At the recent Planet Under Pressure Conference in London, Dr. Will Steffan, executive director of the Australian National University's climate change institute, echoed many other scientists when he warned, "This is the critical decade." He didn't say "a critical decade." He said, "the." He could have said, "This is it. Now or never" but he was a bit more cryptic.
He said, "If we don't get the curves turned around this decade we will cross those lines." And by curves, he meant trajectory or path. If we continue down this road, in other words, we will find ourselves in a new, nasty world. It is as if the bridge collapsed and we are accelerating toward the chasm. Once we cross over that line, we are in for one wild ride. Once we cross over, we can't turn back.
There should be a palpable sense of urgency about all this but there isn't. We should be braking but we aren't. What the scientists tell us and what we are willing to hear are two different tales. We prefer to believe everything will be fine. To some degree we are all living in denial. What the deniers say makes no sense, not even to them, but I think we need some crazy nonsense to tell ourselves so we don't have to think about what is really coming.
The current permanent plan for perpetual procrastination has us scheduled to enact a "new global climate treaty" that will force "the world's biggest polluters, such as the United States and China" to sign an agreement in 2015 that promises to begin curbing our emissions by 2020.
(Psssst...don't tell anyone but by 2020 it will be too late.)
Steffen said, "We are on the cusp of some big changes. We can ... cap temperature rise at two degrees, or cross the threshold beyond which the system shifts to a much hotter state."
(Psssst...don't tell anyone but we are going to bust through that threshold like it's tissue paper and we are a bullet train.)
Here is what we know about the tipping points that are already tipping:
• "For ice sheets - huge refrigerators that slow down the warming of the planet - the tipping point has probably already been passed. The West Antarctic ice sheet has shrunk over the last decade and the Greenland ice sheet has lost around 200 cubic km (48 cubic miles) a year since the 1990s."
(This is science talk based on actual measurements in our physical world and published data in peer-reviewed science journals. Count on the deniers to make something up that denies all this is true.)
• "Most climate estimates agree the Amazon rainforest will get drier as the planet warms. Mass tree deaths caused by drought have raised fears it is on the verge of a tipping point, when it will stop absorbing emissions and add to them instead."
(Like all these concerns, this is a major worry. Like a smoker's lungs, we take the Amazon rainforest for granted until we have completely ruined its ability to do its job.)
• "Around 1.6 billion tonnes of carbon were lost in 2005 from the rainforest and 2.2 billion tonnes in 2010, which has undone about 10 years of carbon sink activity."
• "One of the most worrying and unknown thresholds is the Siberian permafrost, which stores frozen carbon in the soil away from the atmosphere. There is about 1,600 billion tonnes of carbon there - about twice the amount in the atmosphere today - and the northern high latitudes are experiencing the most severe temperature change of any part of the planet."
(That means 1.6 trillion tons of carbon. I challenge you to find a legitimate scientist who believes humans will survive once that carbon is fully released. And that process has begun.)
• "In a worst case scenario, 30 to 63 billion tonnes of carbon a year could be released by 2040, rising to 232 to 380 billion tonnes by 2100. This compares to around 10 billion tonnes of CO2 released by fossil fuel use each year."
• "Increased CO2 in the atmosphere has also turned oceans more acidic as they absorb it. In the past 200 years, ocean acidification has happened at a speed not seen for around 60 million years."
• "This threatens coral reef development and could lead to the extinction of some species within decades, as well as to an increase in the number of predators."
And solutions?
• "London School of Economics professor Anthony Giddens favours focusing on the fossil fuel industry, seeing as renewables only make up 1 percent of the global energy mix. 'We have enormous inertia within the world economy and should make much more effort to close down coal-fired power stations,' he said."
• "Oil giant Royal Dutch Shell favours working on technologies leading to negative emissions in the long run, like carbon capture on biomass and in land use, said Jeremy Bentham, the firm's vice president of global business environment."
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