Climate change - ACTION

It is now without doubt that climate change is underway, and will continue unless we stop (yes stop) using more CO2 producing fossil fuels! They have to be left in the ground - whereas the industry is spending £600B yr trying to extract more… and the capital of these companies makes up a lot of the investments in your pension fund…



The recent IPCC report uses four scenarios they call RCPs. (RCP2.6, 4.5, 6.0 & 8.5). These are named according to the "forcing" scenarios, i.e. how much of the agents that cause warming actually come about. The positive forcing agents are CO2 emissions, CH4 (methane) emissions, Halo-carbons and NO2; of which CO2 is the biggest, closely followed by CH4. Overall the total radiative forcing upwards has gone like this by 1950, 1980 & 2011:



So things are going from bad to worse, quickly. Putting it another way these are the contributors:



Here's what is happening:

1 Arctic sea ice melting, adding to sea level rise



2 Increase in CO2 due to fossil fuel emissions:



3 Land and ocean surface temperature rise as a result of forcing



4 Ocean CO2 & pH fall, killing off all sea life from corals to fish:



5 Sea level change due to thermal expansion and ice melting (poles and glaciers):



6 Heating of the oceans - much more energy is stored in oceans than in the air, so it is much more important to look at sea heat content than air temperature (the 2C story…). This is hell of a lot of Joules of energy:



7 Finally here are the main effects depending on the RCP scenarios:



YOU HAVE GOT TO BELIEVE THIS STUFF. WE NEED TO ACT, OR DROWN, OR STARVE, OR START BLOODY WARS, or…

This is all a very slow process, but it is going on. We can expect by 2100 - warmer days (certainty), hot days (certainty), heat waves (very likely), heavy rain (very likely), droughts (likely), cyclones (likely) and high sea levels (London and New york under water? Likely).