Saturday 5 May 2018

Public information films - climate change



Research For Business as Usual outcome
Tyndall Centre for Climate Chance Research 


Tyndall Vision Statement

Inspired by a group of leading researchers, The Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research was established in 2000. The aim was to see ongoing scientific research support society in making a timely transition to a sustainable low-carbon future.
Governments worldwide have earned our recognition for agreeing to take action to hold “the increase in … temperature to well below 2°C … and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C” and we are proud that our research has contributed to informing and guiding this important and unprecedented objective.
The 2015 Paris Agreement has provided the backbone of resolve for the way forward, but can only be achieved by almost entirely moving away from the use of fossil fuels. This will involve a rapid transformation of the way in which we consume and supply energy, and it will demand global cooperation on a scale never seen before. Furthermore, it will require a drastic reduction of greenhouse gas emissions from other activities such as forestry, agriculture, and industry.
The Paris Agreement presents a clear challenge for the research community: to find achievable pathways of global decarbonisation, without impeding prosperity, security and development. Efforts to tackle climate change must be broadened and should engage not only the highest levels of public policy, but also a wide range of decision makers in the private sector as well as those individuals contributing more broadly to our thriving civil society.

Future Scenarios

The future is uncertain. Yet some things are knowable. One certainty is that our current trajectory of greenhouse gas emissions will lead to considerably more warming. The Paris climate agreement on climate change aspires to limit climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions around the world. But how do we know what options we have. Scenario methods provide a way to explore possible futures.
At their simplest, scenarios are storylines that illustrate how the world may change. Scenarios help us to understand the key elements that will affect emissions in the future. More than 1000 scenarios of our possible future have been proposed by over 30 different research teams around the world. But only about 100 scenarios are consistent with the limits to climate change set in the Paris Agreement.
These scenarios all show substantial and rapid changes in the way we produce and use energy. We use models to enrich scenarios with details: on how much it will cost to reduce our emissions; where will our energy come from; who should act and what are the implications (both positive and negative). 
Many scenarios rely on technologies that have yet to be implemented commercially, with high risk that they might not be viable. Some models even find that the agreed climate change limit, which is set in the Paris Agreement to protect us, is infeasible. This raises major questions regarding our choices for responding to climate change.

Cities & coasts

Our programme on building resilience and decreasing the vulnerability of people and places, with particular reference to cities and coasts, aims to bring greater integration to our work on coastal communities, cities and adaptation. Given the widespread consequences of climate change throughout society, adaptation represents a major challenge to future sustainability. More than half of the world’s population live in cities and approximately forty percent live on or near the coast, with 14 of the 17 world’s mega-cities located on coasts. Urban populations, which are growing most rapidly in developing countries, are facing risks such as heat stress, flooding and damage to infrastructure; coastal regions are particularly vulnerable to climate change and consequent increases in sea level and storminess.
Significant coastal impacts throughout the twenty-first century and beyond are inevitable without appropriate adaptation. The challenge for researchers is to identify resilient adaptation options that increase the ability to withstand climate shocks, help individuals and institutions identify and implement adaptation strategies based on knowledge and resources, and enable learning and adaptation in a timely fashion, without undermining mitigation efforts by inducing energy-intensive adaptations such as air conditioning, pumped drainage or desalination.

Land & water

The use of the planet’s land and water resources are intimately linked with each other and with the climate. Land and water use relates to both the mitigation of climate change via reducing emissions of greenhouse gases, and adaptation via their role in climate change impacts.
Tyndall Centre research is tackling key issues related to land use and the services provided by ecosystems, including the need to avoid tropical deforestation to limit global temperature rise to two degrees Centigrade, the impact of carbon forestry projects on local communities, and the trade-offs between different types of land use for achieving food and energy security, such as the growing of biofuels and food crops.
Research also looks at the resilience of water resources and land systems to the impacts of climate change and adaptation processes and how human security is affected by water-related climate hazards such as floods and droughts. Research spans a range of geographical scales and approaches, from small-holder farmers in Africa in relation to livelihoods and resilience to floods and droughts, to analysing the type of climate change information needed for adaptation by water resources managers in the UK, and global scale modelling studies that assess the benefits of mitigation and adaptation strategies. 



This graph shows that even at the lowest range of climate sensitivity, future global warming will take us well beyond any temperature experienced during civilised human history. The blue line represents reconstructed temperature (Marcott et al. 2013). The red line represents measured and projected global surface temperature (Meinshausen et al. 2011). The red dots show the projected warming in the year 2100 for three different climate sensitivities (high sensitivity 4.5°C, most likely sensitivity 3°C, low sensitivity 1.5°C). H/T to Joe Romm and Michael Tobis whose work inspired this graph.




1.3.1 What Is the Challenge?
The challenge of climate change mitigation from an equity perspective is to ensure that neither the impact of climate change nor that of mitigation policies exacerbates existing inequities both within and across nations. The starting point for describing this challenge is the vast range of differences in incomes, opportunities, capacities, and human welfare, both between and within countries. This is combined with the fact that carbon emissions are closely correlated to income levels–both across time and across nations–which suggests that restrictions on such emissions may have strong distributional effects.
World Economy: growth, distribution, technology

Economic development is expressed in GNP (Gross National Product). The SRES scenarios span a wide range of future levels of economic activity. The highest overall prediction is for the A1 scenario; an estimated GNP of US$529 trillion (1990 US dollars) in 2100. The lowest overall prediction is for the B2 scenario; an estimated GNP of US$235 trillion in 2100. This means that globalization combined with an emphasis on wealth would generate the highest economic growth. This is mainly because population growth is lower in a global scenario, causing a narrower division of the GNP. The emphasis on wealth rather than on sustainability also increases the GNP. It is estimated that the future income gap between developed and developing countries will be smaller than was initially estimated in the IS92 scenarios. A key element, however, is technological development and the implied energy efficiency of future economic development.


Energy system 

The impact of future energy use will largely depend on the fuel type. Both global scenarios depict a transition towards more non-fossil fuel sources. In the regional sustainable scenario the transition towards non-fossil fuel sources is much more gradual. The regional wealth scenario marks a stark transition back to fossil fuels. In all scenarios the share of oil and gas declines and more coal will be used for energy generation in the future.
Figure 4 summarizes the global primary energy structure, shares (%) of oil and gas, coal, and non-fossil (zero-carbon) energy sources - historical development from 1850 to 1990 and in SRES scenarios. Each corner of the triangle corresponds to a hypothetical situation in which all primary energy is supplied by a single source - oil and gas on the top, coal to the left, and non-fossil sources (renewables and nuclear) to the right. Constant market shares of these energies are denoted by their respective isoshare lines. Historical data from 1850 to 1990 are based on Nakicenovic et al. (1998). For 1990 to 2100, alternative trajectories show the changes in the energy systems structures across SRES scenarios. They are grouped by shaded areas for the scenario families A1B, A2, B1, and B2 with respective markers shown as lines. In addition, the four scenario groups within the A1 family A1B, A1C, A1G, and A1T, which explore different technological developments in the energy systems, are shaded individually. In the SPM, A1C and A1G are combined into one fossil-intensive group A1FI. For comparison the IS92 scenario series are also shown, clustering along two trajectories (IS92c,d and IS92a,b,e,f). For model results that do not include non-commercial energies, the corresponding estimates from the emulations of the various marker scenarios by the MESSAGE model were added to the original model outputs


Even if greenhouse emissions stopped overnight the concentrations already in the atmosphere would still mean a global rise of between 0.5 and 1C. A shift of a single degree is barely perceptible to human skin, but it’s not human skin we’re talking about. It’s the planet; and an average increase of one degree across its entire surface means huge changes in climatic extremes. 


Six thousand years ago, when the world was one degree warmer than it is now, the American agricultural heartland around Nebraska was desert. It suffered a short reprise during the dust- bowl years of the 1930s, when the topsoil blew away and hundreds of thousands of refugees trailed through the dust to an uncertain welcome further west. The effect of one-degree warming, therefore, requires no great feat of imagination. 






Reflection
As we started to talk about our ideas we discovered that climate change way one of the most pressing issues of our generation, so much so that we decided to base our film around the issue. What for me is so striking about this information is the rate that it is happening at. That is why we are basing this feature around the Governments 'Business as usual' scenario which gives us some idea of what we could expect if the world heated up buy just a 2 or 3 degrees. This would bring about not only some parts of the world being to hot to inhabit, but also other areas being subjected to extreme weather, more volcanic eruptions, tsunamis and tidal waves, as well as other parts of the planet becoming colder and more deadly. This is something we could all see within our life time, this will hopefully make the work more relatable as it is an ongoing issue.  



Sources 



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