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Salon duc Tape – There is No End Game in the Climate Battle – June 25^th, 2021

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What happens if we blow through our emissions budget and emit too much CO2 to stay within a 1.5 degree C temperature rise?

 During the last salon before summer break on Friday, June 25th, we will hear from Atmospheric Scientist Scott Denning, who will address the question of whether we really “have only twelve (or now nine) years to act” on the climate crisis.  That timeline stems from the 2018 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Special Report titled “Global Warming of 1.5 degrees C,” which set forth emissions budgets for limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius over the pre-industrial average.

Denning writes, “The familiar ‘line in the sand’ binary – this far and no further – has the virtue of simplicity, but the moment the world steps beyond that line policy and advocacy become more complex.  If we realistically embrace the magnitude of the task before us and the fact that the trajectory will become much less clear as we proceed, we can achieve some clarity of purpose that may help us navigate our future.  The world won’t end in 2030.  We’ll be older but will still have hard work to do.  1.5 degrees C is better than 2 degrees C is better than 3 degrees C of warming.  We’ll need to fight every gigaton of emissions, for every ppm of CO2, and for every tenth of a degree of warming.”

Scott Denning is Monfort Professor of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University and Director of Education and Diversity for the Center for Multiscale Modeling of Atmospheric Processes (CMMAP), a major climate modeling center.  His research on the global carbon cycle has been published in nearly 100 articles in peer-reviewed journals. He has been the Science Advisor to the Fort Collins Sustainability Group since 2010.Salon duc Tape, a public forum sponsored by the Northern Colorado Alliance for a Livable Future (NCALF), meets on the 2nd and 4th Fridays of each month from 7:00 — 9:00 p.m. Salons will continue to be held via Zoom through the end of the first half of 2021.  When we return from summer break at the end of August, we intend to move to a hybrid in-person and on-line model.  You will need to register in advance for this salon here.  After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information – including a new link – about joining the salon.