With Earth's Energy Imbalance Nearly Doubling In Past Decade, Hansen Warns That Bills Are Coming Due

[hatrack]

Global heating is accelerating faster than is currently understood and will result in a key temperature threshold being breached as soon as this decade, according to research led by James Hansen, the US scientist who first alerted the world to the greenhouse effect. The Earth’s climate is more sensitive to human-caused changes than scientists have realized until now, meaning that a “dangerous” burst of heating will be unleashed that will push the world to be 1.5C hotter than it was, on average, in pre-industrial times within the 2020s and 2C hotter by 2050, the paper published on Thursday predicts.

This alarming speed-up of global heating, which would mean the world breaches the internationally agreed 1.5C threshold set out in the Paris climate agreement far sooner than expected, risks a world “less tolerable to humanity, with greater climate extremes”, according to the study led by Hansen, the former Nasa scientist who issued a foundational warning about climate change to the US Congress back in the 1980s. Hansen said there is a huge amount of global heating “in the pipeline” because of the continued burning of fossil fuels and Earth being “very sensitive” to the impacts of this – far more sensitive than the best estimates laid out by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

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Hansen points to an imbalance between the energy coming in from the sun versus outgoing energy from the Earth that has “notably increased”, almost doubling over the past decade. This ramp-up, he cautioned, could result in disastrous sea level rise for the world’s coastal cities. The new research, comprising peer-reviewed work of Hansen and more than a dozen other scientists, argues that this imbalance, the Earth’s greater climate sensitivity and a reduction in pollution from shipping, which has cut the amount of airborne sulphur particles that reflect incoming sunlight, are causing an escalation in global heating.

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But while scientists are clear about this being part of an upward trend of global heating, there is as yet no agreement that this trend is accelerating. Michael Mann, a climate scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, said that Hansen and his co-authors are “very much out of the mainstream” in identifying an acceleration in surface heating that has “continued at a remarkably constant rate for the past few decades”. Mann said that cuts to shipping emissions have only a tiny effect on the climate system and that calls for solar geoengineering are misguided and a “very slippery slope”. Bärbel Hönisch, a paleoclimatologist at Columbia University, said she had “some reservations” about the certainties expressed in Hansen’s research about the state of the Earth’s climate millions of years ago, which helps predict the consequences of warming today. “I’d be a little more reserved, but they may well be correct – it’s a nicely written paper,” she said. “It raises a lot of questions that will trigger a lot of research that will bring our understanding forward.”

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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/nov/02/heating-faster-climate-change-greenhouse-james-hansen

[Think. Again.]

1. The bills have been overdue....

...for quite some time, it's the heavily accumulated interest that will really be the problem.