China, the US, and Climate Change

Here is an article about behind the scenes meetings between the U.S. and China, aimed at coming to an agreement to partner to solve the global warming problem. One person said they might even come up with something by this fall. The fact that the two largest emitters of greenhouse gases, who seemed to be playing "chicken" with each other during the Bush administration are now possibly on the verge of cooperating is a huge change for the better. James Hansen said we needed to start making big changes this year, or it would be too late to prevent a global cataclysm. It looks like there is still a chance we can pull it off if these talks succeed. We will have to see what the agreement is, and what actually gets done, and then only time will tell if it will be enough.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/may/18/secret-us-china-emissions-talks

Addendum 9/13/2001: Unfortunately, the climate bill the House passed this year has very anemic reduction target of 3.6% by 2020, about a tenth of what the IPCC said is needed. It also has a provision that would remove the EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gasses. Apparently the fossil fuel industry didn’t like the idea of the executive branch making larger cuts than the easily-controlled Congress. If this bill passes as is, it would be a disaster. Despite all the science and the pleadings from climate scientists like James Hansen, Congress seems determined to sacrifice our future in exchange for more corporate profits for their corporate donors. So much for an agreement with China. If the administration manages to get a good agreement, it would be meaningless without the authority to reduce greenhouse gases.

New Predictions

I saw one "good" piece of news recently. Some think our coal reserves may be much smaller than estimated before, which means the total amount of CO2 we will be able to emit may be smaller than forecast. They were even saying that the IPCC should lower their worst case global warming predictions. The reason this doesn't comfort me much is that if the worst case predictions came true, it would be absolutely horrible, and we have plenty of coal for that to happen. Also, things have turned out much worse than their worst-case predictions so far, so they need to revise them the other direction. It probably won't matter if we have less coal than we thought. We still have way more than enough to trigger feedbacks that will ruin the world for humans and most other species.

Today there was another piece of bad news. If you've read and/or seen "Six Degrees" yet, you know that even 1 or 2 more degrees will be really bad for us, and 6 degrees higher will be almost unimaginable. Now scientists at MIT predict that it will rise another 5 degrees (9 degrees F) by 2100 if current trends continue. If we implement an aggressive worldwide climate change policy, then it will "only" go up a little more than 2 degrees, still very scary. So most likely it will end up somewhere between those two numbers. But there is still much uncertainty, especially in the area of what use humans will do about the situation.

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/environment/2009-05-20-global-warming_N.htm

CO2 must be slashed more

"If the world is going to limit global warming to just a few degrees, it has to slash carbon dioxide pollution much more than now being discussed, two new science studies say."

http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2009/04/29/emissions-cut-warming.html

This is a good article overall, and pretty alarming. However, the person who wrote it doesn't seem to understand what he's reporting on, based on this quote: "World average temperatures going higher than that may be dangerous, some scientists say." Some scientists? How about the vast majority of climate scientists? MAY be dangerous? What an understatement! Calling it an understatement is an understatement!

It's very difficult for people to put this problem into perspective. The U.N. estimated that 300,000 people are dying every year because of the effects of global warming. That is NOW, with less than one degree C of warming so far. So global warming is already much more than "dangerous". Just one degree more, and there will be many more deaths because of famine and disease and severe weather. To want to limit temperature rise to 2 degrees is like saying it is perfectly acceptable to cause the deaths of millions of people, maybe even billions. And since we don't know when the big feedbacks will begin, it could even lead to the extinction of the human species. I wish people who report on this subject would learn more about it and then really tell it like it is, in a language that non-scientists would understand. And I wish the politicians would understand how many people they are killing RIGHT NOW with their policies and how many more will die in the future because they failed to take action.