Three decades of international agreements to reduce greenhouse gases, have had no impact on the accelerating growth of greenhouse gases. Trends in CO2 – NOAA Global Monitoring Laboratory Trends in CO2 – NOAA Global Monitoring Laboratory
via Real Climate Science
November 25, 2024 at 12:42PM
From the University of Oxford and the Wellll….duhhhh! department comes this exercise in peer-reviewed futility.
In a new study, led by the University of Oxford’s Department of Physics and published November 18 in Nature, an international group of authors who developed the science behind net zero demonstrate that relying on ‘natural carbon sinks’ like forests and oceans to offset ongoing CO2 emissions from fossil fuel use will not actually stop global warming.
The science of net zero, developed over 15 years ago, does not include these natural carbon sinks in the definition of net human-induced CO2 emissions.
Natural sinks play a vital role to moderate the impact of current emissions and draw down atmospheric CO2 concentrations after the date of net zero, stabilizing global temperatures. Yet governments and corporations are increasingly turning to them to offset emissions, rather than reducing fossil fuel use or developing more permanent CO2 disposal options. Emissions accounting rules encourage this by creating an apparent equivalence between fossil fuel emissions and drawdown of CO2 by some natural carbon sinks, meaning a country could appear to have ‘achieved net zero’ whilst still contributing to ongoing warming.
The authors call on governments and corporations to clarify how much they are counting on natural carbon sinks to meet their climate goals, as well as recognising the need for Geological Net Zero.
Geological Net Zero means balancing flows of carbon into and out of the solid Earth, with one tonne of CO2 committed to geological storage for every tonne still generated by any continued fossil fuel use. Given the cost and challenges of permanent geological CO2 storage, achieving Geological Net Zero will require a substantial reduction in fossil fuel use.
The authors stress the importance of protecting and maintaining natural carbon sinks while accepting that doing so cannot compensate for ongoing fossil fuel use. Total historical CO2 emissions determine how much a country or company has contributed to the global need for ongoing natural carbon sinks. A country like the UK, with large historical emissions and limited natural sinks, has implicitly committed other countries to maintain natural sinks for decades after UK emissions reach net zero. This is not currently addressed in climate talks.
Professor Myles Allen, of the University of Oxford’s Department of Physics, who led the study, summarises: “We are already counting on forests and oceans to mop up our past emissions, most of which came from burning stuff we dug out of the ground. We can’t expect them to compensate for future emissions as well. By mid-century, any carbon that still comes out of the ground will have to go back down, to permanent storage. That’s Geological Net Zero.”
Dr Glen Peters, of the CICERO Center for International Climate Research in Oslo, Norway, a study co-author, says “Countries report both emissions and removals, but using all removals in climate targets is a recipe for continued warming. Natural carbon sinks currently clean up around half our annual emissions for free, but this ecosystem service must be kept separate from the fossil emissions driving climate change. Relabelling things will not stop global warming.”
Professor Kirsten Zickfeld of Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada, co-author and leader of one of the other 2009 net zero papers, says “It is a common assumption that removing carbon from the atmosphere to offset burning of fossil fuels is as effective as not burning fossil fuels in the first place. It is not. Offsetting continued fossil fuel use with carbon removal will not be effective if the removal is already being counted on as part of the natural carbon cycle and if the carbon is not permanently stored. Unless we can increase transparency in national Greenhouse gas reporting and target setting, offsets will become part of the problem instead of part of the solution.”
Study co-author Professor Jo House of the University of Bristol UK says: “Land is limited, we rely on it for food, nature, biodiversity, leisure, water storage, and so on. It cannot offset more than a portion of fossil emissions even now, probably less in future with worsening pressures on the biosphere such as population increase, fires, and drought. Giving carbon credits for natural processes that are happening anyway undermines trust in the whole idea of offsetting. We have to urgently protect natural carbon sinks, but there are more scientifically credible and equitable ways of doing this than relying on carbon offset markets.”
via Watts Up With That?
November 25, 2024 at 12:02PM
Selwyn Duke writes at American Thinker Let’s say man is changing the climate. So what? Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
The temperature is rising!” “The temperature is dropping.” “The temperature is staying the same.”
We argue the “facts” of climate change (even as parts of New Jersey were just buried under 11 inches of global warming). One side wants the facts to show that man is disrupting the climate, while the other wants them to show that he’s not. But an almost never posed question should be asked:
Let’s say, for argument’s sake, that our industry
is causing global warming. So what?
No, I’m not a guy who “just wants to see the world burn” (and that would be literally). Rather, if anthropogenic climate change were occurring, why should we assume it wouldn’t be beneficial?
Greening of the earth from CO2 and warming.
Oh, it’s not just that the Earth is greener and crop yields are higher when CO2 levels are greater; it’s not just that relative warmth breeds life. It’s also this:
Some scientists have said the Earth will soon enter, or has already entered, a significant cooling phase. Others even contend that another ice age is nigh. And if this is so, any man-caused temperature increase would merely mitigate this naturally induced but deadly phenomenon.
One of these scientists was the late Professor S. Fred Singer, an atmospheric and space physics expert who had been a founding director of the Science & Environmental Policy Project. “I have recently become quite concerned about ice ages and the dangers they pose to humans on our planet,” he wrote in 2015 — “and indeed to most of terrestrial ecology.”
Singer explained later in his article that there “are two kinds of ice ages”:
(i) Major (Milankovich-style) glaciations occur on a 100,000-year time-scale and are controlled astronomically. (ii) “Little” ice ages were discovered in ice cores; they have been occurring on an approx. 1000-1500-yr cycle and are likely controlled by the Sun.
The scientist then warned that the “current cycle’s cooling phase may be imminent….”
Now, this is a frightening prospect. Even the liberal New York Times admitted in 2017, reporting on a Lancet study, that “cold weather is responsible, directly or indirectly, for 17 times as many deaths as hot weather.” That’s in our relatively warm time, too. What would happen during a major ice age?
Well, “The coolings are quite severe,” informed Singer. “[T]he most recent one, ending only about 12,000 years ago, covered much of North America and Europe with miles-thick continental ice sheets and led to the disappearance of (barely) surviving bands of Neanderthalers; they were displaced by the more adaptable Homo Sapiens.”
In other words, another major ice age would likely be a Hollywood-like, apocalyptic disaster. In fact, Singer insisted that we should be prepared to use scientific interventions to mitigate such an eventuality (while Bill Gates wants to do the same to cool down the Earth). To be clear, though, while Singer said that another ice age could begin tomorrow, it could also be tens of thousands of years away. And my article isn’t about hashing out the details, assessing probability, or recommending mitigation measures. (you can read Singer’s work for that). It is about this: prejudice.
Again, accepting for argument that man is significantly warming
the planet (not my belief), why assume this is bad?
In reality, moderns’ thinking so often reflects a kind of misanthropism or, at least, a bias against Western-triumph-born modernity. People believing that extraterrestrials furtively visit our planet never assume the aliens’ matter-of-course environmental impact could be malign; they’re too advanced. People pondering a hunter-gatherer tribe (e.g., the North Sentinelese) generally assume they just must live “in harmony with nature” and be innocuous; they’re too primitive. Never mind that American Indians deforested stretches along, and caused the sedimentation of, the Delaware River long before Europeans’ New World arrival (to provide just one perspective-lending example). The activities of man, or modern man or Western man, depending on the precise prejudice, just must be harmful for the simple reason that he engaged in them. So, yes, racial profiling is a problem — against the human race.
In fairness, we can do and have done much to damage the environment. In fairness again, though, forested area in the U.S. is greater than it was a century back and our water and air are cleaner than they were 60 years ago. And in recent times the Great Barrier Reef has actually increased in size (this isn’t necessarily due to man’s activities). So we can also be good shepherds of the Earth.
See more at Barrier Reef Great Again.
The odd thing, though, about the misanthropic prejudice is that implicit in it is an idea that man is akin to some unnatural, artificial presence. This, coming from people who generally also believe man is himself only an animal, a mere product of evolution; in other words, just another part of nature. And, of course, whether the result of divine creation or evolutionary happenstance, part of nature (or Creation) is precisely what man is.
As for the world’s fortunes, 99.9 percent of the species of life that have ever existed are extinct, partially due to ice ages. So ironically, if man’s activities — either accidentally, intentionally or both — mitigate the coming ice age, we humans may be responsible for counteracting the next great extinction.
Source: Phanerozoic_Biodiversity.png Author: SVG version by Albert Mestre
via Science Matters
November 25, 2024 at 10:44AM
