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Recent Reports Signal a Climate Crisis -- When Will Government Act?

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The same is true in the southern hemisphere, where Australia suffered an intense heat wave in January, while its wildfire season now starts earlier, is longer, and is more devastating. Experts confirm these effects to be long term in a new joint report: The climate has warmed 1C since 1910; the sea levels around the country are rising; stream-flow patterns in the country are changing; and rainfall has decreased except in Northern Australia. "Australia is experiencing climate change now ..." is the blunt appraisal from the director of the climate science center at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), which issued the report jointly with the Bureau of Meteorology.

The U.S. 'National Climate Assessment' last November did not mince words when it reported, "The evidence of human-caused climate change is overwhelming ... the impacts of climate change are intensifying across the country." The report is mandated by Congress and affirmed by science agencies of the government. President Trump, who religiously opposes climate change believing it to be a natural phenomenon that will reverse itself also naturally, had a brief response: "I do not believe it." About the report's estimated economic impacts, Sarah Sanders, his press secretary, claimed the report was "not based on facts." The "facts" on which the Trump administration reached its conclusions have not been released.

Sadly their indifference is not harmless because when the US changes tack on climate action, it gives other countries leeway to do the same. China has slackened and Brazil's newly elected president, Jair Bolsonaro, has promised to open more of the Amazon rain forest for development reversing its CO2 capture into more CO2 emission. CO2 happens to be the most sensitive gas to the heat-radiation wavelengths reflected back from earth, sending more back to earth.

All this at a time when the UN-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its latest report last October setting off alarms. Comprising the work of hundreds of the world's leading climate scientists, it predicts a grim future and a narrowing window of action. Labeled the 1.5C report, it looks at a 1.5-degree Celsius rise in mean global temperature from preindustrial levels. We are already experiencing the effects of being 1 degree above, and according to the report should reach the 1.5C level by 2030 to 2052. It leaves a 12-year window to act before the process becomes self-sustaining and uncontrollable.

Even at 1.5C above, 70-90 percent of the world's sea corals would be lost; the Arctic sea ice in fast retreat threatening polar bears and raising sea levels; and with higher ocean temperatures worse severe storms, rain and flooding. A safer move would be to start removing CO2 from the atmosphere, perhaps even now. Certainly the Paris agreement, holding temperature increase to 2C, is no longer a viable alternative if we do not wish to leave behind a raging planet to our children and grandchildren.

Carbon capture from the atmosphere is difficult and expensive. Climeworks, a Swiss startup, has a pilot project outside Reykjavik, Iceland, removing 50 tons of CO2 a year. For perspective, about a trillion tons are expected to be emitted by 2100, while researchers limit the potential for direct air capture (DACCS) at the most to 5 billion tons per year or about a quarter of the emissions. The cost also is high at $100 to $300 per ton, and it requires considerable energy usage -- a 300- to 500-megawatt power plant to remove a million tons annually reports Scientific American (January 2019).

Another alternative might be to remove it at the source. That means at power stations and factories, and there are claims of new and more affordable processes offering hope. However, most carbon emission comes from transportation, and it points to a future of electric cars using electricity from CO2 scrubbed power stations.

That is also the thesis of Greg Ballard's newly released book, "Less Oil or More Caskets." The book's title refers to the human and military cost of protecting the free flow of oil. A former Marine Lt. Colonel and two-term Republican mayor of Indianapolis, he is a long-term advocate of electric cars and rapid-transit electric buses, the latter underway in Indianapolis. He even managed to secure federal grants despite Trump's opposition, proving both that Trump is not unassailable and some Republicans are seeing the light.


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Arshad M Khan is a former Professor. Educated at King's College London, Oklahoma State University and the University of Chicago, he has a multidisciplinary background that has frequently informed his research. He was elected a Fellow of the (more...)
 
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