Two deadly myths made it to the top. From Australia, leading scientist Andrew King: climate change will continue for a thousand years after Net Zero. Swedish scientist Wim Carton introduces his new book with Andreas Malm: “Overshoot: How The World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown”. The late great journalist Ross Gelbspan told us what went wrong – almost 20 years ago.
Listen to or download this Radio Ecoshock show in CD Quality (57 MB) or Lo-Fi (14 MB)
THE WORLD KEEPS WARMING – FOR A THOUSAND YEARS
ANDREW KING
There was a plan to limit horrible climate disasters. In 2015, 196 countries signed that plan in Paris. We are no where near it, but the hope was to find a resting plateau, where the planet stops heating up. That comes when we stop pushing more greenhouse gases into the sky than nature can absorb, called “Net Zero”. As famous Penn State climate scientist Michael Mann put it: “Warming ends when carbon pollution stops.”
New science from Australia calls all that into question. Andrew King says “Earth’s climate will keep changing long after humanity hits net-zero emissions.“ Dr. King is Senior Lecturer in Climate Science at the University of Melbourne. He’s been working on this question and publishing papers about it for years. Now with 11 co-authors and new approaches, King finds climate change keeps unfolding for at least the next thousand years.
From Melbourne Australia, we welcome Andrew King back to Radio Ecoshock.
Listen to or download this 20 minute interview with Dr. Andrew King in CD Quality or Lo-Fi
As Michael Mann puts it: “Warming ends when carbon pollution stops.” Mann writes:
“.. In the days when I was working on my PhD, in the early 1990s, we were taught that the warming of the planet would persist for decades even if we suddenly stopped burning fossil fuels and emitting carbon into the atmosphere. This is due to what is known as “thermal inertia”—the slow, sluggish response of the oceans. Climate models showed that surface warming would continue for 30 years or more, as the oceans slowly continue to warm, even after carbon pollution ceases.
This so-called “committed warming” would seem to render our efforts to avert disaster somewhat futile. Even if we turned off the metaphorical carbon faucet, the water level of warming would continue to rise. Extending the metaphor, that water would soon spill from our kitchen sink onto the kitchen floor. With apologies to Greta Thunberg, rather than burning, our house would instead be flooding.
But that picture is fundamentally incomplete—there is a “drain” too in the form of the ocean carbon cycle. That drain causes the water level, i.e., the planetary temperature, to stabilize. Through a somewhat fortuitous coincidence of nature, there are offsetting tendencies in ocean physics and ocean chemistry. The positive “thermal inertia” (the physics) is almost perfectly offset by a negative “carbon cycle inertia” (the chemistry).
To be more specific, the rate at which the ocean surface tends to continue to warm up due to the carbon already emitted is nearly identical to the rate at which the oceans absorb and bury atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2), lowering the atmospheric greenhouse effect and cooling the lower atmosphere and surface. The two effects essentially cancel each other out. And so, instead, we get an essentially flat temperature curve – the stable metaphorical water level – when human carbon emissions approach zero.”
Last year I checked this warming plateau theory with expert Kevin Trenberth in New Zealand. Kevin agreed. When I raised natural feedbacks like carbon from permafrost thaw, Trenberth said the ocean’s ability to capture carbon is so vast it can swallow natural sources, as long as humans don’t add more. Andrew talks to us about his journey on this question, and how he came to a different conclusion.
It is not radically different. King and his team find global warming would continue past Net Zero, but increases far less and slower than today (without our input of fossil fuel emissions). But even a small continuous warming has big effects.
Aside from possibly triggering tipping points, increasing warming would not be evenly distributed around the world. The Southern Hemisphere gets much of the added warming, including Australia. The authors project the city of Melbourne would continue to experience up to 1 degree C warming even after Net Zero is reached. Rainfall patterns would shift. Of course sea level rise would continue, and the oceans continue to get more acidic, threatening ocean life. The paper says:
“Antarctic sea ice extent also decreases under transient global warming but, unlike in the Arctic, continues to decline through the net-zero simulations as well.”
Dr. King cautions that this new science is a beginning, and depends on one model: the Australian Community Climate and Earth System Simulator. He would like to see this long-run approach taken up by other big climate models.
Dr. Andrew King is Senior Lecturer in Climate Science at the University of Melbourne. He is also Chief Investigator, ARC Centre of Excellence for the Weather of the 21st Century. The paper we talk about is “Exploring climate stabilisation at different global warming levels in ACCESS-ESM-1.5” published October 30, 2024. It is Open Access, free for you to read.
PREVIOUS APPEARANCE OF ANDREW KING ON ECOSHOCK
Andrew King is Senior Lecturer in Climate Science at The University of Melbourne. He says “climate change isn’t always to blame for extreme rainfall”. Andrew led a new paper in Nature Geoscience to explore what is and is not happening here.
THE MYTH OF OVERSHOOT
WIM CARTON
Mark Twain is supposed to have said: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics“. We are going to talk about damned and dangerous lies we tell ourselves: we will fix climate change later, after we burn more fossil fuels. It is the myth of “overshoot”, found in every climate agreement, official report, and business briefing books. Or is it just a religious belief?
Our guest Wim Carton studied it all: from new technology to the history of believing humans can rebuild the damaged atmosphere. He is the expert with dozens of papers and book chapters on carbon capture, geoengineering, and climate risks. Dr. Carton is Associate Professor of Political Ecology and Senior Lecturer at Lund University in Sweden. Along with co-author Andreas Malm, Wim’s new book is “Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown”. The research was funded by the Swedish Research Council for Sustainable Development.
Listen to or download this 28 minute interview with Dr. Wim Carton in CD Quality or Lo-Fi
This is one of my favorites from Wim’s publications list: “We can’t let markets decide the future of removing carbon from the atmosphere”. It was led by Wim Carton, published Nov. 16, 2021. He looks at big corporate promises as well as government pronouncements.
A couple of decades ago, I recorded talks by Dr. William Rees in Vancouver. He had charts of fish in the sea, trees on land, everything showing humans taking far more than Earth can replenish. Rees and other ecologists called that “overshoot”. For this new book, Andreas and Wim have a narrow definition: the premise of going “temporarily” over a global temperature “safe” limit like 1.5 degrees C – and then coming back down.
Listen to or download Dr. Bill Rees, co-intentor of “ecological footprint” – “What If Can Do – Can’t?” RESILIENT CITIES 091021 38 min CD Quality 36 MB. Notes from the transcript are here.
In this book from Carton and Malm, we find at least three dimensions to even this narrow definition of climate overshoot: we accept warming will go beyond supposed safety limits; we believe they will come back down; and then we find out the verdict of reality.
In an article in The Conversation, Wim and Andreas say: “mainstream climate science endorsed the fantasy of a global warming time machine.” Even top level science, like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change experts bought into overshoot.
Just as an observer of Nature, I find it ridiculous to think any form of life can be run in reverse. When the Cod were over-fished into almost nothing, they did not come back when fishing stopped. New creatures filled the ecological void in the meantime. Surely no one believes life will just go back to Earth 1950 when the smokestacks and tailpipes stop?
There is a growing chorus questioning overshoot. For example, see the new paper in Nature led by Carl-Friedrich Schleussner. It is titled “Overconfidence in climate overshoot”.
OVERSHOOT AS RELIGION
We could add a religious angle to overshoot. It builds on human ability to believe in things that may not exist. Carton and Malm do call fossil fuels the “demon”. I asked an AI “what do demons intend?” It listed five characteristics:
Temptation: Leading humans into sinful behavior or away from virtuous paths.
Possession: Taking control of a human’s body or mind to cause harm or chaos.
Deception: Spreading lies or falsehoods to confuse or mislead people.
Corruption: Influencing individuals to engage in immoral or unethical actions.
Infliction of Suffering: Causing physical, emotional, or spiritual pain to individuals.
Does that sound like fossil fuel addiction to you?
In ancient Greece, a messy ending for a play could only be solved by a God. The Goddess or God figure might be lowered to the stage with a crane. This is the origin of the expression “Deus ex machina” – God from the machine. That is how I see overshoot.
Millions of Christians still believe that is how climate change and everything else will be resolved: God will do it. Humans don’t have to. God will handle overshoot. Or an alien will. Maybe AI. The whole scheme is very fragile even when presented as science, good business, or real policy.
Could we see the overshoot scheme as part of a system of climate Indulgences? We get pardoned for our carbon-making sins if we go vegetarian, build a little solar plant, or save energy on an offshore platform. Overshoot has a lot of uses, doesn’t it?
THE HIT LIST KEEPS GROWING
A couple of chapters in this new book cover rapid-fire climate disasters developing all over the world in the 2020’s. That sad list continues to accumulate. Hardly anyone knows that big picture, and we forget each tragedy when the next one rolls in.
Then Wim and Andreas explore the last ditch, tiny drop of hope. Maybe the great breakdown will open a door to real and necessary changes. I went into this in a 2016 show called “Can We Count on Catastrophe?” My guests warned breakdowns do not always lead to a new dawn. We must be careful about finding hope in crisis.
The new book with Wim Carton and Andreas Malm is “Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown”. Believe me, this is not a narrow book for policy wonks. Our future is on the line.
Overshoot is not just a bad idea. It is a crazy and dangerous idea, perhaps the most dangerous in the long history of deadly beliefs. The myth of overshoot if fully deployed may lead to the end of this civilization, to the end of humanity, and most certainly the end of many species of life on earth – to a mass extinction event. It is hard to imagine an idea more dangerous than that.
On first hearing, “overshoot” in climate change sounds like a technical discussion between scientists and technologists. If is a fine-point about some temperature limit seemingly already crossed. That is another part of it’s danger: it makes climate conversations ABSURD and thus meaningless for the common person trying to live a life. We tune out – and that is part of the attraction of “overshoot”. Leave it to the experts. Just believe we have a plan and that is good enough for you….
I’m glad Carton and Malm wrote this book and these articles about overshoot. They see it as much more than an insider-discussion about climate technicalities. They see it as a potent symbol of error, fatal error.
“THE LONG HEAT: CLIMATE POLITICS WHEN IT’S TOO LATE”
In this interview, we also get a sneak preview into the next book in this series:
“The Long Heat: Climate Politics When It’s Too Late” This will also be published by Verso Books. You can get more on that work in this seminar with Wim on YouTube, posted May 20, 2024.
Wim calls “The Long Heat” as Part Two of the first book on Overshoot. He asks: Can the catastrophe be reversed, masked or simply adapted to, once it is a fact? Or will any such roundabout measure rather make things worse?
He then goes to “the Ideologies of the Founding Fathers”. One is a Freeman J. Dyson paper published in July 26, 1976, title: “Can We Control Carbon Dioxide in the Atmosphere?” Dyson proposed growing trees to offset industrially created CO2.
Perhaps that might have worked at 1976 levels, but recent research shows just planting trees is not enough to reduce the huge burden of greenhouse gases added since then, along with natural production mechanisms triggered by that (like heating tropical bogs to raise methane levels).
Current happy announcements that a carbon dioxide removal plant has gone online reminds me of the police announcing a major drug bust like 5 tons of fentanyl seized and taken out of circulation. Then the police caution this is less than 1 percent of drugs coming into the country. The Governor and Mayor then step up to say we are on our way to solving the drug problem – look at all this progress…even more people die of overdoses.
Carton finds papers and articles, some written directly by utility companies, promising carbon dioxide removal so their energy stocks and projects would retain value into the foreseeable future. So there is about a 50 year history of this story to keep fossil fuels use but remove the harmful pollution, carbon dioxide. This line came into the Kyoto climate agreements in the 1990s, agreeing geoengineering or some carbon capture – it came into international climate negotiations 30 years ago and never left.
Carton likes the early texts because they “say the quiet part out loud” about the purpose of these technologies, to support fossil fuels into the future. Wim finds a connection between mitigation pessimism (too hard, too costly) versus removal optimism (effective, business-like). In the YouTube seminar, Wim concludes:
* mitigation deterrence is a structural feature of fossil Capitalism. Expect it to stay.
* scientists are complicit in reproducing and legitimizing mitigation deterrence
* to avoid mitigation deterrence we have to confront the interests that benefit from it.
REMEMBER: All the COP agreements and negotiations, along with scientific reports, ASSUME AND INCLUDE Carbon Capture and Storage. It is solidly part of the plan – and that is a problem. Our plan includes miracle myths to pardon our carbon sins.
The forces of fossil capital will align themselves to define what kinds of intervention will be allowed (nothing that fundamentally endangers their continuing enrichment). That is what we have at COP29 and all the COPs so far. That is why giant carbon sucking dream machines, polluting the skies, and more state subsidies are the “answer” and never slashing fossil fuel production.
As they say in the book: as soon as one “limit” like 1.5 is passed by, the system sets a new limit, like 1.7 or 2 degrees C, At each new “limit” the wishful overshoot argument is brought out again. It never not works. If the world warms a horrific 5 degrees C on average over pre-industrial times, someone will argue we can reverse that – even though civilized will and means will have evaporated in that heat.
THE CONSPIRACY BEHIND OVERSHOOT
The conversation about ways to save humans from outright catastrophe are generally developed by people, – including many scientists at top universities – who are funded in part or in whole by fossil fuel interests and industrialists totally dependent on fossil fuels. The media, including social media, who can amplify or isolate thinking and acting on solutions is owned by billionaires and wealth managers (like Vanguard or Blackrock who manage pension funds for millions of people).
The courts likewise control the conversation by harsh sentences for opposing views or actions. Politicians also control conversation, in some cases by making it illegal to consider climate impacts, or even mention the words “climate change” in any state functions, or even school textbooks (as in Florida and Texas).
There is literally a conspiracy behind overshoot – both as a permission to keep burning dangerous amounts of fossil fuels, and as an idea that we can recover and go back down again any time – with other “solutions’.
THREE BASIC TEXTS FOR THIS INTERVIEW RESEARCH:
1. Carton and Malm’s new book “Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown” by Verso Books.
2. Their article in the Conversation October 9: “How mainstream climate science endorsed the fantasy of a global warming time machine.”
3. a new related paper published Oct 9: “Overconfidence in climate overshoot”
summarized in this article/press release: “Reversing global warming as part of a climate overshoot likely to be difficult”.
SEE ALSO: “Sea Levels Set To Rise Permanently Even if Global Warming Is Reversed” from International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis November 8, 2024. That article says:
“’This paper does away with any notion that overshoot would deliver a similar climate outcome to a future in which we had done more, earlier, to ensure to limit peak warming to 1.5°C,’ explains Carl-Friedrich Schleussner, Integrated Climate Impacts Research Group Leader in the IIASA Energy, Climate, and Environment Program and scientific advisor at Climate Analytics, who led the study. ’Only by doing much more in this critical decade to bring emissions down and peak temperatures as low as possible, can we effectively limit damages,’ he adds.”
====================
ROSS GELBSPAN KNEW IT THEN
“The White House has become an East Coast Branch Office for Exxon/Mobil and Peabody Coal and climate change has become the pre-eminent case study of the contamination of our political process by money.”
– Ross Gelbspan, MIT, November 2006
That was Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and author Ross Gelbspan. He passed away in January 2024 – but his speech at MIT November 19, 2006 nailed where we are right now. In this program you hear a couple of clips from the event “Straddling Solutions and Survivalism” presented by the Massachusetts Climate Action Network.
For 31 years, Ross Gelbspan was an investigative reporter and editor, for the Philadelphia Bulletin, The Washington Post, and the Boston Globe. His work lead to a Pulitzer Prize. Retiring in 1998, he wrote the book “The Heat Is On, The Climate Crisis, the Cover-up, the Prescription.” President Clinton read it. His 2004 book is “Boiling Point” was reviewed in the New York Times, by Al Gore. Gelbspan has appeared at the World Economic Forum, and regularly in the largest American media.
Find my full program on Ross Gelbspan’s MIT speech in my show “Ross Gelbspan: Climate Solutions – Or Survivalism?” posted March 3, 2007.
A full transcript of Ross at MIT was posted by Rainforest Action Network. Find it here.
=================================
SONG: “I AM THE SEA”
I’m Alex Smith. Tune in next week for more climate voices the mainstream misses. Thank you for listening, and caring about our world.
In the on hour version of this show, we go out with my new song from the sea. It is kind of a green love song. Listen to the song or grab it free here.
I AM THE SEA
Lyrics by Alex Smith, music by AI, Creative Commons License OK to use for any non-profit purpose.
Flowing by
hidden mountains
Fountain of life
On a planet
I am the sea. (I am the sea)
You don’t know me (you don’t know me)
Only the surface
Reaches your eye (your eye)
You do not know me
But.
You need me. (need me)
You don’t know that either
I was always here (always here)
before you were born.
As you dream (as you dream)
I go about my ways,
collecting shells and worms
whales teeth and stones
while you dream (you dream).
I am rare among the planets.
You are rare among the stars.
you invade my gardens
gravity and wind
I will always run.
I will run with you.
Even when (even when)
You are gone (you are gone)
I am the sea. (I am the sea)
Holy ocean
I am.
I am.
I am.