Dr Ricky Rood is a professor at the University of Michigan, both a meteorologist and climate scientist, and a regular contributor to the climate and weather blogs at Weather Underground. In a post from April 6^th (titled “No Way to Slow Down: Silence Howling in Antarctica”), he summarizes the most recent edition of the class, the 10^th time he has taught it, with his personal analysis:

• It will be difficult to avoid a world that is four degrees warmer.
• We have, in fact, underestimated the impacts of warming.
• We have some control over how fast and how far the warming will go.
• We are committed to irreversible changes, for example, sea-level rise.
• We can ‘cope’ with this. We must. There is opportunity.

This list has been largely the same since 2010, and the class analysis of the Paris Agreement did little to change the list.

Dr Rood has a great deal more that’s good to read at the post, summarizing recent findings, especially regarding Antarctica. He has been carefully following that since a a post in 2012 titled “Things going fast” (from which the title of this blog post comes) where he outlined the dangers of Antarctic disintegration.

I offer these links because I think there are many to speak with me that think I am unduly pessimistic, either because they don’t want to face the matter, or because they have an unrealistic hope in technology, or “the free market”, or something. Dr Rood knows way more than I do about these things, even if I have also followed the development of the papers he describes and cites, and the phenomena. I, too, sense that the pace of climate change is increasing, and that’s something the Global Climate Models (“GCMs”) did not catch. There are plenty of reasons why that’s the case, as I mentioned elsewhere here.

Nevertheless, I urge you to read Dr Rood.

And if you want this summed up for you compactly, there’s a YouTube video which sketches the possibilities. Now, I’ve addressed this matter before, and we aren’t quite at the amounts of emissions that the Permian Extinction saw, although we are apparently forcing the climate faster than volcanics did then, because our emission rates are faster. Note the talk in the video is all about methane. That’s the key energy ingredient in so-called “natural gas”. Anyone think it is a good or even rational idea to add to these emissions, as we do with our crazy pursuit (in Massachusetts and New England) of methane power and building more pipelines?