Climate Equity Graph from Meinshausen et al. 2009, and Aerosol Killing / Cooling Double Bind

Used with permission of POTSDAM INSTITUTE FOR CLIMATE IMPACT RESEARCH 

and used by Paul Beckwith. 

Update: The Guardian, at Rockström's request, changed the quote below for a 4 C world to "It’s difficult to see how we could accommodate eight billion people or maybe even half of that."

As a reminder, here is why the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) is not a radical group. I've written on this blog about its "Global Warming of 1.5 C Report." I provided a video of implications and included a statement by Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, noting at 4 C above preindustrial 1850 baseline, "It’s difficult to see how [Earth] could accommodate a billion people or even half of that." I have also written the IPCC report noted "Coral reefs, for example, are projected to decline by a further 70–90% at 1.5°C (high confidence) with larger losses (>99%) at 2°C (very high confidence)." I have seen pushback claiming humanity is not in a climate crisis, but tell that to the estimated 500 million to 1 billion people depending on those coral reefs for food and/or jobs that will clearly be lost unless some miracle science, not yet invented, saves them. 

In the graph above, vertical above the "My kids" line, the nightmare scenario of 4 C is within their kids' lifetimes, with increasing climate chaos for those alive now in the absence of meaningful carbon reductions. In addition, as I wrote, Brian Kahn on December 3rd, 2014, at climatecentral.org noted "CO2 Takes Just 10 Years to Reach Planet’s Peak Heat" so we have some worse effects locked in. 

However, there is also the increasingly-reported problem of the role aerosols from human carbon emissions play in cooling Earth so we need a solution for that as well. Eric Holthaus reported February 8, 2018 in Grist, "According to a new study, we might be locked in this deadly embrace. Research by an international team of scientists recently published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters says that the cooling effect of aerosols is so large that it has masked as much as half of the warming effect from greenhouse gases. So aerosols can’t be wiped out. Take them away and temperatures would soar overnight." He continues "If we magically transformed the global economy overnight, and air pollution fell to near zero, we’d get an immediate rise in global temperatures of between 0.5 and 1.1 degrees Celsius, according to the new study. (For reference: The climate has warmed about 1.2 degrees Celsius since the start of the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century.) The warming would be concentrated over the major cities of the northern hemisphere, close to where most aerosols are emitted. In the hardest hit parts of highly-urbanized East Asia, for example, the complete removal of aerosols would likely have a bigger effect than all other sources of climate change combined. Temperatures in the Arctic could jump as much as 4 degrees Celsius — a catastrophe that would shove the region further toward a permanently ice-free state." As a reminder, President Niinistö of Finland said in Joint Press Conference with President Trump, August 28, 2017, "If we lose the Arctic, we lose the globe." 

Years before the 2018 Grist article was republished in Rolling Stone, I heard about the aerosol problem, currently noted as The McPherson Paradox, but I also saw how McPherson was challenged by climate scientist Michael E. Mann, The Guardian, and others.  Unfortunately, McPherson's ideas about "the aerosol masking effect" or "global dimming" are not easily dismissed, and I am uncertain about the magnitude of this problem. I wrote a post in 2018 "Climate Scientists Expressing Nightmare/Anger/Fear/Gratitude/Other Feelings" with a video of Australian climate scientists' fears of having children. Bill McKibben's most recent book Falter asks in its subtitle "Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?"

In short, this aerosol killing / cooling situation may have us in a double bind. The double bind idea is explained by writer / activist Derrick Jensen at about 5 minutes and 20 seconds into his Forget Shorter Showers video made by Jore. The problem may be that reducing carbon emissions, if humans can do this, is only half the solution with no widely-published plans for resulting removal of aerosol cooling effect. If you have a scientifically-viable plan, please let me know at rivermuses@gmail.com, and maybe I will add it to this post. 

James Hansen in 2012 spoke about the aerosol problem as "Doubling Down on the Faustian Bargain" at 35:48 on this Climate One video. 

U. S. winter is Australia's summer so it's vital to watch what is happening in Australia "with summer yet to start" according to Nine News Australia to preview the trend of possible U. S. climate impacts June through September 2020. The 40.9 C Melbourne's "hottest November day on record" equals 105.6 F.