Global Warming ‘Could Be’ Total Disaster? We’re Way Past That

Experts agreed in 2015 that if we did not cap global warming at another 0.5 degrees Celsius (0.9 degrees Fahrenheit), the effects will be “catastrophic” and “irreversible”. A panel of UN scientists recently predicted that it is all but impossible for us to meet that goal.

There are no "maybes" about global warming, it's here now!

“If you don’t hang on to that goal, what you’ll achieve is a total disaster,” United Nations Secretary General António Guterres told AP reporters last week. He believes that, despite the odds, enacting transformative measures immediately could prevent some of the most destructive effects of global warming from coming to fruition.

To move in this direction, ‘global warming’ as a topic of discussion and point of concern needs to move from the realm of theoretical and future-oriented conversation into that of current events and action. The worst case scenario of the rapid heating of the planet is happening, now.

Read the VozWire story Kathleen Livingston - “Global Warming ‘Could Be’ Total Disaster? We’re Way Past That.”

New scenarios show how the world could limit warming to 1-5c in 2100

In the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change, nearly every country on Earth pledged to keeping global temperatures “well below” 2C above pre-industrial levels and to “pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5C”.

However, at the time, scientists had only modelled energy system and carbon mitigation pathways to achieve the 2C target. Few studies had examined how the world might limit warming to 1.5C.

Now a paper in Nature Climate Change presents the results from a new modelling exercise using six different “integrated assessment models” (IAMs) to limit global temperatures in 2100 to below 1.5C.

The results suggest that 1.5C is achievable if global emissions peak in the next few years and massive amounts of carbon are sucked out of the atmosphere in the second half of the century through a proposed technology known as bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS).

Read the RenewEconomy story by Zeke Hausfather - “New scenarios show how the world could limit warming to 1-5c in 2100.”

El Niño and La Niña – por que no los dos?! (Actually, that would be very bad)

It would be pretty remarkable if you weren’t somehow affected by the Queensland floods in 2011, the Great Ocean Road Christmas bushfires in 2015, or even the heatwaves leading up to Black Saturday in 2009 that killed 173 people in Victoria.

When floods occur, is it always La Nina to blame?
Nope. The tricky part is that no two El Niño or
La Niña events are exactly the same.

But have you ever taken a step back to think about what’s really going on with the weather in times like this? We don’t have bushfires and floods all the time, so something was obviously happening to cause such a drastic change in weather.

You’d be correct in saying that something more was at play here. In fact, it’s called ENSO – the El Niño- Southern Oscillation – the changing surface ocean temperature patterns in the Pacific Ocean. When the central and eastern equatorial Pacific is warmer than normal, it is called El Niño, “the little boy” in Spanish; conversely, when it is cooler than normal, it is called La Niña, or “the little girl.”

These two children are responsible for changes in our weather patterns every two to seven years. They make tweaks in the Pacific Ocean temperatures, wind and clouds that have enormous effects on the rest of us.

Read CSIROscope by Rachel Vorwerk - “El Niño and La Niña – por que no los dos?! (Actually, that would be very bad).”