Global Warming's Terrifying New Math

Found via Claire Barnes. This reminded me of some of Jeremy Grantham’s comments in his latest letter:

“I used to think that “climate change” was a weak, evasive version of “global warming” but not anymore, for weather extremes – drought, floods, and bursts of extreme heat – have turned out to be more devastating for food production than the steady rise in average global temperatures. Droughts and floods were off-the-scale awful three growing seasons ago, and I forecasted some improvement. But with impossibly low odds – based on the previous weather distribution pattern – severe weather events kept going for two more growing seasons. Just as with resource prices, detailed last year, when the odds get into the scores of thousands to one, it is usually because the old model is broken. So in the resource case, the old model of declining resource prices was broken and a new, very different era had begun. Similarly, the odds of three such disastrous years together are just too high to be easily believed and the much safer assumption is that the old weather model is broken and a new era of rising temperature and more severe droughts and floods is upon us. All-time heat records in cities across the world are falling like flies and the months of March through May this year were the hottest in U.S. history.”

Bill Gates also just linked to THIS article on his Twitter page.

If the pictures of those towering wildfires in Colorado haven't convinced you, or the size of your AC bill this summer, here are some hard numbers about climate change: June broke or tied 3,215 high-temperature records across the United States. That followed the warmest May on record for the Northern Hemisphere – the 327th consecutive month in which the temperature of the entire globe exceeded the 20th-century average, the odds of which occurring by simple chance were 3.7 x 10-99, a number considerably larger than the number of stars in the universe.

Meteorologists reported that this spring was the warmest ever recorded for our nation – in fact, it crushed the old record by so much that it represented the "largest temperature departure from average of any season on record." The same week, Saudi authorities reported that it had rained in Mecca despite a temperature of 109 degrees, the hottest downpour in the planet's history.

Not that our leaders seemed to notice. Last month the world's nations, meeting in Rio for the 20th-anniversary reprise of a massive 1992 environmental summit, accomplished nothing. Unlike George H.W. Bush, who flew in for the first conclave, Barack Obama didn't even attend. It was "a ghost of the glad, confident meeting 20 years ago," the British journalist George Monbiot wrote; no one paid it much attention, footsteps echoing through the halls "once thronged by multitudes." Since I wrote one of the first books for a general audience about global warming way back in 1989, and since I've spent the intervening decades working ineffectively to slow that warming, I can say with some confidence that we're losing the fight, badly and quickly – losing it because, most of all, we remain in denial about the peril that human civilization is in.

When we think about global warming at all, the arguments tend to be ideological, theological and economic. But to grasp the seriousness of our predicament, you just need to do a little math. For the past year, an easy and powerful bit of arithmetical analysis first published by financial analysts in the U.K. has been making the rounds of environmental conferences and journals, but it hasn't yet broken through to the larger public. This analysis upends most of the conventional political thinking about climate change. And it allows us to understand our precarious – our almost-but-not-quite-finally hopeless – position with three simple numbers.