Tuesday, April 23, 2019


Global warming has increased global economic inequality



Noah S. Diffenbaugh and Marshall Burke


PNAS first published April 22, 2019 

https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1816020116


Edited by Ottmar Edenhofer, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Potsdam, Germany, and accepted by Editorial Board Member Hans J. Schellnhuber March 22, 2019 (received for review September 16, 2018)


We find that global warming has very likely exacerbated global economic inequality, including ∼25% increase in population-weighted between-country inequality over the past half century. This increase results from the impact of warming on annual economic growth, which over the course of decades has accumulated robust and substantial declines in economic output in hotter, poorer countries—and increases in many cooler, wealthier countries—relative to a world without anthropogenic warming. Thus, the global warming caused by fossil fuel use has likely exacerbated the economic inequality associated with historical disparities in energy consumption. Our results suggest that low-carbon energy sources have the potential to provide a substantial secondary development benefit, in addition to the primary benefits of increased energy access.

Abstract


Understanding the causes of economic inequality is critical for achieving equitable economic development. To investigate whether global warming has affected the recent evolution of inequality, we combine counterfactual historical temperature trajectories from a suite of global climate models with extensively replicated empirical evidence of the relationship between historical temperature fluctuations and economic growth. Together, these allow us to generate probabilistic country-level estimates of the influence of anthropogenic climate forcing on historical economic output. We find very high likelihood that anthropogenic climate forcing has increased economic inequality between countries. For example, per capita gross domestic product (GDP) has been reduced 17–31% at the poorest four deciles of the population-weighted country-level per capita GDP distribution, yielding a ratio between the top and bottom deciles that is 25% larger than in a world without global warming. As a result, although between-country inequality has decreased over the past half century, there is ∼90% likelihood that global warming has slowed that decrease. The primary driver is the parabolic relationship between temperature and economic growth, with warming increasing growth in cool countries and decreasing growth in warm countries. Although there is uncertainty in whether historical warming has benefited some temperate, rich countries, for most poor countries there is >90% likelihood that per capita GDP is lower today than if global warming had not occurred. Thus, our results show that, in addition to not sharing equally in the direct benefits of fossil fuel use, many poor countries have been significantly harmed by the warming arising from wealthy countries’ energy consumption.



Detection of impacts caused by historical global warming has increased substantially in the past decade, including documented impacts on agriculture, human health, and ecosystems (1). Quantifying these historical impacts is critical for understanding the costs and benefits of global warming, and for designing and evaluating climate mitigation and adaptation measures (1).


The impact of historical warming on economic inequality is of particular concern (2). There is growing evidence that poorer countries or individuals are more negatively affected by a changing climate, either because they lack the resources for climate protection (3) or because they tend to reside in warmer regions where additional warming would be detrimental to both productivity and health (46). Furthermore, given that wealthy countries have been responsible for the vast majority of historical greenhouse gas emissions, any clear evidence of inequality in the impacts of the associated climate change raises critical questions of international justice.


More broadly, measuring and understanding the past and present evolution of global economic inequality is an area of active research and policy interest, with ongoing disagreement about the nature and causes of observed inequality trends (710). Quantifying any climatic influence on these trends thus has implications beyond climate risk management.


Recent research has identified pathways by which changes in climate can affect the fundamental building blocks of economic production (11, 12). Empirical work has included sector-specific analyses of agriculture, labor productivity, and human health (12), as well as analyses of aggregate indicators such as gross domestic product (GDP) (4, 13). A key insight is the nonlinear response of many outcomes to temperature change, with the coolest regions often benefitting in warm years, and warmer regions being harmed. As a result, empirical evidence combined with projections of future climate change suggests that, although some wealthy countries in cooler regions could benefit from additional warming, most poor countries are likely to suffer (4, 14).


Efforts to apply empirical approaches to explicitly quantify the spatial pattern of aggregate impacts have primarily focused on future climate change (46, 14), with quantification of historical impacts being limited to specific economic sectors and outcomes (e.g., ref. 1), or to global GDP (12). Likewise, although a number of researchers have noted that the most robust regional warming has generally occurred in lower-latitude regions that are currently relatively poor (e.g., refs. 1519), these analyses have not attempted to quantify the distributional impacts of historical temperature change.


Here, we build on past work linking economic growth and fluctuations in temperature (4, 14) to quantify the impact of historical anthropogenic climate forcing on the global distribution of country-level per capita GDP (Materials and Methods and Fig. 1). We use the Historical and Natural climate model simulations from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5) (20) to quantify the temperature trajectory of different countries in the absence of anthropogenic forcing. We then combine these counterfactual country-level temperature trajectories with empirically derived nonlinear temperature–GDP response functions to calculate the counterfactual per capita GDP of individual countries over the past half century. Finally, we use those counterfactual country-level economic trajectories to calculate the impact of historical anthropogenic forcing on population-weighted country-level economic inequality, accounting for both uncertainty in the relationship between temperature and economic growth and uncertainty in the climate response to historical forcing.



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Fig. 1.


Response of temperature and per capita GDP to global warming. (A) The ensemble-mean difference in annual temperature between the CMIP5 Historical and Natural forcing experiments during the IPCC’s historical baseline period (1986–2005). (B) The annual temperature for selected countries from historical observations [black; calculated as in Burke et al. (14)] and the world without anthropogenic climate forcing (gray). Overlaid on the country-level temperatures are the response functions containing the 10th (red), 50th (orange), and 90th (yellow) percentile temperature optima, calculated across the 1,000 temperature optima generated by the bootstrap replication of the regression. The full distribution of temperature optima from ref. 14 is shown in the gray box; as in ref. 14, darker red colors indicate cooler temperature optima and thus greater likelihood of negative impacts from warming. (C and D) The impact of anthropogenic climate forcing on annual economic growth rate, and accumulated impact on per capita GDP, for Norway and India.


Results


The estimated parabolic relationship between temperature and economic growth means that long-term warming will generally increase growth in cool countries and decrease growth in warm countries (Fig. 1). For example, for cooler countries such as Norway, warming moves the country-mean temperature closer to the empirical optimum (Fig. 1B), resulting in cumulative economic benefits (Fig. 1C). In contrast, for warm countries such as India, warming moves the country-mean temperature further from the optimum (Fig. 1B), resulting in cumulative losses (Fig. 1D).


As a result, anthropogenic climate forcing has decreased economic growth of countries in the low latitudes and increased economic growth of countries in the high latitudes (Fig. 2). The median losses exceed 25% for the 1961–2010 period (relative to a world without anthropogenic forcing) over large swaths of the tropics and subtropics (Fig. 2A), where most countries exhibit very high likelihood of negative impacts (Fig. 2 C and D), including >99% likelihood (SI Appendix, Table S1). The median gains can be at least as large in the high latitudes, where many countries exhibit >90% likelihood of positive impacts. Many countries in the middle latitudes exhibit median impacts smaller than ±10%, along with greater uncertainty in the sign of the response (particularly in the northern hemisphere). Thus, the global-scale pattern is of cool countries benefitting and warm countries suffering, with temperate countries exhibiting the greatest uncertainty.



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Fig. 2.


Country-level economic response to global warming. (A) The median impact on country-level per capita GDP across the >20,000 realizations of the world without anthropogenic forcing, calculated for each country over the 1961–2010 period. (B) As in A, but for the 1991–2010 period. Differences in the presence/absence of countries between the 1961–2010 and 1991–2010 periods reflect differences in the availability of country-level economic data. Differences in the magnitude of country-level values between the 1961–2010 and 1991–2010 periods reflect the influence of accumulation time on the net accumulated economic impact. (C and D) The probability that historical anthropogenic forcing has resulted in economic damage, calculated as the percentage of the >20,000 realizations that show a decrease in per capita GDP relative to the counterfactual world without anthropogenic forcing.



Although this global pattern could be expected from the concave structure of the empirical temperature–growth relationship (Fig. 1B), such an outcome is not determined for historical climate forcing, because internal climate variability creates uncertainty in the sign and magnitude of regional temperature change (e.g., refs. 21 and 22). However, because the mean temperature response is positive across all land areas (Fig. 1A), and because the differences in temperature change between countries (Fig. 1A) are small compared with the range of country-mean temperatures (Fig. 1B), the median economic response is that countries that are currently warmer than the median optimum have experienced losses, while countries that are currently colder than the median optimum have experienced benefits (Fig. 3A).



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Fig. 3.


Relationship between economic impact of global warming and country-level temperature, GDP, and cumulative CO2 emissions. (A) The relationship between country-level mean annual temperature and median economic impact of anthropogenic forcing over the 1961–2010 period. The orange line shows the median temperature optimum reported by Burke et al. (14), and the orange envelope shows the 5–95% range. (B) The relationship between per capita GDP in 2010 and median economic impact of historical anthropogenic forcing over the 1961–2010 period. (C) The relationship between cumulative emissions over the 1961–2010 period (calculated from ref. 32) and median economic impact of historical anthropogenic forcing over the 1961–2010 period. (A–C) Gray strip plots show the density of points along the x and y axes. The black regression line and gray envelope show the 95% confidence interval of a locally weighted regression (“loess”).



Consistent with the strong spatial correlation between temperature and GDP (23), we find a positive relationship between current GDP and impact from historical warming, with lower per capita GDP generally associated with more negative impacts (Fig. 3B). Furthermore, at a given level of wealth, warmer countries have tended to experience more negative impacts, while cooler countries have tended to experience less negative—or in some cases more positive—impacts. Because the majority of the world’s warmest countries are poor (Fig. 3 A and B), the majority of large negative impacts have been concentrated in poor countries (Fig. 3 A and B). Likewise, because the majority of the world’s richest countries are temperate or cool, the median likelihood is that the majority of rich countries have benefited.


Consistent with the strong relationship between wealth, energy consumption, and CO2emissions (2426), we also find a positive relationship between per capita cumulative emissions and impact from historical global warming (Fig. 3C and SI Appendix, Fig. S1). For example, over the 1961–2010 period, all 18 of the countries whose historical cumulative emissions are less than 10 ton CO2 per capita have suffered negative economic impacts, with a median impact of −27% (relative to a world without anthropogenic forcing) (Fig. 3C). Likewise, of the 36 countries whose historical emissions are between 10 and 100 ton CO2 per capita, 34 (94%) have suffered negative economic impacts, with a median impact of −24%. In contrast, of the 19 countries whose historical emissions exceed 300 ton CO2 per capita, 14 (74%) have benefited from global warming, with a median benefit across those 14 countries of +13%.


The net effect of these economic impacts is that country-level inequality has very likely increased as a result of global warming (Fig. 4). For example, the ratio between the top and bottom population-weighted deciles [a common measure of economic inequality (9)] has become 25% larger (5th to 95th range of −6% to +114%) during the 1961–2010 period compared with a world without global warming, with ∼90% likelihood that the ratio has increased (Fig. 4C). Likewise, the ratio between the top and bottom population-weighted quintiles [another common measure (9)] has become 45% larger (5th to 95th range of +10% to +99%), with ∼99% likelihood that the ratio has increased. As a result, although overall between-country inequality has decreased substantially over the past half century (Fig. 4A, refs. 9 and 10), it is “very likely” (27) that global warming has slowed that decrease (Fig. 4 A and C).



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Fig. 4.


Impact of global warming on country-level inequality over the past half century. (A) The ratio between the population-weighted 90th percentile and 10th percentile country-level per capita GDP for the historical observed time series and each of the >20,000 realizations of the world without anthropogenic forcing. (B) The density of the >20,000 realizations at each decile of the population-weighted country-level per capita GDP distribution. (C) The distribution across the >20,000 realizations of percent change in population-weighted 90:10 and 80:20 percentile ratios in the year 2010, relative to the present ratio. Calculations include only those countries that have continuous socioeconomic data from 1961 through 2010 (n = 86).



The increase in inequality between countries has resulted primarily from warming-induced penalties in poor countries, along with warming-induced benefits in some rich countries (Figs. 2A, 3B, and 4B). We find that the poorest half of the population-weighted country-level economic distribution has become relatively more poor over the 1961–2010 period, including a median impact of −17% at the poorest decile, and −30% to −31% at the next three poorest deciles (Fig. 4B). In contrast, the top half of the population-weighted country-level economic distribution has likely suffered much less—and has a much higher likelihood of having benefited—than the bottom half of the distribution (Fig. 4B).

Discussion


Although some canonical uncertainties in quantifying future economic impacts are largely removed when focusing on the historical period—such as future discounting uncertainty (e.g., refs. 14, 28, and 29) and the limits of accounting for future changes that fall well outside of historical experience (14)—other uncertainties must be considered.


For example, uncertainty in the exact magnitude of the temperature optimum creates uncertainty in the sign of the historical climate impact in some countries (Fig. 2C and SI Appendix, Table S1). However, the sign of the impact on inequality is robust (Fig. 4C), primarily because the mean temperature of so many poor countries lies in the extreme warm tail of uncertainty in the optimum (Fig. 3 A and B). For these countries, it is “very likely” (27) that historical warming has reduced economic growth and lowered per capita GDP (Fig. 2C and SI Appendix, Table S1). As a result, although uncertainty in the magnitude of the response of regional temperature to historical forcing creates uncertainty in the magnitude of impact at a given decile of the country-level economic distribution (Fig. 4B), the sign of the impact on the lower deciles (Fig. 4B)—and therefore on inequality (Fig. 4C)—is robust.


The sign of the inequality impact is also robust to the inclusion of lagged responses (SI Appendix, Table S2). Lagged responses can compensate the growth effects of temperature fluctuations, leading to decreases in both the growth benefit in cool countries and the growth penalty in warm countries (4). These lagged responses reduce the calculated magnitude and probability of warming-induced increases in economic inequality. However, even with a 5-y lag, there is still 66% likelihood that historical warming has increased country-level inequality.


The availability of socioeconomic data also creates uncertainty. Because growth effects cumulate, the length of time over which economic impacts are evaluated can meaningfully affect results (4, 12, 14). However, data availability creates an inherent tradeoff between evaluating fewer countries over a longer period and evaluating more countries over a shorter period. We repeat our primary analysis using a larger, shorter sample. Overall, the pattern of impact is robust, but the cumulative magnitude is larger over the longer period (Figs. 2 and 3 and SI Appendix, Fig. S1). This expansion over longer periods suggests that the full impact of warming since the Industrial Revolution has been even greater than the impact calculated over the past half century.


Our approach to quantifying the impact of global warming on economic inequality is also limited by its reliance on country-level relationships between temperature and economic growth. Our analysis focuses on country-level data because their wide availability (in both space and time) allows us to use empirical relationships to quantify how historical temperature changes have affected economic outcomes around the world. The impact of climate change on the evolution of within-country inequality is a critical question (e.g., ref. 2), but would require either strong assumptions about how within-country income distributions respond to aggregate shocks at the country level, or comprehensive subnational data on incomes (which are currently unavailable for most country-years around the world). Although our population weighting provides some indication of global-scale individual-level inequality (9), documenting the impact of global warming on within-country inequality remains an important challenge.


Many countries in our sample have experienced rapid urbanization and economic development for reasons unrelated to climate, and such trends could plausibly alter how economies respond to subsequent climate change. Because past work did not find statistically significant evidence that higher incomes reduce temperature sensitivities (4), we do not attempt to model this moderating effect here. However, if increasing urbanization or economic development has reduced the temperature sensitivity of economies over our study period, this effect will be implicitly included in our estimated impact of temperature on GDP growth and inequality—that is, we have estimated the effect of temperature on growth for economies that are rapidly urbanizing. Explicitly quantifying the role of these moderating influences is an important avenue for future work, as it will be critical for understanding how future climate change will affect the level and distribution of global income.


Trade between countries has likely already influenced the impacts of global warming on population-weighted inequality. First, a large part of the reduction in historical inequality during our sample period has been due to the unprecedented growth in incomes in East Asia [and particularly China (9, 10)], much of which was built on critical trading relationships with high-income countries. In a no-trade counterfactual, China would likely grow much less rapidly. Thus, because of China’s large population and small sensitivity to historical warming (Fig. 2), repeating our analysis in a no-trade counterfactual would likely result in smaller reductions in per capita GDP in the lower deciles of the population-weighted income distribution (Fig. 4B). However, trade can also serve as a buffer against climate shocks, particularly in poor countries (e.g., ref. 30). Thus, the economic impacts of global warming—which has substantially increased the occurrence of extremes (e.g., ref. 21)—would likely have been even greater in poor countries in a no-trade counterfactual, amplifying the impact on between-country inequality.

Conclusions


It has been frequently observed that wealthy countries have benefited disproportionately from the activities that have caused global warming, while poor countries suffer disproportionately from the impacts (e.g., refs. 16, 17, 19, 25, and 26). Our results show that, in addition to the direct benefits of fossil fuel use, many wealthy countries have likely been made even more wealthy by the resulting global warming. Likewise, not only have poor countries not shared in the full benefits of energy consumption, but many have already been made poorer (in relative terms) by the energy consumption of wealthy countries. Given the magnitude of the warming-induced growth penalties that poor countries have already suffered, expansion of low-carbon energy sources can be expected to provide a substantial secondary development benefit (by curbing future warming-induced growth penalties), in addition to the primary benefits of increased energy access.

Materials and Methods

Climate Model Experiments.


We compare the Historical and Natural climate model simulations from the CMIP5 archive (20). As in Burke et al. (14), we analyze the subselection of CMIP5 realizations analyzed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (31). For the Natural experiment, this includes one realization each from 21 of the participating global climate models, which are paired with the 21 corresponding Historical realizations. Note that although the socioeconomic data are available through 2010, the CMIP5 experimental protocol for the Historical and Natural experiments ends in 2005. Thus, as in Burke et al. (14), we use the IPCC’s 20-y historical baseline period (1986–2005) as the baseline period for climate model bias correction.


For each country, we create 21 counterfactual historical temperature timeseries TNoAnthro, which remove the influence of anthropogenic forcing simulated by each of the 21 climate models. Our approach to creating the counterfactual timeseries follows the widely applied “delta method” of climate model bias correction, in which the model-simulated change in the mean is applied to the observed timeseries. For each country c, we first calculate the observed country-level population-weighted mean annual temperature timeseries TObs for the 1961–2010 time period covered by the socioeconomic data, following Burke et al. (14). Then, for each country c and climate model m, we calculate the difference in country-level population-weighted mean temperature between the Historical and Natural CMIP5 simulations, both for the 20-y period centered on the beginning of the socioeconomic data (1951–1970), and for the 20-y historical baseline period used by the IPCC (1986–2005). We then linearize the difference between the Historical and Natural simulations over the 1961–2010 period, such that the difference in 1961 is equal to the difference in the Historical and Natural means during the 20-y period centered on 1961 (1951–1970), and the difference in 2010 is equal to the difference in the Historical and Natural means during the IPCC’s 20-y baseline period (1986–2005). Finally, for each year t in the 1961–2010 observed temperature timeseries, we add the linearized Natural minus Historical difference ∆T for that year:


TNoAnthro[t]=TObs[t]+ΔT[t].TNoAnthro[t]=TObs[t]+ΔT[t].





This process generates, for each country, an ensemble of 21 counterfactual timeseries TNoAnthro. This 21-member ensemble reflects a combination of uncertainty in the climate response to external forcings and uncertainty arising from internal climate system variability, but removes biases in the climate model simulation of the absolute temperature magnitude and of the interannual temperature variability. [The TNoAnthro timeseries corresponds to the counterfactual timeseries used in Diffenbaugh et al. (21) to calculate the contribution of the observed trend to the extreme event magnitude, except that in this case the magnitude of the counterfactual trend is calculated from the CMIP5 Natural forcing simulation.]

Impact of Historical Temperature Change on Economic Growth.


Burke et al. (4, 14) used historical data to quantify the empirical relationship between variations in country-level temperature and country-level annual growth in per capita GDP, allowing for the marginal effect of annual temperature deviations to vary nonlinearly as a function of country-level mean temperature. As described in detail in Burke et al. (4, 14), the equation for the panel fixed-effects model is as follows:


Δlog(Yit)=β1Tit+β2T2it+λ1Pit+λ2P2it+μi+υt+θ1it+θ2it2+εit,Δlog(Yit)=β1Tit+β2Tit2+λ1Pit+λ2Pit2+μi+υt+θ1it+θ2it2+εit,





where Yit is per capita GDP in country i in year t, T is the average temperature in year t, Pis the average precipitation in year t, μi are country-fixed effects, υt are year-fixed effects, and θ1it + θ2it2 are country-specific linear and quadratic time trends.


In the current study, we repeat the primary regression calculation described in Burke et al. (14), using historical data from 1961 to 2010, and bootstrapping with replacement to estimate a separate response function for each of 1,000 resamples, which we denote fb. The uncertainty in the magnitude of the temperature optimum (Fig. 1B) creates uncertainty in exactly which countries are likely to benefit or be penalized at different levels of warming, and is the largest source of uncertainty in the response of GDP growth to elevated levels of global climate forcing (14).


We quantify the uncertainty in economic damages arising from uncertainty in the temperature optimum (e.g., Figs. 2 and 4 and SI Appendix, Table S1), as well as the uncertainty arising from lagged responses to temperature fluctuations (SI Appendix, Table S2). We also explore additional aspects of the relationship between temperature and GDP growth. For example, we find that historical temperature fluctuations explain on average 8.6% of the overall variation in country-level annual income growth fluctuations during our study period (SI Appendix, Fig. S2). Likewise, given the shape of the temperature–growth response function (Fig. 1B), temperature fluctuations around a stable mean will induce a negative trend in per capita GDP. However, we find that the magnitude of this effect is small compared with the impact of long-term warming (SI Appendix, Fig. S3).


Whereas Burke et al. (4, 14) projected economic impacts under future emissions scenarios, we calculate the accumulated economic impacts of historical temperature change. For each country c in each year t, we compare economic growth under historical observed temperatures (TObs) with predicted growth under counterfactual temperatures (TNoAnthro). We repeat this comparison for each climate model m and each bootstrap j, yielding more than 20,000 realizations of the impact of anthropogenic forcing on economic growth in each country.


We first initialize the analysis in each country with the observed per capita GDP from the starting year t = 0 of the socioeconomic data (e.g., GDPcapObs[1961]). Then, for each year t and using the temperature–growth response functions f estimated above, we calculate the difference in growth rate between the observed temperature and the counterfactual temperature (Fig. 1 C and D):


ΔGrowth[t]=f(TNoAnthro[t])−f(TObs[t]).ΔGrowth[t]=f(TNoAnthro[t])−f(TObs[t]).





We then add that difference ∆Growth[t] to the actual observed growth rate GrowthObs[t] to calculate the counterfactual growth rate GrowthNoAnthro[t]:


GrowthNoAnthro[t]=GrowthObs[t]+ΔGrowth[t].GrowthNoAnthro[t]=GrowthObs[t]+ΔGrowth[t].





We then multiply this counterfactual growth GrowthNoAnthro[t] by the accumulated counterfactual per capita GDP in the previous year (GDPcapNoAnthro[t − 1]) to calculate current-year counterfactual per capita GDP:


GDPcapNoAnthro[t]=GDPcapNoAnthro[t−1]+(GDPcapNoAnthro[t−1]*GrowthNoAnthro[t]).GDPcapNoAnthro[t]=GDPcapNoAnthro[t−1]+(GDPcapNoAnthro[t−1]*GrowthNoAnthro[t]).





We repeat this process through the last year of the socioeconomic data (2010), for each country in the GDP dataset.


Finally, we calculate the percent difference between the actual observed per capita GDP (GDPcapObs) and the per capita GDP calculated for the counterfactual temperature timeseries (GDPcapNoAnthro) in the last year of the socioeconomic data (2010):


ΔGDPcap=[(GDPcapObs[2010]–GDPcapNoAnthro[2010])/GDPcapNoAnthro[2010]]×100%.ΔGDPcap=[(GDPcapObs[2010]–GDPcapNoAnthro[2010])/GDPcapNoAnthro[2010]]×100%.





For each country c, we calculate GDPcapNoAnthro and ∆GDPcap for each of the 1,000 bootstrapped response functions fb, applied to the counterfactual temperature timeseries TNoAnthro from each of the 21 global climate models (thus yielding more than 20,000 values of GDPcapNoAnthro and ∆GDPcap for each country).


Our primary analysis is focused on quantifying the impacts that historical global warming has had during the full period for which socioeconomic data are available (1961–2010). However, because the socioeconomic data do not extend to 1961 for a large number of countries, we repeat our analysis for the 1991–2010 period. For all analyses that start in 1961, we analyze only those countries that have continuous socioeconomic data from 1961 through 2010 (n = 86); for all analyses that start in 1991, we analyze only those countries that have continuous socioeconomic data from 1991 through 2010 (n = 151). Observed and estimated counterfactual temperatures and growth rates are the same for the years that overlap between the two periods, but growth rates are cumulated over 30 more years in the longer period, yielding larger (in absolute value) impacts on economic outcomes by the end of the period (Fig. 2).

Quantifying the Impact of Historical Global Warming on Economic Inequality.


A number of measures of economic inequality have been developed (9). Given the limited availability of long timeseries of subnational economic data, investigations of changes in global inequality often rely on country-level metrics (e.g., refs. 9 and 10). However, when using country-level metrics, weighting by country-level population is critical to accurately capture trends in global inequality (9).


We measure global economic inequality using the ratio of the top and bottom decile (“90:10 ratio”) and top and bottom quintile (“80:20 ratio”) of the population-weighted country-level per capita GDP distribution. Both metrics are included among “eight of the most popular” indexes of income inequality identified by Sala-i-Martin (9). According to Sala-i-Martin (9), “The top-20-percent-to-bottom-20-percent is the ratio of the income of the person located at the top twentieth centile divided by the income of the corresponding person at the bottom twentieth centile. A similar definition applies to the top-10-percent-to-bottom-10-percent ratio.” Because of the lack of availability of long timeseries of subnational economic data, we calculate these ratios using the respective percentiles of the population-weighted empirical CDF of country-level per capita GDP values (SI Appendix, Fig. S4).


We first calculate the percent difference in per capita GDP for each decile of the population-weighted country-level GDP distribution. To do so, we calculate the deciles of country-level population-weighted per capita GDP, using the countries in the 1961–2010 dataset. For each year t in the observed country-level per capita GDP dataset (GDPcapObs), we calculate the pth percentile population-weighted GDP as the country-level per capita GDP below which the sum of the country-level populations represents ppercent of the total population of countries in the 1961–2010 dataset (SI Appendix, Fig. S4). For example, we calculate the 10th percentile population-weighted GDP as the country-level per capita GDP for which the total population of countries with lower per capita GDP is 10% of the total population of countries in the 1961–2010 dataset, and so on for each decile.


Next, we calculate the deciles of country-level population-weighted per capita GDP in each year t of each bootstrap j and climate model m of the counterfactual world without anthropogenic climate forcing (GDPcapNoAnthro). Then, for the year 2010 in each bootstrap jand climate model m, we calculate the percent difference between the observed population-weighted decile value and the counterfactual population-weighted decile value (as described for ∆GDPcap above). For the differences in each population-weighted decile, we calculate the density distribution across all 1,000 bootstrap regressions from all 21 climate models, as well as the median value across the 1,000 bootstrap regressions for each climate model.


Finally, we quantify the between-country population-weighted economic inequality GDPcapHigh:Low as the ratio between the higher percentile (e.g., 90th) and lower percentile (e.g., 10th) population-weighted per capita GDP. We first calculate GDPcapHigh:Low in each year t of the observations (GDPcapHigh:LowObs), and in each year t of the counterfactual world without anthropogenic climate forcing (GDPcapHigh:LowNoAnthro). Then, for each bootstrap j and climate model m, we calculate the percent difference between the observed population-weighted inequality GDPcapHigh:LowObs and the counterfactual population-weighted inequality GDPcapHigh:LowNoAnthro in the year 2010:


ΔGDPcapHigh:Low=[(GDPcapHigh:LowObs[2010]–GDPcapHigh:LowNoAnthro[2010])/GDPcapHigh:LowNoAnthro[2010]]×100%.ΔGDPcapHigh:Low=[(GDPcapHigh:LowObs[2010]–GDPcapHigh:LowNoAnthro[2010])/GDPcapHigh:LowNoAnthro[2010]]×100%.

Acknowledgments


We thank the editor and two anonymous reviewers for insightful and constructive feedback. We acknowledge the World Climate Research Programme’s Working Group on Coupled Modelling (which is responsible for CMIP), the climate modeling groups for producing and making available their model output, and the Department of Energy’s Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison for access to the CMIP5 data. Computational facilities were provided by the Center for Computational Earth and Environmental Science and Stanford Research Computing Center at Stanford University. We acknowledge funding support from Stanford University.

Footnotes
1To whom correspondence should be addressed. Email: diffenbaugh@stanford.edu.


Author contributions: N.S.D. and M.B. designed research, performed research, contributed new reagents/analytic tools, analyzed data, and wrote the paper.


The authors declare no conflict of interest.


This article is a PNAS Direct Submission. O.E. is a guest editor invited by the Editorial Board.


This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1816020116/-/DCSupplemental.
Copyright © 2019 the Author(s). Published by PNAS.


This open access article is distributed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License 4.0 (CC BY-NC-ND).

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Charlie, the Oldest Living Southern Sea Otter at Any Aquarium or Zoo, Dies at Age 22

BY  04.23.2019 :: 11:50AM EDT
In visible light, this galaxy looks like a jellyfish with blue "tentacles" of young stars dangling from its disk. In X-ray light, a giant tail of hot gas streams behind the galaxy. Infrared will study this tail of gas & the stars forming in it.
The spiral galaxy ESO 137-001 is an example of a “jellyfish” galaxy, because blue tendrils of star formation stream away from it like jellyfish tentacles. NASA’s Webb Space Telescope will study those sites of star formation to learn more about conditions there.
Credits: NASA, ESA
 
This composite view of ESO 137-001 includes visible light from Hubble and X-ray light from the Chandra X-ray Observatory (in blue). It reveals a tail of hot gas that has been stripped from the galaxy.
Credits: NASA, ESA, CXC

Study: Climate Change Affects Global Economic Inequality, Too



BY STEPHANIE MLOT 04.23.2019



The map on the left shows countries where per capita GDP increased or decreased as a result of global warming between 1961 and 2010. The map on the right shows the same information from 1991, after economic data became available for more countries (via Stanford University)

Glaciers Have Lost More Than 9 Trillion Tons of Ice Since 1961 


This Floating City Can Withstand Category 5 Hurricanes

Climate change affects more than just the environment: A Stanford University study shows global warming has increased economic inequality.

While temperature fluctuations have enriched cool countries like Norway and Sweden, warmer nations such as India and Nigeria are suffering.

“Our results show that most of the poorest countries on Earth are considerably poorer than they would have been without global warming,” lead study author and climate scientist Noah Diffenbaugh said in a statement. “At the same time, the majority of rich countries are richer than they would have been.”

Based on 50 years of annual temperature and gross domestic product (GDP) measurements for 165 countries, researchers demonstrated that growth during warmer-than-average years has accelerated in cool nations and slowed in warm ones.




Warming that has already happened has increased economic inequality around the world (via Stanford University)

“The historical data clearly shows that crops are more productive, people are healthier, and we are more productive at work when temperatures are neither too hot nor too cold,” according to study co-author Marshall Burke, a Stanford assistant professor of Earth system science.

“This means that in cold countries, a little bit of warming can help,” he said. “The opposite is true in places that are already hot.”

Using climate models to isolate how much each country warmed due to human-induced climate change, researchers were able to estimate a range of outcomes, suggesting what each nation’s economic output might have been had temperatures not increased.

“For most countries, whether global warming has helped or hurt economic growth is pretty certain,” Burke said, admitting that the data is less clear for countries in the middle latitudes, including the US, China, and Japan.

“A few of the largest economies are near the perfect temperature for economic output,” he continued. “Global warming hasn’t pushed them off the top of the hill, and in many cases, it has pushed them toward it.”



The gap between economic output of the world’s richest and poorest countries is 25 percent larger today than it would have been without global warming (via Stanford University)

Things won’t stay this way forever, though: A large amount of warming in the future would mean a severe drop in productivity.

Just ask Sudan, India, Nigeria, Indonesia, and Brazil, which saw a 25 to 36 percent decrease in per capita GDP from global warming between 1961 and 2010.

“The more these countries warm up, the more drag there’s going to be on their development,” Diffenbaugh warned, emphasizing the importance of increased sustainable energy access for poorer countries.

“Our finding that global warming has exacerbated economic inequality suggests that there is an added economic benefit of energy sources that don’t contribute to further warming,” he added.

The full study was published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 

Global warming has increased global economic inequality
Noah S. Diffenbaugh and Marshall Burke

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2019/04/global-warming-has-increased-global.html
PNAS first published April 22, 2019 


US threatens to veto UN resolution on rape as weapon of war, officials say


Exclusive: US warns it will reject measure over language on sexual health in latest example of hardline abortion stance



Julian Borger in Washington


Mon 22 Apr 2019 

 
The United Nations headquarters in New York. Photograph: Valery Sharifulin/Tass


The US is threatening to veto a United Nations resolution on combatting the use of rape as a weapon of war because of its language on reproductive and sexual health, according to a senior UN official and European diplomats.


The German mission hopes the resolution will be adopted at a special UN security council session on Tuesday on sexual violence in conflict.


But the draft resolution has already been stripped of one of its most important elements, the establishment of a formal mechanism to monitor and report atrocities, because of opposition from the US, Russia and China, which opposed creating a new monitoring body.


Even after the formal monitoring mechanism was stripped from the resolution, the US was still threatening to veto the watered-down version, because it includes language on victims’ support from family planning clinics. In recent months, the Trump administration has taken a hard line, refusing to agree to any UN documents that refer to sexual or reproductive health, on grounds that such language implies support for abortions. It has also opposed the use of the word “gender”, seeing it as a cover for liberal promotion of transgender rights.


“We are not even sure whether we are having the resolution tomorrow, because of the threats of a veto from the US,” Pramila Patten, the UN special representative on sexual violence in conflict, told the Guardian.


In cases of disagreement in the security council, member states often fall back on previously agreed text, but the US has made it clear it would no longer accept language from a 2013 resolution on sexual violence.


“They are threatening to use their veto over this agreed language on comprehensive healthcare services including sexual and reproductive health. The language is being maintained for the time being and we’ll see over the next 24 hours how the situation evolves,” Patten said.


“It will be a huge contradiction that you are talking about a survivor-centered approach and you do not have language on sexual and reproductive healthcare services, which is for me the most critical.”






Trump administration ignoring human rights monitors, ACLU tells UN

In a draft of the resolution seen by the Guardian, the contentious phrase is only mentioned once, in a clause that “urges United Nations entities and donors to provide non-discriminatory and comprehensive health services, including sexual and reproductive health, psychosocial, legal and livelihood support and other multi-sectoral services for survivors of sexual violence, taking into account the specific needs of persons with disabilities.”

A spokeswoman for the US mission said it “does not comment on draft resolutions that are under active negotiation”.

European states, led by Germany, the UK and France, have been resisting abandoning the language on access to family planning and women’s health clinics, as they believe it would mean surrendering the gains of recent decades in terms of international recognition of women’s rights.

“If we let the Americans do this and take out this language, it will be watered down for a long time,” a European diplomat, who asked to remain anonymous because of the sensitivity of the negotiations, said. “It is, at its heart, an attack on the progressive normative framework established over the past 25 years.”

“Until the Trump administration, we could always count on the Americans to help us defend it. Now the Americans have switched camp,” the diplomat said. “Now it’s an unholy alliance of the US, the Russians, the Holy See, the Saudis and the Bahrainis, chipping away at the progress that has been made.”

Diplomats at the security council expect a long night of negotiations on the wording.

The latest version of the draft resolution recognises the work of the informal expert group on women, peace and security, but Patten had argued that the current system does not provide a consistent channel to bring violations on sexual violence to the attention of the security council.

A formal mechanism, with a panel regularly assessing compliance and recommending sanctions, would have given her more leverage on states and non-state groups.

“In the current draft as it stands, the formal mechanism is gone,” she said. “It’s very, very weak.”
SOCIALISM IS SUSTAINABLE CAPITALISM


To stop global catastrophe, we must believe in humans again


Bill McKibben


We have the technology to prevent climate crisis. But now we need to unleash mass resistance too – because collective action does work 


@billmckibben
Tue 23 Apr 2019 

 

‘We have two relatively new inventions that could prove decisive to solving
 global warming before it destroys the planet. One is the solar panel.’ 
Photograph: Gérard Julien/AFP/Getty Images

Because I am concerned about inequality and about the environment, I am usually classed as a progressive, a liberal. But it seems to me that what I care most about is preserving a world that bears some resemblance to the past: a world with some ice at the top and bottom and the odd coral reef in between; a world where people are connected to the past and future (and to one another) instead of turned into obsolete software.

And those seem to me profoundly conservative positions. Meanwhile, oil companies and tech barons strike me as deeply radical, willing to alter the chemical composition of the atmosphere, eager to confer immortality.

There is a native conservatism in human beings that resists such efforts, a visceral sense of what’s right or dangerous, rash or proper. You needn’t understand every nuance of germline engineering or the carbon cycle to understand why monkeying around on this scale might be a bad idea. And indeed, polling suggests that most people instinctively oppose, say, living forever or designing babies, just as they want government action to stabilise the climate.


The financial sector must be at the heart of tackling climate changeMark Carney, François Villeroy de Galhau and Frank Elderson


Luckily, we have two relatively new inventions that could prove decisive to solving global warming before it destroys the planet. One is the solar panel, and the other is the nonviolent movement. Obviously, they are not the same sort of inventions: the solar panel (and its cousins, the wind turbine and the lithium-ion battery) is hardware, while the ability to organise en masse for change is more akin to software. Indeed, even to call nonviolent campaigning a “technology” will strike some as odd. Each is still in its infancy; we deploy them, but fairly blindly, finding out by trial and error their best uses. Both come with inherent limits: neither is as decisive or as immediately powerful as, say, a nuclear weapon or a coal-fired power plant. But both are transformative nonetheless – and, crucially, the power they wield is human in scale.

Before we can best employ these technologies, we need to address the two most insidious ideas deployed in defence of the status quo. The first is that there is no need for mass resistance because each of us should choose for ourselves the future we want. The second is that there is no possibility of resistance because the die is already cast.

Choice is the mantra that unites people of many political persuasions. Conservatives say, “you’re not the boss of me”, when it comes to paying taxes; liberals say it when the topic is marijuana. The easiest, laziest way to dispense with a controversy is to say: “Do what you want; don’t tell me what to do.”

If “let anyone do what they want” is a flawed argument, then “no one can stop them anyway” is an infuriating one. Insisting that some horror is inevitable no matter what you do is the response of those who don’t want to be bothered trying to stop it, and I’ve heard it too often to take it entirely seriously.


I remember, for instance, when investigative reporters proved that Exxon had known all about global warming and had covered up that knowledge. Plenty of people on the professionally jaded left told me, in one form or another, “of course they did”, or “all corporations lie”, or “nothing will ever happen to them anyway”. This kind of knowing cynicism is a gift to the Exxons of the world. Happily, far more people reacted with usefully naive outrage: before too long, people were comparing the oil giants with the tobacco companies, and some of the biggest cities in the US were suing them for damages. We don’t know yet precisely how it will end, only that giving them a pass because of their power makes no sense.


Innovation doesn’t scare me. I think that if we back off the most crazed frontiers of technology, we can still figure out how to keep humans healthy, safe, productive – and human. Not everyone agrees. Some harbour a deep pessimism about human nature which I confess, as an American in the age of Donald Trump, occasionally seems sound.


Of all the arguments for unhindered technological growth, the single saddest (in the sense that it just gives up on human beings) comes from the Oxford don Julian Savulescu. In essence he contends that, left to themselves, democracies can’t solve climate change, “for in order to do so a majority of their voters must support the adoption of substantial restrictions on their excessively consumerist lifestyle, and there is no indication they would be willing to make such sacrifices”. Also, our ingrained suspicion of outsiders keeps us from working together globally. And so, faced with the need to move quickly, we should “morally bio-enhance” our children or, more likely, use genetic engineering, so they will cooperate.


This is roughly akin to “geoengineering the atmosphere” to prevent climate change – some people, having given up on taming the fossil-fuel companies, want to instead pump the atmosphere full of sulphur to block incoming solar radiation. Both cases are based on the premise that we humans won’t rise to the occasion.


I hope Savulescu seriously underestimates the power of both technology and democracy – of the solar panel and of nonviolence. I believe we have the means at hand to solve our problems short of turning our children into saintly robots – which, in any event, wouldn’t do a thing to solve climate change, given that by the time these morally improved youths had grown into positions of power, the damage would long since have been done. And I’m convinced Savulescu is wrong about people’s selfishness presenting the main obstacle to solving climate change: around the world, polling shows that people are not just highly concerned about global warming, but also willing to pay a price to solve it. Americans, for instance, said in 2017 that they were willing to see their energy bills rise 15% and have the money spent on clean energy programmes – that’s about in line with the size of the carbon taxes that national groups have been campaigning for.


Glaciers and Arctic ice are vanishing. Time to get radical before it's too lateBill McKibben

The reason we don’t have a solution to climate change has less to do with the greed of the great, unengineered unwashed than with the greed of the almost unbelievably small percentage of people at the top of the energy heap. That is to say, the Koch brothers and the Exxon execs have never been willing to take a 15% slice off their profits, not when they could spend a much smaller share of their winnings corrupting the political debate with rolls of cash. If you wanted to “morally enhance” anyone, that’s where you’d start – if there are Grinches in need of hearts, it’s pretty obvious who should be at the front of the line.


But let’s not win that way. Let’s operate on the assumption that human beings are not grossly defective. That we’re capable of acting together to do remarkable things.

• Bill McKibben is an environmentalist, author and journalist

This is an edited extract from Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? by Bill McKibben (Headline)



Global warming has increased global economic inequality
Noah S. Diffenbaugh and Marshall Burke

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2019/04/global-warming-has-increased-global.html
PNAS first published April 22, 2019 





It's time for nations to unite around an International Green New Deal 



                             'The stakes of the international Green New Deal 
                              are not merely environmental.’ 

                           Photograph: Craig Easton/Getty Images/Cultura RF

Several countries have proposed their own versions of a Green New Deal, but climate change knows no borders. We need a global response



Yanis Varoufakis and David Adler


Tue 23 Apr 2019



In times of crisis and catastrophe, children are often forced to grow up quickly. We are now witnessing this premature call to action on a planetary scale. As the adults in government accelerate their consumption of fossil fuels, children are leading the campaign against our species’ looming extinction. Our survival now depends on the prospects for a global movement to follow their lead and demand an International Green New Deal.


Several countries have proposed their own versions of a Green New Deal. Here in Europe, DiEM25 and our European Spring coalition are campaigning under the banner of a detailed Green New Deal agenda. In the UK, a new campaign is pushing similar legislation with MPs such as Caroline Lucas and Clive Lewis. And in the US, dogged activists in the Sunrise Movement are working with representatives such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to push their proposal to the front of the political agenda.


Glaciers and Arctic ice are vanishing. Time to get radical before it's too late
Bill McKibben


But these campaigns have largely remained siloed. Their advisers may exchange notes and ideas, but no strategy has emerged to coordinate these campaigns in a broader, global framework.


Unfortunately, climate change knows no borders. The US may be the second-largest polluter in the world, but it makes up less than 15% of global greenhouse emissions. Leading by example is simply not enough.


Instead, we need an International Green New Deal: a pragmatic plan to raise $8tn – 5% of global GDP – each year, coordinate its investment in the transition to renewable energy and commit to providing climate protections on the basis of countries’ needs, rather than their means.




Call it the Organization for Emergency Environmental Cooperation – the namesake of the original OEEC 75 years ago. While many US activists find inspiration in a “second world war-style mobilization”, the International Green New Deal is better modeled by the Marshall plan that followed it. With financial assistance from the US government, 16 countries formed the Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC), dedicated to rebuilding the infrastructure of a devastated continent and coordinating its supply of energy.


But if the original OEEC entrenched an extractive capitalism at Europe’s core –protecting the steel and coal cartel – the new organization for an International Green New Deal can empower communities around the world in a single transformational project.


The transnational scope of this mobilization is crucial for three main reasons.


The first is production. Recent studies show that, as long as countries cooperate, all continents have the wind, solar and hydropower resources they need in a zero-emissions world. Northern countries and mountainous regions have better access to wind power, while southern lands are better suited to exploiting the sun. An International Green New Deal could exploit these differences and ensure that renewable energy is available to all of them year-round.

Confronting the climate crisis will require more than keeping fossil fuels in the ground

The second is innovation. Confronting the climate crisis will require more than keeping fossil fuels in the ground. We will also need major scientific breakthroughs to develop renewable sources of energy, adapt existing infrastructure, detoxify our oceans and decarbonize the atmosphere. No country alone can fund the research and development necessary to meet these challenges. The OEEC would pool the brainpower of the global scientific community: a Green Manhattan Project.

The third is reparation. For centuries, countries such as the US and the UK have plundered natural resources from around the world and polluted them back out. Less developed nations have been doubly dispossessed: first, of their resource wealth, and second, of their right to a sustainable life – and in the case of many small island developing states, of their very right to exist. An International Green New Deal would redistribute resources to rehabilitate overexploited regions, protect against rising sea levels, and guarantee a decent standard of living to all climate refugees.


The UN climate change conferences will not save us from extinction – the demise of the Paris agreement should be evidence enough.
These frameworks lock us into prisoners’ dilemmas, in which every country has an incentive to defect on their climate commitments, even if cooperation between them would yield a greater collective good. As long as climate cooperation is framed around sacrifice, it is vulnerable to strongmen like Donald Trump who vow to buck international rules in the name of national interests.





The International Green New Deal changes the frame. Rather than pleading for restraint, it sets out a positive-sum vision of international investment, in which the gains from joining in outweigh those to going it alone.


This is the strategy that won Franklin D Roosevelt the original New Deal. His plan addressed people who had given up hope and inspired in them the idea that there is an alternative. That there are ways of pressing idle resources into public service. It made sense to the disheartened and offered opportunity to the entrepreneurial.


The same is true of the International Green New Deal, which mobilizes public finance to crowd in private investments that, together, fund the $8tn transition. Just like in the original New Deal, public financing will involve a mix of taxes and bond instruments. On the former, we can introduce a global minimum corporate tax rate that is then redistributed on the basis of their sales. On the latter, public investment banks – including the European Investment Bank, the World Bank and the KfW, Germany’s state-owned development bank – can coordinate the issue of green bonds that the major central banks agree collectively to support in the secondary markets.


Suddenly, countries with large trade surpluses will realize they are better able to invest their excess capital if green investments in deficit countries are coordinated under the auspices of an international plan. The positive-sum dynamic will prevail.


In this sense, the stakes of the International Green New Deal are not merely environmental. By uniting countries in the project of bottom-up economic transformation – and coercing multinationals to fund their fair share of it – it will also stem the tide of bigotry and xenophobia engulfing the world.


“Advanced” capitalist countries today are literally falling apart. In the US, net public investment has fallen below half of one per cent of GDP. Across the eurozone, net public investment has remained below zero for nearly a decade. It is little wonder that political monsters are rising again: just as in the 1930s, the grapes of wrath are ripening and “growing heavy for the vintage”.


To revive the liberal democratic project, some pundits have suggested making China into a bogeyman. But the real bogeyman is of our creation: a climate crisis wrought by decades of inaction and underinvestment. To address the true existential threat that we face today, we must reverse the economic policies that brought us to this brink. Austerity means extinction.


The promise of an International Green New Deal to is to avoid the pitfalls of cold war politics and unite humanity in the only project capable of preserving a habitable planet. To do this, however, we need a powerful progressive international movement to demand that our leaders begin to act beyond their own borders. Let’s start building it. The children are watching.


Yanis Varoufakis is the co-founder of the Democracy in Europe Movement and the former finance minister of Greece. David Adler is a writer and a member of DiEM25’s Coordinating Collective. He lives in Athens, Greece

Global warming has increased global economic inequality
Noah S. Diffenbaugh and Marshall Burke



XTINCTION REBELLION





CLIMATE CHANGE

Greenland Is Melting 6 Times Faster Than in the 1980s



Olivia Rosane

Apr. 23, 2019 




Greenland is melting six times faster than it was in the 1980s, which is even faster than scientists thought, CNN reported Tuesday.

The new figure is part of a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that reconstructed the mass balance of Greenland over the past 46 years, comparing ice lost to snowfall gained over the period. The results showed that Greenland has contributed 13.7 millimeters to sea level rise since 1972, half during the last eight years. If all the ice in Greenland were to melt, it would raise global sea levels by more than 20 feet.


In reporting the findings to The Washington Post, study author and Earth systems scientist for the University of California at Irvine and NASA Eric Rignot echoed the urgency of activists from the Sunrise Movement to Extinction Rebellion who have called for immediate government action on climate change.

"If we do something now, it will take 30 years to affect the climate and another few decades to turn the melt down of glaciers, so probably half of that signal is already written in stone," Rignot said. "But the impact sea level will have on humanity increases with every 10 [centimeters] of sea-level rise, and right now we are about to commit to multi-meter sea-level rise in the coming century if we don't do something drastic."

Monday's study found that ice loss from Greenland began to exceed its natural variability in the 1980s. From 1980 to 1990, Greenland's glaciers discharged 51 billion tons of ice into the ocean. From 2010 to 2018, they discharged 286 billion tons.

"When you look at several decades, it is best to sit back in your chair before looking at the results, because it is a bit scary to see how fast it is changing," Rignot told AFP.

The research also showed that even Greenland's colder north is impacted by ice loss.

"The entire periphery of Greenland is affected. I am particularly concerned about the northern regions, which host the largest amount of potential sea-level rise and are already changing fast," Rignot told The Washington Post.

Monday's study follows another co-written by Rignot and published in January, which found that Antarctica's ice loss had also increased six-fold in the last 40 years.

In order to obtain a clear picture of Greenland's ice loss, the researchers used three kinds of data, AFP reported.
Satellite measurements of glacier altitude, which lowers with ice loss.
NASA satellites that measure the gravitational pull of glaciers, which also decreases with ice loss.
Models of ice loss and snow accumulation used to calculate the difference and understand changes.

"This is an excellent piece of work by a well-established research group using novel methods to extract more information from the available data," Colin Summerhayes of the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge, who was not involved with the study, told AFP.


The trend calculated by the researchers is likely to continue if nothing is done to lower greenhouse gas emissions. The National Snow & Ice Data Center said that the Greenland summer melt season has already begun, more than a month earlier than usual, CNN reported.

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB
Lower Sea Level Rise but More 'Climate Chaos'? Two New Studies ... › Rain Is Melting Greenland's Ice, Even in Winter - EcoWatch › Greenland is melting even faster than experts thought, study finds ... ›

You did not act in time': Greta Thunberg's full speech to MPs

Read the full text of the speech Greta Thunberg gave to MPs at the Houses of Parliament

Greta Thunberg


Tue 23 Apr 2019


 

‘Humans are very adaptable: we can still fix this. 
But the opportunity to do so will not last for long.
We must start today.’ Photograph: Facundo Arrizabalaga/EPA

My name is Greta Thunberg. I am 16 years old. I come from Sweden. And I speak on behalf of future generations.
I know many of you don’t want to listen to us – you say we are just children. But we’re only repeating the message of the united climate science.

Many of you appear concerned that we are wasting valuable lesson time, but I assure you we will go back to school the moment you start listening to science and give us a future. Is that really too much to ask?



Greta Thunberg condemns UK's climate stance in speech to MPs

In the year 2030 I will be 26 years old. My little sister Beata will be 23. Just like many of your own children or grandchildren. That is a great age, we have been told. When you have all of your life ahead of you. But I am not so sure it will be that great for us.

I was fortunate to be born in a time and place where everyone told us to dream big; I could become whatever I wanted to. I could live wherever I wanted to. People like me had everything we needed and more. Things our grandparents could not even dream of. We had everything we could ever wish for and yet now we may have nothing.

Now we probably don’t even have a future any more.
Because that future was sold so that a small number of people could make unimaginable amounts of money. It was stolen from us every time you said that the sky was the limit, and that you only live once.

You lied to us. You gave us false hope. You told us that the future was something to look forward to. And the saddest thing is that most children are not even aware of the fate that awaits us. We will not understand it until it’s too late. And yet we are the lucky ones. Those who will be affected the hardest are already suffering the consequences. But their voices are not heard.
Is my microphone on? Can you hear me?


Around the year 2030, 10 years 252 days and 10 hours away from now, we will be in a position where we set off an irreversible chain reaction beyond human control, that will most likely lead to the end of our civilisation as we know it. That is unless in that time, permanent and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society have taken place, including a reduction of CO2 emissions by at least 50%.



And please note that these calculations are depending on inventions that have not yet been invented at scale, inventions that are supposed to clear the atmosphere of astronomical amounts of carbon dioxide.

Furthermore, these calculations do not include unforeseen tipping points and feedback loops like the extremely powerful methane gas escaping from rapidly thawing arctic permafrost.

Nor do these scientific calculations include already locked-in warming hidden by toxic air pollution. Nor the aspect of equity – or climate justice – clearly stated throughout the Paris agreement, which is absolutely necessary to make it work on a global scale.

We must also bear in mind that these are just calculations. Estimations. That means that these “points of no return” may occur a bit sooner or later than 2030. No one can know for sure. We can, however, be certain that they will occur approximately in these timeframes, because these calculations are not opinions or wild guesses.

These projections are backed up by scientific facts, concluded by all nations through the IPCC. Nearly every single major national scientific body around the world unreservedly supports the work and findings of the IPCC.
Did you hear what I just said? Is my English OK? Is the microphone on? Because I’m beginning to wonder.

During the last six months I have travelled around Europe for hundreds of hours in trains, electric cars and buses, repeating these life-changing words over and over again. But no one seems to be talking about it, and nothing has changed. In fact, the emissions are still rising.

When I have been travelling around to speak in different countries, I am always offered help to write about the specific climate policies in specific countries. But that is not really necessary. Because the basic problem is the same everywhere. And the basic problem is that basically nothing is being done to halt – or even slow – climate and ecological breakdown, despite all the beautiful words and promises.

The UK is, however, very special. Not only for its mind-blowing historical carbon debt, but also for its current, very creative, carbon accounting.

Since 1990 the UK has achieved a 37% reduction of its territorial CO2 emissions, according to the Global Carbon Project. And that does sound very impressive. But these numbers do not include emissions from aviation, shipping and those associated with imports and exports. If these numbers are included the reduction is around 10% since 1990 – or an an average of 0.4% a year, according to Tyndall Manchester.

And the main reason for this reduction is not a consequence of climate policies, but rather a 2001 EU directive on air quality that essentially forced the UK to close down its very old and extremely dirty coal power plants and replace them with less dirty gas power stations. And switching from one disastrous energy source to a slightly less disastrous one will of course result in a lowering of emissions.

But perhaps the most dangerous misconception about the climate crisis is that we have to “lower” our emissions. Because that is far from enough. Our emissions have to stop if we are to stay below 1.5-2C of warming. The “lowering of emissions” is of course necessary but it is only the beginning of a fast process that must lead to a stop within a couple of decades, or less. And by “stop” I mean net zero – and then quickly on to negative figures. That rules out most of today’s politics.

The fact that we are speaking of “lowering” instead of “stopping” emissions is perhaps the greatest force behind the continuing business as usual. The UK’s active current support of new exploitation of fossil fuels – for example, the UK shale gas fracking industry, the expansion of its North Sea oil and gas fields, the expansion of airports as well as the planning permission for a brand new coal mine – is beyond absurd.

This ongoing irresponsible behaviour will no doubt be remembered in history as one of the greatest failures of humankind.

People always tell me and the other millions of school strikers that we should be proud of ourselves for what we have accomplished. But the only thing that we need to look at is the emission curve. And I’m sorry, but it’s still rising. That curve is the only thing we should look at.

Every time we make a decision we should ask ourselves; how will this decision affect that curve? We should no longer measure our wealth and success in the graph that shows economic growth, but in the curve that shows the emissions of greenhouse gases. We should no longer only ask: “Have we got enough money to go through with this?” but also: “Have we got enough of the carbon budget to spare to go through with this?” That should and must become the centre of our new currency.

Many people say that we don’t have any solutions to the climate crisis. And they are right. Because how could we? How do you “solve” the greatest crisis that humanity has ever faced? How do you “solve” a war? How do you “solve” going to the moon for the first time? How do you “solve” inventing new inventions?

The climate crisis is both the easiest and the hardest issue we have ever faced. The easiest because we know what we must do. We must stop the emissions of greenhouse gases. The hardest because our current economics are still totally dependent on burning fossil fuels, and thereby destroying ecosystems in order to create everlasting economic growth.

“So, exactly how do we solve that?” you ask us – the schoolchildren striking for the climate.
And we say: “No one knows for sure. But we have to stop burning fossil fuels and restore nature and many other things that we may not have quite figured out yet.”
Then you say: “That’s not an answer!”
So we say: “We have to start treating the crisis like a crisis – and act even if we don’t have all the solutions.”
“That’s still not an answer,” you say.
Then we start talking about circular economy and rewilding nature and the need for a just transition. Then you don’t understand what we are talking about.

We say that all those solutions needed are not known to anyone and therefore we must unite behind the science and find them together along the way. But you do not listen to that. Because those answers are for solving a crisis that most of you don’t even fully understand. Or don’t want to understand.

You don’t listen to the science because you are only interested in solutions that will enable you to carry on like before. Like now. And those answers don’t exist any more. Because you did not act in time.

Avoiding climate breakdown will require cathedral thinking. We must lay the foundation while we may not know exactly how to build the ceiling.

Sometimes we just simply have to find a way. The moment we decide to fulfil something, we can do anything. And I’m sure that the moment we start behaving as if we were in an emergency, we can avoid climate and ecological catastrophe. Humans are very adaptable: we can still fix this. But the opportunity to do so will not last for long. We must start today. We have no more excuses.

We children are not sacrificing our education and our childhood for you to tell us what you consider is politically possible in the society that you have created. We have not taken to the streets for you to take selfies with us, and tell us that you really admire what we do.

We children are doing this to wake the adults up. We children are doing this for you to put your differences aside and start acting as you would in a crisis. We children are doing this because we want our hopes and dreams back.
I hope my microphone was on. I hope you could all hear me.