Climate Change - Awaz Radio, Glasgow 15th July 2020

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The following blog is a transcript (slightly expanded) of the discussion between Ravi Singhal and Manjulika Singh on Climate Change on  AWAZ Radio (Glasgow). 

This was a great opportunity for me to reach general public and tell them in simple language what climate crisis means and emphasize the need for 'real' action now.

Radio programme - AWAZ Radio (Wednesday 15 July 2020)

Q1:  What is the difference between weather and climate?

Weather refers to atmospheric conditions (temperature, pressure, wind speed, rain etc.) at a particular time and location.

Atmospheric conditions, and hence the weather, can change very quickly.

Climate is average atmospheric conditions over a period of time – normally 30 years or more.  

Climate does not change much from one year to the next.

Q2: Is global warming (GW) the same as climate change (CC)?

GW refers to warming that is caused by humans – a recent phenomenon – mostly since the start of the Industrial Revolution over  200 years ago.

CC can be both human caused or can occur naturally (but on a much longer time scale of several thousands of years)

"Today’s global warming is an unprecedented type of climate change, and it is driving a large number of side effects (e.g. melting of polar ice sheets, warmer oceans)"

"It’s these side effects that are likely to have a much greater impact on society than temperature change alone."

Q3:  Many people claim that Climate Change (CC) is one of the most serious threats to human civilization. 

Why should we be concerned about CC? 

Could you describe some of the undesirable effects of CC.

CC will impact all aspects of our lives:

1.  Changes in sea-level will affect cities along heavily populated coastlines causing disruption for 100s of millions of people by 2050.

2.  Worldwide retreat of mountain glaciers – millions of people depend on for drinking water & agriculture

3.  Extreme weather events – extensive wildfires, more severe hurricanes, droughts, excessive and intense rainfalls causing flash floods etc.

4.  Tropical diseases - move to regions of higher latitudes. People have less immunity in these regions

5.  Air pollution – due to high particulate emissions – already responsible for several million people dying prematurely every year

6.  Habitat Loss – due to clearing of forests – serious reduction in biodiversity

7.  Migration – Hundreds of millions of people will migrate from un-inhabitable tropics (too hot to live, droughts) to northern regions.

8.  Food scarcity – It will be too hot to grow crops efficiently – may not be sufficient food to feed the 11 billion population expected by 2100.

9. Ocean Acidity – Oceans will become more acidic affecting survival of coral and other sea creatures.

10. Oxygen depleted Ocean Zones – Vast areas of the oceans will be unable to support life due to lack of available oxygen in the water

Q4:   What should we do to control CC?  Is it expensive?

The main cause of CC is burning of fossil fuels (FF).  We need to urgently reduce our dependence on FF.

This involves changing our wasteful habits, adopting life-styles and habits that require less energy consumption

(e.g. energy conservation, less air-travel, eating more vegetarian meals etc.)

Estimates are that nations need to spend ~1% of GDP to tackle CC (£25 billion per year in UK; £150 billion per year in USA)

Q5:  Who will be most adversely affected by CC?

Everybody will be affected by CC.

Poor countries will be most seriously impacted.  They tend to have large populations and will find it difficult to cope with CC.  Most regions in the tropics might become un-inhabitable creating a huge refugee problem (may be a 1 billion or more migrants) for the rest of the world.

Also poor communities in rich nations will be severly effected by CC.

Q6:  Why can’t the world governments come together to solve the problem?

Governments operate with short time horizons of a few years at most.  Additionally, there is a lot of misinformation propagated by interested parties (like the FF industry etc.) that confuses the issues.

CC is the problem of the future – so far its effects have been modest – so motivation to spend lots of money to manage CC is less. 

Q7:  They say that renewable energy (RE) like wind and solar power will replace fossil fuels and cut down carbon di-oxide emissions. This should reduce global warming and control CC?

Not really.   RE provides a very small percentage of our energy consumption just now.  About 80% of global energy comes from FFs which emit CO2. Over the next 50 years, in the global context, the impact of RE will only be modest.

Moreover, CO2 stays in the atmosphere for over 100 years and CO2 that we have already put in there will continue to warm the world. 

In order to reduce CO2 emissions and keep CC within sensible levels of 1 to 2^oC rise in mean global temperature, serious action needs to be taken over the next 20 to 30 years, but much better to start today. RE will not be the major player in that.

Time to act is now, RE will come too late

Q8:  COVID-19 pandemic forced lockdowns.  This has resulted in reduced emissions.  Has this reduced global warming?

Emissions were much reduced during COVID-19 but they are going up again as economies are beginning to open up. 

So far in 2020, there has been some serious reduction in the amount of CO2 emitted, but we still added CO2 to the atmosphere.

This would have slowed GW by a tiny amount but not enough to make any serious difference.

Q9:  Can technology not help to solve the problem of CC?

Difficult to be sure.  Technology is not always predictable.

CO2 build up has been relentless and for sure we have left it too late.  We need to develop technologies which can 

(a) Capture CO2 from the atmosphere and store is safely

(b) Meet our energy needs w/o GHG (greenhouse gas) emissions

People have suggested that CC may be controlled by:

Blocking sunlight from reaching Earth (mirrors in space, spraying aerosols in the atmosphere etc.)  - But watch out for unintended side effects of geo-engineering – I wouldn’t recommend it just now.

Q10:  Is it too late to solve the CC conundrum?   

Probably.  Most scientific opinion is beginning to converge on mean global temperature rising by 3^oC over the next 50 years provided nations start to take some serious action now. On the current trajectory, a rise of 4^oC or even greater is highly likely - with some dire consequences.  We have missed the opportunity of keeping GW below 2^oC.  

Q11:  Should one just give up and hope for the best? 

Not advisable.  To continue as now (business as usual) will create many bad situations that will be irreversible - some of them will cause runaway uncontrolled changes whose consequences cannot be predicted at present. 

In this scenario, CC might indeed become an existential threat for the human race.

Have you read? 

7.75 Billion and 415 ppm; 4C Warmer World is Really Bad News  :  The paper explains why we need to act now.

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FINAL WORD:  COVID-19 pandemic came suddenly, was treated as a crisis by national governments and swift action was taken by most countries to control the pandemic.  Additional resources of 10 -15% of GDP were immediately found to tackle the pandemic. 

Unfortunately, climate change has never been treated as a crisis by most sectors of our society.  Scientists have been ridiculed for their predictions even though the climate crisis is unfolding to be a more urgent and more severe problem than what was predicted 10 or 20 years ago.  The goal of keeping global warming below 2^oC with aim to limit the temperature rise to 1.5^oC before year 2100 has been shown to be totally unrealistic – the latest projections are that we shall hit 1.5^oC rise in GW within the next decade! 

We need to educate ourselves and understand the extent of the crisis – act responsibly to limit GW by our own actions and put pressure on politicians and business interest to act decisively.

References:  To understand the science of climate change, you can look up my following six blog articles prepared specifically for non-specialists:

https://ektalks.blogspot.com/2019/11/making-sense-of-our-changing-climate-1.html

to

https://ektalks.blogspot.com/2019/12/making-sense-of-our-climate-change-6.html

IMO 1988 Problem 6: General Term Using School-Level Maths

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Problem 6 IMO 1988:  Let a and b be positive integers 

Show that (a2+ b2)/(ab +1) is the square of an integer.
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Problem 6 in the 1988 International Mathematical Olympiad paper has almost reached a legendry status.  The problem is considered extremely difficult to solve - most solutions require a high level of mathematical sophistication or are long and tedious.

Using school level maths, I obtain a general term that may be used to provide a complete list of solutions.  

First we notice that the expression (a2+ b2)/(ab +1) is symmetric in a and b.  The problem also has some trivial solutions - for example,  a = b = 1 and 

a = 0, b = 1 (b = 0 and a = 1 is also a solution). 

We can also find a special case solution following the simple process described in the slide 

Derivation of the general solution:  In the following, I shall derive a general expression for a and b from which the rest of solutions may be obtained.  This is discussed in the following slides:

As a physicist, I need to check if eq.10 may be simplified further for some special conditions and how that might effect the answer in eq.11.  The obvious case to consider is when x and m are large - this is discussed int he next slide:

It was satisfying for me to be able to provide a general solution for all possible combinations of a and b.  Besides the solutions (a = 0, 1 or 2) and b = a3 (eq. 3), we have found a new class of solutions such that a must be the cube of a real positive number and b is defined by eq.10 (solutions of the problem in the form asked in IMO 1988). 

Big Data, Artificial Intelligence and Freedom - Cyber Dystopia and Beyond

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'Artificial Intelligence is more profound than fire or electricity' - Sundar Pichai (CEO Alphabet)

'Country leading in AI in 2030 will rule the planet until at least 2100' - Brookings Institution Report

'If you have enough data about me, enough computing power and biological knowledge, you can hack my body, my brain, my life, and you can understand me better than I understand myself' - Yuval Harari (Historian)

Introduction:  Recently, there has been much disquiet expressed about the uncertain world that exponential rise in technology might create for our civilisation. Previous technological revolutions have, on the whole, helped us humans in creating healthier, more comfortable living conditions.  The trio of technologies; bio-, nano- and digital-, mostly developed in the second half of the 20th century, have transformed life and augmented what we can do in a big way - generally for the better.  The two most damaging aspects of technological development in the 20th century have been human population explosion and ecological collapse.  To control these global problems needed co-ordinated global action and co-operation among the nations of the world.  This was the missing element, and humans have let the situation get out of control with dangers of many unpleasant consequences in the future. 
In the 21st century, digital technology has the potential of affecting our lives in ways that was not possible in the past.  Our privacy, freedom and human rights are all at risk.  There is a fair possibility that even if nations of the world co-operate in tackling such risks (unlikely from past experience), it may not be possible to contain serious damage to our human rights. 

What is AI? - Artificial Intelligence (AI) or  intelligent machines is the concept that digital devices (computers) can make decisions based on the data being fed and are essentially able to 'think'. During the 20th century,  based on a set of instructions (algorithm) computers could perform certain tasks more efficiently - this is artificial narrow intelligence (ANI).  A chess playing computer that beats the best players is an example of ANI in action.  ANI capabilities have been increasing exponentially in terms of number of computations a computer can do per second.  The question is when will the computer match the capabilities of the human brain?  Ray Kurzweil thinks it is 2029 - others seriously doubt that, but most experts agree that it will happen in not too distant future - by about 2050. 
It is convenient to think of three stages in the development of AI - the slide explains this:

The graph explains the situation further: 

For a transition from ANI to AGI, machine learning (ML) is an essential first step. ML enables a computer system to automatically learn from real-life data and improve from experience without being explicitly programmed - the computer learns automatically without human intervention or assistance.  The amount of input data is important - the more the better - and current trends in collecting large quantities of data (Big Data - see below) is helping AI systems to progress rapidly.
In this blog, I shall restrict the discussion to the near future spanning the next few decades and try to figure out what might happen as AI evolves towards becoming human level intelligence (AGI).  

However, it is good to note that there is much ongoing discussion about the benefits of AI, how to control AI, dangers posed by ASI to human race etc. ASI will have far superior intellect than humans and will not be bound by rules made by humans. It is a moot point if ASI will act to safeguard human rights and support 'prone to irrationality' humans.  These are uncharted territories. 

Threats to Our Privacy and Freedom - Digital technology has been very useful in making our lives more interesting and industries more productive.  Over the past 40 years, technologies based on ANI and some early modest capabilities in AGI have transformed our lives beyond recognition.  This is reflected in the way the valuations of tech companies have rocketed - they now occupy seven out of ten top positions with many at trillion US dollar valuations. The slide also shows how rapidly the valuations of the tech companies have grown, and continue to do so. 

Of the seven leading tech companies, five are based in USA and two in China. The size of a company determines the power it can wield - they can seriously influence regulatory environment and use their vast funds to undermine competition and new start-ups. Tech companies also have global reach.

In order to understand why the rise of tech companies might on the whole be negative for our privacy and freedom, we first need to understand what 'big data' is.

Big Data:  
Large amounts of data is generated and collected every second.  To understand the magnitude of this, consider that you have 1 GB (109 bytes) of data available for use on your smart phone every month.  The global data is estimated at 33,000,000,000,000 GB or 33 Zetabytes (33 x 1021 bytes), is increasing rapidly and is expected to reach 175 ZB by 2025. The Volume, Variety and Velocity of the data underpins the development of artificial intelligence. 
Data about us is collected in many ways - smart phones, social media, smart home appliances, consumer products etc.  Much data about us is combined and shared among commercial, government and other institutions without our consent - in fact lot of the time we are not even aware that this is happening. 
Recent advances in face- and voice- recognition software allow you to be recognised in real time.  Such AI is already used by civic authorities in many countries to monitor peoples' movements - generally without any legal authority.   
These extremely large datasets (Big Data) enable computers to reveal useful hidden patterns, market trends, customer choices etc. leading to more informed decisions.  Big data may also be analysed to extract information about multiple aspects of human behaviour on an individual and collective levels. 
Tech companies 'own' and control Big Data.  With increasing capabilities of AI, they are in a strong position to exploit the information.  Let us look at it in more detail.
AI and Threat to Privacy:  One can consider privacy in two ways:  
1) Physical privacy concerns with your location, information about friends and family, biological (genetic DNA) information - medical records, financial information etc. Such information is what Big Data collects and stores. For example, Google has just sent us a log of all the places we had visited in the past 12 months.  It also keeps record of what we have been searching on the internet (our shopping habits).  Details of our bank accounts, medical history etc. are all digitised and are available to anybody who has the authority to access these.  
2)  Privacy of Thought: was indeed so during the 20th century.  With the ever increasing speed and scale of AI, computers can analyse Big Data to profile our thoughts with increasing accuracy.  For example, the way you drive your car may be analysed to deduce your emotional states such as anxiety, alertness, distractions etc. Similar information may be obtained from your keyboard typing patterns or your speech, the way you walk etc.
Even more worrying (and sinister) developments of AI have been the way data about you and those around you may be combined to deduce practically any aspects of your thinking like your political views, sexual orientations etc and can have massive influence on your credit worthiness, employment prospects and much more.  
Output from AI is not 100% accurate all the time - it looks for the most likely result.  AI does make mistakes and this might be catastrophic for those who are wrongly targeted for actions and thoughts that they are not guilty of.  There is no appeal allowed - AI results are final.  Authorities now use AI routinely for facial recognition and gait recognition to monitor communities suspected of challenging thoughts.  How many people are wrongly convicted or harassed is a good question.

BUT THINGS ARE MUCH WORSE: It is beyond doubt that within the next decade, AI will help authorities to effectively monitor and control their people.
A far more sinister possibility is the dominance of China and USA in their AI capabilities and the dominance of privately owned tech companies to effectively enslave the populations globally.  
I had analysed this aspect of AI in my September 2018 blog  and refer you to the second half of the blog for details. Enjoy.

7.75 Billion and 415 ppm; 4C Warmer World is Really Bad News

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Summary: 
(Click on a slide to see full page image)

Atmospheric CO2 levels have reached 415 ppm 


World population is over 7.75 billion 

Mean global temperature is on trajectory for 4C rise over preindustrial levels by year 2100
(Some actually say that world will be +4C hotter much sooner)


Predictions are difficult as things might change but everything points to a miserable time for human civilisation.

Introduction:  One hears slogans like 'Save the World', 'We must protect the environment', 'Planet is burning'.  The fallacy in this thinking is to assume that it is the planet (mother Earth) that needs rescuing and we humans should do the right thing and help out.

What we must be saying is that human race is suffering, quality of life is on a declining path and we need to do something to rescue the human race from their self-inflicting foolishness.  The planet has been around for over 4500 million years and has hosted various forms of life - humans only arrived a few million years ago.  Nobody will notice if we disappear in a few hundred years - Earth will live on and, in a few thousand years, erase all traces of human existence. 

Humans have been waging a war on the natural world and there can be only one winner.  We need to take note.

It is not that we have not been warned - specially in the past 50 years, there have been scientifically sound advice about the need to take action. This has not been heeded and the negative effects of human activity on the earth are beginning to be felt in a serious way. 

Earth's resources have limits - there are planetary boundaries - stay within the boundaries and the planet will continue to provide the facilities for us to live here.  Current value of services nature provides us are estimated at 130 trillion dollars!  Humans need food, water and air to survive.  There are limits to how much food, freshwater, clean air our planet can give us.  We have crossed many of the planetary boundaries and, unfortunately,  there are few sign that humans are doing enough to improve matters in the future. 

In this blog, I shall discuss why the trajectory we are on is not a good one and threatens the survival of human civilisation as we know now. I do not believe that there is an existential threat - we are not facing extinction - what is on the cards is a lot of misery for a good fraction of human population.  In general, the wealthy OECD countries will manage to mitigate some of the effects of climate change, leaving the vast populations (and that is nearly 90% of the people) suffer miserably outside OECD.  Ironically, it is the extravagant lifestyle of unbridled consumption in the wealthy countries that has been responsible for most of the damage to the environment so far.  Even today, per capita, they are the biggest consumers of planetary resources. 

Why can't Something be Done about it?

There are two factors at play that have serious effect on global warming and climate change:  Fossil Fuels and Population.  Let us look at some numbers first:

1. Fossil Fuels: We need fuel to generate energy.  Fossil fules have been the driver of industrial growth for over 250 years (see slide).  They emit CO2 that is responsible, in addition to boosting ocean acidity, for increasing global mean land and sea temperatures. The concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has been increasing since year 1800 with USA and EU being responsible for 50% cumulative emissions even though only about 11% of the population lives there.

Notice that Coal, oil and gas provide most of the energy.  Renewables like solar and wind are barely able to supply the increase in energy demand.

Recently, much economic progress has been taking place in developing countries like China and India.  These countries have large populations and people there aspire to reach living standards long enjoyed in USA and EU.  This is a megatrend and unstoppable, and will largely be achieved by burning more fossil fuels.  They also burn more of the highly polluting coal because it is cheaper and supplies are more reliable.  The result is increasing emissions - in fact it is already happening with China now emitting 25% of global emissions - as much as USA and EU together.  India too is catching up.  
The CO2 emissions from fossil fuel use are actually increasing faster than in the past.

On the current trajectory, emissions will continue to increase over the next few decades and the atmospheric CO2 levels will continue to go up as well. Most experts are talking about global mean temperature rising by >3C by 2100 - a far cry from the 1.5C 'target' of the 2015 Paris accord.

 Scientists and activists like Greta Thunberg and David Attenborough make good points but they are up against formidable reality - for the next two to three decades, there is no energy source available that can replace the energy generated by fossil fuels. CO2 levels and global warming will continue to increase as in the past decades because the world leaders just can't move too far away from the global growth model - particularly in the developing countries where the people's expectations are at an all time high.  It is interesting to note that fossil fuel industries receive an annual subsidy of $5000 billion.

Under current policies, temperature rise of nearly 4C by the year 2100 with all its consequences is projected. An interesting question is, whether we shall end up with a 5 or 6C rise! 

2. Human Population: Our numbers have been rising exponentially.  The slide shows some details:

There are several things about this slide that are worrying.  Even with an extremely low rate of 0.1% annual increase (it is currently about 1% per year), the population will grow to 11 billion by 2100 and to 25 billion by year 3000.  Mortality rates will be lower than today and the world will be overwhelmed by the number of 60+ years old people with hardly any young children around.  The function of societies socially, economically, housing and healthwise will be very different.
More relevant for our discussion is the provision of basic necessities - feeding 11 billion population is difficult to imagine with the type of diet and waste that we indulge in these days. Massive changes to what we eat and how food is produced will have to be brought in. Much research is underway and new ideas about making more efficiently produced plant food diet are being talked about.  Freshwater supply is a big worry too. 

For the increasing populations, we shall need houses and factories - increased cement production will add  massively to CO2 emissions.  Huge area of land are currently cleared to grow food for livestocks and agriculture.  Deforestation removes trees that then results in reduced absorption of CO2 from the atmosphere.  Habitats for wildlife are lost and there is already a serious loss of bio-diversity throughout the globe.  

Already, with 7.5 billion people, the earth's resources are extremely stretched.  We live on a planet that has finite resources in terms of land, food, water and fresh air.  These planetary boundaries are at breaking point - once broken the planet does not replenish itself efficiently and a vicious chain of decline sets in.  

Many scientists feel that we are at that point already.  Controlling population is a sensitive subject and nobody has a good answer as to how this aspect of the problem can be tackled. The current policy is not to talk about it!

In the wealthy countries, humans have treated the world resources inefficiently with total disregard for conservation.  Globally, a third of the food produced is wasted.  Obesity has been a problem of the rich countries but over the past 30 years, people in developing countries are also becoming obese and suffer with all the health related problems created by obesity. 

Pollution has been a big problem in the throw away society where vast amounts of packaging (lot of it plastic) is used unnecessarily. Recycling is being encouraged and many people are talking about circular economy with the aim to achieve zero waste. 
All efforts to control pollution, diet, waste etc. are not going to deliver the required climate mitigation as long as population keeps on increasing - even at 0.1% per annum - while each of us continues to consume more.
Many experts claim that population will plateau in response to better educated and more financially independent female population.  To some extent this seems reasonable but I think that culturally humans will wish to have more children (the extent to which chinese couples tried to bypass the countries one-child policy) and under the weight of increasing number of over 60 year olds, govermnments will start encouraging higher birth rates - this is already evident in many countries. In any case, a projected population of 11 billion by year 2100 stands in sharp contrast to the much reduced carrying capacity of the earth of a few billion under a +4C scenario. Interesting times ahead...  
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Have you read: 

Making sense of Our Climate Change - Parts 1 to 6

Over-population is 'Elephant in the Room'; Why Do We Not Address the Real Problem?

Future of Food; How to feed 10 billion People? 

Will Future Water Crises Destroy Our Civilization?

Arctic Ocean - Soaring Temp., Loss of Ice Cover - How Much and Why? What is the Future?

‘The only uncertainty is how long we’ll last’: a worst case scenario for the climate in 2050 - A feature article in The Guardian 15 February 2020

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A 4C warmer world is Bad News

Scientific advice has been to act to limit global warming to 2C or less at the end of the century. The residence time of CO2 in the atmosphere is several hundred years and climate change will continue for centuries beyond year 2100.  Also, the climate of the earth is determined by a number of feedback loops - disrupt enough of these and the climate may irreversibly drift towards one extreme (hot or cold) - sometimes rapidly.  The 2C warmer world is considered a limiting situation, beyond which changes can take their own momentum and could be difficult to control/reverse - so called 'tipping points' are reached. Predicting the climate then becomes difficult - almost certainly the reality will be much worse than linear models would suggest.  Also, we lock-in adverse climate change with all its consequences for a much longer period - not good for human civilisation.

Specifically, let me consider what a 4C warmer world would look like. The mean global temperature increase is exactly what it says - it is an average increase in temperature - different parts of the globe will warm by different amounts.  The poles will be warmer by 10 to 12 degrees, land area will also be warmer than 4C generally with the tropics affected most seriously.  They will become sufficiently hot and humid to make them uninhabitable.

Warmer oceans will result in more water vapour in the atmosphere and hence we shall see more intense rainfalls and higher humidity.  For ambient temerature of 37C or more, higher humidity causes heat stress and almost certainly tropics will be uninhabitable during the summer months.  

The slide shows what the world will be like at +4C.

+4C world will not be a pleasant place for 11 billion people to live.  Most regions in Africa, India, Southern China, most of USA and Brazil will be too hot or dry for agriculture and survival.  Fresh water will be a problem and populations will have to migrate north.  Canada and Siberia will be ideal places to live - infrastructure in the form of high rise, high density cities will need to be developed.

All people will have to eat plant based diet with new technologies like hydroponics widely used to safeguard fresh water and economise on land area. 

According to Professor Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, one of Europe’s most eminent climate scientists, director of the Potsdam Institute: “At 4C Earth’s … carrying capacity estimates are below 1 billion people.”

It is expected that sufficient energy can be produced by using vast solar farms in Africa, Southern Europe, India,  China and USA. 

Arctic will be ice-free most of the year and new navigational routes will connect Europe to Asia.  Phytoplankton form the base of the marine food chain.  Currently, they are plentiful in coastal areas where lots of nutrients are available.  Ocean upwelling also brings nutrients to surface and most phytoplankton are found in the northern latitudes.  They will shift further north and vast areas of the ocean will not be able to support marine life higher up in the food chain.  

Most mountain glaciers will have melted and rivers they feed will dry out.  However, intensive rains will cause frequent flooding - life will be a nightmare.

Extreme weather events will be more intense and frequent with devastating consequences.  Stronger hurricanes and frequent extensive wildfires will make life unbearable.  More than 70,000 additional deaths occurred in Europe during the extreme heatwave of 2003 - earth was only +1C hotter then!

Things might get much worse:  The scenario I have described assumes a linear progression in the response of earth systems to a warming world.  Once we hit +2C tipping points, we will expect to see unexpected events whose effects on the climate have not been included.  

For example, permfrost that holds twice as much carbon as the atmosphere will start to melt (it is already showing many sign of melting at levels that are 70 years ahead of schedule).  Melting permafrost will put large amounts of greenhouse gases (GHGs) into the atmosphere - accelerating global warming.

Oceans currently absorb about 50% of the CO2 we put in the atmosphere and there are some indications that the oceans are getting saturated with worrying implications of increased global warming.

Are There Any Hopeful Signs? 

Historically, humans have always risen to the challenges.  Even though world leaders are unable to take action because they are tied to the growth models requiring continued burning of fossil fuels and stoking global warming, there are strong signs that there is much unease at the grassroot level.  Throughout the world, activist groups are protesting and asking for action to control climate change.  Sustainable investment is being talked about that will divert funding from fossil fuel companies to more environment friendly sources of energy.  Many new ideas about new sources of energy, new ways of growing food, switching to plant based diet on a big scale, increasing energy efficiency of products etc. are all welcome signs and may help delay the +4C world by a few years.  However, rising population and absence of alternative energy sources makes the arrival of a +4C world near certainty - one can argue if it will be 2075 or 2100 or 2125?  Societal Inertia also does not help - sustained action taken in 1970 or 1980 might have solved lot of the climate change threats in a sane fashion. 

Final Word:  It will not be out of place to address the apparent paradox: In year 2100, the world is expected to be +4C warmer with a carrying capacity of one billion people; what will happen to the remaining 10 billion?
First of all, it will be a gradual process - as parts of the world become uninhabitable and coastal cities start flooding, there will be a mass migration towards more northern latitudes.  Siberia is already part of Russia, USA will annex Canada and Greenland by force and China will occupy Mongolia -  the superpowers will accommodate their populations okay but the rest of the world - particularly 1.8 billion people of India will have no where to go.  Many deaths will occur in the conflicts between indigenous populations of the north and migrants (who, if accepted, will be subjected to subhuman treatment).  
With a large number of existential issues, World War 3 (WW3) is quite likely.  Barring natural catastrophies like an asteroid strike or a super-volcano, other events could cause millions to die - for example,  a virulent strain of a virus or widespread famines due to failure of monsoon rains and diseases due to polluted water supplies.

Going around is a crazy notion (by some eminent people) that somehow, when the earth becomes too crowded and polluted, we can colonize other planets and heavenly bodies in space.  This is a hopelessly poor suggestion - I have discussed the matter of 'hype about space colonization' here. 

However, I think the biggest threat will come from artificial intelligence that can prosper irrespective of the state of the climate. The super-artificial intelligence (SAI) might see no need of human existence.  As I have said before - interesting times ahead...

Thanks for reading.

Climate Change; Indecision at COP25 in Madrid; Fiddling as the Planet Burns

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COP25 in Madrid has ended and COP26 will happen in Glasgow next year to continue the discussions.  Everybody has been disappointed that COP25 did not achieve anything of value - I am surprised that people were disappointed.  COPs are talking shops where they say good words and express concerns but by their very structure, they are not supposed to achieve anything much of value.  This has been going on since Kyoto 1997.  Paris 2015 was important as it seemed that at least it was realised that global warming should be limited to below 2C in 2100 but ideally attempts would be made to keep it no more than 1.5C. I did not believe anything will happen, and I said that again before COP25 and I do not believe much will change in COP26.  The world will continue to aggravate global warming, and 3 to 4C rise by 2100 is well on the cards.

The situation is really very simple and there are  several flaws in the whole process:  
To start with, number one reason that has been driving global warming is never seriously on the agenda - population growth. More than 2.5 billion people in China and India have joined the over-consumption binge of the developed OECD countries in a big way.  Even on the assumption that global population might stabilise by year 2100, consumption from other Asian and African countries will continue to drive the need for more energy - burning more fossil fuels and aggravating global warming further.  

A second problem in meeting any global warming target is what I call the 'Coal Trap'. The world faces a dilemma about how to produce the energy required to maintain a decent functionality and meeting peoples' aspirations for better standard of living.  There is no technological solution in sight that will rid us of consuming fossil fuels by 2050 and probably much longer.  There are many projections about renewable energy that is supposed to replace fossil fuels over the next few decades.  But, look seriously and you can quickly convince yourselves that this is not for real - renewable energy, in due course, might stop the increase in the amounts of fossil fuel we use but it is not practical for them to meet the global energy demand on their own - certainly not by 2050.

And we have left it too late.  That global warming is an issue has been known for 50 years or more.  Many predictions that science made have come true but governments and business interests have tried their best to confuse the issues.  They claimed that no action was needed and no serious action was, therefore, taken.  Perversely, the intensity of action needed increases as every day goes by and there are few scientists who believe that global warming may be limited to 3C by 2100 even if nations make their best efforts from now.

Climate change control clashes head-on with Sustainability:  Our planet is able to support consumption up to a certain level - we use planetary resources that need to be replenished.  This has not been happening.  In the OECD countries, we delude ourselves by saying that we have controlled energy consumption - it is not going up.  This is dishonest - what we have done is transferred manufacturing to China, India and other developing countries and import finished goods.  Emissions from the manufactured goods elsewhere are due to our consumption - they are our emissions and we are not counting them.  Include these and OECD will be shown not to be doing so well. Net zero by 2050 as UK and EU claim for their targets will be unachievable.

Who will pay and who will make sacrifices?  Rich countries caused the global warming by their extravagant, overconsumption lifestyle over the past 200 years.  Even today, USA consumes more than 2 times energy per capita than China and 8 times more than India, and EU is not far behind.  Standard of living in OECD will have to come down substantially to reduce emissions - will it happen? Definitely not.
The cost of climate mitigation is enormous - there is no extra money in the kitty.  Central banks and poor financial judgements at government level have ensured that most economies are just ticking over - there is no slack and I can't see much enthusiasm for funding climate control measures.

Poor will suffer most, and the rich have the means to do something: 
Look at the projections of the area of the world that will be most severely affected by Climate Change.  They are the poorest areas just now and have little or no political or economic power to do anything significant.  The other group to suffer more will be the poor people in the rich countries - again they will be sidelined by the government policies that will favour the rich (they generally do anyway). Serious migration from poorer countries will happen. The question I would like to ask is whether the poor of the world will be effectively enslaved by the few rich in each country - inequality has been rising and is expected to continue on that trajectory.  With new digital technology, a kind of cyber dystopia appears the most probable outcome over the next 80 years or so.