Went to a climate change lecture by Dr. George Jacobson, Professor Emeritus of Biology, Ecology and Climate Change, University of Maine a few days ago. He showed us a satellite photo of the ice cover circa 9/5/1979 and 9/5/2012--you can really see the changes.

What I found a bit odd was there was very little talk about holding off change, but there was a lot about preparing for it. He did address a couple of mundane topics--like highway planners needing to install larger culverts in Maine. But mostly he took a "change is normal and inevitable' perspective.

I found myself a bit confused. For example he showed 20,000 time series for the distribution of spruce, then oak, in north america. The obvious point being that change is inevitable. Almost as if anthropogenic warming should be treated as a natural phenomena. Plan for bigger culverts and other infrastructure changes, but otherwise don't worry.

What he didn't address, and I now regret not asking about, is the rate of change. My understanding is that the rate of change is the biggest threat we face. If things move too quickly we may not be able to adapt.

Re: rate of change. During the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, a period of very rapid climate change 56 million years ago, the temperature warmed 0.025 C per 100 years (1 degree in 4,000 years). That was rapid change compared to other warming periods in history where the rise was much less (1 degree in tens of thousands of years).

Our current rate of warming is 1 to 4 degrees C per 100 years with the higher range being the most likely at this point. So even our really rapid change is happening more rapidly than first thought. The Arctic ice cap is at levels that weren't supposed to happen till middle to late 21st century--we're about 50 years or more ahead of schedule. Oceans are rising faster than expected. Ocean heating up is faster than expected. The only thing not happening faster than expected is the rate CO2 is being added to the atmosphere--that's about right in the middle of the predictions.

Animals, plants cannot adapt to a rate of change that is magnitudes faster than even the fastest rate in the past (PETM, incidentally, also saw a massive extinction event). We may be able to, but not before we see a tremendous amount of suffering and damage from floods to food crop failures. We will eventually adapt regardless but we still have a choice about how much adaptation will be necessary providing we can curtail emissions.

Thanks Ken,

I knew that the rate of change had to be an important factor--after all change is constant so life has to be able to cope with it at normal rates. But 40x to 100x the rate of prior historic "fast" is clearly going to be a problem.

This week we hit a milestone. CO2 hit 400 ppm, up from about 280 from preindustrial times.

For every doubling of CO2 from preindustrial levels, global climate will warm between 1.5-4.5 degrees C, with the value somewhere near the middle of those two values.

It isn't that 400 ppm is an important number in terms of effects (399 to 400 isn't going to make a measurable difference), but it is just a warning signpost that we zipped by without slowing down. We're well on our way to 1000 ppm by the end of the century.

Incidentally, last time earth had 400 ppm there were no ice caps, water levels were meters higher, the Arctic had tropical vegetation and animals, and modern humans didn't exist. Things are happening so fast (75% of summer ice in the Arctic is gone compared to even just 30 years ago) that scientists can't keep up with the changes (this level of ice disappearance wasn't supposed to occur for another 20 to 40 years) to project how this will affect weather patterns ("Whiplash weather" is a term we perhaps may be hearing more of).

It may not be possible for an inhabited world to exist in the same condition that an uninhabited one would. We're certainly not going back to pre-industrial times, and probably billions would die if we did.

Quite true on both counts. If we don't transition away from fossil fuels though, we may very well end up with millions to billions dying anyway. We're probably locked in for two degrees C of warming even if all our CO2 emissions magically stopped today. I do feel somewhat optimistic that we will eventually transition away, but perhaps only after a few catastrophes hit the developed nations (that'll spur the general populace, which should help the politicians develop a backbone and stop being so wishy-washy).

Mind you, I'm not as optimistic we'll make it through some of the coming ecological bottlenecks all that well....but who knows.

Suppose a catastrophe hit the developed nations tomorrow, and it were absolutely certain that fossil fuels caused it? No developed nation can do anything by itself, and even if the right thing were done, wouldn't it take decades to make a difference?

The biggest problem is that our #1 solution for dealing with this is to invest even more power into politicians who can't so much as balance a checkbook and cross our fingers and hope that they can fix it. Balancing a checkbook isn't rocket science, but this very nearly is.

Obama has shown us where that goes. In the name of green energy, all he's done is give money to rich friends and contributors. The result has been investing in 20 or so companies about to go bankrupt, which proceeded to do so, after the friends were paid off. When we try to negotiate treaties, they're more geared towards helping developing nations catch up than with combatting environmental problems. It's the developing nations catching up to the developed ones that's as likely as anything to push us over the edge. So I see no hope at all in the Give Dimwitted Politicians More Power solution. And I don't see any other solutions on the table. So, without having any good solution at all, I tend not to talk about the issue much. What's the point?

The politicians don't need more power, all they need to do is make it easier for people to choose to do the right thing.

Politicians think they need more power, that they need to control all the details. They are not individually or collectively smart enough to figure out what to do.

To the extent that politicians need to do anything they need to tax carbon and help people make good decisions through education and tax policy. They need to provide individuals and corporations the opportunity to bring good ideas to market to see which survive--not pick corporate winners.

Politicians need to identify goals and support those goals, not specific companies. There was a prize for the first company to develop an LED light bulb that met a specific set of criteria for energy usage and light produced. The prize worked, it pushed the technology ahead and has resulted in lower LED lighting costs to consumers. A specific company awarded a contract would never have achieved the same outcome.

Gov't has a role to play. They need to set goals and policies that encourage us to achieve those goals. The gov't doesn't need more power, it simply needs to use the power it has wisely.

Lately I've been coming round to this way of thinking more and more. It seems to be working in my country, the UK, with the feed-in tariff that gives you money for every KwH of electricity you generate (with solar panels, wind turbines and the like). There's a similar scheme coming in soon for heat pumps and other systems that generate heat.

The UK feed-in tariff encouraged loads of people to set up companies that installed PV panels, in order to meet the demand from people who wanted to take advantage of the subsidies. At one point, before the Government slashed the feed-in tariff rate, solar panels were a very lucrative investment (if you had the required capital, of course) given how far the price of the panels had dropped since the tariffs were first introduced. A triumph for 'nudge theory', it seems!

I'm not overly familiar with this. Solyndra was the most high profile one which went bankrupt, and there were a few others. Still, Herb Allison who led a team of auditers concluded the program cost taxpayers 2 billion less than expected. Over a 20 year period the loans and loan guarantee program cost taxpayers 94 cents for every 1000 dollars invested.

Also, none of the reviews, hearings, audits, found any evidence of wrongdoing. The Republican accusations were, as they admitted much later, political-based rather than evidence-based as they were trying to keep a scandal (or fake scandal) in the news up till election day.

Again, I'm not overly familiar with this, but I suspect your quote isn't based on any evidence. (also, there appear to have been 40 companies, not 20...and the loans kept 60,000 people employed during economic downturn).

So, are all companies going to succeed? No. As noted, the cost-benefit ratio is quite high though so enough companies are succeeding to make the loans program beneficial. Tesla, for example, paid back its loan 9 years early, taxpayers see a 12 million dollar profit, plus thousands of jobs.