WE NEED TO POWER DOWN NOW!

Then Anderson reveals a startling twist on what we need to do now. He says we do not have time to implement large scale alternatives. We need not focus on the supply side, like the Tar Sands, Arctic oil, fracked gas, alternative energy or nuclear power. Those technologies all take more time to implement than we have to save the climate.

Anderson concluded in a science paper published by the British Royal Society, only a planned economic downturn accompanies by severe energy austerity by the one percent who use 50% of the world's energy - that's us! - can avoid this climate disaster. We needed to start action yesterday. We start, we must campaign, on the demand side. We still have time to each and every one of us drastically slash our energy use.

As he tells us, just to burn a 100 Watt bulb demands several times that amount of energy down the power chain, to mine the resource, transport it, burn it with only partial efficiency, and then lose another 50% or so in transmission. So turning off the bulb grows in impact up the power chain, if we can all cut back deeply, quickly.

The result of that energy austerity of course, when we stop buying useless consumer junk with all that embedded energy, is an economic crash. Is that better than a climate that wipes out at least half of all living species, possibly including ourselves? You be the judge.

We must always keep in mind the target of keeping under 2 degrees C of warming was always an arbitrary political decision. It doesn't necessarily guarantee a safe climate, as we are already finding out these days. The droughts, super-floods, super-storms like Sandy, and drastic melt-back of Arctic sea ice all come when we are only officially approaching 1 degree of warming over pre-industrial times. 2 degrees gives us double that, at the very least.

Anderson says scientists have been keeping quiet about the tendency, one could even say "plot" to underplay everything about the looming climate catastrophe.

Anderson should know. He's working every day with scientists from around the world who "just keep quiet".

In reality, once we factor in continuing emissions coming from things like agriculture and deforestation, there is no room left for emissions from the developed countries.

EVEN WORSE NEWS: WHAT KEVIN ANDERSON DOESN'T TALK ABOUT

Anderson also leaves aside the whole issue of natural climate feedbacks that could dramatically add more carbon dioxide and methane to our atmosphere. He's a specialist in energy, even working in that field for companies like Shell Oil in the past. In this speech Dr. Anderson takes us on a straight path through the impacts of our fossil fuel extraction and burning alone. He acknowledges there may be much more, but says science knows too little about them at this time.

We can think for example about recent science finding methane coming from the Siberian sea bed, and from the warming waters along the East Coast of North America. Other studies, in speeches already broadcast on Radio Ecoshock, show that melting permafrost in the Arctic and sub-Arctic could add far more greenhouse gases than all fossil fuel burning.

Rob Hopkins, founder of the Transition Town movement in the UK, did a written interview with Kevin Anderson in Hopkins' blog "Transition Culture" published on November 2nd, 2012.

In the comments, we find this compact addition to the warming forces Kevin Anderson did not cover, written by the Wales farmer Lewis Cleverdon:

Kevin Anderson said: “Rapid and deep emissions reductions may not be easy, but 4°C to 6°C will be much worse”

In the comments at transitionculture.org, Lewis Cleverdon writes:

"I’m sorry to say that this presents a false dichotomy. And doubly sorry to hear it from one of Anderson’s standing.

Taking a credible best case for emissions reduction of getting to near zero output by 2050,

- regardless of whether that is by personal virtue demonstrations suddenly sweeping the whole world -

- or by determined popular global efforts at steering the politics to achieve an equitable and efficient global climate treaty -

- or by the latter adamantly supported by the former

- we are going to emit enough GHGs by 2050 for at least 0.6C of further warming.

Adding this to 0.7C of warming now time lagged “in the pipeline” of ocean thermal inertia, plus the 0.8C of warming already realized, would give 2.1C of warming as a total, but for one critical factor.

Ending our fossil fuel emissions means ending those of fossil sulphate which maintain the ‘Sulphate Parasol’ that veils the planet. As Hansen & Sato reported, the loss of the Sulphate Parasol will mean a rise of warming by 110%, (+/- 30%), raising the projected 2.1C to a total 4.41C (+/- 0.6C), that would be realized by about 2080, due the time lag of around 30 years after 2050. Our ‘best case’ for emissions control would thus give between 3.8C and 5.0C of warming.

However, there is a further critical factor, namely that of the interactive mega-feedbacks, of which at least six are already accelerating and several have the potential to dwarf anthropogenic GHG emissions. The most advanced of these, cryosphere decline (loss of snow & ice cover) causing albedo loss, is reportedly already causing warming equivalent to around 30% of our CO2 emissions. This feedback alone is already nearing the capacity to offset the 43% average annual intake of our CO2 output by the natural carbon sinks.

In the 68 years between now and 2080, under our ‘best case’ emissions control, those feedbacks would have continuously intensifying warming to drive their interactions and outputs far beyond any possibility of our control. Under this scenario we should certainly have substantially more than 5.0C of warming in 2080, and warming would then continue at a pace dictated by the interactive feedbacks.

Arguments over emissions control via personal virtue or via collective political action for the global climate treaty are thus missing the point. Even the best case of emissions control is patently not remotely commensurate with our predicament."

Lewis Cleverdon goes on to say only geoengineering to increase our albedo effect, namely by spraying natural seawater into the air to brighten clouds, and thus turn away some solar energy, could possibly save us. That is the least toxic, and most easily reversed proposal for geoengineering, but it's a topic for another day.

The main point here is this: Kevin Anderson's speech sticks to the simple math of our fossil fuel trajectory. That alone promises to take us to at least 4 degrees hotter, and possibly much more if we don't act immediately. The mega feedbacks and warming hidden by pollution loom as even greater shadows over this already dark picture.

In his November 6th speech in Bristol, UK, Anderson warns again and again, we allow ourselves to be fooled, year after year.

The American scientists are playing the same incredible game, pretending world emissions peaked in the past.

NO... WE WON'T SUCK ENOUGH CO2 OUT OF THE AIR TO GO BACKWARDS IN TIME

Every big report assumes we will rescue ourselves by sucking CO2 out of the air by some magic as yet undiscovered technology assembled almost instantly on a massive scale. It's geoengineering, the technical fix. And it presumes a kind of magic that goes like this: "if we reduce the CO2 in the atmosphere, things will go back to the way they were."

Except nature doesn't work like that. If you could reduce greenhouse gases, by the time you do, the whole ecosystem has already changed. A large percentage of species will be extinct. Coral reefs won't be around. Like the Amazon rainforest won't either. There is not backward path through time. It's a huge fallacy in the public mind, and in too many government reports.

Anderson notes there is not a single big commercial scale operation taking CO2 out of the air, and storing it for long periods, anywhere in the world.

Most schemes, and governments use this idea in most big reports, involve taking biomass, burning it in power plants, capture the CO2 as it goes up the stack, and then burying that CO2 somewhere in a geologically stable hole. Anderson dissects this idea and finds giant leaks of greenhouse gases into the sky at every step.

We must grow the biomass - agriculture and the food industry contributes about 30% of all human-made emissions currently. Producing fertilizers (often from fossil fuels), transporting things around, it all adds up to emissions. Then the power plant only burns at a peak of about 70% efficiency. More wasted. The best smokestack capture techniques only grab 70 to 80%, so at least 20% will still go into the sky as greenhouse gases. Then we have to store the CO2 somehow, and that hasn't been worked out yet. It's like nuclear waste, where everyone expects a solution will come up in the future, that hasn't developed so far. Bottom line: it's not going to work, at any scale comparable to our current energy use, and more importantly - such a massive energy change would take at least 20 or 30 years to implement (we haven't even started yet) - and we don't have that long! Fail. It all sounds good on paper, but fail.

AND THE SCIENTISTS KEEP QUIET...

In the radio show, I play you a longer passage from Dr. Kevin Anderson as he spoke at the Cabot Institute at the University of Bristol on November 6th. I recorded the speech from the webcast. Download the whole speech here.

Anderson gives example after example of scientists, policy advisors and government ministers who (a) know the 2 degree target is no longer attainable, and (b) admit the public can't be told this. Our awful predicament is being hidden by official process, deliberate underestimates of known facts, and scientists keeping quiet. No one wants to alarm the herd, and politicians want to win the next election. Corporate board members want the next big quarter's profits, and big investors want their payback. Nobody rock the boat!

DON'T DESPAIR?

Don't despair Anderson tells us. We are the very people who can do something to save the climate, right now.

Anderson goes into an interesting analysis that find half the world's emissions are coming from about 1 percent of the world's population. It's almost a play off the Occupy 99% and 1% model. We need to reach those high carbon emitters, and get them to change.

It's likely this expose of sweetened climate projections, with known bad numbers and reassuring official talk, could be my speech of the year.

Now you've got the tools you need to take another hour out of your life, to hear the truth about climate change. Download the November 6th speech by Professor Kevin Anderson at the Cabot Institute.

Listen, learn, worry, and rededicate yourself to change, before the new out-of-control climate changes everything and everyone we love.

Thank you for taking the time, and having the courage, to listen.

I'm Alex Smith, for Radio Ecoshock.