[Coral-List] 1.5 C not plausible anymore

[Douglas Fenner]

    It is pretty widely recognized that climate change, particularly global
warming, is the greatest single threat to the future of coral reefs, so
this discussion is relevant.  It is true that there are many other things
people do that damage reefs, from major impacts to very minor impacts, and
some people disagree with the statement that climate change is the greatest
threat, and they are entitled to their views and we need to hear them as
well.

    Several points.  1. stopping global warming isn't just due to
people who aren't well informed, it is more due to people who are active
deniers, at least in the US.  But you are correct that the public and
particularly probably business, are fearful of the costs of taking action.
But those costs are minor compared to the costs of inaction.

2. Population is NOT the cause of global warming.  It is a contributor,
when combined with high consumption of things produced with energy from
fossil fuels, and other things that contribute less to global warming.
India with 1.3 billion people, has been a minor contributor to global
warming, it has released only a small amount of CO2, particularly compared
to the largest emitter, USA with "only" 330 million people.  It is the size
of the economy (roughly) that causes global warming.  (obviously, the size
of the total economy depends on both the number of people and the size of
the economy per person.  They multiply each other.

3. Not "every" activity humans engage in is a contributor to global
warming, some actually go against it, such as aerosol emissions, and many
actions are very tiny contributors or near neutral, like walking.  Which is
why countries like India with huge populations but low income, have not
contributed significantly to global warming.

4. I have no quarrel with your point about the need to reduce meat in
people's diets.

     *First*, the problem getting action is not just people who don't care
to get themselves informed.  There is a large and influential block in the
US at least, which follow a smaller group that are often called "climate
change deniers," based on what they advocate.  They regularly produce and
disseminate disinformation about climate change, including some outright
lies, and they know perfectly well what they are doing (though their
followers are generally not willing to admit what they are doing).  There
is hard evidence that fossil fuel companies have financed such people and
are likely continuing to do it.  The companies do it in secret, going to
significant efforts to cover it up.  They do it because they make huge
profits.  Profits at the expense of humanity's future.  Like the people
flooded in Kentucky, and nearly the entire country of Pakistan flooded (but
who gives a flip what happens to the people of Pakistan?) and the forest
fires of the US west and Australia and elsewhere, which have burned
thousands of houses to the ground and thousands of square miles of forests,
killing people and putting more CO2 and deadly air pollution into the air.
And heat waves now kill more people than all other weather events
combined.  And so on.
     OK, *second*.  You shame people for "harping on and on" about
inequality as a cause of climate change.  Really?  Who "harps on and on"
about population as the cause of climate change??  If population was the
true sole cause, there are two countries that have about 4 times as much
population as the third largest country.   I'm talking, of course, about
China and India, each of which have about 1.3 billion people, and the US is
third with 330 million.  So if population is the cause, then China and
India are the prime causes of global warming and climate change, and the US
should be about 1/6th as big a contributor than the two of them together.
However, in fact, the USA has released, over history, twice as much total
CO2 as the number two country, China, and India isn't even in the running.
Yes, China is currently releasing about twice as much per year as the USA.
But the physics of heat capture by CO2 depends on how much CO2 is in the
atmosphere, NOT on the current rate of release.  And how much is in the
atmosphere depends on how much has been released over history, because CO2
has a very long lifetime in the atmosphere, in the thousands of years.  It
IS true that CO2 isn't the only cause of warming.  Methane, nitrogen
oxides, HFC's and several other gases are also contributors, with methane
being No. 2 I believe and having a much shorter lifespan in the
atmosphere.  So for methane, the rate of release is an important factor,
but it is not the number one cause, CO2 is.  I have not seen data, but I
suspect that if the UK and EU were considered as a single country, it might
be up near the US in total CO2 release over time.  The reason the US and
EU + UK are at the top of the list is that they had the industrial
revolution first.  Think of burning coal to power factories and heat homes,
and cities black with soot from burning coal and "London fog" killing
people because it was actually coal smoke full of toxic chemicals.
"NorthAmerica and Europe have contributed 62% of carbon dioxide emissions
since the Industrial Revolution, whereas Africa has contributed only 3%."
http://press.psprings.co.uk/bmj/october/climatecop27.pdf
       So, if population was the primary or sole cause of global warming,
India and China would be the culprits, but they are NOT.  The USA has to
look in the mirror, the USA (and perhaps Europe and UK) are the leading
contributors, they are the cause.  How come???  Because of the industrial
revolution and burning fossil fuels at high rates to power the industrial
revolution started earlier and so has been going on over a longer period
and so has released a larger total amount of CO2.
        *Last point*.  NO, it is not "everything that everybody does" that
causes global warming and climate change.  In fact, there are activities
that humans engage in that do the opposite.  Such as planting trees, and
releasing large amounts of aerosols into the atmosphere, primarily SO2.
Ironically, the SO2 comes primarily from burning coal.  And it blocks and
reflects radiation and so works to cool the earth (it is also toxic air
pollution and causes "acid rain").  Planting trees may be a relatively
small thing compared to burning fossil fuels, but it also works to reduce
global warming as trees absorb CO2 and store it in tree trunk wood.
         "Consumption" is an imperfect shorthand for the activities that
cause global warming, of which there are quite a few in addition to burning
fossil fuels, though burning fossil fuels gets the attention because it is
by far the largest.  But there are activities that humans engage in that
don't contribute much to global warming.  In countries that do not have
developed economies, most of the population's activities contribute very
little to global warming.  Until recently, that was the case with India and
China, which is why, even though China is currently by far the world's
largest CO2 emitter, it has contributed only about half as much as the US
added up over time.  What people DO is a VERY important factor in producing
global warming.  And in low-income countries, what people do contributes
only tiny amounts to global warming.  The culprit is NOT population alone,
it is population COMBINED with developed economies that are built largely
on fossil fuel burning that provides the large amounts of energy consumed,
for electricity, transportation, producing clothing, much of which is
discarded, and a zillion other things.  Part of the problem is that it is
not just one sector of developed economies, it is lots of different
sectors.  It would be easier to correct if it was just one thing, but it is
not.
       You are correct, that what the majority of people do that may
contribute to global warming is more important than the personal activities
of the very wealthy, simply because the middle class in developed
countries, and the lower class in developing countries, are far more
numerous than the ultra-wealthy.  We agree that there is a problem with
gross inequality.  I would also suggest that the ultra-wealthy, in their
ownership of large companies and corporations, and in their visibility in
the media and great ability to influence governments, have an outside
influence on the policies and actions of large corporations, governments
and entire countries, which DO have huge influence over how energy is
generated and whether fossil fuels continue to be burned in vast quantities
and whether the populations move to more sustainable lifestyles.  The
ultra-rich do have significant responsibilities in whether the world
continues business as usual, or moves to be more sustainable.  Not everyone
does the same things, including among the ultra-rich, I'm thinking of one
owner of the largest electric vehicle company (Tesla) and probably one of
the world's largest rechargeable battery manufacturers.  But one thing is
clear, and that is the poor of the world are NOT the cause of global
warming and climate change, nor is population alone, India being a prime
example.  And the people of developing countries have as much right to
prosperity as those in rich countries.  The presently rich countries used
cheap fossil fuels to develop, which now the developing countries such as
China and India are using for rapid development, and it is great that they
are lifting vast numbers of people out of poverty.  And both those
countries have very ambitious programs to build renewable energy.  And do
the wealthy countries have the right to tell the poor countries that they
can't develop using fossil fuels like the wealthy countries did?  "Don't do
as we did"?  But for everybody's sake, all countries have to move to
renewable energy as fast as possible.  As for people in the US who don't
have to pay income tax, many or most of those are within what in the world
as a whole is the middle class (or higher), and they ARE contributors to
global warming, as most of them own vehicles almost all of which burn
fossil fuels, and they consume electricity the majority of which is
produced from burning fossil fuels, they heat their houses, and so on.
They are not homeless and living on the streets, most are lower middle
income people, sometimes called the "working class.".
        So speaking of harping on and on, readers will remember that I've
long harped on and on that population is not the sole cause, that
"consumption" is also a cause, and it is only when the two are combined
that the largest contributions occur to climate change and global warming,
namely by the USA and probably Europe.  I also have been harping on and on
that there is NO ethical way to reduce populations fast enough to save
coral reefs (and people from floods, fires, stronger hurricanes, heat waves
that kill people, etc, you know, trivial little things).  But since some
people don't seem to want to face up to these realities, when I see things
posted that look to me to be untrue or misleading, I feel compelled to try
to set the story straight.  But I am guilty of harping on and on, I admit.
If things that distort reality are no longer posted, I will happily stop
harping on and on about these things.
       We need solutions.  You say that the UN goal is not to impoverish
the rich countries but to lift the poor countries out of poverty.  I agree
with that.  You correctly point out that will increase consumption, and I'd
be willing to guess that would increase consumption greatly.  So what is
the solution??  Endless harping about population, even though family sizes
now have dropped drastically and there is no ethical way to reduce
population quickly?.  World population will take care of itself, peaking
and then going down, but that will happen much too slowly.  The only
solution is to make consumption MUCH MORE SUSTAINABLE.  Generate
electricity without burning fossil fuels.  Move transportation from using
fossil fuels to using electricity and/or hydrogen.  Not cheap or easy.  But
less expensive than having the world on fire, flooded, and roasted to death.
      My understanding is that solar and wind are now less expensive than
fossil fuels, and the trend is for that to continue and amplify in the
future.  Fossil fuels will be phased out whether we like it or not.  But if
we don't take action, it won't happen fast enough, and global warming
without rapid fossil fuel reduction and some other changes to be more
sustainable, is a very scary future.  I agree that people and countries
have not been doing enough.  That's obvious.  I do think, however, it is
not hopeless, there are some positive signs, one of which is that the US
Congress has passed a bill and the president signed it, to do far more than
the US has been willing to do in the past.  It is a significant change in
the right direction.  More will have to be done, and other countries will
have to do more.  Not just promise more, but actually DO more.  Things that
are effective, not just window dressing and greenwashing.  But it will be
critical what China does, as it is currently the world's largest CO2
emitter, emitting twice what the US emits.  It CAN be done, let's get it
done!
       If I am factually incorrect about some things, please, DO correct me
here, publically.  It is vastly more important to have people understand
reality than to protect my ego from criticism, in the broad scale of things
that doesn't matter at all.
       Cheers, Doug

On Sun, Oct 23, 2022 at 2:24 AM Alina Szmant via Coral-List <
coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov> wrote:

> Hello Peter , Franziska et al:
>
> I would like to add to your posts. The fact that there is zero chance to
> keep global warming below +1.5  oC is way long gone (aren't we near +1.4
> oC  already?). I think it is well recognized by most scientists who care to
> be informed, including many well informed non-scientists (tough to reach
> the people who are uninformed because they don't care and have no interest
> in becoming informed). Thus I am not clear who your intended audience is.
> And as I have expressed so many times before on Coral List, I have no hope
> that humanity at large has the will to make the sacrifices essential to
> keep warming below +3 oC.
>
> Peter indirectly alluded to one of them which I will address directly, and
> I will elaborate on a second major one.
>
> Human overpopulation (along with people everywhere wanting a reasonable
> standard of living) is the primary cause of climate change. Climate change
> is much more than fossil fuel burning for energy producing green house
> gasses (GHG). It is the sum of all activities that every human alive
> undertakes in daily life, some consuming more than others. Many on Coral
> List harp away about some people consuming more than others, and the need
> for social justice in consumption (basically wealthy people and nations
> consuming less). But the United Nations Millennial Goals are not to
> impoverish the majority of humanity but rather improve the standards of
> living of the billions of people living in poverty, which by necessity will
> lead to much more consumption. The super-rich billionaires with mega yachts
> etc are very few, only 3811 worldwide. There are another 6% globally who
> are millionaires,  which is less than 5 million out of 8,000 million, about
> 0.0625 % of humanity. While there is certainly much
>   unfairness in the distribution of wealth that needs work to correct from
> a fairness and ethical standpoint, that's not the reason for climate
> change. In the US, over 40 % of the population lives at levels that are not
> luxurious by any means, so low an income that they don't even pay taxes
> (the infamous 47 % that Mitt Romney referred to when he was running for US
> president). The average per household income per capita was $36,000 in 2021
> and life on the US is expensive compared to many countries. Over 50 % of
> HOUSEHOLDS (families) had less than $75,000 per year to spend on basics
> which is not a lot of consuming at US prices when that income has to cover
> food, housing, transportation, education and clothing. There are only a few
> % (less than 5 %) of the US population who earn more than $450,000 per
> year. So excess consumption, while uneven among income groups and nations,
> is not the main cause of anthropogenic climate change. It's the sum total
> of all the activities by the increasing
>   number of humans on Earth. The cutting down of trees to make charcoal or
> grow crops for people to eat. The conversion of land to growing food for
> cattle and other food livestock. The deforestation to build more houses and
> cities for the increasing urban populations. Few leaders or organizations
> have the guts to tackle this problem head on. So we are doomed.  Even Peter
> gently side-stepped the issue.
>
> Couple that with the energy costs of maintaining a global society that
> reasonably resembles what the millennial goals want to provide for even
> human being. A recent book by Dr. Mark Rowlands, a professor of Philosophy
> at the University of Miami titled "World on Fire: humans, animals and the
> future of the planet" makes the case, based on the Energy Return on
> Investment (EROI), that unless humanity gives up meat and dairy (i.e.
> becomes a global vegan community) there isn't a way to generate enough
> energy to support all of the energy required to support a global humanity
> of 8 billion people and counting with a stand of living "reasonable
> recognized as our own".  He calculates the true energy yield for every type
> of fossil fuel and renewable resource and reports that the energy yields of
> fossil fuels have decreased because of the increasing complexity and cost
> of obtaining this kind of energy from gas, oil, coal, given that the easy
> deposits have been exhausted and more difficult and ene
>  rgetically costly sources have to be exploited. Use of fossil fuels
> releases CO2 and other GHGs, which have to be eliminated to prevent further
> climate change and global warming. Given the need to include in the true
> cost of using fossil fuels the cost of carbon capture and sequestration
> (CCS, when/if it becomes available, prohibitively expensive right now),
> fossil fuels are now less able to provide the energy needs to fuel human
> society. He also does the calculations for the various types of renewables
> and nuclear, including the costs of producing and consuming each, and none
> of them can support the energy needs to maintain a "society reasonable
> recognized as ours". I'm not going into the details of his 237 page book,
> but his message is that industrial production and consumption of animal
> meats has been calculated to be responsible for up to 40 % of climate
> change and global warming depending on how the calculation is made, plus
> it's the major cause of deforestation and loss of wil
>  derness and wildlife. He proposes this is the easiest low-hanging food
> and easiest to switch off for humanity to control climate change. He wrote
> that switching to a vegan diet would release up to 60 % of land now used
> for animal agriculture for rewilding. By afforesting all of the excess land
> now used for rearing cattle and other meat animals, the trees grown on this
> rewilded land would provide a cheap and natural means of CCS and help
> counter global warming and climate change.  But giving up eating meat and
> dairy is seen as too big of a sacrifice to protect the planet and our
> future by most people. Even the recent ICRS meeting that tried so hard to
> be climate friendly included dairy in most of its lunch options and served
> sausages at the banquet. So I don't have much hope humanity will embrace
> this idea either.
>
> Coral reefs are not isolated from the rest of the biomes on Earth, and
> there is no way to save the part without saving the whole. Humans are to0
> self-involved and stuck on their ways to have much hope for the future.
> Cleaning up toxic waste discharge, or reducing eutrophication, out-planting
> coral nubbins, etc, are just band aids on a victim that's bleeding to
> death.  Not a hopeful outlook I know but just wishing for optimism is
> sticking one's head in the proverbial sand.
>
> Alina Szmant
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Coral-List <coral-list-bounces at coral.aoml.noaa.gov> On Behalf Of
> Peter Sale via Coral-List
> Sent: Wednesday, October 19, 2022 3:12 PM
> To: coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov
> Cc: franziskaelmer at hotmail.com
> Subject: Re: [Coral-List] 1.5 C not plausible anymore
>
> To: CoraL-LIST
> Thank you, Franziska Elmer for reminding us that the world is not heading
> towards 1.5 degrees and that doing so is (or is rapidly becoming) an
> impossibility.
>
> Over past decades, the coral reef community has tried doom and gloom.  And
> it has tried ocean optimism.  Neither approach has led to significant
> change in perspectives and action on the global environmental crisis.  Yes,
> lots of people have worked locally, or joined the global conversation, in
> an effort to change where we are headed, but little change has been
> achieved.  We have not even lowered the rate of increase in the
> concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere.
>
> I support signing the letter as Franziska suggests.  But I also think it
> is time for a new approach to communicating what we know of the likely
> future of this planet - a planet without any functional coral reefs and
> degraded in many other ways besides.  That new approach is called telling
> the whole truth, rather than just parts of the truth, or sugar-coated parts
> of the truth.
>
> The whole truth, in my view, is that we have been deluding ourselves,
> since well before the days of the Rio Declaration, that it would be
> possible for an ever-increasing number of humans to raise their level of
> prosperity towards median advanced nation norms in an environmentally
> sustainable way.  This was not possible in 1992 and it is even less
> possible in 2022.  The extent to which we have already degraded the natural
> world is substantial.  The fact that we are eliminating coral reefs very
> rapidly through a combination of actions - warming of the planet,
> overfishing, inappropriate coastal management and pollution are the most
> egregious - is just the most conspicuous of many deleterious impacts.
> These broader impacts range from deforestation, land use capture by
> agriculture, urbanization, over-production of biologically accessible
> nitrogen, and massive removal of glacial ice reserves to a whole host of
> other slights, such as the immense shift of biomass and energy flow into
> humans
>   and their handful of food organisms.
>
> Even if we rapidly transition away from use of fossil fuels, our
> degradation of the planet in these many other ways will continue.  As we
> simplify the natural world, we erode its capacity to be resilient and
> continue to supply the goods and services that sustain human life.  To
> pretend that we can address all these threats while also ensuring a march
> towards heightened quality of life for a rapidly growing number of us, and
> do this with only modest changes to lifestyles of those of us already
> fortunate enough to live on more than $2 per day has to be denounced as
> perhaps the biggest lie out there.  A lie in which those of us struggling
> to articulate the need to live within the means of the planet are (almost)
> as complicit as those others of us who maintain that the state of the
> planetary system is irrelevant to human progress.
>
> I personally believe there is still a lot that humanity can do to lessen
> the impact of the Anthropocene.  But we will not get very far until we
> recognize that we and all other creatures share this planet and depend on
> it for our survival.  With that recognition, perhaps, we can mount the kind
> of all-out, global attack on the environmental crisis that has to happen,
> and which shows no signs of happening by itself.
>
> Peter Sale
> University of Windsor (emeritus)
> sale at uwindsor.ca<mailto:sale at uwindsor.ca<mailto:sale at uwindsor.ca<mailto:
> sale at uwindsor.ca>>
> www.petersalebooks.com<http://www.petersalebooks.com/<
> http://www.petersalebooks.com<http://www.petersalebooks.com/>>
>
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