You can make a difference to the hurt being caused by climate chaos and the great extinction event, in your town or your city! How? Reuse, repurpose, and recycle this information.
This is the letter for week 60 of a weekly climate strike that went on for 4 years in front of San Francisco City Hall, beginning early March 2019. For more context, see this story. For an annotated table of contents to see topics for all the strike letters, see this story. Meanwhile…
STRIKE FOR THE PLANET
Because it turns out the models were overly optimistic.
So this week’s topic is SCOPE.
What was wrong with the models?
Clouds.
The prime indicator of climate risk is climate sensitivity — how sensitive the climate is to added carbon. For the last 40 years, the models have shown that doubling pre-industrial CO2 levels (from 280 ppm to 560 ppm) would raise the average global temperature 3°C. This was the worst-case with mitigation scenario, and what the IPCC was trying to avoid.
A 3°C average global temperature increase is very bad. It means 1-4 billion people will suffer water shortages1, food production will drop significantly, killer urban heat waves will increase, the number and area of droughts and wildfires will increase, the number of refugees will increase, global economic systems will see massive disruption, and ice and permafrost will melt (raising the ocean level and releasing methane, a potent greenhouse gas in its own right).2
But in the last year and a half, evidence has been accumulating that the net effect of clouds on climate was underestimated in the models. This has led to reworking the models and now there’s a growing consensus that we’re looking at a worse-case with mitigation increase of 5°C. A 5°C average temperature increase is not survivable.3
Why am I telling you this?
Because adaptation and mitigation only work if you’re taking action sufficient to the scope of the problem.
Examples of superficial actions that ignore the scope of a problem are:
- treating a gangrenous leg by trimming the toe nails,
- fighting a house fire with a plant mister, or
- sheltering from a hurricane in the basket of a hot air balloon.
These are all insufficient responses to the problems presented.
Methane (natural gas, CH4), a greenhouse gas in its own right that also produces CO2 (another greenhouse gas) when combusted, is clearly a lose/lose actor in climate change. It is not necessary and it is destructive. We have to stop drilling for, making pipelines for, building for, and using methane, period.4, 5
So why are you only getting rid of methane infrastructure in some government buildings that are going to be built or drastically remodeled?6 Why are you clipping the toenails and not treating the gangrene? Gangrene will kill you. Methane will kill us. Why aren’t you acting sufficient to the scope of the danger?
Eliminating methane infrastructure only from new or rebuilt city buildings is like telling the citizens, as a pandemic descends on us, that you’re going to distribute 1 square of tissue to every 10th person. It will help a little, but it will not stop or slow the pandemic. It is action, but it is action that is insufficient to the scope of the problem.
When the coronavirus pandemic started here, you shut everything down for a disease with an estimated 5.5% mortality rate.7 The fight to preserve a habitable planet is a fight for all of our lives. So what are you waiting for? Why are you not taking big actions? In the face of 5°C, why are you clipping toenails?
Why aren’t you terrified? Why aren’t you acting like your life depends on what you do about this today? Because it does. And mine does, too.
You must act now.
- Implement countywide blackwater recycling;
- Plant an SF native urban forest with green pathways for plants and animals throughout the city;
- Move immediately to all electric and clean energy transportation, and shutting down some roads to car traffic permanently now;
- Eliminate all single-use plastics in SF and move toward eliminating all plastics that are not reusable, locally recyclable, and biologically safe;
- Immediately require all local, carbon-neutral or carbon-negative energy — eliminating all methane heating and cooking and assisting fireplace-to-electric heating; and
- Focus everything on making SF resilient and self-sufficient.
Remember the countdown I’ve been providing at the end of every strike letter? For instance, this would have been 28 weeks left in which to start big actions?8, 9 Well, it turns out that was overly optimistic. There is NO time left at all. You must act now!
FOOTNOTES
1. Catherine Brahic. “The impacts of rising global temperatures”. NewScientist. 2 February 2007. https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11089-the-impacts-of-rising-global-temperatures/.
2. Renee Lewis. “As UN says world to warm by 3 degrees, scientists explain what that means”. Al Jazeera America. 23 September 2015. http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/9/23/climate-change-effects-from-a-3-c-world.html.
3. Jonathan Watts. “Climate worst-case scenarios may not go far enough, cloud data show”. The Guardian. 13 June 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jun/13/climate-worst-case-scenarios-clouds-scientists-global-heating. Read the entire article. It’s a preview of one of the big issues that will be in the 6th UN IPCC assessment.
4. Gayathri Vaidyanathan. “How Bad of a Greenhouse Gas Is Methane?” Scientific American. 22 December 2015. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-bad-of-a-greenhouse-gas-is-methane/.
5. Erica Gies. “Landfills Have A Huge Greenhouse Gas Problem. Here’s What We Can Do About It.” Ensia. 25 October 2016. https://ensia.com/features/methane-landfills/.
6. Mallory Moench. “SF bans natural gas in new city buildings, plans all construction ban”. San Francisco Chronicle. 19 January 2020. https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/SF-bans-natural-gas-in-new-city-buildings-may-14984899.php.
7. “United States COVID-19 Statistics”. Covid USA. 17 June 2020. https://covidusa.net.
8. See the Action Timeline in the report in “Only 11 Years Left to Prevent Irreversible Damage from Climate Change, Speakers Warn during General Assembly High-Level Meeting”. United Nations. 28 march 2019. https://www.un.org/press/en/2019/ga12131.doc.htm.
9. Paula Murray. “We’ve 10 years to save the seas or life on earth will become impossible”. Express. 23 December 2018. https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1062990/environment-plastic-pollution-Sir-David-Attenborough-seas-earth.