[TheClimate.Vote] January 5 , 2021 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/*January 5, 2021*/

[Associated Press]
https://apnews.com/article/climate-climate-change-pollution-3f226aed9c58e36c69e7342b104d48bf
*Study: Warming already baked in will blow past climate goals*
By SETH BORENSTEIN - Jan 4, 2021
The amount of baked-in global warming, from carbon pollution already in 
the air, is enough to blow past international agreed upon goals to limit 
climate change, a new study finds.

But it’s not game over because, while that amount of warming may be 
inevitable, it can be delayed for centuries if the world quickly stops 
emitting extra greenhouse gases from the burning of coal, oil and 
natural gas, the study’s authors say.

For decades, scientists have talked about so-called “committed warming” 
or the increase in future temperature based on past carbon dioxide 
emissions that stay in the atmosphere for well over a century. It’s like 
the distance a speeding car travels after the brakes are applied.

But Monday’s study in the journal Nature Climate Change calculates that 
a bit differently and now figures the carbon pollution already put in 
the air will push global temperatures to about 2.3 degrees Celsius (4.1 
degrees Fahrenheit) of warming since pre-industrial times.

Previous estimates, including those accepted by international science 
panels, were about a degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) less than 
that amount of committed warming...
International climate agreements set goals of limiting warming to 2 
degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times, 
with the more ambitious goal of limiting it to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 
degrees Fahrenheit) added in Paris in 2015. The world has already warmed 
about 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit).

“You’ve got some ... global warming inertia that’s going to cause the 
climate system to keep warming, and that’s essentially what we’re 
calculating,” said study co-author Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist 
at Texas A&M University. “Think about the climate system like the 
Titanic. It’s hard to turn the ship when you see the icebergs.”

Dessler and colleagues at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab and 
Nanjing University in China calculated committed warming to take into 
account that the world has warmed at different rates in different places 
and that places that haven’t warmed as fast are destined to catch up.

Places such as the Southern Ocean, surrounding Antarctica are a bit 
cooler, and that difference creates low-lying clouds that reflect more 
sun away from earth, keeping these places cooler. But this situation 
can’t keep going indefinitely because physics dictates that cooler 
locations will warm up more and when they do, the clouds will dwindle 
and more heating will occur, Dessler said.

Previous studies were based on the cooler spots staying that way, but 
Dessler and colleagues say that’s not likely.

Outside experts said the work is based on compelling reasoning, but want 
more research to show that it’s true. Breakthrough Institute climate 
scientist Zeke Hausfather said the new work fits better with climate 
models than observational data.

Just because the world is bound to get more warming than international 
goals, that doesn’t mean all is lost in the fight against global 
warming, said Dessler, who cautioned against what he called “climate 
doomers.”

If the world gets to net zero carbon emissions soon, 2 degrees of global 
warming could be delayed enough so that it won’t happen for centuries, 
giving society time to adapt or even come up with technological fixes, 
he said.

“If we don’t, we’re going to blow through (climate goals) in a few 
decades,” Dessler said. “It’s really the rate of warming that makes 
climate change so terrible. If we got a few degrees over 100,000 years, 
that would not be that big a deal. We can deal with that. But a few 
degrees over 100 years is really bad.”
___
Read stories on climate issues by The Associated Press at 
https://apnews.com/hub/climate.
https://apnews.com/article/climate-climate-change-pollution-3f226aed9c58e36c69e7342b104d48bf
- -
[Source material]
Published: 04 January 2021
*Greater committed warming after accounting for the pattern effect*
Chen Zhou, Mark D. Zelinka, Andrew E. Dessler & Minghuai Wang
Nature Climate Change (2021)
Abstract
Our planet’s energy balance is sensitive to spatial inhomogeneities in 
sea surface temperature and sea ice changes, but this is typically 
ignored in climate projections. Here, we show the energy budget during 
recent decades can be closed by combining changes in effective radiative 
forcing, linear radiative damping and this pattern effect. The pattern 
effect is of comparable magnitude but opposite sign to Earth’s net 
energy imbalance in the 2000s, indicating its importance when predicting 
the future climate on the basis of observations. After the pattern 
effect is accounted for, the best-estimate value of committed global 
warming at present-day forcing rises from 1.31 K (0.99–2.33 K, 5th–95th 
percentile) to over 2 K, and committed warming in 2100 with constant 
long-lived forcing increases from 1.32 K (0.94–2.03 K) to over 1.5 K, 
although the magnitude is sensitive to sea surface temperature dataset. 
Further constraints on the pattern effect are needed to reduce climate 
projection uncertainty.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-020-00955-x



[new visions in climate science]
Michael E. Mann
@MichaelEMann -·Jan 3
*"Many Scientists Now Say Global Warming Could Stop Relatively Quickly 
After Emissions Go to Zero"* by Bob Berwyn (@BBerwyn) for @InsideClimate
  News: https://twitter.com/MichaelEMann/status/1345760391121547265
- -
[news]
*Many Scientists Now Say Global Warming Could Stop Relatively Quickly 
After Emissions Go to Zero*
That’s one of several recent conclusions about climate change that came 
more sharply into focus in 2020.
By Bob Berwyn
January 3, 2021
Parts of the world economy may have been on pause during 2020, dampening 
greenhouse gas emissions for a while. But that didn’t slow the overall 
buildup of atmospheric carbon dioxide, which reached its highest level 
in millions of years.

If anything, research during the year showed global warming is 
accelerating. Symptoms of the fever include off-the-charts heat waves on 
land and in the oceans, and a hyperactive and destructive Atlantic 
hurricane season.

And through November, the last year was on pace to end up as either the 
hottest, or second-hottest on record for the planet, almost 1 degree 
Celsius above pre-industrial times, inching closer to the 1.5 degree 
limit set by the Paris climate agreement.

Here are five aspects of climate change that were new and unexpected in 
2020:
*
**The La Niña Effect?*
Some scientists noted that the persistent heating came even with the 
tropical Pacific Ocean tilting toward a cyclical cooling phase that 
suppresses the global average temperature slightly. November’s warmth 
across the planet was “stunning, especially considering the ongoing La 
Niña,” Zack Labe posted on Twitter.

During La Niña, cooler than average sea surface temperatures spread 
across a large part of the tropical Pacific. During the warm El Niño 
phase every few years, it’s the opposite, and that’s usually when global 
temperatures spike to new records, most recently in 2016.

The global climate signal from the cycle usually is strongest about 
three or four months after the ocean cycle peaks, so the full effect 
won’t be known until next year, said climate scientist Stefan Rahmstorf, 
with the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. He said, “2020 
may beat 2016 without the extra push from El Niño.”

This year’s warming is another sign that “heat being trapped by 
greenhouse gases” is overwhelming the planet’s natural variability, said 
Jennifer Francis, a climate scientist with the Woodwell Climate Research 
Center in Massachusetts (formerly the Woods Hole Research Center).

“I hate to think what the global temperature would have been this year 
if we’d been in an El Niño rather than La Niña,” she said.
*
**The Polar Breakdown*
Warming in the Arctic and Antarctic continues to accelerate faster than 
the global average, scientists reported this year.

In September, NASA Earth wrote on Twitter that, “The Arctic region is 
warming three times as fast as the rest of the planet, with effects 
beyond the ocean.” In recent years, the rate of Arctic warming was 
widely reported at twice the global average.

And in June, a team of scientists tracked a similar rate of warming in 
Antarctica. Their research, published in Nature, found that, since 1989, 
the average temperature at the South Pole increased about 0.6 degrees 
Fahrenheit per decade, also three times as fast as the global average.

The warming of the polar regions disrupts global climate patterns in 
ways that can cause more extreme droughts, floods and heat waves, and 
changes in climate-regulating ocean currents.

In a recent letter to the incoming Biden administration, 193 Arctic 
scientists spelled out their growing concerns, including “acidification 
of the Arctic Ocean that threatens U.S. fisheries, and a loss of sea ice 
that contributes to “persistent heat waves and cold spells, prolonged 
stormy periods, and extended droughts that greatly worsen Western 
wildfires.”

The rapid Arctic warming has also triggered permafrost thaw that is “now 
releasing carbon at the same scale as many larger nations,” the 
scientists wrote. “Rising sea levels from melting glaciers and polar ice 
sheets have accelerated clear-day flooding and storm damage, especially 
along the U.S. Eastern and Gulf coasts,” they added.

The letter called on President-elect Joe Biden to appoint a U.S. 
ambassador with a climate mandate to the Arctic Council, as a way of 
recognizing the “urgency of the threat from a disintegrating Arctic.”
*
**Swamped by the Seas?*
As polar ice melts more quickly, sea level rise also accelerates. But 
sea level is complicated, because it doesn’t rise at the same rate 
everywhere, at the same time. The global average rate recently increased 
from about 1.3 inches to about 2 inches per decade.

In the best-case scenario of reaching the Paris target of capping global 
warming at 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, sea level will rise between 1 and 2 
feet by 2100, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned in a 
2019 global assessment.

The acceleration could be felt especially strongly along the West Coast, 
where sea level is starting to rise much faster than in recent years, 
according to NASA.

In early November, researchers with the agency said a decades-long lull 
in sea level rise is ending. Large-scale changes in the Pacific Ocean 
are accelerating the inundation of beaches and marshes, as well the 
erosion of the coastal bluffs where millions of people have built homes 
and businesses.

“We’ve definitely seen an uptick,” said Bill Sweet, a sea level rise 
expert with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “In the 
next 20 to 30 years, by 2050, sea level will be about a foot higher, 
compared to 2000. There is going to be more erosion and we’re going to 
lose beaches,” he said, identifying San Diego and the San Francisco Bay 
Area as potential trouble spots.

A lot of the Bay Area is built on reclaimed low-lying land that is 
permeable and vulnerable to incoming saltwater that can cause drainage 
systems to back up and overflow, and interfere with freshwater supplies.

“You’re going to see more of what we’re already seeing on the East 
Coast. San Diego is a stand-out spot already. There’s more nuisance 
flooding these days, and they’re going to see a jump,” he said. At 
times, the rising ocean will block roads, start to threaten low-lying 
properties and commerce and increase erosion, collapsing coastal bluffs 
and overtopping dunes, he added.

*Climate Justice and Science are Connected*
California, one of the wealthiest parts of the world, may be able to 
adapt to sea level rise, but it’s a matter of life and death for 
millions of other people in developing countries with small carbon 
footprints that contribute little to global warming.

But new research in 2020 showed that researchers have done relatively 
little to study impacts of global warming extremes in areas where the 
most people are affected. And this year, climate impacts were compounded 
by the coronavirus pandemic. Together, they affected at least 50 million 
people worldwide, mostly in developing countries in Asia and Africa, as 
well as Central America.

But the impacts have mostly been measured in the developed world by 
scientists in wealthier nations, raising a fundamental issue of climate 
justice in science, said University of Oxford climate scientist Fredi 
Otto, co-author of a recent study that outlines the challenges of 
understanding climate extremes in lower income countries.

Soon after starting work on the study, she said, “It became very obvious 
that scientists research what’s in their backyard, but not in Africa, 
large parts of Asia, or South America.” As climate extremes intensify, 
the information gaps become “a lot more obvious,” she said.

The reason it’s important is that a lack of accurate information about 
extreme climate impacts puts more lives at risk, she said. “We don’t 
know what we need to adapt to and build resilience for … or what should 
trigger a heat warning,” she added.

*Making it Stop*
Some scientists punctuate their alarming warmings with hopeful messages 
because they know that the worst possible outcome is avoidable.

Recent research shows that stopping greenhouse gas emissions will break 
the vicious cycle of warming temperatures, melting ice, wildfires and 
rising sea levels faster than expected just a few years ago.

There is less warming in the pipeline than we thought, said Imperial 
College (London) climate scientist Joeri Rogelj, a lead author of the 
next major climate assessment from the Intergovernmental Panel on 
Climate Change.

“It is our best understanding that, if we bring down CO2 to net zero, 
the warming will level off. The climate will stabilize within a decade 
or two,” he said. “There will be very little to no additional warming. 
Our best estimate is zero.”

The widespread idea that decades, or even centuries, of additional 
warming are already baked into the system, as suggested by previous IPCC 
reports, were based on an “unfortunate misunderstanding of experiments 
done with climate models that never assumed zero emissions.”

Those models assumed that concentrations of greenhouse gases in the 
atmosphere would remain constant, that it would take centuries before 
they decline, said Penn State climate scientist Michael Mann, who 
discussed the shifting consensus last October during a segment of 60 
Minutes on CBS.

The idea that global warming could stop relatively quickly after 
emissions go to zero was described as a “game-changing new scientific 
understanding” by Covering Climate Now, a collaboration of news 
organizations covering climate.

“This really is true,” he said. “It’s a dramatic change in the paradigm 
that has been lost on many who cover this issue, perhaps because it 
hasn’t been well explained by the scientific community. It’s an 
important development that is still under appreciated.”“It’s definitely 
the scientific consensus now that warming stabilizes quickly, within 10 
years, of emissions going to zero,” he said.
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/03012021/five-aspects-climate-change-2020/


[Mass innovates but has received no agreement from the climate]
*Negotiators Reach Deal On Major Climate Bill*
January 04, 2021
Michael P. Norton, State House News Service
After six months of private talks, legislative negotiators on Sunday 
afternoon reached an agreement on a major bill to accelerate the state's 
pace toward addressing the global problem of climate change.

The bill would establish in state law a "net zero" greenhouse gas 
emissions limit for 2050 and establish statewide emissions limits every 
five years over the next three decades. Within that plan, the bill 
creates mandatory emissions sublimits for six sectors of the economy: 
electric power, transportation, commercial and industrial heating and 
cooling, residential heating and cooling, industrial processes, and 
natural gas distribution and service.

And within the 2050 "net zero" target, the bill says gross emissions by 
2050 must fall at least 85% below 1990 levels. The statewide emissions 
limit for 2030 shall be at least 50% below the 1990 level, according to 
the bill, and the limit for 2040 must be at least 75% below the 1990 level.

The six-member conference committee's report will be put before the 
House and Senate for up-or-down votes during the final two days of 
sessions for the current sitting of the General Court. All six conferees 
— four Democrats and two Republicans — signed off on the deal, which 
arrives just days before a new Legislature will be sworn in and all 
bills start from scratch.

The bill's chief negotiators — Rep. Thomas Golden of Lowell and Sen. 
Michael Barrett of Lexington — called the proposal "the strongest effort 
of its kind in the country" and the first major update to the 2008 
Global Warming Solutions Act.

"This bill is a climate toolkit, assembled over the course of months, to 
protect our residents, and the beautiful place we call home, from the 
worsening of an existential crisis," they said. "Its particulars owe 
much to the advocacy of thousands of citizen activists in Massachusetts. 
To these activists, we say thank you. We heard you."

The bill calls for utilities to purchase an additional 2,400 megawatts 
of offshore wind generation, raising the total state authorization to 
5,600 megawatts. The state this year expects to hear from the new Biden 
administration about the prospects of two offshore projects already in 
the works.

The Department of Public Utilities would also need to alter its approach 
to regulating the electric and natural gas utilities under the bill, 
which orders the DPU to balance the following priorities: system safety, 
system security, reliability, affordability, equity and reductions in 
greenhouse gas emissions.

The legislation is also designed to ensure that at least 40% of the 
state's electric power will be renewable by 2030, by making incremental 
changes in the state's Renewable Energy Portfolio Standard each year 
from 2025 through 2029.

The bill, dubbed An Act Creating a Next-Generation Roadmap for 
Massachusetts Climate Policy, addresses a range of other areas, from 
environmental justice to hydrogen power, natural gas safety, energy 
efficiency in appliances, and the creation of a greenhouse gas emissions 
standard for municipal lighting plants.

Massachusetts lost ground in its latest report on reducing greenhouse 
gas emissions. The state faces a 2020 requirement of a 25% reduction 
from 1990 emissions levels. The Baker administration in October released 
its latest update to the Massachusetts Greenhouse Gas Emissions 
Inventory which showed emissions in 2018 were 22.2% below emissions in 
1990, compared to 2017 emissions that were 22.7% below 1990 levels.
https://www.wbur.org/earthwhile/2021/01/04/massachusetts-climate-change-bill-conference

- -

[Press Release from 4/2020]
*Baker-Polito Administration Issues Letter Establishing Net Zero 
Emissions Target*
The Baker-Polito Administration today issued its formal determination 
letter establishing net zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions as the 
Commonwealth’s new legal emissions limit for 2050.
https://www.mass.gov/news/baker-polito-administration-issues-letter-establishing-net-zero-emissions-target



[legacy of climate science and activism]
*Mary Nichols: A Climate Champion’s Legacy*
Nov 17, 2020
Climate One
Throughout a 45-year career as an environmental regulator, Mary Nichols 
has been called everything from “Trump's nemesis” to “the most 
influential environmental regulator of all time”. A powerful climate 
champion for advancing climate action and limiting emissions, Nichols 
has taken on automakers and collaborated with them. Environmentalists 
have cheered her moves to cut greenhouse gas emissions, occasionally 
criticizing her for letting polluters off easy and not doing enough for 
disadvantaged communities of color.

Where does California’s climate leadership go from here, and what’s 
ahead for a new national climate agenda in 2021? Join us for a 
conversation on the storied career of Mary Nichols, chair of the 
California Air Resources Board, and a look at California’s ambitious and 
controversial climate leadership from Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to 
Governor Gavin Newsom.
This program is generously underwritten by the ClimateWorks Foundation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlnRysjH71c



[Classic lecture in the fundamentals]
*The Math of Climate Change*
Nov 22, 2018
Gresham College
Climate change is controversial and the subject of huge debate. Complex 
climate models based on math helps us understand. How do these models work?
A lecture by Chris Budd OBE, Gresham Professor of Geometry 13 November 2018

Climate change is important, controversial, and the subject of huge 
debate. Much of our understanding of the future climate comes from the 
use of complex climate models based on mathematical and physical ideas.
In this talk, Professor Budd will describe how these models work and the 
assumptions that go into them. He will discuss how reliable our 
predictions of climate change are, and show how mathematicians can give 
us insights into both past and future.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4O4jK-lZrI



[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming - January 5, 2000 *

January 5, 2000: During a Democratic Presidential debate with former New 
Jersey Senator Bill Bradley, Vice President Al Gore notes that as a 
Congressman, "...I decided to take on the issue of global warming and 
make it a national issue, when everybody was saying 'You know, you're 
going to run a lot of risk there. People are going to think that that's 
kind of off the edge there.' Well, now more and more people say, 'Yes, 
it is real,' and the next president has to be willing to take it on."

(29:28-29-50)

http://c-spanvideo.org/program/DemocraticCandidatesDebate10


/-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------/

/Archive of Daily Global Warming News 
<https://pairlist10.pair.net/pipermail/theclimate.vote/2017-October/date.html> 
/
https://pairlist10.pair.net/pipermail/theclimate.vote

/To receive daily mailings - click to Subscribe 
<mailto:subscribe at theClimate.Vote?subject=Click%20SEND%20to%20process%20your%20request> 
to news digest./

*** Privacy and Security:*This mailing is text-only.  It does not carry 
images or attachments which may originate from remote servers.  A 
text-only message can provide greater privacy to the receiver and sender.
By regulation, the .VOTE top-level domain must be used for democratic 
and election purposes and cannot be used for commercial purposes. 
Messages have no tracking software.
To subscribe, email: contact at theclimate.vote 
<mailto:contact at theclimate.vote> with subject subscribe, To Unsubscribe, 
subject: unsubscribe
Also you may subscribe/unsubscribe at 
https://pairlist10.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/theclimate.vote
Links and headlines assembled and curated by Richard Pauli for 
http://TheClimate.Vote <http://TheClimate.Vote/> delivering succinct 
information for citizens and responsible governments of all levels. List 
membership is confidential and records are scrupulously restricted to 
this mailing list.


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://pairlist10.pair.net/pipermail/theclimate.vote/attachments/20210105/fcbba9d5/attachment.html>