MIT: How to limit risk of climate catastrophe:…significant benefits from early actions

[OKIsItJustMe]

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/climate-change-1002.html

How to limit risk of climate catastrophe

Comprehensive analysis of the odds of climate outcomes under different policy scenarios shows significant benefits from early actions.

David L. Chandler, MIT News Office

A new analysis of climate risk, published by researchers at MIT and elsewhere, shows that even moderate carbon-reduction policies now can substantially lower the risk of future climate change. It also shows that quick, global emissions reductions would be required in order to provide a good chance of avoiding a temperature increase of more than 2 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial level — a widely discussed target. But without prompt action, they found, extreme changes could soon become much more difficult, if not impossible, to control.

Ron Prinn, co-director of MIT's Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change and a co-author of the new study, says that "our results show we still have around a 50-50 chance of stabilizing the climate" at a level of no more than a few tenths above the 2 degree target. However, that will require global emissions, which are now growing, to start downward almost immediately. That result could be achieved if the aggressive emissions targets in current U.S. climate bills were met, and matched by other wealthy countries, and if China and other large developing countries followed suit with only a decade or two delay. That 2 degree C increase is a level that is considered likely to prevent some of the most catastrophic potential effects of climate change, such as major increases in global sea level and disruption of agriculture and natural ecosystems.

"The nature of the problem is one of minimizing risk," explains Mort Webster, assistant professor of engineering systems, who was the lead author of the new report. That's why looking at the probabilities of various outcomes, rather than focusing on the average outcome in a given climate model, "is both more scientifically correct, and a more useful way to think about it."

Too often, he says, the public discussion over climate change policies gets framed as a debate between the most extreme views on each side, as "the world is ending tomorrow, versus it's all a myth," he says. "Neither of those is scientifically correct or socially useful."

…

http://globalchange.mit.edu/pubs/abstract.php?publication_id=1989">The report: "Analysis of Climate Policy Targets under Uncertainty"

[BlooInBloo]

1. So.... Basically there's no way to limit the risk.

[imdjh]

2. enter my standard response

[kestrel91316]

3. The time for early action has come and gone.

[OKIsItJustMe]

4. Today is the earliest we can act at this point

Ideally, we should have acted decades ago, but we cannot do that at this point.

So, should we not act today?

…

One interesting finding the team made is that even relatively modest emissions-control policies can have a big impact on the odds of the most damaging climate outcomes. For any given climate model scenario, there is always a probability distribution of possible outcomes, and it turns out that in all the scenarios, the policy options have a much greater impact in reducing the most extreme outcomes than they do on the most likely outcomes.

…

"These results illustrate that even relatively loose constraints on emissions reduce greatly the chance of an extreme temperature increase, which is associated with the greatest damage," the report concludes.

…

[kestrel91316]

5. I've done about all I can do under my present circumstances,

except maybe get rid of my refrigerator, lol. I am even carless (involuntarily, due to theft).

Time for a few million other Americans to step up to the plate. I have seen a dozen Hummers in the past week, after not seeing any for months. There is a lot of room for improvement out there.

[OKIsItJustMe]

6. "There is a lot of room for improvement out there."

Boy, I'll say there is.

I don't mean to say that you need to take the entire burden upon yourself. Instead, I want to encourage you not to give up hope. All may not be lost (yet.)

It's up to us to try to open other people's eyes…

[wuvuj]

7. Info on "tipping points"...

http://www.frontlinethoughts.com/index.asp


Ubiquity, Complexity Theory, and Sandpiles

We are going to start our explorations with excerpts from a very important book by Mark Buchanan, called Ubiquity: Why Catastrophes Happen. I HIGHLY recommend it to those of you who, like me, are trying to understand the complexity of the markets. Not directly about investing, although he touches on it, it is about chaos theory, complexity theory, and critical states. It is written in a manner any layman can understand. There are no equations, just easy-to-grasp, well-written stories and analogies.

As kids, we all had the fun of going to the beach and playing in the sand. Remember taking your plastic buckets and making sandpiles? Slowly pouring the sand into an ever bigger pile, until one side of the pile started an avalanche?

Imagine, Buchanan says, dropping one grain of sand after another onto a table. A pile soon develops. Eventually, just one grain starts an avalanche. Most of the time it is a small one, but sometimes it builds on itself and it seems like one whole side of the pile slides down to the bottom.

....................

"But to physicists, has always been seen as a kind of theoretical freak and sideshow, a devilishly unstable and unusual condition that arises only under the most exceptional circumstances ... In the sandpile game, however, a critical state seemed to arise naturally through the mindless sprinkling of grains."

Thus, they asked themselves, could this phenomenon show up elsewhere? In the earth's crust, triggering earthquakes, or *as wholesale changes in an ecosystem* - or as a stock market crash? "Could the special organization of the critical state explain why the world at large seems so susceptible to unpredictable upheavals?" Could it help us understand not just earthquakes, but why cartoons in a third-rate paper in Denmark could cause worldwide riots?