The Brutal Truth
by Professor Bruce E. Johansen
Drafts in progress of a very important paper have been rattling around the Internet for the past few weeks. The lead author (with 18 co-authors) is James Hansen, whom a columnist for the New York Times recently called “The Godfather of Global Warming.” Many people in Eastern Nebraska and Western Iowa know him for his personal presence, both for the many times that he has shared his expertise with us, but also as a friend and a neighbor: high school graduate in Dennison, nearby in Western Iowa, paperboy for the World-Herald, as well as long-time director of the Goddard Institute for Space Sciences in New York City. He is now retired from his NASA job, but this has not stopped him from being the first to let those listening to the rough news to come.
The rough news is that we are finishing the hottest year in the history of human experience on our home planet. Aided by a strong El Nino, the last year has utterly demolished extreme heat records for at least 125,000 years. This is merely an estimate. No one was reading thermometers 125,000 years ago. Another estimate takes the figure back to the Pliocene, four to six million years ago, which produced conditions we will not see until thermal inertia (warming “in the pipeline”) produces them.
The paper circulating under the signature of Hansen et al. is titled: “How We Know that Global Warming is Accelerating and that the Goal of the Paris Agreement is Dead.”
Its abstract is:
The drive for global temperature change is Earth’s energy imbalance (EEI), the difference between the energy Earth receives from the Sun and the energy Earth reflects and radiates back to space. We have good measurements of EEI today based on precise satellite data for change of reflected and emitted radiation calibrated by decadal ocean heat content change measured by deep-diving Argo floats. Interpreting global temperature change and predicting future temperature requires knowledge of the principal forcings that now affect EEI: human-made greenhouse gases (GHGs) and atmospheric aerosols (fine airborne particles). Aerosol climate forcing is not being measured, but information on aerosol forcing can be extracted from an ongoing “great inadvertent aerosol experiment” due to discrete changes in International Maritime Organization (IMO) regulations on the sulfur content of ship fuels. These limited assessment tools are threatened by the absence of firm plans to continue direct EEI observations. A shortcoming of our climate science is the failure to communicate well what is known from existing data. Global warming and emissions in the pipeline ensure that the goal of the Paris Agreement – to keep global warming well below 2°C – is already dead if policy is constrained only to emission reductions plus uncertain and unproven CO2 removal methods.
10 November 2023
James Hansen, Pushker Kharecha, Norman Loeb, Makiko Sato, Leon Simons, George Tselioudis, and Karina von Schuckmann, et al.
The battle over climate change is over, and the good guys lost? That this ship has sailed?
Some intelligent people have tried to haul humanity out of this swamp for decades. It’s tough to surrender to what the science is telling us. The brutal truth hurts.
Face it: the proportion of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere has steadily risen since the first handful of coal was burned for human comfort, convenience, and profit about 200 years ago. The rise has accelerated since the first oil was put to work about 150 years ago. To reverse this trend, we need to bend that curve and keep it falling for centuries, something human beings have never done. Electric cars and wind turbines are not going to do it. Sorry. We will have to fundamentally change how we conduct our lives, and many of us will have to suffer inconvenience for the good of generations to come.
So here’s the letter:
Warm & Warmer
Almost any time I have turned on the TV news or read a newspaper this summer, climate change has played a leading role -- more heat, with records set worldwide and observations that we are living through the hottest period since the beginning of humankind’s tenancy on Earth; with heavier and more damaging rainfall, wind and hail, as well as temperatures.
These events are no accident. They are a result of how greenhouse gases operate.
The speed with which temperatures increase in both the oceans and atmosphere (along with the intensity of precipitation) is governed by thermal inertia, the delayed effect of greenhouse gas emissions, and their effects on the air and water. Temperatures’ actual effects in the air are evident about 50 years after gases are emitted. In the oceans, inertia requires about 100 years.
When the fossil-fuel age began two hundred years ago, the proportion of CO2 varied from about 180 parts per million to about 280. Since then, it has increased to about 420 ppm. Until that curve begins to decline and fall, heat in the atmosphere and oceans will continue to rise.
Until we deal with humankind’s inability to make peace between nations, and the same nations’ unwillingness to peacefully set strict, enforceable limits on greenhouse gas emissions, the atmosphere’s increasing gases will continue. If it continues, the lives of every living thing in our only home will be in increasing peril. Reducing that peril should be our number one priority. The other path will be increasingly dangerous and unpleasant. This is not a matter of political debate. It’s how the world works.
Drafts in progress of a very important paper have been rattling around the Internet for the past few weeks. The lead author (with 18 co-authors) is James Hansen, whom a columnist for the New York Times recently called “The Godfather of Global Warming.” Many people in Eastern Nebraska and Western Iowa know him for his personal presence, both for the many times that he has shared his expertise with us, but also as a friend and a neighbor: high school graduate in Dennison, nearby in Western Iowa, paperboy for the World-Herald, as well as long-time director of the Goddard Institute for Space Sciences in New York City. He is now retired from his NASA job, but this has not stopped him from being the first to let those listening to the rough news to come.
The rough news is that we are finishing the hottest year in the history of human experience on our home planet. Aided by a strong El Nino, the last year has utterly demolished extreme heat records for at least 125,000 years. This is merely an estimate. No one was reading thermometers 125,000 years ago. Another estimate takes the figure back to the Pliocene, four to six million years ago, which produced conditions we will not see until thermal inertia (warming “in the pipeline”) produces them.
The paper circulating under the signature of Hansen et al. is titled: “How We Know that Global Warming is Accelerating and that the Goal of the Paris Agreement is Dead.”
Its abstract is:
The drive for global temperature change is Earth’s energy imbalance (EEI), the difference between the energy Earth receives from the Sun and the energy Earth reflects and radiates back to space. We have good measurements of EEI today based on precise satellite data for change of reflected and emitted radiation calibrated by decadal ocean heat content change measured by deep-diving Argo floats. Interpreting global temperature change and predicting future temperature requires knowledge of the principal forcings that now affect EEI: human-made greenhouse gases (GHGs) and atmospheric aerosols (fine airborne particles). Aerosol climate forcing is not being measured, but information on aerosol forcing can be extracted from an ongoing “great inadvertent aerosol experiment” due to discrete changes in International Maritime Organization (IMO) regulations on the sulfur content of ship fuels. These limited assessment tools are threatened by the absence of firm plans to continue direct EEI observations. A shortcoming of our climate science is the failure to communicate well what is known from existing data. Global warming and emissions in the pipeline ensure that the goal of the Paris Agreement – to keep global warming well below 2°C – is already dead if policy is constrained only to emission reductions plus uncertain and unproven CO2 removal methods.
10 November 2023
James Hansen, Pushker Kharecha, Norman Loeb, Makiko Sato, Leon Simons, George Tselioudis, and Karina von Schuckmann, et al.
The battle over climate change is over, and the good guys lost? That this ship has sailed?
Some intelligent people have tried to haul humanity out of this swamp for decades. It’s tough to surrender to what the science is telling us. The brutal truth hurts.
Face it: the proportion of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere has steadily risen since the first handful of coal was burned for human comfort, convenience, and profit about 200 years ago. The rise has accelerated since the first oil was put to work about 150 years ago. To reverse this trend, we need to bend that curve and keep it falling for centuries, something human beings have never done. Electric cars and wind turbines are not going to do it. Sorry. We will have to fundamentally change how we conduct our lives, and many of us will have to suffer inconvenience for the good of generations to come.
So here’s the letter:
Warm & Warmer
Almost any time I have turned on the TV news or read a newspaper this summer, climate change has played a leading role -- more heat, with records set worldwide and observations that we are living through the hottest period since the beginning of humankind’s tenancy on Earth; with heavier and more damaging rainfall, wind and hail, as well as temperatures.
These events are no accident. They are a result of how greenhouse gases operate.
The speed with which temperatures increase in both the oceans and atmosphere (along with the intensity of precipitation) is governed by thermal inertia, the delayed effect of greenhouse gas emissions, and their effects on the air and water. Temperatures’ actual effects in the air are evident about 50 years after gases are emitted. In the oceans, inertia requires about 100 years.
When the fossil-fuel age began two hundred years ago, the proportion of CO2 varied from about 180 parts per million to about 280. Since then, it has increased to about 420 ppm. Until that curve begins to decline and fall, heat in the atmosphere and oceans will continue to rise.
Until we deal with humankind’s inability to make peace between nations, and the same nations’ unwillingness to peacefully set strict, enforceable limits on greenhouse gas emissions, the atmosphere’s increasing gases will continue. If it continues, the lives of every living thing in our only home will be in increasing peril. Reducing that peril should be our number one priority. The other path will be increasingly dangerous and unpleasant. This is not a matter of political debate. It’s how the world works.
