by Bruce Melton PE
Climate Change Now Initiative
October 2023
(Link to the learning tool)
This slide deck is a learning tool with 18,000 words in 52 slides with 70 beautiful images. The notes include about 85,000 words and over 600 references with summaries. The tool describes the scientific justification for a restoration threshold of less than 1 degree C, tipping activation, the eleven reticent and understating biases of our climate culture, climate science and the climate science consensus, and the reality of carbon capture processes and geoengineering vs. what we hear in the media and reticent science.
The fundamentals of climate tipping, or Earth systems collapse responses are presented along with images of these collapses across North America, with plain English interpretation of the scientific literature’s description of the timelines and irreversibly untenable futures these tipping response create. The reasons why these collapses are irreversible is that once a collapse begins, any collapse, it does not stop unless the thing that caused its collapse to begin is removed. This is climate restoration to less than 1 degree C warming above normal (the natural limits of our old climate), not our current climate culture of further warming to minimum of 1.5 degrees C is safe.
This learning tool is about the fantastic understatements and misrepresentations (both premeditated and organic) in our climate culture that have literally allowed us to believe further warming is safe. The reasons why the understatements are so meaningful is illustrated by the eleven understating biases of our climate culture, climate science and the climate science consensus organizations our climate culture is built upon.
Solutions too, are afflicted with the same understating reticence and statistical challenges as are impacts. The reality though, is that processes for carbon dioxide removal from our atmosphere (treating climate pollution already emitted), using processes from the last 100 years that are fundamental to beer, vitamines (note the spelling), submarines, fertilizer and explosives, can solve the climate pollution problem. We can do this using these existing and broadly implemented processes whose components are even more broadly used in industry globally. Importantly, carbon dioxide removal from our atmosphere is something we know how to do: treat pollution. What we do not know how to do is eliminate the most important, wealthiest and most influential thing our advanced culture has ever known, that is responsible for increasing Earth’s population from 1 to 8 billion people in the last 200 years. Time is up, tipping collapses are now active generations ahead of worst-case projections. It is time to begin treating climate pollution like we have always treated pollution; not by eliminating the source, but by treating the pollution emitted so we can be safe.
This learning tool is an ongoing project and since its release, we have now realized the remarkably unprecedented jump in global temperature that has exceeded the critical 1.5 degrees C above normal threshold in 2023 is now a pivotal piece of advanced climate change. This is yet another example of the understating biases in our climate culture, where the models projected this nonlinear acceleration of warming would not occur until the later half of the century if we continued to delay action. Because of this foreshortened realization of projections and the mid-century time frames of irreversible and untenable futures with tipping collapses, emergency cooling with geoengineering is now indicated. We still have a lot to learn about geoengineering and how to safely implement, but like carbon dioxide removal, we have been geoengineering with cooling aerosols emitted from burning fossil fuels for 150 years. Rescinding new regulations limiting these cooling aerosols is an extremely well know quantity as well as extremely low hanging fruit.
We know exactly how many people these respiratory risks kill every year, and we know exactly what regional weather patterns to expect. Risks from respiratory disease and regional weather patterns however, cannot be compared to untenable futures from tipping collapse completion. Rescinding these new regulations will get us back several tenths to a half degree of warming and buy time for carbon dioxide removal and decarbonization to work.
New science on this remarkably unprecedented temperature jump is covered here, and by mid-summer we should see enough additional lines of investigation published to amend An Introduction To Advanced Climate Change to include this new mandate of emergency cooling.
An Introduction to Advanced Climate Change, October 2023
https://climatediscovery.org/Introduction_to_Advanced_Climate Change_October_2023.ppt