More Good News
George Monbiot is so alarmed by recent scientific findings that he has released an update to his book Heat.
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The last time we had two degrees of warming in the Pliocene 55 millionyears ago, the ice sheets at the poles did not melt – as the IPCC proposes -over a millennia, but within the course of one century. And they did not cause a maximum sea level rise within the course of one century – as predicted by the IPCC – of 59 centimeters, but of 25 meters.
And Hansen proposes that through a series of factors – the collapse of the buttresses that prevent the ice from sliding into the sea, the melt water trickling down through crevasses and lubricating the base of the ice sheets, and melt water on the surface of the ice sheets changing the albedo, making the ice darker and therefore absorbing more heat, will lead to the sudden and – certainly in geological terms – almost immediate collapse of both the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets within the course of one a century at somewhat less than two degrees of warming.
Not only does this lead to the immediate affect of inundation of most of the inhabited world – something like 60% of the people live within 50 km of the coast – it also means that you get a severe and sudden change in global albedo change as white stuff at the poles gives way to dark stuff absorbing much more solar radiation.
And he proposes that we can’t go beyond 1.5 to 1.7 degrees of warming above 1990 levels. Combine this with what Richard was talking about and the stuff contained in the IPCC’s 4th Assessment Report which shows that in order to have a maximum cap of two degrees of warming we need an 85% global reduction even before you take population growth into account. So when that’s added to the fact that we’re going to have something like a 50% increase in population, you can see that that pushes way over 90% even before you take the issue of global equity into account which means that the rich nations must cut the emissions much further than anybody else, you realize that we are talking at a minimum of a 100% cut, and it looks like it might have to go to 110% or 115%.
You laugh but we’re talking about sequestration and we’re talking about such things for example, as growing biofuel and burying it, simply for growing as much bio mass as we can and sticking it back on the ground….something…..anything to stave off this catastrophe.
http://climatechangecoalition.com.au/home/video-filelinks/george-monbiot-updates-his-global-warming-book.html