atmospheric warming. CO2 is also the only major greenhouse gas we humans can do much about, which is why the focus is on this gas and not the others.