Failure and More Failure: Time to Get Real
If you are a typical reader of this blog, much of what you’ll see below is not news . But my hope is to frame questions about climate change and its remedies in a coherent way. . . and also to make the argument that. . . you’ll see.
As much as climate change believers have attempted to rein in the combustion of fossil fuels to reduce CO2 emissions, they have largely failed. It doesn’t matter what accord or protocol we’re talking about—Paris, Copenhagen, Kyoto—economic considerations (especially in India and China), and the slow development of zero carbon technologies are preventing us from meeting the goals.
That’s even without the worsening of U.S. emissions we can expect for the next four years—at least.
The good news is that CO2 emissions worldwide have ceased growing—we may be at a plateau with some promise of reduction.
The Bad News Comes in Three Parts
(1) A plateau is obviously not good enough. A modest curtailment is not anywhere good enough. If you’re driving at 100 miles per hour towards a concrete wall 20 yards away and take your foot off the gas, you will hit the wall with calamitous results. Apply the brakes in a panic mode (assume instantaneous reaction time), and you will still hit the wall and total the car, and if you don’t have a really good airbag you will die.
(2) most of the curtailment in emissions is due to substituting natural gas for coal in electricity generation—a natural gas power plan emits about half the CO2 of a typical coal plant. Half, of course is not zero. It’s not even near zero. Moreover, the extraction of natural gas cannot capture all of the methane coming out of the hole—no matter how well regulated—and the escaped methane is a more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2 (albeit shorter lived). AND, we all know how natural gas fracking has heavy impacts on the environment. Then you have the pipelines….
(3) Even if we were to stop burning all fossil fuels tomorrow—with catastrophic damage to the world economy—we have already loaded the atmosphere with enough CO2 to keep its greenhouse effect going for another few hundred years. Moreover, warmer seas release more water vapor than cooler ones. Water vapor being the principal greenhouse gas, that gives another push to the out-of-control vehicle that is global warming. That’s an example of a “positive” feedback loop; another is the release of methane from soon-to-be-thawing permafrost in Canada and Russia.
(Aside: clouds are a really complicated story which I will not get into now, except to say that scientific studies tell us that clouds are not going to save us.. Don’t count on clouds)
Bad, bad, and triple bad. Droughts, heat waves, floods, tornadoes, and other severe weather events are conspicuously on the rise. And sometimes the warming phenomenon arrives in the shape of a cruel joke: the warming Arctic, assisted by a shifting jet stream, keeps shoving super-cold air towards lower latitudes in the winter, paradoxically pummeling the midsections of northern continents with harsh winter storms, even while the planet as a whole heats up.
(This is not even to mention the acidification of oceans by dissolved carbon dioxide hammering the marine biome. So far the oceans have helped us by storing excess atmospheric heat while also pulling CO2 out of the air. But even oceans do not have an infinite capacity.)
Getting Real: What to Do (or at least think about)
It doesn’t matter how much “Greens” campaign for clean energy, and how many new coal plants China scuttles, we are on course for a climate smash-up. (China is indeed ditching plans for new coal plants; there’s something to be said for enlightened despots.)
You know it. We are a long way, globally, from zero carbon emissions, or even half the current carbon emissions. Even without the U.S. tightening its suicidal embrace of fossil fuels, we are still on course for a smash-up.
Unless. . .
“Geoengineering” to the Rescue! There are Two Strategies:
(1) Suck the carbon dioxide out of the air artificially with techniques such as artificial trees, “carbon scrubbers. And many more ingenious solutions. all of which are beset with the difficulty of scaling up before doomsday (see link at end of this post).
(2) Reduce the amount of solar radiation getting to the Earth’s surface, encapsulated as Solar Radiation Management (SRM). For example, launching giant mirrors (“sunshades”) into space (presumably to be placed at sun-earth LaGrange points). I don’t know much about engineering, but I strongly suspect that this is an almost inconceivably expensive and technologically complex project, with estimates I have heard of in the tens of trillions of dollars. We could certainly use some extra reflective devices, since our time-tested reflective features—ice sheets at the poles and Greenland, and glaciers elsewhere—are quite literally melting away (yet another “positive’ feedback that compounds the cooling challenge).
The Easiest Solar Radiation Management Option (SRM), with Unknown Risks
There is one technique for blocking solar radiation that has already succeeded without human assistance many times over: volcanic eruptions. Volcanoes spew aerosols high into the atmosphere that block solar radiation. It’s effective, as the gigantic Mt. Pinatubo eruption of 1991 demonstrated. For two years temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere fell about .5 degrees Celsius, and worldwide about .4 degrees C. The eruption of Mt. Tambora in 1815 produced “The Year Without a Summer” in 1816, worse than Pinatubo, leaving crop failures, starvation, and thousands of deaths directly by freezing. See links at end of this post.
Scattering sulfate aerosols in the atmosphere in imitation of volcanoes is relatively simple and cheap compared with giant space mirrors, Amazonian-scale swaths of artificial trees, and other such fancy tools.
If it worked for the volcanoes, it will work for us. (Better, there are some dangerous products of volcanic eruptions we would eschew.) How well it would work, we don’t know. We also don’t know a lot about the side effects, and their impacts on weather, atmospheric chemistry, oceans, terrestrial biomes, and agriculture. We do know the sulfates are damaging to ozone, and would contribute to atmospheric acidification and increase acid rain, but not how badly. Nor how they would add to the acid burden of CO2 in the oceans.
I will give you below links that take you to sources that make arguments pro and con for the aerosols treatment—particularly the “cheap and easy plan” one, where one geophysicist called the concept “barking mad.” I don’t think, if you are in any way an activist on climate, you can dodge the question of geoengineering. It’s coming, like it or not. The questions will be, what method(s) of geoengineering, at what scale, and who is going to do it?
Perhaps the worst byproduct of this scheme, were it successful at cooling, would be the cessation of efforts to combat the underlying cause of warming—that is, CO2 and methane emissions. SRM is a stopgap measure, a pretty huge stopgap, but not a permanent solution.
Start Experimenting Now to Build a Knowledge Base
The key agenda item of proponents is that we at least have to experiment on a small scale—a test drive. The aerosols do not hang around long enough for a small-scale trial to have a big impact. We need to see what the effects are before we are forced to undertake this or other projects on a large scale in a state of ignorance, the state we’re in now.
If you flatly dismiss geoengineering as being too dangerous, you are blinding yourself to the grim reality that is marching relentlessly toward us.
We will be forced to use technology to undo much of the bad stuff we have done. There’s no “natural” way, aside from trusting to volcanic eruptions and getting clobbered by enormous rocks from outer space. We will have to make choices among alternatives, none of which is without risk, but that’s just the point.
As to who should or may do it, the specter looms that another entity with enough resources—such as China, India, Russia, the European Union, or perhaps Japan—will take matters into their own hands. Do we want to wait for that?
=========================================================
LINKS
On the point of no return: Carbon Threshhold Crossed
On sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere:
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/531346/can-sucking-co2-out-of-the-atmosphere-really-work/
On climate-altering volcanoes:
On injecting aerosols:
(the first is quite long and technical. But I have read parts of it, and it is interesting. The second is an easier read.)
http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/366/1882/4007#sec-14
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/511016/a-cheap-and-easy-plan-to-stop-global-warming/