Chris Mooney Profile picture
Oct 8, 2018 8 tweets 3 min read Twitter logo Read on Twitter
1. These are today's emissions and top emitters. We included this graphic for a reason. #SR15 washingtonpost.com/energy-environ…
2. As we put it, in order to hold warming to 1.5C, "overall reductions in emissions in the next decade would probably need to be more than 1 billion tons per year, larger than the current emissions of all but a few of the very largest emitting countries." @brady_dennis
3. So, most of these countries. We'd have to cut emissions every year by more than most of these countries emit annually. That is the scale of what is being talked about.
4. Some other key details about the huge, "unprecedented" lift that is being proposed if the world is somehow to hold warming to 1.5 C, either entirely, or with only a minor overshoot.
5. As we note in the piece, according to @iea, only 4 percent of road transport is now powered by renewable fuels. And only slow change is expected in this sector. Somehow, the pace of change here would have to be hugely sped up in just a decade iea.org/media/publicat…
6. The @IPCC_CH also says there has to be a big change in how land is used -- devoting vast areas to carbon-storing forests and crops for energy (BECCS). “Such large transitions pose profound challenges for sustainable management of the various demands on land," it says.
7. One could go on. But clearly ,the question is how this change without "historic precedent" can happen.
8. There are going to be a lot of takes on this. A lot. In our story, @Peters_Glen offered one of them: "Even if it is technically possible, without aligning the technical, political and social aspects of feasibility, it is not going to happen." /end

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More from @chriscmooney

Sep 25, 2018
1. Want to thank folks for reading my recent story about Esieh Lake, a strange lake in the Arctic that’s bubbling up lots of methane, and the scientists led by Katey Walter Anthony of @UAFairbanks, who are trying to plumb its secrets. washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/…#thread
2.Here, I’m hoping to share a little more about the story, and some photos and charts.
3. We were intrigued by this study by Walter Anthony and her colleagues on Arctic thermokarst lakes, formed as permafrost thaws, and the major punch they could deliver to the climate system, since they thaw to considerable depths and unleash methane. nature.com/articles/s4146…
Read 20 tweets
Aug 16, 2018
1. It's time to talk -- again -- about Totten glacier, East Antarctica. In size, it’s somewhere between California and Texas. Single-handedly, it could raise global sea levels by nearly 13 feet. They basically don’t get any bigger than this. agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.10…
2. Every year, as part of its normal outward flow, Totten sends 71 billion tons of ice into the ocean (but it also gains much of this ice back through snowfall). That’s more than any other glacier in East Antarctica, which is itself the largest ice mass on the globe, by far.
3. We worry a lot about West Antarctica these days. But as a new study notes, if Totten were to go it could raise sea levels more than all glaciers and all the ice in West Antarctica combined. agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.10…
Read 16 tweets
Jul 12, 2018
1. The “Younger Dryas” was an exceedingly weird climatic era beginning around 13,000 years ago. And it could have something really important to tell us about the future. washingtonpost.com/energy-environ…
2. It’s weird because it’s an ice age throwback at the end of an ice age. The world was getting warmer, ice was melting – and then suddenly it wasn’t any more (in the Northern hemisphere, that is, and especially Europe).
3. One theory has been that this has something to do with the vulnerable ocean "conveyor belt," or overturning circulation, in the Atlantic Ocean. If it shut down, it could have caused a cooling. But what shut it down?
Read 16 tweets
Jun 27, 2018
1. In which I endeavor to convince you that a process you may not have heard of called “Atlantification” is a pretty big deal washingtonpost.com/news/energy-en…
2. Basically, the Arctic Ocean is weird. Well, so is the Southern Ocean, and in the same way, but let’s focus on the Arctic.
3. The thing is, it’s inverted. Colder water on the top, warmer water below it.
Read 18 tweets
Jun 14, 2018
1. So in light of the really big news yesterday about Antarctic ice loss *tripling* in a decade, I wanted to further unpack what this means and why it is so significant. washingtonpost.com/news/energy-en…
2. As I reported yesterday, a major scientific assessment has confirmed that the continent is now losing 219 billion tons of ice per year from 2012-2017, and that is three times the ice loss for the period 2002-2007, or 10 years ago.
3. The study itself is here and the data on how the rate of ice loss has increased, over 5 year periods, is in table 1.
nature.com/articles/s4158…
nature.com/articles/s4158…
Read 19 tweets
Jun 6, 2018
1. So a pretty big deal study about changes to hurricanes under global warming -- changes that have apparently *already happened* -- has just come out. My coverage here: washingtonpost.com/news/energy-en…
2. The original study, in Nature, can be found here nature.com/articles/s4158…
3. The new finding is that the storms are moving more slowly. This refers not to their wind speeds, but rather, the speed at which the entire rotating bundle of wind travels across the ocean or land, guided by the larger atmospheric flow, what scientists dub "steering currents."
Read 12 tweets

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