https://insideclimatenews.org/news/03012021/five-aspects-climate-change-2020/
By Bob Berwyn
Making it Stop
Some scientists punctuate their alarming warmings with hopeful messages because they know that the worst possible outcome is avoidable.
Recent research shows that stopping greenhouse gas emissions will break the vicious cycle of warming temperatures, melting ice, wildfires and rising sea levels faster than expected just a few years ago.
There is less warming in the pipeline than we thought, said Imperial College (London) climate scientist Joeri Rogelj, a lead author of the next major climate assessment from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
“It is our best understanding that, if we bring down CO2 to net zero, the warming will level off. The climate will stabilize within a decade or two,” he said. “There will be very little to no additional warming. Our best estimate is zero.”
The widespread idea that decades, or even centuries, of additional warming are already baked into the system, as suggested by previous IPCC reports, were based on an “unfortunate misunderstanding of experiments done with climate models that never assumed zero emissions.”
Those models assumed that concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere would remain constant, that it would take centuries before they decline, said Penn State climate scientist Michael Mann, who discussed the shifting consensus last October during a segment of 60 Minutes on CBS.
The idea that global warming could stop relatively quickly after emissions go to zero was described as a “game-changing new scientific understanding” by Covering Climate Now, a collaboration of news organizations covering climate.
“This really is true,” he said. “It’s a dramatic change in the paradigm that has been lost on many who cover this issue, perhaps because it hasn’t been well explained by the scientific community. It’s an important development that is still under appreciated.”“It’s definitely the scientific consensus now that warming stabilizes quickly, within 10 years, of emissions going to zero,” he said.
Bob Berwyn
Freelancer
Bob Berwyn an Austrian-based freelance reporter who has covered climate science and international climate policy for more than a decade. Previously, he reported on the environment, endangered species and public lands for several Colorado newspapers, and also worked as editor and assistant editor at community newspapers in the Colorado Rockies.
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Related:
We are in luck! The “new science” means the Green New Deal and endless lockdowns can save us after all from a planetary climate emergency!
John Kerry: “I can tell you, we’re not getting done even what we promised in Paris.”
“And even if we did everything that was promised in Paris, the earth’s temperature’s still going to rise to 3.7 degrees Fahrenheit [sic],” Kerry continued. “But because we’re not doing anything, we’re actually heading to [a rise of] 4.1, 4.5 degrees today. It’s beyond catastrophic.”
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Flashback 2019: UN admits ‘historic’ Paris climate pact did not save Earth after-all!
But in 2015, the UN Paris climate pact was supposed to be enough.
Secretary of State John F. Kerry in 2015: “This is a tremendous victory for all of our citizens–not for any one country or bloc, but a victory for all of the planet, and for future generations.”
John Kerry in 2015: “The fact is that even if every American citizen biked to work, carpooled to school, used only solar panels to power their homes, if we each planted a dozen trees, if we somehow eliminated all of our domestic greenhouse gas emissions, guess what – that still wouldn’t be enough to offset the carbon pollution coming from the rest of the world.
If all the industrial nations went down to zero emissions –- remember what I just said, all the industrial emissions went down to zero emissions -– it wouldn’t be enough, not when more than 65% of the world’s carbon pollution comes from the developing world.”
