Reality: We are losing the fight against climate change
It’s time to stop kidding ourselves. Global carbon emissions are going up, not down. No surprise there. Even if they stayed flat, we’d be in a world of hurt. Even if they were halted immediately, with CO2 at 405 parts per million, planetary greenhouse warming will continue for many decades, perhaps hundreds of years.
Well, you already know that.
Of course if fossil fuel burning were stopped immediately, we’d have a world-wide depression that would make the recent Great Recession look like a garden party.
The climate change conference in early December in Katowice, Poland, accomplished the usual: not much. Politico carried a succinct summary of a largely disappointing affair, written by Kalna Oroschakoff and Paola Tamma: Climate disappointments in Katowice
The leading solution is geoengineering. Like it or not.
Is geoengineering inevitable? Just do a web search on “geoengineering inevitable” and you’ll find all sorts of smart people, realistic smart people, coming to the conclusion that without geoengineering, we’re sunk (as many coastal cities will literally become).
Should we get behind geoengineering to counter global warming?
Yes! That’s why you should be advocating it, or if not, just get out of the way.
If you have read my earlier post on geoengineering to be found here, much of what I have to say below is redundant. (That post has a more links to geoengineering topics than this one does.)
But I think it bears repeating now, since current dramatic weather events—intense and long-lingering hurricanes, record-breaking rains and floods, huge and hellish fires—have finally got the public’s attention enough to say, “Huh. Maybe these climate alarmists have been right all along.”
Despite greater concern, the public will shrug its collective shoulders and carry on business as usual. The public will not do much to shrink its carbon footprint, unless it is forced upon them. It’s too inconvenient, and folks feel they cannot make a difference even if they did act. Polls tell us that Americans are unlikely to change their behavior to restrain carbon on the necessary scale. They are resigned to a warming world, content to let the wealthy run the show, willfully ignorant of how much worse it’s going to get. In developing nations such as China and India, efforts to emulate the developed nations’ standard of living are driving more coal burning, not less.
It’s all getting worse ever faster, because of feedback loops. You know all that too.
The same public believes we can deal with climate change hazards by adaptation—technological measures to ward off the most dangerous effects, such as seawalls to hold back rising oceans, hardening infrastructure against flood and fire. Floating cities.*
Adaptation is necessary. But it’s bad in several ways.
Five main ways it’s bad:
(1) fabulously expensive, and increasingly so,
(2) because it is so expensive, large scale adaptation will be unaffordable to most of the poor of the Earth—the ones who are already suffering the worst effects of climate change, on account of the profligacy of the rich countries. It will be the ultimate Environmental Injustice.
(3) adaptation, to the extent it is successful, will induce more complacency and an unwillingness to curb business as usual. And the warming may continue at an ever-faster clip.
(4) there’s only so much adaptation to be done. Particularly in agriculture, where climate, to include the availability of water, is key to growing and harvesting crops. The most promising adaptation in this area is genetically engineering crops to be tolerant of weather extremes and drought, while fighting off diseases and pests. It’s a different sort of engineering, carrying its own risks—in particular, reliance on genetically engineered varieties which may turn out to have their own risks, forcing the creation of even more varieties, with more likely unintended consequences.
(5) as with any radical measure, the unknown unknowns. (Don’t ask me.)
Treatment Option One: “Chemotherapy for the Earth”
As discussed in the earlier post, spreading sulfate aerosols in the atmosphere is the best publicized form of Solar Radiation Management (SRM) for a reason. It’s the cheapest and most reliable method to cool the Earth. We know it works, because volcanoes do so with great success—most dramatically in the recent past when Mt. Pinatubo erupted in the Philippines in 1991, cooling the planet, particularly the northern hemisphere, by more than half a degree Celsius for two years. For more detail on Pinatubo and volcanoes’ effect on climate, see this in Scientific American, where you will read of the paradoxical phenomenon that the CO2 in volcanic eruptions tends to warm the earth, while the sulfate aerosols tend to cool it (by scattering sunlight), with the latter being dominant in the short run.**
“Chemotherapy for the Earth” is a phrase coined (maybe borrowed) by David Keith, the staunchest advocate in the climate science community for cooling with sulfate aerosols. Like chemotherapy for cancer, it will damage the body (Earth), but it will ward off the still more damaging attacker (Anthropogenic Global Warming). So goes the hope. Read about Keith’s position and other approaches to geoengineering in this piece by Marc Gunther in GreenBiz: Gunther: is geoengineering inevitable?
Upsides:
(1) Proven: it will induce cooling
(2) Known: short persistence in the atmosphere. Pinatubo made us colder, but for only two years, because the aerosols precipitate out. If it does work without terrible side effects, it can be repeated inexpensively. If it has terrible side effects, we’ll have to go to a Plan B.
Downsides:
(1) More acidification of the oceans when the aerosols precipitate out of the air. That, at least, is a known hazard, but the degree is an unknown. Also unknown is the speed with which species can evolve to tolerate lower pH as well as warmer seas.
(2) As with adaptation, a slide into complacency with the expectation of success at low cost.
(3) What if another big volcano—volcanoes are notorious for their unpredictability—erupts while we are spreading aerosols? Usually, predictions of eruptions go out months rather than years. Could we have a debacle like the “year without a summer” following the eruption of Mt. Tambora in 1816? Cold killed off crops, and thousands died from hunger. If we had a Tambora-like event compounding our spread of aerosols, what then?
(4) More unknown unknowns.
Science demands experimentation—but who’s going to do it? We need a trial before somebody jumps the gun.
For years David Keith has been campaigning for an experiment with aerosols at modest scale, to explore the unknowns before someone—industry, financial institution, country (China comes to mind)—goes full bore on its own. An international agreement is called for—but if no one at high levels comes forward to talk about it, it ain’t gonna happen. You can help it happen: contact legislators who are not in the climate-denial camp.
Treatment Option Two: pull carbon dioxide out of the air with “negative emissions” technologies
You’ve heard of Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), technologies to scrub CO2 from the exhaust of fossil fuel fired electric power plants and waste gases from industrial processes, and store it somewhere such as deep underground. CCS has been explored for decades with disappointing results. I’m not going to go into it at any length here, except to say that it’s not going to help much—at best it can only capture 90% of CO2 emissions from electric power plants, and does nothing for the transport sector. To date it has proven too expensive for significant investment (read no big profits), despite that the fossil fuel industry is rolling in dough.
CCS has recently got a shot in the arm in the form of national tax credits in a bill signed into law early in 2018. It has the most promise for use in the industrial, not the electrical generation or transportation sectors. Read about it in the MIT Technology Review here.
BUT . . . the real thing? Pulling CO2 out of thin air?
Quartz has a balanced summary of the leading carbon capture technologies that are alleged to have negative emissions capability (see in Quartz here. ) Do any of them singly or in combination have a snowball’s chance in Hell of significantly lowering the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, even if a substantial fraction of the planet’s economic activity were devoted to it? Not likely. As you read this piece by Quartz, keep in mind that we are emitting upwards of 40 billion tons of CO2 per year into the atmosphere. More than a thousand metric tons per second. 600,000 metric tons in the last ten minutes. These technologies are like bailing out the Titanic with 5-gallon buckets. Maybe with one liter bottles. At this scale it doesn’t make much difference.
Bottom line: choose geoengineering, or invite climate catastrophe
It’s not game over for the mitigation effort—cutting back substantially on fossil fuel burning—but the game is still moving at a slow crawl, way too slow to put a stop to global warming any time soon. That’s inevitable in view of the multiple feedback effects, two of which are touched on above (the other principal one is the melting of ice at the poles and at high elevations throughout the world, thus reducing the albedo of the planet).
The downsides of adaptation are mentioned above. Even affordable adaptation leaves unsolved the problem of ocean acidification. and disruption of the life cycles of marine organisms. Also, without mitigation the climate effects will devastate much of the land-based natural world that we are already hacking to pieces with industrial, agricultural, and residential development.
Here’s a pretty safe prediction: within the next twenty years, massive geoengineering projects will be under way to forestall the worst consequences of global warming. The remaining questions are: which projects, how soon, and will they be taken in a deliberative manner with a global consensus, or be left up to individual countries or well-funded organizations to go it on their own?
Time’s a-wasting, folks.
=============footnotes===================
* Seriously. See Cities of the future – on water
**Topic for a post to come: what really killed off the dinosaurs? Volcanoes remain on the list of suspects.