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Saturday, September 16th, 2017

The Window Is Closing to Avoid Dangerous Global Warming

Author:     Jean Chemnick
Source:     Scientific American/Climatewire
Publication Date:     September 15, 2017
 Link: The Window Is Closing to Avoid Dangerous Global Warming
Stephan:   Increasingly I feel like I am sitting with my card empty at the Bingo table on Titanic. The world is sorting itself out based on the degree to which each national society is committing to social programs that place wellbeing first. I have been studying and writing about climate change since 1991, and there are two constants that I can see: First, every reassessment reports worse outcomes. Second, the timeline is collapsing.

Pollution colors the sky Credit: David McNew

Deadly climate change could threaten most of the world’s human population by the end of this century without efforts well beyond those captured in the Paris Agreement.

That’s the finding of a pair of related reports released yesterday by an international group of climate science and policy luminaries who warned that the window is closing to avert dangerous warming. They say carbon dioxide might have to be removed from the atmosphere.

Scientists Yangyang Xu and Veerabhadran Ramanathan found in a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) that there already exists a 1 in 20 chance that the 2.2 trillion tons of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere could cause an existential warming threat. This “fat tail” scenario would mean the world experiences “existential/unknown” warming by 2100 — defined in the report as more than 5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels.

Temperatures haven’t been that high since the Miocene warming period. That low-probability but very extreme scenario could expose most of the world’s people to deadly heat stress, with […]

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