Michael Oppenheimer: Avoiding 2C Warming "Is Now Totally Unrealistic" - Atlantic

[hatrack]

EDIT

Robinson Meyer: You’ve been involved in climate diplomacy for a long, long time. How are you feeling today?

Michael Oppenheimer: I’m upset and troubled—as I rarely am, because I’ve been involved in this issue for 35 years. I’ve seen a lot of ups and downs, but this is the most discouraging. It is more discouraging than when George W. Bush withdrew from the Kyoto Protocol. The reality is the clock has been ticking all this time, all those 35 years the clock has been ticking. And because the clock has been ticking, Earth is already a degree warmer than it would otherwise have been. We don’t have much time to avoid the two degrees of warming that would destabilize ice sheets, entail extreme heatwaves, and potentially undermine food security. And this decision is just enough to push us over the edge, in my view. I think it’s totally unrealistic now to believe that we are going to meet that objective.

So in a personal way, for someone who has worked on the issue for decades, this more so than any other setback seems to indicate that it’s highly unlikely that we can make the two-degree goal. The Trump action pushed us over the edge, and basically Trump owns the responsibility now for this problem.

Meyer: Do you think it’s the withdrawal from Paris that puts us over the edge? The Trump administration has already cancelled a lot of the Obama programs to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions—are those more important?

Oppenheimer: No, I don’t think that cancelling domestic regulations will actually have as much effect as the withdrawal from Paris could. I am fairly confident it’s going to discourage some other countries from being aggressive in their commitments.

The two do go together, they’re of a piece. But, in fact, there is no immediate effect from some of the work the Trump administration has done on the Obama regulations. Because you can’t just cancel them. Even with the Clean Power Plan—if the courts determine that the plan is legal, then it will take years for the adminstration to rewrite it. They can slow down implementation but they can’t eliminate it. Also, a lot of the momentum in the markets—in terms of low prices for solar and wind and natural gas—is going to continue, no matter what. But the point is: All that wasn’t enough. We needed a ratcheting up of stringency over the next decade or so, if we were going to be assured of meeting the U.S. plan under Paris—and certainly if we wanted to go beyond that and keep decreasing emissions at an accelerating pace.

EDIT

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/06/oppenheimer-interview/529083/

[hatrack]

1. Don't usually self-kick, but this snippet was right on the money:

Oppenheimer: Let me frame that by saying that the speech Trump made yesterday was about Kyoto. He wasn’t talking about Paris. I don’t think there was one thing about Paris.

Meyer: Yeah, it was all these recycled arguments that actually applied to Kyoto.

Oppenheimer: It’s all bullshit. That’s all there is to it. But it was a speech that could have been written—that was written—by industrial lobbyists twenty years ago. It was the same criticism they made of Kyoto, but Paris is entirely different than Kyoto.

For Paris, the world’s countries had finally gotten together in a framework that had allowed each, in their own way, to find a pathway to reducing their greenhouse-gas emissions. All the important emitters had indicated that they were willing and eager to do so. And that was a major step forward, because previously—in the UN Framework Convention or the Kyoto Protocol—significant emitters were either left out of having any obligations, or they clearly weren’t serious in what they would do. But [Paris] had a level of seriousness that was credible.

[Kittycow]

2. ..

[Binkie The Clown]

3. Natural Selection: A species too dumb to save itself WILL perish.

The most optimistic scenario I see is for a few humans to survive here and there in scattered hunter-gatherer bands, but civilization is toast.

[hunter]

5. Always Coming Home, by Ursula K. Le Guin, is set in such a world.

It's an optimistic book too, not the usual post apocalypse survival grunge. (Of course you have to overlook a history where billions of people died and the oceans swallowed up major cities.) The people of Le Guin's world see our lost civilization as a bit of a mystery. Why did they destroy themselves?

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/201901.Always_Coming_Home

[diva77]

4. K&R

[pscot]

6. We were going to crack 2 C anyway

I have never really believed in the efficacy of the Paris agreement. No doubt it was the best that could be achieved, given the economic forces leagued against it, but it seemed more like a noble gesture than an effective policy declaration; sort of a bureaucratic forlorn hope . What Trump has done has applied 440 volts to the climate "debate". He's not going to last much longer and push back against what he's done has created greater public awareness than the Paris agreement itself. Ten years from now will either the Trump Presidency or the Paris accords be reflected in the climate data? I'm skeptical. Climate change is like a train. It runs on rails. To change direction we need to lay new track. Paris doesn't do that, in my opinion.