Nutshell

Excerpts from Time to Derail Fossil Fuel Train, Energy Agency Warns, Stephen Leahy, IPS (with links added by ecoSanity)

Countries have chained themselves to a fossil fuel train that is headed straight off a cliff, warns the International Energy Agency (IEA).

Without a bold change of policy direction, the world will lock itself into an insecure, inefficient and high-carbon energy system, the IEA said Wednesday in London on the release of the 2011 World Energy Outlook.

...the conservative IEA called for urgent action by governments to massively shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy and boost energy efficiency. Without a major shift in priorities in the next five years, there will be enough fossil fuel infrastructure in place to guarantee a two-degree C rise in temperatures, it warned...

..."Delaying action is a false economy," the World Energy Outlook report emphasises. Every dollar of investment in cleaner technology before 2020 avoids the need to spend an additional 4.30 dollars after 2020 to compensate for the increased emissions, it said.

No climate scientist considers a two-degree C temperature increase "safe". In fact, many experts, along with more than 100 countries, want overall global warming to be limited to less than 1.5 degrees C.

The burning of fossil fuels has already pushed the global average temp 0.8 C higher, triggering a number of documented large- scale changes, including record numbers of extreme weather events, record melt of Arctic sea ice, spring arriving two to four weeks earlier, and much more.

The IEA's urgent recommendations come on the heels of a U.S. Department of Energy announcement last week that global carbon emissions jumped six percent in 2010, the biggest increase ever. That puts the world on the road to a worst case scenario of six degrees C of global warming by 2100.

Below is a re-post of an essential -- and brief(!) -- Guardian article, Models Guiding Climate Policy are 'Dangerously Optimistic, by Nadya Anscombe for environmentsearchweb.  Additional links and bolding added for emphasis by ecoSanity.

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Integrated assessment models (IAMs) used by researchers today – where climate change data is integrated with economic data – are dangerously flawed because they are based on naïve assumptions, according to Kevin Anderson from the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change at the University of Manchester, UK.

Dennis Bushnell is the chief scientist at the NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia.  Below are excerpts from an article he wrote for THE FUTURIST magazine, with links added by eco-S for this post.

Original article: Conquering the Climate Crisis, Dennis Bushnell, THE FUTURIST

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At 2:20 into the above video of a speech by President Mohamed Nasheed of the Maldives (Islands) at the UN Climate Summit in New York on Sept. 22, 2009, the threat posed by the impacts of climate change (breakdown, destabilization) to the ability of his people to survive, and the weight of his profound anguish, becomes clear.

 

[With essential content submitted by ecoSanity.org Kindred Defender, Dr. Peter D. Carter]
 

"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."
~ Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi ~
 

• Proviso
• Essential Statement by Sir Nicholas Stern
• Insanities of Note
• 3 Musts
• Essential March 2009 'Emergency' Climate Conference Article Excerpts

PROVISO

As a world community, we don't know the full potential of what we COULD do to bring our terrible atmospheric greenhouse gas levels down because we have not yet begun to try on a massive scale.  For 15 years, world powers have delayed serious action to curtail the rise and acceleration of global emissions, and similar forces are at it again in the lead up to the crucial, December 2009, climate conference in Copenhagen.

But if the world DID try, as if the survival of our species and most other life depended on it, multiple renewable energy and carbon cutting 'miracles' would, no doubt, be discovered.

As we continue to expose the inadequate and suicidal lack of proportional response to the latest, unnerving greenhouse data, we must take care not to underestimate the potential carbon cutting options that may surface once we commit our collective abilities to the task.

ESSENTIAL STATEMENT BY SIR NICHOLAS STERN

[The former chief economist for the World Bank and author of the 2006 Stern Review: The Economics of Climate Change] said new research done in the past two or three years had made it clear there were "severe risks" if global temperature rose by the predicted +4 ºC to +7 ºC by 2100.  Agriculture would be destroyed and life would be impossible over much of the planet... ~ Lord Stern on global warming: It's even worse than I thought, The Independent, Michael McCarthy, March 13, 2009