Another Monday Message Board. Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please.
I’m now using Substack as a blogging platform, and for my monthly email newsletter. For the moment, I’ll post both at this blog and on Substack. You can also follow me on Mastodon here.
John Quiggin 
As we here in SE Qld experience a significant relative heatwave at the end of winter / beginning of spring, Tasmania and perhaps now Victoria face seemingly record breaking storms for the season. The general feeling that climate change is now spiralling out of control is inescapable, at least to me. What sort of summer SE Qld now faces is still to be seen but I am expecting any or all of severe heat, humidity, storms, winds, rain events, floods and maybe even (somewhat paradoxically) bushfires in some parts.
In the longer or even mid term I wonder if climate change, sea level rise, and all the other attendant phenomena will destroy / degrade infrastructure and living / productive environments faster than we can rebuild and/or repair and/or remediate them. I think it very possible we will be facing consistent high damage events so widely and often that the accumulating damage and degradation will exceed all our efforts and abilities to replace, repair and maintain infrastructure and life as we know it.
Maybe I am “way out there” in this prediction but I don’t even see any severely wrecked place (like Lismore) being fixed up properly or replaced in a safer place with better or like. IMHO, this is not even happening now. What chance is there that it will happen when things get really serious. I give that about 1% chance.
I am not a “glass half-full” man. At this point I say, “There’s a glass?”
A global mean surface temperature (GMST) anomaly of +1.5 °C (30-year mean) relative to the 1850-1900 baseline is likely to be breached by around 2030, and the +2.0 °C (30-year mean) threshold sometime in the 2040s. See the Carbon Brief article published on 13 Jun 2024 by Zeke Hausfather headlined Analysis: What record global heat means for breaching the 1.5C warming limit.
At +1.5 °C (30-year mean) warming level, marine scientists warn that 70-90% of coral reefs would likely be destroyed, and only 1% would remain at +2.0 °C (30-year mean) warming level. See Quarterly Essay, Jun 2024 edition, Highway to Hell: Climate Change and Australia’s Future by Joëlle Gergis.
The loss of the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) would be a disaster for Australia.
But according to a headline in The Australian on 12 Aug 2024, The Great Barrier Reef is in rude health — but why let facts get in the way, as ABC TV’s Media Watch reported in one of their story segments last night (Sep 2).
The UN published on 26 Aug 2024 their technical brief titled Surging Seas in a Warming World: The latest science on present-day impacts and future projections of sea-level rise. Table 1 includes projected rates of sea level rise (SLR) for the periods 2040-2060 & 2080-2100, for a range of end-of-century warming scenarios from 1.4 °C to 4.4 °C. I’d suggest the projections are likely far too reticent.
The Earth System GMST anomaly is already at +1.3 °C (30-year mean) relative to the 1850-1900 baseline, and the rate of SLR is already at around 5.0 mm/year now. Since satellite altimetry data began in 1992-3, the rate of SLR has been accelerating with a doubling time of about 18-years. See the World Meteorological Organization’s report titled State of the Global Climate 2023, on page 6.
I think to suggest in the UN report’s Table 1 that the rate of SLR in 2040-2060 would be less than what it currently is, at around 5.0 mm/year, is just ludicrous.
I would not be at all surprised if the rate of SLR progressively accelerated to around 10 mm/year by sometime in the 2030s, and then accelerated further to around 20 mm/year by sometime in the late-2040s.
I’d suggest 1 m of SLR is more than enough to cause chaos/catastrophe for many coastal and estuary locations around the world. Add periodic storm surges on top of that and more locations are impacted. That’s likely billions of lives disrupted directly or indirectly.
I’d suggest what looks increasingly likely is that SLR will exceed well over 1 metre relative to year-2000 levels by year-2100. That will be undeniably catastrophic for many coastal properties and infrastructures. Whether SLR reaches 1.5 m or 2.0 m or significantly more by 2100 is academic – societal chaos would have already well and truly ensued.
If governments, NGOs and the media are unwilling to tell the public the full magnitude of the risks then how can society respond effectively?
It seems preliminary Copernicus ERA5 GMST anomaly data for the month of Aug 2024 is perhaps effectively a dead heat with Aug 2023 for the hottest Aug in the full instrumental record. Prof Eliot Jacobson tweeted/X’d on Sep 3:
Berkeley Earth published on 21 Aug 2024 their July 2024 Temperature Update by Robert Rohde. It began with (bold text my emphasis):
Geoff,
Thanks for continuing to highlight the real data. What is written below is not a criticism of you. It is more a thumbnail sketch of our cultural and political economy problems.
The neoliberal political economy fraternity, which includes most of the business economists, is (lamentably) not interested in real data. By real data I mean data about real stuff which is measurable and measured in the scientific dimensions (as per the SI, International System of Units). The above named classes think dollars are “realer” than real stuff; “realer” than natural systems and forces.
For them dollars are “realer” because the operations of the political-social economic system make them operationally “more real” or “super real”. They (the top oligarchic, corporate and political operators) set the rules of the system. These rules decree where and how dollars are made (as notional, not real entities) and to whom these dollars are gifted. Many, perhaps most, dollars are essentially gifted, not earned. Only workers have to earn dollars. Other dollars are unearned: gifts in essence. All unearned income is gifted income. The top operators of the system gift themselves, and each other in various reciprocal ways, lots of dollars. Then of course these free and essentially unreal dollars (all dollars are unreal in the strict sense) are convertible, or rather exchangeable, under the their rules in their system, into real stuff.
The ultimate problem with this system (or rather those who run it and those who accede to it) is that it is not interested in and does not measure real stuff, except in so far as it uses science for production (production science). The system has no use for impact science: that is no use for all the science that measures the impacts of production (and consumption) on real people and real natural systems (biological and physical). Few resources (relatively) are assigned to impact science and to what we might term care science, the science of caring for people, ecosystems and natural systems. There is just a mania for production and consumption without concern for (non-rich) people or care for impacts including damage to natural capital. Even the term “natural capital” is in essence coined and thus tainted by this political economy system. New concepts and a new lexicon is needed to fight the economism of destructively dragooning nature into the service of economics.
This political economy system appears to have no way of understanding itself and no way of understanding its effect on powerless humans and on nature. It cannot stand outside itself and critique itself. All its irrealisms (like propertarianism for example) are naturalized as real, good, natural and inevitable within its self-construction and self-perception. Nature of course is not powerless. It is all-pervading and all-powerful and we are still entirely dependent upon it. Indeed, we ourselves and all our systems are part of nature (simply the real interconnected, complex and emergent workings of everything real, all real systems) and cannot stand or exist outside it in any sense.
A system like neoliberal propertarianism, which is founded on non-real, and indeed very fantastical precepts and concepts, cannot work against and disrupt natural systems indefinitely, without the natural systems complexly reacting in return, as we are seeing. Since the political economy system and the essentially deluded minds inculcated into it as owners, workers and consumers, cannot dialectically critique itself (and themselves) and logically, sensibly elect to change course, then nature, as a natural complex system of systems, will “dialectically critique” the political economy system. This natural “dialectic critique” comes in the form of complex, destabilizing feedbacks. The political econmomy system and its real productions will be entirely disequilibriated: thrown into gyrations, chaos and collapse.
The scientific predictions (before it happens) and the vindicated scientific explanations (when this inevitably happens) are critical. They are the only “narratives” (except they will be predictions and thence factual narratives of real events told via scientific facts, phenomena and their out-workings. Only if some people, enough people, in a population collapsing world, understand this story, the true story of the real events will they stand any chance of salvaging anything.
In that case, the false prophets of neoliberal economics will face, as they should, a tremendous reckoning and become a warning which should never be lost from our cultural memory as long as human continue to exist. Telling the scientific truth and the truth about why our self-manufactured apocalypse occurred will be tremendously important for re-building some form of positive human civilization from the ashes. There will be a lot of ashes. This will be so now even if we humans do not add to them by responding to the crises with conflict rather than cooperation.
Geoff,
I agree with all your concerns. I just lost a post outlining the form of my agreement. That was my own fault, so no matter. I also analyse matters in a form almost nobody understands, or will accept into their echo chambers, so no matter again.
Keep posting this data, its one of the few reality guides and guides to useful links that I get. I don’t search hard any more myself, for reasons of economy of effort.