What the Fossil Fuel Industry Doesn’t Want You To Know | Al Gore | TED
Al Gore on the climate crisis and lies, evasions and distractions employed by the fossil fuel industry. Discusses CCS, DAC, fossil fuel subsidies, etc
Not convinced on the need for urgent climate action? Here’s what happens to our planet between 1.5°C and 2°C of global warming
Rachel Warren, University of East Anglia and Sally Brown, University of Southampton
Many numbers are bandied around in climate emergency discussions. Of them, 1.5°C is perhaps the most important. At the Paris Agreement in 2015, governments agreed to limit global warming to well below 2°C and to aim for 1.5°C. By 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – the UN body tasked with relaying the science of climate breakdown to the world – had made worryingly clear in a special report how much graver the consequences of the higher number would be.
Together with the University of Queensland’s Ove Hoegh-Guldberg and colleagues around the world, we’ve explored in newly published work just how much sticking to 1.5°C matters.
Climate breakdown is already harming livelihoods, cities and ecosystems. From heatwaves and droughts to cyclones and floods, devastating extreme weather events are more frequent, more intense and more unpredictable than they would be in the absence of global heating. Warming and acidifying oceans are causing severe coral bleaching to occur twice as often as in 1980, leaving many unable to recover.
Shrinking habitats are increasingly forcing wildlife into conflict with human settlements. Increasing wildfires are damaging vital carbon stores in North America and Siberia, while the advance of spring is throwing species who depend on each other out of sync.
The more we destabilise our climate, the greater the risk to human societies and ecosystems. Even at 1.5°C of global heating, tough times are in store for the living planet. But the space between 1.5°C and 2°C of heating is a crucial battleground, within which risks to humanity and ecosystems amplify rapidly.
Climate battleground
At 1.5°C of warming, about one in twenty insect and vertebrate species will disappear from half of the area they currently inhabit, as will around one in ten plants. At 2°C, this proportion doubles for plants and vertebrates. For insects, it triples.
Hoegh-Guldberg, Jacob, Taylor/IPCC
Such high levels of species loss will put many ecosystems across the world at risk of collapse. We rely on healthy ecosystems to pollinate crops, maintain fertile soil, prevent floods, purify water, and much more. Conserving them is essential for human survival and prosperity.
Between 1.5°C and 2°C, the number of extremely hot days increases exponentially. Some parts of the world can also expect less rain and more consecutive dry days, while others will receive more extreme floods. Collectively, this will place agriculture, water levels and human health under severe stress – especially in southern African nations, where temperatures will increase faster than the global average. The Mediterranean is another key area at particular risk above 1.5°C of heating, where increased drought will alter flora and fauna in a way without precedent in ten millennia.
At 1.5°C of warming, we could expect to lose between 70% and 90% of our coral reefs. While this would be catastrophic for the millions of ocean creatures and human livelihoods these beautiful ecosystems support, there would still be a chance of recovery in the long term if oceans warm slowly. But at 2°C of warming, we could kill 99% of reefs. To be clear, this is a line that once crossed cannot be easily uncrossed. It could mean the extinction of thousands of species.
Arctic sea ice has been a constant on our planet for hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of years. If we limit global heating to 1.5°C, there’s a 70% chance of it remaining that way. But at 2°C, some Arctic summers will be ice-free. Polar bears and other species who depend on frozen sea ice to eat and breed will be left homeless and struggling to survive.
Studies show that at 1.5°C, we could expect one metre of sea-level rise in 2300, with an extra 26cm at 2°C. However, between these two levels of global heating, the risk of the Greenland and West Antarctic Ice Sheets starting a slow process of decline dramatically increases. For the Greenland sheet, this is likeliest to happen at 1.6°C, with the Antarctic ice sheet’s tipping point hovering not far above this mark.
FloridaStock/Shutterstock
If these ice sheets melt, seas could rise by up to two metres over the next two centuries. These rises could lead to millions more people being exposed to flooding each year. Many of those living in coastal cities, deltas, or small islands will be faced with little option but to build upwards or relocate.
Way off track
The impacts of climate breakdown are accelerating. The planet has warmed by 1.1°C since 1850-79, but 0.2°C of this warming happened between 2011 and 2015 alone. The last four years were the warmest in the global temperature record.
Despite knowing all the above, many country-level commitments and action are nowhere near enough to limit warming to 2°C, let alone 1.5°C. We’re heading for 2.9°C to 3.4°C of warming. By this point, many dangerous tipping points could be crossed, leading to rainforest die-back, deadly heatwaves, and significant sea-level rise. Half of all insect and plant species are projected to disappear from more than half of the area they currently inhabit, potentially causing widespread ecosystem collapse and threatening organised human civilisation itself.
Limiting warming to 1.5°C will save the global economy trillions of dollars in the long run, even accounting for the seemingly gargantuan cost of transitioning our energy systems. But this is more than just an economic or academic issue – its a matter of life and death for millions of humans and animal species, and a severe threat to the well-being of billions.
Tackling climate breakdown is perhaps the tallest order humanity has ever faced, and there is no simple solution. The only way forward is accepting that we must fundamentally change the way we live our lives. It won’t be an easy transition, but there is no alternative if we are to preserve the well-being of humans, wildlife, and ecosystems. The coming year is vital, and there’s too much at stake not to act now.
Rachel Warren, Professor of Global Change, University of East Anglia and Sally Brown, Senior Research Fellow, University of Southampton
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
We just blew past 1.5 degrees. Game over on climate? Not yet
Ailie Gallant, Monash University and Kimberley Reid, Monash University
July 2023 was the hottest month ever recorded. And now we know something even more alarming. This week, the European Space Agency announced the July heat pushed the global average temperatures 1.5℃ above the pre-industrial average.
The ominous headlines seemed to suggest we’d blown past the 2015 Paris Agreement goal of holding warming to 1.5℃ – and around a decade earlier than expected.
Is that it? Game over, we lost?
Well, like all things to do with climate change, it’s not quite that simple. The threshold was breached for a month before average temperatures dropped back. And July 2023 isn’t actually the first time this has happened either – the dubious honour goes to February 2016, where we broke the threshold for a few days.
Remind me – why is 1.5℃ so important?
In 2015, the world looked like it was finally getting somewhere with action to combat climate change. After decades of arduous debate, 195 nations adopted the Paris Agreement, a formal but non-binding agreement with a clear goal: limit global warming to 1.5℃ above pre-industrial levels to avoid the worst effects of climate change.
But there’s nothing magic about this number. Every increase worsens the impacts. So why is 1.5℃ so important?
Essentially, it was thrashed out by experts as a threshold representing heightened danger. The Paris Agreement states avoiding dangerous climate change means keeping global temperatures “well below 2℃” of warming, and so the 1.5℃ threshold was born.
What’s a dangerous level of climate change? Basically, levels of warming where the damage becomes so widespread or severe as to threaten economies, ecosystems, agriculture, and risk irreversible tipping points such as the collapse of ice sheets or ocean circulations. More importantly, this level of warming risks pushing us beyond the limits of being able to adapt.
Put simply, the 1.5℃ threshold is the best estimate of the point where we are likely to find ourselves well up the proverbial creek, without a paddle.
Is it too late to act on climate change?
So, should we all just give up?
Not yet.
The global authority on climate change, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, defines 1.5℃ as a departure from global average temperatures above the 1850 to 1900 (pre-industrial) average.
It’s true that this threshold was exceeded for the month of July 2023. But the climate is more than a single month.
Global average temperatures go up and down every year on top of the global warming trend, because climates naturally vary year-to-year.
The most recent few years have been much warmer than average, but cooler than they could have been because of consecutive La Niña events.
This year, there’s been a significant acceleration in warming, largely due to the brewing El Niño event in the Pacific. El Niño years tend to be hotter.
To iron out year-to-year differences, we typically average data over several decades. As a result, a 2021 IPCC report defines the 1.5℃ threshold as the first 20-year period when we reach 1.5℃ of global warming (based on surface air temperatures).
Recent research shows the best estimate to pass this threshold is in the early 2030s. That means, by IPCC definitions, the average global temperature between the early 2020s and early 2040s is estimated to be 1.5C.
Dangerously close to the red line
All of this means we haven’t yet failed to meet our Paris targets. But the July record shows us we are dangerously close to the line.
As the world keeps heating up, we’ll see more and more months like this July, and move closer and closer to the threshold of 1.5℃, beyond which global warming will become more and more dangerous.
Is it still possible to stay below 1.5℃? Maybe. We would need extremely aggressive cuts to emissions to have a chance. Failing that, we will likely exceed the Paris target within the next decade or so.
Let’s say that happens. Would that mean we just give up on climate action?
Hardly. 1.5℃ is bad. 1.6℃ would be worse. 2℃ would be worse still. 3℃ would be unthinkable. Every extra increment matters.
The closer we stay to the line – even if we cross it – the better.
And there’s now good evidence that even if we overshoot 1.5℃, we could still reverse it by ending emissions and soaking up excess greenhouse gas emissions. It’s like turning around an enormous container ship – it takes time to overcome the inertia. But the sooner we turn around, the better.
Ailie Gallant, Senior Lecturer, School of Earth, Atmosphere and Environment, Monash University and Kimberley Reid, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Atmospheric Sciences, Monash University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
1.5°C: where the target came from – and why we’re losing sight of its importance
Piers Forster, University of Leeds
The US economist William Nordhaus claimed as early as the 1970s, when scientific understanding of climate change was still taking shape, that warming of more than 2°C would “push global conditions past any point that any human civilisation had experienced”. By 1990, scientists had also weighed in: 2°C above the pre-industrial average was the point at which the risk of unpredictable and extensive damage would rapidly increase.
Two years later, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was established to stabilise the amount of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere at a level that would “prevent dangerous interference with the climate system”. At the first summit in Berlin in 1995, countries began negotiations for the global response to climate change which continue to this day.
Halting global heating at 2°C remained the horizon to which negotiators strived for nearly two decades. And yet, you’re more likely to hear about the rapidly approaching 1.5°C temperature limit nowadays. At the most recent UN summit, COP27 in Egypt, leaders clinched an agreement to keep the target at 1.5°C, though they achieved little that would put the world on track to meet it.
So why did 1.5°C became the acceptable limit to rising temperatures? That story reveals an essential truth about climate change itself.
Acceptable for who?
Global temperature rise is just one measure of how the climate is changing. Scientists also track concentrations of CO₂ in the atmosphere, sea-level rise and the intensity of heatwaves and flooding. But taking the Earth’s temperature is the simplest way to predict the global consequences of warming.
At Copenhagen’s 2009 climate summit, the world still lacked an official temperature goal, nor had there been a full scientific assessment of what was “safe”. But a formation of island nations known as the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) was already urging countries to draw the line at 1.5°C.
Scientific research had started to reveal the devastation that awaited many of these countries at 2°C, with coral bleaching, coastal erosion and erratic weather expected to become more frequent and severe. Worse still, new estimates indicated that sea levels would rise faster than earlier assessments had predicted, threatening the very existence of some islands.
Rich Carey/Shutterstock
Only stopping global temperature rise well below 1.5°C would head off this catastrophe, AOSIS argued. As Mia Mottley, prime minister of Barbados, would later put it: “2°C is a death sentence”.
At a summit in Cancún, Mexico in 2010, governments agreed to keep global average temperature rise below 2°C while scientists reviewed the proposal for 1.5°C. The review, when published in 2015, found that the “concept, in which 2°C of warming is considered safe, is inadequate”. The idea that a “safe” level of warming could be achieved was subjective: current levels were already unsafe for those on the sharpest end of climate change.
Although the science on the effects of 1.5°C was, at the time, less robust than for 2°C, the review concluded that limiting warming to 1.5°C would minimise risks compared to a warmer world.
Coral reefs, for example, which millions depend on for food and income, are already being damaged by climate change. At 1.5°C, few reefs will escape harm. But at 2°C, virtually all reefs throughout the tropics are thought to be at severe risk. Halting climate change at 1.5°C would slow the rate of sea-level rise by roughly 30%, preserving cultures and communities that could disappear at 2°C.
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This insight fed into negotiations that ultimately produced the Paris Agreement in 2015, which committed countries to:
holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels, and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C.
A scientific assessment in 2018 confirmed the relative advantages of limiting warming to 1.5°C. In essence, the benefits of halting warming at a lower temperature are always relative to the costs of allowing warming to continue, which will continue to mount for as long as action is delayed. The only “acceptable” limit is that which humanity collectively decides.
Campaigning by AOSIS forced the rest of the world to acknowledge (in principle at least) that 2°C was unacceptable for many. But more recent research suggests that even 1.5°C of warming could carry unforeseen risks, such as the West Antarctic ice sheet collapsing at current levels of warming.
Dennis Stogsdill/Shutterstock
1.5 is still alive
The world has already warmed by around 1.2°C. By the time COP27 ended in late November 2022, only 30 out of nearly 200 countries had strengthened their national pledges for reducing emissions. No country has a pledge compatible with limiting warming to 1.5°C. And with temperatures increasing more than 0.2°C a decade, some suggest that 1.5°C is already out of reach.
The latest scientific assessments indicate that achieving the 1.5°C limit is still technically and economically feasible, but fossil fuels must be rapidly phased out, and CO₂ emissions halved by 2030 and reduced to net zero by mid-century. This is a huge, but not impossible, task.
We will, however, need a little luck on our side. Staying within 1.5°C also depends on how the climate responds to the emissions we put into the atmosphere in the meantime. Although limiting warming to 1.5°C becomes increasingly unlikely with every year of delay, giving up on it now would play into the hands of those determined to preserve fossil fuel revenues indefinitely.
Limiting warming limits the consequences of climate change, particularly for the most vulnerable people and communities. And even if the world does pass 1.5°C, it doesn’t remove any pressure. 1.5°C became the goal because exceeding it was deemed unacceptable. The increasing likelihood – but not certainty – of passing 1.5°C demands even more urgent action to avoid every additional fraction of a degree of warming, minimising the impacts, risks and costs of climate change for everyone, everywhere.
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Piers Forster, Professor of Physical Climate Change; Director of the Priestley International Centre for Climate, University of Leeds
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Faster disaster: climate change fuels ‘flash droughts’, intense downpours and storms
Andrew King, The University of Melbourne and Andrew Dowdy, The University of Melbourne
The run of extreme weather events around the world seems to be never-ending. After the northern summer of extreme heat and disastrous fires, we’ve seen more exceptional autumn weather over Europe with record-breaking heat in the UK.
Meanwhile, record-breaking rain and intense flash floods struck Greece before the same storm devastated Libya, with thousands dead.
Almost 20% of Africa is estimated to be in drought, and drought conditions are returning to parts of Australia. To top it off, we’ve seen several hurricanes intensify unusually quickly in the Atlantic.
We know climate change underpins some of the more extreme weather we’re seeing. But is it also pushing these extreme events to happen faster?
The answer? Generally, yes. Here’s how.
Flash droughts
We usually think of droughts as slowly evolving extreme events which take months to form.
But that’s no longer a given. We’ve seen some recent droughts develop unexpectedly quickly, giving rise to the phrase “flash drought”.
How does this happen? It’s when a lack of rainfall in a region combines with high temperatures and sunny conditions with low humidity. When these conditions are in place, it increases how much moisture the atmosphere is trying to pull from the land through evaporation. The end result: faster drying-out of the ground.
Flash droughts tend to be short, so they don’t tend to cause the major water shortages or dry river beds we’ve seen during long droughts in parts of Australia and South Africa, for example. But they can cause real problems for farmers. Farmers in parts of eastern Australia are already grappling with the sudden return of drought after three years of rainy La Niña conditions.
As we continue to warm the planet, we’ll see more flash droughts and more intense ones. That’s because dry conditions will more often coincide with higher temperatures as relative humidity falls across many land regions.
Flash floods and extreme rainfall
Climate change can cause increased rainfall variability. Some parts of the world will get a lot wetter, on average, while others will get drier, increasing the variation in rainfall between different regions. For Australia, most locations are generally expected to have intensified downpours of rain, as well as intensified droughts. So we might be saying more often “it doesn’t rain, it pours!”.
We’re seeing exceptionally extreme rainfall in many recent events. The recent floods that submerged villages in Greece came from a sudden downpour of over 500 millimetres in a single day. Hong Kong was hit last week by the heaviest rains in 140 years, flooding subway stations and turning streets into rivers.
But why does it happen so quickly?
Sudden extreme rains fall when we have very moist air coupled with a weather system that forces air to rise.
We’ve long known human-caused climate change is increasing how much moisture the air can hold generally, rising by about 7% per degree of global warming. That means storms now have the potential to hold and dump more water.
Notably, the impact of climate change on rain-bearing weather systems can vary by region, which makes the picture more complicated. That means, for instance, climate change may lead to more extreme rain in some places, while other places may only see an intensification in really short extreme rain events and not for longer timescales.
We can safely say, though, that in most parts of the world, we’re seeing more intense storms and sudden extreme rainfall. Sudden dumps of rain drive flash floods.
More moisture in the air helps fuel more intense convection, where warm air masses rise and form clouds. In turn, this can trigger efficient, quick and intense dumps of rain from thunderstorms.
These short-duration rain events can be much larger than you’d expect from the 7% increase in moisture per degree of warming.
Flash cyclones? Hurricanes are intensifying faster
Last month, Hurricane Idalia caused major flooding in Florida. As we write, Hurricane Lee is approaching the US.
Both tropical storms had something odd about them – unusually rapid intensification. That is, they got much stronger in a short period of time.
Usually, this process might increase wind speeds by about 50 kilometres per hour over a 24-hour period for a hurricane – also known as tropical cyclones and typhoons. But Lee’s wind speeds increased by 129km/h over that period. US meteorological expert Marshall Shepherd has dubbed the phenomenon “hyperintensification”, which could put major population centres at risk.
Rapidly intensifying tropical cyclones are strong and can be very hazardous, but they aren’t very common. To trigger them, you need a combination of very high sea surface temperatures, moist air and wind speeds that don’t change much with height.
While still uncommon, rapid intensification is potentially getting more frequent as we heat the planet. This is because oceans have taken up so much of the heat and there’s more moisture in the air. There’s much more still to learn here.
Australia’s El Niño summer in a warming world
Spring and summer in Australia are likely to be warmer and drier than usual. This is due to the El Niño climate cycle predicted for the Pacific Ocean. If, as predicted, we also get a positive Indian Ocean Dipole event, this can heighten the hotter, drier weather brought by El Niño. After three wet La Niña years, this is likely to be a marked shift.
If it arrives as expected, El Niño would lower the risk of tropical cyclones for northern Australia and reduce chances of heavy rain across most of the continent.
But for farmers, it may help trigger flash droughts. Prevailing warm and dry conditions may rapidly dry the land and reduce crop yields and slow livestock growth.
Drier surfaces coupled with grass growth from the wet years could worsen fire risk. Grass can dry out much faster than shrubs or trees, and grass fires can start and spread very rapidly.
Climate change loads the dice for extreme weather. And as we’re now seeing, these extremes aren’t just more intense – they can happen remarkably fast. 
Andrew King, Senior Lecturer in Climate Science, The University of Melbourne and Andrew Dowdy, Principal Research Scientist, The University of Melbourne
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.