[GWSG] Business as usual; would be catastrophic; but a green recovery turns us; CA's SLR report; Arctic heating; and losing sea ice

[Tilley, Al]

1. RCP8.5 is the “business as usual” course of events regarding climate. A new study finds that this is the path we are on. https://climatenewsnetwork.net/climate-sciences-worst-case-is-todays-reality/

2.  Mark Lynas has written Our Final Warning: Sex Degrees of Climate Emergency to explore what business as usual would mean. The book revises and updates his 2007 book Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet. Thanks to Dick Bizot for suggesting Lynas’s new book. https://www.nhbs.com/our-final-warning-book

3. A green recovery from covid-19 could avoid .3C of heat by midcentury and put us on track for the 1.5C target of the Paris Agreement and a livable world. https://www.carbonbrief.org/coronavirus-green-recovery-could-prevent-0-3c-of-warming-by-2050?utm_campaign=Carbon%20Brief%20Daily%20Briefing&utm_medium=email&utm_source=Revue%20newsletter

4. California’s Legislative Analyst’s Office has published a report What Threat Does Sea-Level-Rise Pose to California? The report is significant not for its projections, which are conservative, but for the kinds of problems it foresees and its recommendations for the moderation of risks and damages.   https://lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/4261

5. Over the last 40 years the Arctic has heated a degree a decade, a pace anticipated in only the most extreme projections. Our models should be adjusted to reflect the abrupt changes underway. https://phys.org/news/2020-08-underestimated-pace-arctic.html

6. Historical analogies lead to the prospect of the disappearance of sea ice in the Arctic by 2035. (One consequence is that the dark water absorbs much more heat than did the ice it replaces, which reflected much of the heat back into space.) https://phys.org/news/2020-08-evidence-loss-arctic-sea-ice.html

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.unf.edu/pipermail/gwsg/attachments/20200811/a1b73abc/attachment.html>