Thanks to Adam for pointing out this article by Raymond Pierrehumbert:
Pierrehumbert RT 2005: Climate change: A catastrophe in slow-motion. Chicago Journal of International Law, (in press) pdf
It's worth checking out. I hadn't heard of this guy
Pierrehumbert, but he writes a lot of interesting things. Here puts the future in stark perspective:
...The situation is about to become much worse. In China, India, and the US combined, there are currently 850 new coal-fired power plants on the drawing board, and these will annually add some 681 million tons of carbon to the atmosphere in the form of carbon dioxide. By way of comparison, the signatories of the Kyoto Protocol (an agreement that the US declined to sign) will reduce their annual carbon emissions by only 131 million tons if they meet their targets. The 850 planned coal-fired plants almost irrevocably foreclose future opportunities to reduce carbon emissions.
7 comments:
Just for the record he's also one of the people behind Realclimate.
Two posts down you doubt Al Gore's comment that we have ten years to do something. Here you reinforce it. While consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds, everyone should at least have the intelligence to put two and two together.
Eli makes a good point. But I think that it should be up to Gore and Hansen to state this explicitly. Lest their arguments be misconstrued...
Well, actually Gore and Hansen have been stating that we are near the tipping point explicitly. For example see Hansen's talk at the tribute to CD Keeling:
"I present multiple lines of evidence indicating that the Earth’s climate is nearing, but has not passed, a tipping point, beyond which it will be impossible to avoid climate change with far ranging undesirable consequences."
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/notyet/2005_submitted_Hansen_etal_1.pdf
"Have we already passed a “tipping point” such that it is now impossible to avoid “dangerous’ climate change? In our estimation, we probably have not, but we are very close to such a point."
Very close indeed.
Eli,
fair enough...
My point is that, perhaps, Gore and others could more explicitly make the connection between future emissions commitments that the US, China and India are making -- by building all of these coal-fired power plants -- and the potentially dire climatic consequences. I have not had a chance to watch Hansen's speech... perhaps he does this clearly. I gather that Gore draws on Hansen's perspective when he says that we are reaching a climatic "tipping point."
Personally, I would like to see this notion of a rapidly approaching "climatic tipping point" better supported through peer reviewed research, if possible. I applaud Hansen's efforts to tackle this difficult question. However, at the risk of it quickly diminishing into little more than a "climatic talking point," I think that the tipping point idea should be better defined scientifically before politicians and other non-specialists start running with it to the public and Capitol Hill.
Whaddya know... Gavin Schmidt, over at RC, posted on the tipping point notion yesterday.
I'm good at that sort of thing
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