Monday, September 16, 2019

On behalf of the kids - climate scientests quit being conservative as the adults aren't fearful enough

In the last post Climate Change: When we collectively don't know what we are doing, we should fear for our future! the disastrous use of SF6 in wind turbines which were supposed to replace coal-fueled power plants to reduce the greenhouse gas effects was discussed.

This morning The Washington Post published an article Most American teens are frightened by climate change, poll finds, and about 1 in 4 are taking action which tells us:

    In a coastal town in Washington, climate change has a high school junior worried about the floods that keep deluging his school. A 17-year-old from Texas says global warming scares him so much he can’t even think about it.
    But across the country, teens are channeling their anxieties into activism. “Fear,” says Maryland 16-year-old Madeline Graham, an organizer of a student protest planned for this week, “is a commodity we don’t have time for if we’re going to win the fight.”
    A solid majority of American teenagers are convinced that humans are changing the Earth’s climate and believe that it will cause harm to them personally and to other members of their generation, according to a new Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation poll. Roughly 1 in 4 have participated in a walkout, attended a rally or written to a public official to express their views on global warming — remarkable levels of activism for a group that has not yet reached voting age.
    The poll by The Post and Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) is the first major survey of teenagers’ views since the explosion of the youth climate movement last year. Inspired by 16-year-old Greta Thunberg, whose year-long “strike” in front of the Swedish Parliament and carbon-neutral sailboat voyage across the Atlantic have made her an activist icon, growing numbers of teens have been skipping school on Fridays to protest on behalf of something they say is more important.

I'm glad some Americans are aware of what is going to happen during the next decades and want to do what can be done about it.

And I'll be darned if a BBC news article Faster pace of climate change is 'scary', former chief scientist says also published this morning tells us about the continuing debate among climate scientists:

    Prof Sir David King says he's been scared by the number of extreme events, and he called for the UK to advance its climate targets by 10 years.
    But the UN's weather chief said using words like “scared” could make young people depressed and anxious.
    Speaking to the BBC, Prof King, a former chief scientific adviser to the government, said: “It’s appropriate to be scared. We predicted temperatures would rise, but we didn’t foresee these sorts of extreme events we’re getting so soon.”
    He said the world had changed faster than generally predicted in the fifth assessment report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2014.
    The physicist Prof Jo Haigh from Imperial College London said: “David King is right to be scared – I’m scared too."
    Petteri Taalas, the secretary-general of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), a specialised UN agency, said he fully supported United Nations climate goals, but he criticised radical green campaigners for forecasting the end of the world.
    Dr Taalas agrees polar ice is melting faster than expected, but he’s concerned that public fear could lead to paralysis – and also to mental health problems amongst the young.
    “When I was young we were afraid of nuclear war. We seriously thought it’s better not to have children.
    “I’m feeling the same sentiment among young people at the moment. So we have to be a bit careful with our communication style.”
    It seems though, that some scientists believe their communications in the past have been failing to provoke an emotional response that would convince the public to act.
    Prof King said the world could not wait for scientific certainty on events like Hurricane Dorian. “Scientists like to be certain,” he said.
    Some of the IPCC scientists we contacted didn’t share his urge to engage with the public on an emotional level.

The sad fact is that climate scientists are not debating whether it will be bad but rather when and how bad.  And as noted here previously, official conclusions have been reached.

Unfortunately in 2018 in both the U.S. and China formal findings have been made that we have "locked in warming" of 4°± Celsius most likely within 60 years.

Under the direction of the Trump Administration the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) with the cooperation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) issued a Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) for the Safer Affordable Fuel-Efficient (SAFE) Vehicles Rule for Model Year 2021–2026 Passenger Cars and Light Trucks proposing reduced average fuel economy standards for those vehicles.

The DEIS has determined that the draft official policy of the United States government will be acceptance of a near worst case scenario, a 4.387°C (7.876°F) global temperature rise since 1880 by 2100. That is because any lesser scenario would require deep cuts in carbon emissions to avoid this drastic warming. A lesser scenario “would require substantial increases in technology innovation and adoption compared to today’s levels...which is not currently technologically feasible or economically feasible.”

In China, home to the world's second largest (and sooner or later, largest) economy, the same conclusion was reached.

In May a collaborative research team from China published a new analysis that shows the Earth's climate would increase by 4 °C, compared to pre-industrial levels, most likely by 2084. They found that most of the models projected an increase of 4°C as early as 2064 and as late as 2095, with 2084 appearing as the median year.

"Our ultimate goal is to provide a comprehensive picture of the mean and extreme climate changes associated with higher levels of global warming based on state-of-the art climate models, which is of high interest to the decision-makers and the public," said Dabang Jiang, a senior researcher at the Institute of Atmospheric Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Perhaps some would want to dismiss both governments as being too pessimistic. But the reality is much worse, so much worse.

For Climate Change will not stop "as early as 2064 and as late as 2095."

I would say to Dr. Taalas who was born in 1961, the year preceding the Cuban Missile Crisis, that as a kid in Finland he didn't know what fear of nuclear war was. As a kid in the 1950's who lived near a Strategic Air Command Base full of B-52's carrying nuclear warheads and who was ducking under desks in school, nuclear war was a serious concern to me. But even then, I realized that it would take a direct action by a few specific human beings in a moment of time to cause such a war.

Climate Change is the result of the continuing behavior of all the humans in Western Civilization of the past century, behavior that is continuing. Taalas is the same age as my kids. We'll both be dead before 2064. But we have to be in a near panic on behalf of future generations, not politely discussing probabilities. Those predictions by the U.S. and China are accurate enough to justify such fear.

Stop pretending this is routine science.


The 21st Century Climate Change Black Death is happening now.
                                                                                                          If you're new to this blog here's the link to the listing of the 30+ previous posts in the Blog regarding Climate Change and the Environment.

This post is a part of a series:  climate change black death surrounds us 
                                                                                                         

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