The truth revealed (and concealed) about carbon emissions

What do they mean?- if they take every last piece of fossil fuel out of the ground or just follow present practises (as they will)? In either case this report is overoptimistic and deluded not taking into account either current reality or the exponential nature of the change.

World could warm by massive 10C if all fossil fuels are burned

Arctic would warm by as much as 20C by 2300 with disastrous impacts if action is not taken on climate change, warns new study

The Guardian,

23 May, 2016

The planet would warm by searing 10C if all fossil fuels are burned, according to a new study, leaving some regions uninhabitable and wreaking profound damage on human health, food supplies and the global economy.

The Arctic, already warming fast today, would heat up even more – 20C by 2300 – the new research into the extreme scenario found.

“I think it is really important to know what would happen if we don’t take any action to mitigate climate change,” said Katarzyna Tokarska, at the University of Victoria in Canada and who led the new research. “Even though we have the Paris climate change agreement, so far there hasn’t been any action. [This research] is a warning message.”

The carbon already emitted by burning fossil fuels has driven significant global warming, with 2016 near certain to succeed 2015 as the hottest year ever recorded, which itself beat a record year in 2014. Other recent studies have shown that extreme heatwaves could push the climate beyond human endurancein parts of the world such as the Gulf, making them uninhabitable.

In Paris in December, the world’s nations agreed a climate change deal intended to limit the temperature rise from global warming to under 2C, equivalent to the emission of a trillion tonnes of carbon. If recent trends in global emissions continue, about 2tn tonnes will be emitted by the end of the century.

The new work, published in Nature Climate Change, considers the impact of emitting 5tn tonnes of carbon emissions. This is the lower-end estimate of burning all fossil fuels currently known about, though not including future finds or those made available by new extraction technologies.

The researchers used a series of sophisticated climate models and found this rise in CO2 would lead to surface temperatures rising by an average of 8C across the world by 2300. When the effect of other greenhouse gases is added, the rise climbs to 10C.

The heating predicted by the models was not uniform across the globe. In the Arctic, the higher CO2 levels led to 17C of warming, with another 3C from other greenhouse gases, across the year. These rises are higher than indicated by previous, less comprehensive models, which are less accurate at modelling how the oceans takes up heat. In February, parts of the Arctic had already recorded temperatures 16C above normal.

The warming caused by burning all fossil fuels would also have enormous impact on rainfall. The new research shows rainfall falling by two-thirds over parts of central America and north Africa and by half over parts of Australia, the Mediterranean, southern Africa and the Amazon.

Thomas Frölicher, at ETH Zürich in Switzerland and not involved in the new work, said: “Given that current trends in fossil fuel emissions would result in temperatures above [the 2C Paris] target, policymakers need to have a clear view of what is at stake both on decadal and centennial timescales if no meaningful climate policies are put in place. The unregulated exploitation of fossil fuel resources could result in significant, more profound climate change.”

In the meantime we KNOW that nothing is going to change and the energy companies are going to double down on what they’re already doing to destroy the planet.

For instance, we know that the predecessors of Exxon Mobil had a patent to reduce carbon emissions from cars from the 1960’s but suppressed it.

Exxon Unlikely to Change Course on Climate Change at Annual Shareholder Meeting

The oil giant opposes six shareholder resolutions involving climate change and its risks, including assessing the impact of the Paris climate accord.

David Hasemyer

Inside Climate News,

23 May, 2016

ExxonMobil Corp. wants to extend its quarter-century streak of largely resisting the demands of some of its most vocal shareholders to alter course on climate change.

At the annual stockholders meeting on Wednesday, management will again urge rejection of six resolutions on global warming. These include taking moral responsibility for climate change, electing a board member with environmental expertise, paying special dividends rather than investing more in fossil fuel reserves, and assessing how global action to slow climate change would affect Exxon's business. 

What's different this year is that Exxon is doing so in the face of mounting pressure from dozens of activist stockholder groups, including some with significant holdings. State attorneys general are investigating whether Exxon violated racketeering, consumer protection or investor protection statutes through what it said about climate change. Other oil companies are already shifting gears. Shell, BP and Statoil last year backed resolutions to assess the implications of restrictions on fossil fuel use, and ConocoPhillips is conducting such an analysis.

"The go-slow approach is no longer a responsible position as seen by many investors," said Andrew Logan, director of the oil and gas program at Ceres, a Boston nonprofit that coordinates action by many of the nation's largest institutional investors.

"Climate change is not the fringe issue that it was 25 years ago," Logan said. "It has become an urgent existential issue, one that needs immediate attention, not one that can be put off as Exxon wants."....[ ]

To read article GO HERE

In the meantime Dahr Jamail continues to report the truth of the matter.

C02 levels in the atmosphere have reached 407 ppm which is a sure indicator that greenhouse gasses are coming from natural sources such as wildfires and other positive feedbacks.

As we know there at least a 10 year lagtime before we see the effects of all these emissions

Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Concentration Has Passed the Point of No Return

Dahr Jamil

12 May, 2016

A recent trip up Washington State's Mount Rainier brought home to me how rapidly things are changing, even in the high country.

I first climbed the mountain in 1994, when the main route was a picturesque climb up smooth glaciers. Most of the time crevasses weren't even visible, and snow cover was abundant.

But anthropogenic climate disruption (ACD) has been speeding up with each passing year, and in the same area 22 years later, I found large portions of it nearly unrecognizable. We took a somewhat different route than the one I'd climbed in 1994, primarily because the lower portion of that route is now unusable, as the glacier it traversed is so broken up and crevassed as to make it impassable.

"Changes that normally occur over a matter of centuries are transpiring over decades."

It being early season (most of the guide services had yet to begin taking clients up the mountain), I expected much heavier snow cover and the snow bridges over crevasses to be in decent shape. That wasn't the case. After gingerly stepping our way over several sketchy snow bridges, I was grateful we weren't on the 14,411-foot-high northwestern volcano any later in the season than we were. Thankfully, we were able to summit and get back down without incident.

Less than a year and a half earlier, in December 2014, Nature World News reported that ACD was melting Rainier's glaciers at "unprecedented" rates (six times the historic speed).

To read the article GO HERE