David A. McKay

Screenshot of section of interview of Johan Rockström by Exame: Exame: In the last World Economic Forum, there was much talk that A.I. and Fusion energy could solve the climate issue through mass carbon absorption. Would AI not be, in reality, a dangerous distraction? Rockström: A.I. can become a distraction that receives disproportionate amounts of focus when we have a planetary crisis. And not just A.I., but also the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, and the ridiculous tariffs of the Trump Administration. There are many factors that push us away from the necessary focus on fighting climate change. For instance, I always get asked whether I am worried about A.I. because of the energy consumption of their data centers. I answer that I am not, because of the simple fact that renewable energy sources are being developed so fast that we should have abundant energy. My concern lies in biodiversity, fresh water, minerals, the soil, and the entire biosphere.

He was even more blunt in this interview, categorising Gaza & Ukraine as distractions: exame.com/en/brazil-is...

(also odd on not being worried about AI energy usage, as renewables will inevitable be abundant...)

The rapidity of oil/gas decline without investment in this report struck me too - from eyeballing, not super far off rate needed for well-below 2C (or even 1.5 if had started earlier): bsky.app/profile/drsi...

Analysis: Shell says new ‘Brazil-sized’ forest would be needed to meet 1.5C climate goal - Carbon Brief For the first time, Shell has released a “pathway” showing how the world could potentially meet the Paris Agreement’s ambitious goal of limiting global warming to 1.5C.

Or indeed when 1 of Shell's 2021 global net-zero scenarios involved planting a *Brazil-sized* forest to make up for continuing fossil fuels to 2100: www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-she....

People on the ground may be sounder on its limits, but it has been used by suits to justify continued emissions!

Analysis: UK misses tree-planting targets by forest the ‘size of Birmingham’ - Carbon Brief UK governments have fallen short of their tree-planting targets since 2020 that they have failed to plant an area of forest nearly the size of Birmingham

It's also been commonly taken up in that way by politicians, e.g. UK parties outbidding each other on tree-planting targets back in 2019 election to make up a big chunk of net-zero plans, with generally underwhelming results: www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-uk-...

It's also fine to climb up motorway gantries, if it's for a flag bsky.app/profile/davi...

YouTube video by Just Stop Oil Yvette Cooper MP | Good Morning Britain | ITV | 17 July 2023 | Just Stop Oil

Strange how Just Stop Oil activists were imprisoned even for being in a *meeting* about going up the gantries, with Cooper calling JSO "dangerous & irresponsible" for triggering motorway closures by doing so, and yet now popping up one to put a flag on is all good... youtu.be/ney0E6sNceU?...

YouTube video by Just Stop Oil Yvette Cooper MP | Good Morning Britain | ITV | 17 July 2023 | Just Stop Oil

Strange how Just Stop Oil activists were imprisoned even for being in a *meeting* about going up the gantries, with Cooper calling JSO "dangerous & irresponsible" for triggering motorway closures by doing so, and yet now popping up one to put a flag on is all good...
www.youtube.com/watch?v=ney0...

Collapse of critical Atlantic current is no longer low-likelihood, study finds Scientists say ‘shocking’ discovery shows rapid cuts in carbon emissions are needed to avoid catastrophic fallout

Recent news for context: www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Overall the general picture is the same though: the AMOC weakens with warming, the larger that warming the more likely it is to collapse in the long run, that collapse would radically change life in Europe & the tropics, and one part of it could go much sooner. But also: deep uncertainty remains!

Shutdown: can climate change make ocean currents collapse? A recent study renewed worries that the ‘AMOC’ – a key set of ocean currents – could soon pass a tipping point and shutdown this century, with major ramifications for the cl…

Apropos of recent AMOC news, I've finally gotten round to updating this AMOC tipping explainer from a couple years back with some of the flurry of papers published since then - check it out if you'd like some more background:
climatetippingpoints.info/2023/08/15/a...

#AMOC #TippingPoints #Climate

Complementarily, one can think of this (and other categorisation problems) in terms of an n-dimensional phase space on which the main PCA principal component maps roughly on to an existing axis/spectrum construct (like sex, left/right-wing, etc.), but never perfectly, or capturing all variation.

Obviously this doesn't mean Arctic sea ice loss isn't happening (it is! and this slowdown likely means next drop is bigger) or isn't a problem (it's already causing harm!), but given how things are actually panning out the dark-boosterism that Arctic sea ice seems to attract doesn't seem very useful

A graph from a 2018 Extinction Rebellion talk (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2VkC4SnwY0) showing Arctic summer sea ice volume data from 1979 to 2018, showing a decline in particular after 2000, with various trends fit to the data that hit the zero line mostly around 2022.

Graph from The Guardian's article showing Arctic summer sea ice extent (note extent rather than volume, but former correlates with latter) showing gradual decline from 1979 to 2000, faster decline 2000 to 2010, and then roughly plateauing from 2010 to now

How it started // How it's going

(p.s. 1st graph - from XR's first talks in 2018 - is volume rather than extent, which amplifies changes, but the two have similar trends)

Writing this in 2019, there was a small cottage industry in dodgy Arctic sea ice trend-fitting to claim collapse by 2022. Instead, it's plateaued, in line with projected 1st ice-free summer in 2030s/40s plus natural variability. A case study in power of process understanding vs. naïve trend-fitting!

Are Earth’s natural carbon sinks collapsing? This autumn, several media articles reported on a study showing the global carbon sink on land – which so far has drawn down around a quarter of human carbon dioxide emissions – took up…

For more background, check out this explainer I wrote last year on why claims of a 2023 carbon sink collapse were wide of the mark (and which I'll update soon-ish on what the unexpected lack of a land sink recovery in 2024 likely means): climatetippingpoints.info/2024/12/03/c...

Quote from me on this. Obviously not good, but not unexpected - the more warming there is, the harder it gets for natural carbon sinks to keep pace with rising CO2, but in absolute terms we still expect them to keep on taking up carbon in to the future (just not as big a % of emissions as so far).

Stockholm?

Air pollution modulates trends and variability of the global methane budget Nature - An integrated observation-driven and model-driven approach demonstrates that, from 2005 to 2021, periods of high atmospheric methane growth were linked to trends and variations in OH...

Hi Aaron, this was an interesting paper describing recent CH4 sink dynamics w.r.t. air pollution, quantifying how increased O3/H2O & decreased CO helped increase CH4 sink over last 2 decades, partly balancing increased CH4 emissions (mostly from tropical wetlands & anthro. sources): rdcu.be/eAm3h

YouTube video by ClimateAdam Is Permafrost Really a Climate Time Bomb?

I've wanted to make this video for literal years, and finally summoned the courage.

Is permafrost *really* a climate time bomb?

Thank you @davidamckay.bsky.social for the input!

youtu.be/97-egzC-xjk

Reverend Lovejoy from The Simpsons holding a copy of Adorno's Minima Moralia and saying "Marge, have you ever actually sat down and read this thing? Technically even going to the bathroom is fascism"

Chance and purpose in the evolution of biospheres | Royal Society Discussion meeting organised by Professor Philip Donoghue, Professor Anja Spang, Professor Tim Lenton, Professor Samir Okasha, and Professor Graham Shields.

Yep, playlist linked from here: royalsociety.org/science-even...

No respite from permafrost-thaw impacts in the absence of a global tipping point - Nature Climate Change It has been postulated that there is a threshold temperature above which permafrost will reach a global tipping point, causing accelerated thaw and global collapse. Here it is argued that permafrost-t...

This paper also relevant, and comes to largely same perspective: www.nature.com/articles/s41.... (Some Qs remain though -at least for me - on how much we can extrapolate from current land models, which can partly resolve gradual but not abrupt thaw.)

1.2.2.4 Permafrost

Mostly a Q of scale - more agrrement on localised tipping-style dynamics for abrupt thaw events, but that doesn't aggregate to a global-scale TP in permafrost-carbon feedback, and larger-scale collapse in Yedoma remains largely hypothetical: report-2023.global-tipping-points.org/section1/1-e...

(specific to Johan's bit, rather than Jean-Pascal's)

There's also the issue that the assessment he normally bases this off has tipping risks escalating from *below 1C*, & while several TPs turn 'likely' from 1.5C that doesn't translate to a jump in aggregate likelihood at 1.5C (it's more a line in sand on accelerating risks, like everything else)

Scottish households urged to cut water use as climate crisis limits supplies Scottish Water boss says average Scot uses 40% more water than people in Yorkshire partly due to mistaken belief water is abundant in Scotland

The presenter on this panel seemed surprised, despite record wildfires & dryness, when I insisted that, yes, drought could be coming for Scotland too - seems I'm not the only one struggling to get that across: www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Seen a #TippingPoints story recently about the SMOC (the AMOC's southern sibling) abruptly reversing? Thankfully, it's not true (seems a press release got overenthusiastic). Want to know what the paper behind it really said? Read this from the lead author instead: theconversation.com/completely-u...

Mm, some of the links to global impacts are pretty loose. The description of regional dynamics and the research itself seems pretty sound though - certainly better than some of the stories and quotes going around on it!

Seen a #TippingPoints story recently about the SMOC (the AMOC's southern sibling) abruptly reversing? Thankfully, it's not true (seems a press release got overenthusiastic). Want to know what the paper behind it really said? Read this from the lead author instead: theconversation.com/completely-u...

Screenshot of part of a post from James Dyke on his Eccentric Orbits substack: "Some of my students have been arrested and imprisoned because of peaceful non-violent direct action. This is the result of the criminalisation of protest in the UK which is utterly shameful. I appreciate that we all have different roles to play in trying to get politicians to act, and that not everyone can put their liberty on the line. But I am profoundly uncomfortable extolling young people to lead a revolution when there is very little wider support for their actions and they face imprisonment for years. If that sounds patronising, then guilty as charged! I feel deeply responsible for my students, and I would rather err on the side of being a overbearing square than urging people to act in ways that are harmful to them."

Amen to this - relatedly, can't get myself behind a theory of change extolling filling prisons up with desperate young people to hit some magic threshold