TheBrain

2020 Lynas_Our Final Warning Six Degrees of Climate Emergency

1/2 meter of SLR will flood land currently occupied by 50 million people

5oC would be the warmest the Earth has been in 50 million years

5-10 million years ago the Arctic seems to have been ice-free at 450ppm CO2

6 zetajoules of energy are being added to upper ocean every year, compared to 0.5 zetajoules consumed by humans

50 billion tons of methane are stored as methane hydrates under the East Siberian Arctic ice shelf

A 1 in 3.5 million chance that climate warming is not human-caused

An ice-free Arctic could absorb heat equivalent to 1 trillion tons of CO2 emissions, accelerating warming by 25 years

Arctic soils could store a trillion tons of carbon

At the end of the Permian period, 250 million years ago, a mass extinction event wiped out 90% of life on the planet - it was associated with a 6oC rise in temperature

Between 2006 and 2008, soaring global food prices put 100 million people back into poverty

Cities are “moving south” by 20 km per year, or 54 meters per day, 2 meters per hour, or half a milimeter per second

CO2 levels now higher than in last 3-5 million years

Each day over 30o C reduces maize productivity by 1%, up to 2% if combined with drought

Each ton of emitted CO2 is responsible for the loss of 15 tons of Himalayan glacier ice

Every ton of CO2 released results in 3 m2 of Arctic ice being lost

Greenland’s ice sheet can warm suddenly. About 12,000 years ago it warmed by 15oC in just a few decades

Large areas of the PNW are now too dry to support regeneration of Douglas Fir and Ponderosa Pine after fires

Ocean warming can translate into 2-5 kilometers per year of “tropicalization”

Oceans have lost 77 billion tons or 2% of oxygen over last 50 years

On average global climate zones are already shifting at a rate of 5 meters per day

Past high-temperature periods on the planet took thousands of years to develop

Protecting U.S. coasts could cost $400 billion over the next 20 years, and trillions this century

Seasonal glacier meltwater supplies the needs of more than 200 million people

The 6 zetajoules of energy being added to the oceans per year equates to the equivalent of 3 Hiroshima bombs worth of energy being added to oceans ever second

The AMOC transfers heat to the North equivalent to 500,000 nuclear power plants

The amount of Arctic sea ice lost since 1980 would cover 40% of contiguous U.S.

The Brazilian rainforest stores between 150 and 200 billion tons of carbon

The generally recognised definition for ‘ice-free’ is therefore the first year when September (late summer) sea ice extent falls below one million square kilometres.

The UK MET Office’s super computers can run 14,000 trillion arithmetic operations per second

The West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) sits on bedrock from hundreds to thousands of meters below sea level

An ice-free Arctic has global repercussions

I’m talking, in addition, about the kind of denial that we all practise, the ‘implicatory denial’ of climate change that allows us to keep on living our lives as usual despite the obvious implications of what climate scientists are telling us. It’s as if we don’t really believe them. Lynas, Mark. Our Final Warning: Six Degrees of Climate Emergency (p. xi). HarperCollins Publishers. Kindle Edition.

Mitigation efforts are not shifting the Keeling curve’s trajectory

What happens in the Arctic doesn’t stay in the Arctic

1999 Satellite data suggests this was the year that CO2 induced global greening tipped to global browning as a result of falling moisture availability

2003 European heat wave kills 35,000 to 70,000 people

2010 A marine heatwave kills 100 km of kelp along off of SW Australia

2010 Pakistan suffers its worst-ever floods, with 2,000 deaths, 20,000 cattle dead, $500 million worth of crops destroyed

2012 Greenland ice sheet melt unparalleled in last 6,800-7,800 years

2014-2015 Marine heat-wave off the PNW may have been most significant event ever seen

2015 A heat wave in the Middle East drove temperatures in parts of Iran to the edge of lethal with a wet bulb temperature of 34.6oC

2015 Hurricane Patricia, with windes exceeding 200 miles per hour, was most powerful hurricane ever recorded in the Pacific

2015 MET Office announces global temperature has increased by 1oC over 1850-1900 average

2015 The Sierra Nevada snowpack reaches its lowest level in 500 years

2016-2017 large sections of Great Barrier reef wiped out by coral bleaching events

2016 A world-wide coral bleaching event did extensive damage, killing more than 90% of corals in the Southern Arabian Gulf.

2016 Many of the Antarctic ice shelves were reported to reach or exceed 0oC, setting the stage for melt

2016 Mumbai in India experiences record 51oC temperature

2017 Hurricane Harvey earily similar to a hypothetical hurricane included as a 3oC impact in the first edition of Six Degrees.

2017 Hurricane Harvey is wettest hurricane in U.S. history, dumping 50-60 inches of rain in places

2017 Hurricane Harvey results in 300,000 flooded buildings, 500,000 flooded cars, and 30,000 water rescues

2017 Hurricane Ophelia is the strongest hurricane ever recorded in the East Atlantic

2017 The 27 named Atlantic storms encompassed 245% the cyclone energy of a typical year

2018 Heat waves around the world surpassed all kinds of records

2018 Paradise, CA burns after no rain for 221 days, and surrounded by trees that died in the 2017 drought

2018 Scientists report that die-off of oldest Baobab trees in Africa - often 1,000 years old or more, is unprecedented and appears to be the result of droughts

2019 Amazon fires were up 84% in a single year

2019 Australian Bramble Cay (rat-like) becomes first mammal declared extinct as a result of climate change

2019 Botswana’s first private sector coal mine opens - the country has 200 billion tons of reserves

2019 Delhi recorded an all-time record temperature of 48oC

2019 Greenland’s contribution to global sea level rise may have been 1.5mm, 5 times the level just a decade ago

2019 Scientists conclude that rate of WAIS ice loss has increased 500% in just a few decades

2019 Scientists record 65,000 lakes on the surface of Antarctica

2019 Scientists report that U.S. bird populations are down by a third, probably as a result of falling insect populations

2020s - The first ice-free Arctic may occur in the late 2020’s

$1,000,000 The per person cost of fortifying coast-lines in smaller and often poorer U.S. communities

$1,400,000,000,000 annual cost of sea level rise flooding by 2100 in 130 major cities

$400,000,000,000 costs faced by U.S. to fortify coast-lines over the next 20 years

1.7 million people will be displaced per cm of SLR

2.8% of GDP Damages from 1.8m of SLR in 2100 ($25 trillion)

10% The GDP impact of a 5oC world in which 5% of humanity is flooded annually

95% percentile for estimates of SLR in 2100 has gone from 1.8m in 2013 to 3m in 2017

Coastal protection for Miami alone could cost $130 billion

For a 1.8m sea level rise, annual damage costs could exceed $25 trillion

Using BECCs to limit temperature to 2.5oC would require 1.1 billion hectares of cropland

1oC - 157 million more people are exposed to dangerous heat waves today than in 2000

1oC - a one in thousands of years storm like Huricane Harvey is 3x as likely and 15% more intense

1oC - AMOC seems to have weakened about 15%, the most in the last 1,500 years

1oC - Antarctic ice melt has increased 6 fold to 250 billion tons in last 4 decades

1oC - Antarctic ice melt rates are up to two orders of magnitude greater than theories had predicted

1oC - babitats are shifting 17km northward and 11m vertically per decade according to IPCC

1oC - between 1970’s and today the 650 Himalayan glaciers have doubled their rate of melt, from 20cm to 45 cm per year

1oC - between 1972 and 2018 the area burned in CA every year is up 500%

1oC - birds and butterflies are lagging behind shifting climatic zones by 212 and 135 kms respectiveley

1oC - combined ice loss in Greenland and Antarctica is up 700% over the last two decades

1oC - dengue fever now endemic in 100+ countries, up from just 9 in 1979, with potentially 390 million additional infections per year, and 12,000 deaths

1oC - flash flooding of kind that hit Wuhan, China in 2016 now 10x as likely to occur

1oC - marine heatwave days are up by 50% since first half of 20th century

1oC - mountain glaciers are now losing 335 billion tons of ice per year

1oC - negative impacts on crop productivity - ~1% - already being seen across large areas

1oC - observed maximum permafrost thaw depths already exceed what models anticipated would occur with 3oC of warming

1oC - once in a century droughts hit parts of the Amazon in 2005, 2010, and 2016

1oC - rainfall intensity is increasing in many parts of the world

1oC - since the 1970’s the Antarctic’s Pine Island Glacier has gone from releasing 6 billion tons of ice to 46 billion tons of ice

1oC - the frequency of high-tide flooding in Eastern U.S. has doubled in the last 30 years

1oC - the number of dust storms in the SW U.S. has increased from 20 per year in 1980s to 50 per year in the decade prior to 2011

1oC - the reproductive success of corals has declined globally by 80% since 1970’s

1oC - warmer waters may be causing corals to lose their ability to synchronize release of eggs and sperm over large distances

1.5 - 2oC - IPCC concludes in 2018 that: ‘The threshold of global temperature increase that may initiate irreversible loss of the West Antarctic ice sheet and marine ice sheet instability (MISI) is estimated to lie between 1.5°C and 2°C.’

1.5oC - 40% of world’s 44 megacities and 350 million people will experience dangerous heat extremes every hear

1.5oC - 70-90% of reef building corals are lost

1.5oC - 90 million Europeans are exposed to unprecedented summer heat waves

1.5oC - 500,000 fewer Latin America dengue fever cases by the end of the century

1.5oC - Once in a decade extremes for ag crops become the new normal

1.5oC - the costs of hurricanes in the Caribbean double to $1.4 billion per year

1.5oC - the European heat-waves of 2003 and 2017 could become a “normal summer”

1.5oC - the frequency of extreme El Ninos doubles, from every 15 years to every 7 years

1.5oC - we lose 4.8 million km2 of permafrost

1.5oC - world an ice-free Arctic occurs ever 40 years, in a 2oC world every 3 years

2oC - “meandering” jet stream increases length of wet and hot weather across Europe

2oC - 2 billion people are exposed to extreme heat at least once every 20 years

2oC - 10’s of millions of Chinese become exposed to dangerous summer heat waves for the first time

2oC - 18% of insects in the Amazon lose 50% of their climatic range

2oC - 79 million people displaced by rising sea levels

2oC - 150% increase in land area and number of people affected by 5-day precipitation events

2oC - 163 million Europeans are exposed to unprecedented summer heat waves

2oC - 529,000 estimated additional deaths due to malnutrition worldwide by 2050

2oC - An ice-free Arctic almost certainly will occur in a 2oC world, leading go 6.6 million km2 of melted permafrost

2oC - An ice-free Arctic is almost certain

2oC - average European summer resembles Russian summer of 2010

2oC - average flow of rivers across Northern Hemisphere increases by as much as 50%

2oC - by 2050 all cities have shifted to the South by the equivalent of 1,000 km

2oC - by 2050 Seattle has the climate of San Francisco, London - Barcelona, Madrid - Marrakech

2oC - Central American rainforests are unlikely to survive

2oC - countries will hit peak seasonal meltwater from the Himalayas in the 2020’s, followed by a steep decline

2oC - EU likely to experience 30,000 heat related deaths per year by the 2030’s

2oC - food production falls by 99 kcal per person per day, resulting in greater malnutrition, and more than 500,000 climate-related deaths by 2050

2oC - Ganges river flow could increase by 30-110% as a result of precipitation and metlwater

2oC - Greenland ice sheet likely to irreversibly tip toward melting early on

2oC - hundreds of billions of tons of carbon could be released from permafrost thawing in coming centuries

2oC - IEA has estimated that by 2050 new air conditioning demand will be equivalent to generating capacity of US, EU, and Japan.

2oC - mammals, birds, and reptiles lose 1/3 of their climatic range by 2100

2oC - many African countries experience a 10% reduction in rainfall, and dry spells 15-19 days longer

2oC - more than 130 large cities are at risk of flooding from sea level rise by 2100, at annual cost of $1.4 trillion

2oC - More than 99% of reef-building corals are lost

2oC - mortality begins to increase exponentially at a heat index of 40oC (104oF)

2oC - overall global droughts increase by 20%, with 400 million people more exposed

2oC - probability of 100 year flood events in China increases by a factor of 2.4

2oC - tens of billions of tons of carbon could be released by permafrost thawing by 2100, including methane

2oC - thawing permafrost by 2050 will have major costs and implications

2oC - the freezing level in the Peruvian Andes rises by 230 meters

2-3oC - the most likely critical threshold for forest collapse in Amazonia

2.5oC - NYC could suffer 3 (currently) 100 year flood events per year

2.5oC - trees may find that their climatic zone has moved by 500 kms

3oC - 1/3 of the global land area will exceed “deadly heat thresholds” 20 days a year

3oC - 2/3 of North American bird species are at risk of extinction

3oC - 20-year return period heat waves will be happening every years in many regions including the U.S.

3oC - 136 UNESCO World Heritage Sites put at risk

3oC - 200 million people could be affected by flooding annually, with a qudrupuling of deaths to 20,000 people per year

3oC - African generally faces a 20-50 fold increase in exposure to dangerous heat

3oC - Amazon fires smoke could be the global equivalent of a volcanic eruption

3oC - Arctic permafrost emissions could add .3 to .4 oC of warming to existing estimates

3oC - by 2050, the frequency of 100-year floods will have doubled across 40% of the globe, affecting 450 million people

3oC - by 2100, sea levels will be rising by more than they have risen during any point in human history

3oC - countries like Canada that were projected to benefit agriculturally in a 2oC world, experience yield losses

3oC - enough to melt the entire WAIS over the next 500 years

3oC - extreme heat waves currently expected 4 times a century in SE Asia will occur every other year

3oC - flood damage in the U.S. more than doubles

3oC - flooding damages rise by 1000% to more than a trillion dollars

3oC - food shortages are the highest probability cause of a societal collapse

3oC - global food production could be cut by half

3oC - hundreds of thousands of square kms in the Amazon become subject to wildfire

3oC - in CA, SLR could cost $150 billion and affect 600,000 people

3oC - invasive species like the tropical rabbitfish will do large-scale damage to kep forests as they move North

3oC - IPCC assesses a 50% chance of a meter of SLR by 2100, and a 5% chance of 1.77 meters

3oC - large parts of the world see a 500% increase in drought risk

3oC - major crops become unviable in Africa

3oC - more than 10 million people are exposed to “extreme risk” of heat stroke if working outside

3oC - more than half of insects, 44% of plants, and 20% of birds will lose more than half their climatic range

3oC - NYC could see 3 Hurricane Sandy flood events annually, which flooded 50 square miles of the city

3oC - over a billion people exceed the “workability” heat threshold

3oC - permafrost thawing could release 100 billion tons of carbon by 2100

3oC - rainfed agriculture will cease to exist in many parts of the world

3oC - subsistence farming becomes impossible in most of Africa and South Asia, affecting 1 billion people

3oC - takes us back in time about 3 million years

3oC - the average Mediterranean drought will last a decade or more

3oC - the fraction of the world population exposed to “deadly heat” will rise from 30% in a 1oC world to 53%

3oC - the massive East Antarctic ice sheet to melt over several thousand years

3oC - the water resources of a billion people are threatened

3oC - West African cities experience 145 dangerous heat days per year by the 2090’s

3oC - will generate 2-4 meters of SLR from Greenland over the next 1000 years

3oC - would cause the loss of 80% of glacier mass in many parts of the world, and 50% in Alaska

4oC - 1-2 meters of SLR are in the cards by 2100, affecting hundreds of millions of people

4oC - 3/4 of the boreal region will become crop-suitable

4oC - 60 million people are exposed to regular flooding, with 100-year events now happening every decade

4oC - 100-year return period flood flows increase by 60-80% across key rivers

4oC - 480 million people are subject to annual flooding by 2100

4oC - an additional 3 billion people face water stress

4oC - an energy-intensive human civilization as we know it is teetering

4oC - annual coastal damages in Europe go from $1 billion to between $100 billion and $1 trillion by 2100

4oC - at least 1/6 of all species will be driven extinct

4oC - billions of people are experiencing dangerous heat index conditions every year

4oC - by 2100, 25 U.S. cities of over 100,000 people face inundation

4oC - Category 6 super-storms will become a reality

4oC - China faces a 4x increase in cyclone damage in a 4oC world, and a 7x increase in a XoC world, or $65 billion per year.

4oC - crop losses could approach 80%

4oC - extreme precipitation across the U.S. may increase by 400%

4oC - global exposure to extreme heat increases by 30x, while in Africa it is 100x

4oC - heat-related deaths in the U.S. increase by 500%, and by 2,000% in Colombia

4oC - Jakarta Indonesia will experience dangerous heat 365 days a year

4oC - large densely populated areas become effectively unlivable

4oC - large parts of South Asia will be approaching wet bulb temperatures of 35oC

4oC - loss of the WAIS is inevitable (over centuries)

4oC - many US states will experience 8 weeks of 100oF temperatures

4oC - marine protected areas will be devastated

4oC - meltwater from the Himalayan ice pack will peak and then decline

4oC - more than half of the world’s land area is classed as “arid”

4oC - mosquito-borne diseases will decline in large parts of the world because it will be too hot for mosquitos

4oC - New Orleans would be flooded, along with large parts of NYC, Tampa, Sacramento, Boston, Honolulu, Tampa, and Long Beach, CA

4oC - only a third of the Himalayan ice pack remains. Today it supports the needs of a billion people

4oC - Portland OR has the climate of Sacramento, while Los Angeles shifts to Baja CA

4oC - Sierra Nevada snowpack is reduced by 80-90%

4oC - simulations suggest storms with a wind speed of 115 m per second, far higher than today’s record of 87 m per second.

4oC - the Alps have lost 90% of their ice cover, and the Himalayas 50%

4oC - the economic damages from flooding increase by 500%, in Europe equivalent to $100 billion per year

4oC - the likelihood of simultaneous bread basket failures is very high

4oC - the probability of marine heat waves will increase by a factor of 40, compared to the factor of 2 witnessed today.

4oC - the probability of strong El Nino events in the Pacific could double

4oC - the risk of large fires in the Western U.S. and Florida rises by more than 500%

4oC - warming will be occurring at a rate 65 times greater than during the last inter-glacial

4.5oC - most categories of life have lost between 1/2 and 2/3 of their climatic ranges

5oC - 25% of Africa’s cities experience more than 200 days of dangerous heat per year, preventing outside work

5oC - 60oC temperatures are common across the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia

5oC - Arctic rainforests might re-establish themselves

5oC - by 2100, climatic zones have shifted 5,000 kms northward, or 170 m per day

5oC - concepts of morality are undermined

5oC - global food trade has ended

5oC - humans can still exist in quite a few parts of the world, but not 10 billion of them

5oC - most societies come to an end

5oC - sea could be rising by 2-4 cm per year by 2100

5oC - SLR by the end of the century could rise to 3m, with 800 million people flooded

550 ppm CO2, major food crops may see reducing protein, zinc, and iron content of 3-17%, adding hundreds of millions of people to the numbers of malnourished.

2030’s - could see two degrees as soon as the early 2030s, three degrees around mid-century, and four degrees by 2075 or so.

Per degree - thawing 4 million square kms of permafrost

Per degree, major crops - maize, rice, soybean, wheat may face up to 25% yield reductions from insect attack

Per degree, major crops - maize, rice, soybeans, wheat, may lose 3-7% of yield

Per degree, ocean plant and animal biomass likely to decrease by 5% per degree of warming

A 6oC world by 2100 has been considered within the bounds of plausibility by several IPCC reports

A key uncertainty in forecasting black swan outcomes is the pace at which we are emitting carbon to the atmosphere

Arguably, the chances of a 6oC world by 2100 are similar to the chances of achieving a 1.5oC world by 2100

Could the AMOC collapse?

If we’re unlucky with positive feedbacks from thawing permafrost in the Arctic or collapsing tropical rainforests, then we could be in for five or even six degrees by the century’s end.

It is literally hard to imagine a 6oC world

It will never be too late!

Models have estimated that the permafrost feedback could add 0.2oC to global warming, but new indications suggest it could be 0.5 - 1oC

One argument is that the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum was triggered by permafrost melt

Permafrost thaw could happen much faster than models anticipate, releasing additional tens of billions of tons of carbon

The global implications of an ice-free Artic?

The IPCC should be carrying out studies of the implications of high-end scenarios, not just low-end scenarios

Was the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) temperature rise of 5-9oC 56 million years ago triggered by a 2oC increase?

We are emitting more carbon today than during the period leading to the Permian extinction 250 million years ago - and a temperature rise of 6oC

We are running an experiment somewhat analagous to Chernobyl

We have no way to know for sure how we will respond to the food shocks of a 4oC world

We should beware of the risk of suddenly ending climate engineering once undertaken

What if we lose a lot of the Earth’s cloud cover?

While seemingly inconceivable, the odds of a 6oC world by 2100 are considerably higher than that of a plane crash or nuclear plant meltdown

Lynas, Mark - Author

2007 Lynas_Six Degrees Our Future on a Hotter Planet

2020 - 2021 Sources

2020 Lynas_Our Final Warning Six Degrees of Climate Emergency

Individual Books, Reports, Journal Articles

Sample Sources

Under-Estimating the Costs of Climate Change

In 2007 Mark Lynas published Six Degrees Our Future on a Hotter Planet, which walked through the potential implications of climate warming year degree by degree. In 2020 he published an updated version of the book: Our Final Warning: Six Degrees of Climate Emergency.

The books can contribute significantly to our thinking about climate risk, which is ultimately more of a function of uncertainties about the future than certainties. But books like this suffer from a fundamental problem. By the time you’re finished you’ll have forgotten more than 50% of its content, and you’re likely to forget the rest over the next couple of weeks. That makes it a lot harder to take ongoing advantage of the massive amount of research that Mark Lynas did in assembling the books.

That’s why the Climate Web exists. Not just to help you leverage the knowledge in Mark Lynas’ books, of course, but to manage the knowledge associated with hundreds of books and reports, and thousands of articles and websites.

With respect to Mark Lynas latest book, the screenshot below illustrates that we’ve extracted factoids, arguments, dates, degree-by-degree climate impacts etc. from the book (different categories of extracted materials are color- and icon-coded so you always know what you’re looking at - but we won’t get into the details of that here).

Don’t be put off by the number of “child thoughts” shown above. The real point of the Climate Web, and the real power of TheBrain software we use, is not to organize lists like that shown above, but to be able to slice and dice the information contained there into fit-for-purpose actionable climate knowledge kits (stories), much like climate LEGO blocks. In effect, the Climate Web contains 150,000 information building blocks that can be used in this way.

In the sections below we’ll summarize some of the key conents of Mark Lynas’ book. We hope it will encourage you to dig deeper into the book (it’s heavily referenced with respect to the points made below), and the topic of climate risk more generally. At the bottom of the page we’ll provide you with links you can use to jump to relevant places in the Climate Web.

It’s worth noting that Mark Lynas does provide a lot of source materials in his book, many of which are already in the Climate Web. We’d like to link individual thoughts to source materials to make it easy to dig deeper, but he’s made it a bit difficult to systematically do that so it’s a pending project.

The Climatographers

Lynas makes a number of thought-provoking points in the book, and we’ve pulled a few of them together here:

A 6oC world by 2100 has been considered within the bounds of plausibility by several IPCC reports
Arguably, the chances of a 6oC world by 2100 are similar to the chances of achieving a 1.5oC world by 2100
Could the AMOC (Atlantic Current) collapse?
If we’re unlucky with positive feedbacks from thawing permafrost in the Arctic or collapsing tropical rainforests, then we could be in for five or even six degrees by the century’s end.
It is literally hard to imagine a 6oC world
Models have estimated that the permafrost feedback could add 0.2oC to global warming, but new indications suggest it could be 0.5 - 1oC
One argument is that the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum was triggered by permafrost melt
Permafrost thaw could happen much faster than models anticipate, releasing additional tens of billions of tons of carbon
The global implications of an ice-free Artic?
Was the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) temperature rise of 5-9oC 56 million years ago triggered by a 2oC increase?
We are emitting more carbon today than during the period leading to the Permian extinction 250 million years ago - and a temperature rise of 6oC
We are running an experiment somewhat analagous to Chernobyl
We have no way to know for sure how we will respond to the food shocks of a 4oC world
We should beware of the risk of suddenly ending climate engineering once undertaken
What if we lose a lot of the Earth’s cloud cover?
While seemingly inconceivable, the odds of a 6oC world by 2100 are considerably higher than that of a plane crash or nuclear plant meltdown

Interesting Factoids

The book presents A LOT of interesting factoids like those below. The question is, how can factoids like these be combined into climate stories that are effective with specific individuals and audiences.

An ice-free Arctic could absorb heat equivalent to 1 trillion tons of CO2 emissions, accelerating warming by 25 years
Arctic soils could store a trillion tons of carbon
At the end of the Permian period, 250 million years ago, a mass extinction event wiped out 90% of life on the planet - it was associated with a 6oC rise in temperature
Between 2006 and 2008, soaring global food prices put 100 million people back into poverty
Cities are “moving south” by 20 km per year, or 54 meters per day, 2 meters per hour, or half a milimeter per second
Coastal protection for Miami alone could cost $130 billion
Each day over 30o C reduces maize productivity by 1%, up to 2% if combined with drought
Each ton of emitted CO2 is responsible for the loss of 15 tons of Himalayan glacier ice
Every ton of CO2 released results in 3 m2 of Arctic ice being lost
For a 1.8m sea level rise, annual damage costs could exceed $25 trillion
Greenland’s ice sheet can warm suddenly. About 12,000 years ago it warmed by 15oC in just a few decades
Large areas of the PNW are now too dry to support regeneration of Douglas Fir and Ponderosa Pine after fires
On average global climate zones are already shifting at a rate of 5 meters per day
Seasonal glacier meltwater supplies the needs of more than 200 million people
The 6 zetajoules of energy being added to the oceans per year equates to the equivalent of 3 Hiroshima bombs worth of energy being added to oceans ever second
The AMOC transfers heat to the North equivalent to 500,000 nuclear power plants
The amount of Arctic sea ice lost since 1980 would cover 40% of contiguous U.S.
The IPCC should be carrying out studies of the implications of high-end scenarios, not just low-end scenarios
The UK MET Office’s super computers can run 14,000 trillion arithmetic operations per second

Some Interesting Numbers

Again, the book presents A LOT of interesting numbers like those below. We’ve integrated thousands of such numbers into the Climate Web for purposes of delivering actionable climate knowledge.

$1,000,000 The per person cost of fortifying coast-lines in smaller and often poorer U.S. communities
$1,400,000,000,000 annual cost of sea level rise flooding by 2100 in 130 major cities
$400,000,000,000 costs faced by U.S. to fortify coast-lines over the next 20 years
1/2 meter of SLR will flood land currently occupied by 50 million people
1.7 million people will be displaced per cm of SLR
2.8% of GDP Damages from 1.8m of SLR in 2100 ($25 trillion)
6 zetajoules of energy are being added to upper ocean every year, compared to 0.5 zetajoules consumed by humans
10% The GDP impact of a 5^o C world in which 5% of humanity is flooded annually
50 billion tons of methane are stored as methane hydrates under the East Siberian Arctic ice shelf
95% percentile for estimates of SLR in 2100 has gone from 1.8m in 2013 to 3m in 2017