Long-term Solutions to Accelerated Global Warming

At right, below "What is a Wedge?," are links to three proposed solutions to our climate emergency, the top being my low-tech and conservation-oriented plan, the next being a tech-heavy plan of a prominent scientist/politician, and the third being the inept Obama Energy Plan. If technology-dependent plans are adopted, by the time it becomes painfully obvious that they won't work, that will be too late. I feel that solutions relying heavily on technology will allow our excessively consumptive ways to carry on, and therefore are doomed to failure because we cannot continue forever on a path of endless growth on a finite planet. Most of the posts on this site explain my ideas in further detail. I think the best solution is right here: Relocalization, not Militarization.

For New Visitors to this Blog
As this is a blog that displays posts reverse-chronologically, if you are interested in starting with my first post, see the Blog Archive at right and start with Climate Change Basics. If you wish to make a comment that disagrees with the causes, or trivializes the severity, of accelerated global warming, then this is not the cyber site for you. Such comments will not be posted. To post your actions, click here.


01 February 2009

Climate Change Basics

Dear friends, family and communities of friends and family,

For those of you who were steered here by a personal letter from me, some of this post will be a repeat. Sorry about that!

About two and half years ago, I wrote a letter, intending to send it to everyone with whom I felt a genuine connection. That letter was about the oil, economic and environmental crises coming our way, and it was meant to inspire conversation about what we could do. I never sent it, primarily out of fear of bringing overwhelmingly sad news to people I cared about. Fear of being someone that no one would want to talk to. Fear of dragging people down without offering any options that they might find palatable.

Since then I’ve read quite a bit more about all these emergencies facing us, most recently a book called Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet. This is the book that has pushed me over the edge of those fears into the realm of taking the risk of alienating myself from nearly everyone I know. If you choose to read on, be forewarned that our future prospects are far bleaker than the mainstream media have ever reported. The book is devastating for many reasons, mostly because its data is based on real world physics and history, and because we have so little time to change things. Radically change things.

I expect most readers of this blog will have knowledge about accelerated global warming (AGW, aka climate change) similar to what mine was before reading Six Degrees. I’ve spent over 60 hours reading multiple articles on the web and in print since finishing the book, trying to further my grasp of the situation. So I thought it’d be a good idea to sum up AGW basics.

Climate Change Basics

• General trends over the last 500 million years: the sun has been getting hotter, Earth has been getting cooler. Hence, those who credit the sun with global warming aren’t looking at all the data. Also, over that time period, atmospheric CO2 levels have been generally declining, and many major extinctions have come with sudden rises in CO2 levels. Actual parts per million (ppm ) of atmospheric CO2 isn’t critical here—it is not about levels of CO2—it is about the speed with which the change takes place. Most life cannot adapt to rapid temperature/climate change.

• Greenhouse gases—especially carbon dioxide (CO2), because humans are generating so much of it—have a vastly greater impact on global temperatures than does the increasing heat from the sun. So CO2 rise = temperature rise. And vice-versa, actually, which makes our predicament even worse.

•”Rapid temperature change,” geologically speaking, is in the range of 1° C per thousand years, when the change is sustained for a century or more. [While a 1° change may have happened within rare 25- to 30-year periods, these changes always were offset by rapid temperature swings in the opposite direction in the following decades, making the trend a stable temperature. A more realistic measure of these rapid mini-swings is that they are about 0.4°, not the full 1° (the historical data isn’t that accurate).] There was a rise in global mean temperature (GMT) of about 0.6°C during the last century, and the trend is definitely a sustained increase with no significant fluctuation since the early 1800’s.

• Atmospheric CO2 levels had been on a general decline for more than 100 million years until about 18 thousand years ago. They then rose gently for about 8 thousand years, and have been fairly stable since, with a rise of just 20 ppm during the 10 thousand years prior to the industrial revolution.

• CO2 levels have risen 80 ppm in the last 75 years. (Almost directly proportional to economic growth, interestingly enough.) This is 533 times faster than the rate of the preceding 10,000 years.

• The current atmospheric CO2 level, 385 ppm, is higher than it has been since the Pliocene era, three million years ago.

• The Earth was 3°C hotter then, and the seas were 25 m (82 ft.) higher.

• Atmospheric CO2 levels are rising about 2 to 2.4 ppm per year.

• At this rate, we will hit 400 ppm in 2015.

• General agreement of climatologists is that CO2 levels above 400 ppm will generate a global mean temperature 2°C higher than pre-industrial levels [We are currently 0.7°C above that temperature] and carbon feedback cycles will begin.

• It appears that the first carbon feedback cycle has already begun. It is one that none of the models incorporated, and it is ominous: the tundra has begun to melt. It contains more carbon than is currently in the atmosphere as CO2. It also has a vast amount of methane, which has 20 times the heat trapping power of carbon dioxide. All it will take is a 0.1%/year release of its carbon to end life as we know it.

• The science says we have a 50-50 chance of avoiding catastrophe if we stop the atmospheric CO2 at 400 ppm and then rapidly decrease it for a century or more.

• As sophisticated as the science is, climatic events are happening years and years in advance of the projections, for example the melting of the tundra and the Arctic ice.

• So my conclusion is that, if the science says we have a 50-50 chance of avoiding catastrophe, then our chances are probably not that good. There seems no honest way to frame this gently.

So it is challenging to know where to begin this discussion. But Six Degrees offers a framework that is easy to follow: let’s look at what each degree (C) rise in global mean temperature does to selected regions of the world. The book walks the reader through 1 to 6 degrees increases, pointing out the feedback cycles that will occur as certain tipping points are passed along the way. Rather than give a full review of the book, I highly recommend getting it and reading it. If any of you who know me reading this are financially strapped and desire to read the book, let me know, I’ll send it to you.

But for the sake of putting this information out to my human community, and for hoping to inspire discussion of our options, I will proceed with the some of the most powerful points from Six Degrees and other sources I’ve read.

First of all, it is important to acknowledge that the world we live in is one already suffering from tremendous anthropogenic (human-caused) pressures. Extinction rates currently are about 1000 times higher than the historical norm for such a benign climatic period. The fact that a mainstream estimate for species extinction is 72 per day ought to be in the headlines of every paper on the planet on a daily basis, yet is almost completely ignored, shows both how dire the situation is and how those in power want to keep us ignorant of it.

To repeat what I summed up above: even fairly conservative scientific assumptions lead to the conclusion that we have only six years to freeze global emissions of greenhouse gases (primarily CO2). As of today, our atmosphere has a concentration of 385 ppm of CO2. The climate models all generally agree that if we exceed 400 ppm, our global mean temperature will rise beyond 2°C, which will lead to escalating dangers of runaway global warming. We’ve got six years before it is too late. What does that mean? It means we can’t ignore this overwhelming information this time. Back in the ‘70’s, more than a handful of scientists started saying we had about 30 years to find more efficient and less destructive ways of existing. Well, the time is here, and in all those years, the gains in efficiency have only accelerated industrial civilization’s rate of destruction. So this time, instead of allowing business as usual, we, the people, have to be willing to make big changes, and to demand our governments do as well. We have to do this with all the spare time we have. We have to create a massive movement that cannot be ignored by the corporations and their governmental puppets. Honestly, I don’t have that much faith in civilized people, I don’t expect most of them to change, but my morality won’t allow that to stop me.

Here’s why.

While the effects of a 2°C warmer world will be horrific for many life forms (over a third of all species would be committed to extinction), and would include the slow but irreversible complete melting of Greenland’s ice—which means fast-rising sea levels and massive displacement of humans—it is still a world to which perhaps 60% of existing species could adapt, though no living species has ever had to adapt to such rapid changes in climate. And a 2°C warmer world is still a world where agriculture is possible, albeit at latitudes a good deal further from the equator than what we now experience. But the reality is, overall crop yields worldwide will decline, as they are already doing in Australia and other regions. So one huge fact we humans will have to accept is that economic and population growth will have to be reversed. To clarify the paradigm from which this culture will have to depart, here is a quote from Kirkpatrick Sale:

“Why is it that we seem willing to live with the threat of apocalypse rather than trying to seriously alter a world where consumption, of anything, is seen as unrelieved [i.e. unending] virtue, production, of anything, is regarded as a social and economic necessity, and more, of anything (like children or cars or chemicals or PhDs or golf courses or recycling centres), is unquestioningly accepted?”

We really don’t need more of anything except wild land and intact biotic communities, especially forests. If we give the Earth that, she will take care of the CO2 issue. This isn’t just Earth-based spirituality, it is proven science as well.

What happens if we go over 400 ppm?

The last time atmospheric concentrations of CO2 were in the range they are today was during the Pliocene era, three million years ago. The world was almost 3°C warmer than today, the Arctic and Antarctic supported trees and shrubs, and sea levels were 25 meters (82 ft.) higher. This calls for a long excerpt from Six Degrees:
If CO2 concentrations (of 360+ ppm) gave three degrees of global warming, surely they’ll do the same now? Perhaps—but over a longer time period than a mere century. It takes thousands of years for warmer temperatures to penetrate into the darkest depths of the oceans, for example; and for as long as the seas keep on warming, the atmosphere cannot reach equilibrium, because heat is still transferring downward. This is an example of the planet’s “thermal inertia”: Temperatures will always lag behind changes in “forcing” from solar radiation or greenhouse gases, because of the long response time of the Earth system. In the same way, it takes several minutes for water to boil in a saucepan once the stove has been turned on.
Global warming this century is a result of accumulated greenhouse gases emitted since the dawn of the industrial revolution…Even if we stopped increasing atmospheric CO2 tomorrow, it would take many centuries for the Earth to once again reach thermal equilibrium in a new, hotter state. Expecting today’s Pliocene CO2 levels to equate to Pliocene temperatures straight away would be like expecting a kettle to boil instantly.
On the positive side, this suggests that if we switch the CO2 “kettle” off quickly, we can probably avoid hitting three degrees for another century at least. On the other hand, if emissions go on rising as they currently are, global temperatures could shoot past three degrees as early as 2050. The choice is ours and the clock is ticking.

So the author, Mark Lynas, shows that temperatures lag CO2 by centuries, which is why so many people don’t see the urgency of our situation. But if you’ll look at the line I bolded above, he also suggests we are in unvisited waters. Changes are happening so rapidly and trends are such that we might see more than a 2° rise from today’s GMT by 2050.

Lynas suggests (and many others do as well) that the nations of the world agree to not allowing the CO2 level to exceed 400 ppm, thus allowing much of the current economic activity to continue, but requiring a long steady decline in emissions. While this is far from ideal, it is an avenue that allows for a paradigm transformation to take place. It will mean business can go on, but not as it has up until now. It means there will be a global acknowledgment of the dire situation we are in, and that ought to translate to the next generation growing up with a better understanding of the place of humans in the scheme of life: part, not above. Perhaps this new culture would make plans for serious decreases in economic activity and compassionate means of reducing the human population, like great personal incentives not to have children, for example.

So this appears to be the only option most of the current world could agree on: stop emissions increases about the time they hit 400 ppm, which at today’s rate is 2015. That is why we have six years before we blow the so-called 50-50 chance. But remember, the lower we keep the atmospheric CO2 level, and the faster we decrease it, the better our chances get, so why not shoot for capping emissions within 3 years?

And here is why going above 400 ppm is morally reprehensible (for the record, even if CO2 emissions could be magically eradicated, but business went on as usual, I would still find that morally reprehensible, but first things first):

• The “carbon cycle feedback,” a vicious circle by which warming releases more greenhouse gas, causing more warming, and on and on, would likely begin with the near-total collapse of the Amazon rain forest, leaving humans powerless to stop what they had started. The Amazon River contains 20% of all the water discharged into the world’s oceans, and the energy released by this huge amount of precipitation plays a major role in the weather patterns around the world, and therefore is a critical component of contemporary climate. As the Andean glaciers melt and the Amazon forest withers, the water will stop. This is simplifying it of course, but the importance of this cannot be overstated.

• A three degree rise (which, again, could happen as early as 2050 if we don’t stop it) effectively reverses the carbon cycle. Instead of absorbing CO2, vegetation and soils start releasing it in massive quantities, as soil bacteria work faster in a hotter environment and plant growth goes in reverse. (FYI: photosynthesis starts to decline at 95°F and stops entirely at 104°.) Just this source alone would cause a further increase of 250 ppm in 50 years, resulting in a planet inhospitable to nearly all life. If we get to three degrees, we will get to six or seven, and life as we know will be destroyed at that point.

• Climate models suggest a drier climate for SE Asia, home to significant tropical forests. Drier climate translates to more wild fires. Peat, sometimes hundreds of feet thick, lies beneath most of this forest, and is carbon rich. Two billion extra tons of carbon went into the atmosphere during the devastating fire season of 1997-98 from Indonesia alone. [Current anthropogenic carbon emissions are 8.1 billion tons/yr.] Fires like this would be nearly impossible to mitigate.

• With more energetic and hotter oceans, hurricanes will reach a fierceness requiring a new category, meaning we have never seen the kinds of storms that will terrorize the next several generations.

So I could go on with how it gets worse once we exceed 450 ppm, etc., but I, again recommend getting the book and reading other sources, many of which are listed on this web page. Rather than delve into that, I hope I’ve shown you enough to inspire you to make climate change a priority in your life.

The next post will lay-out some of the details of the options that seem best for us.

With sincere concern and hope for joyous action,
Brien

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