Global Warming in the Pipelinehttps://youtu.be/v-ArA_xYxfsDr. Peter Carter, Paul Beckwith and Regina Valdez discuss a recent paper called ‘Global Warming in the Pipeline’ by James Hansen et al. The paper explains global warming will likely pierce the 1.5°C ceiling in the 2020s and 2°C before 2050 under the current geopolitical approach to dealing with anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.
This video was recorded on May 24th, 2023, and published on June 18th, 2023.
Some of the topics discussed:
- How one of the key characteristics of climate change known for decades has always been inertia and momentum. This paper shows that at the current levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the planet is slowly moving towards a 10°C rise in global average temperature.
- How James Hansen is a voice crying in the climate wilderness as he always seems to have been because the scientific community is not agreeing with him.
- How one of the big feedbacks in the climate system is ice sheet albedo and its key role in leading us to a 10°C rise.
- How the methane emissions feedback from the warming of the wetlands will be inevitable.
- How a new draft of the paper was released on May 19th.
- How the Global Climate Models (GCMs) have been under predicting the global average temperature rates of change and how by using the Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity (ECS), which is how much the climate warms for a doubling of CO2 levels, we can arrive at much more accurate prediction of global average temperature rise from paleoclimate data.
- The enormity of consequences of climate change demands a return to a Holocene-level global temperature with the required actions that include: 1) A global increasing price on GHG emissions; 2) An East-West cooperation in a way that accommodates developing world needs; 3) Intervention with Earth’s radiation imbalance to phase down today’s massive human-made “geo-transformation” of Earth’s climate.
- and much more. . .