The latest science suggests that preventing runaway climate change means total decarbonisation.
Gandalf Grey
One Shot Left
The latest science suggests that preventing runaway climate change means
total decarbonisation.
by George Monbiot
George Bush is behaving like a furious defaulter whose home is about to be
repossessed. Smashing the porcelain, ripping the doors off their hinges, he
is determined that there will be nothing worth owning by the time the
bastards kick him out. His midnight regulations, opening America's
wilderness to logging and mining, trashing pollution controls, tearing up
conservation laws, will do almost as much damage in the last 60 days of his
presidency as he achieved in the foregoing 3000(1).
His backers - among them the nastiest pollutocrats in America - are calling
in their favours. But this last binge of vandalism is also the Bush
presidency reduced to its essentials. Destruction is not an accidental
product of its ideology. Destruction is the ideology. Neoconservatism is
power expressed by showing that you can reduce any part of the world to
rubble.
If it is now too late to prevent runaway climate change, the Bush team must
carry much of the blame. His wilful trashing of the Middle Climate - the
interlude of benign temperatures which allowed human civilisation to
flourish - makes the mass murder he engineered in Iraq only the second of
his crimes against humanity. Bush has waged his war on science with the same
obtuse determination with which he has waged his war on terror.
Is it too late? To say so is to make it true. To suggest that there is
nothing that can now be done is to ensure that nothing is done. But even a
resolute optimist like me finds hope ever harder to summon. A new summary of
the science published since last year's Intergovernmental Panel report
suggests that - almost a century ahead of schedule - the critical climate
processes might have begun(2).
Just a year ago the Intergovernmental Panel warned that the Arctic's
"late-summer sea ice is projected to disappear almost completely towards the
end of the 21st century . in some models."(3) But, as the new report by the
Public Interest Research Centre (PIRC) shows, climate scientists are now
predicting the end of late-summer sea ice within three to seven years. The
trajectory of current melting plummets through the graphs like a meteorite
falling to earth.
Forget the sodding polar bears: this is about all of us. As the ice
disappears, the region becomes darker, which means that it absorbs more
heat. A recent paper published in Geophysical Research Letters shows that
the extra warming caused by disappearing sea ice penetrates 1500km inland,
covering almost the entire region of continuous permafrost(4). Arctic
permafrost contains twice as much carbon as the entire global atmosphere(5).
It remains safe for as long as the ground stays frozen. But the melting has
begun. Methane gushers are now gassing out of some places with such force
that they keep the water open in Arctic lakes, through the winter(6).
The effects of melting permafrost are not incorporated into any global
climate models. Runaway warming in the Arctic alone could flip the entire
planet into a new climatic state. The Middle Climate could collapse faster
and sooner than the grimmest forecasts proposed.
Barack Obama's speech to the US climate summit last week was an astonishing
development(7). It shows that, in this respect at least, there really is a
prospect of profound political change in America. But while he described a
workable plan for dealing with the problem perceived by the Earth Summit of
1992, the measures he proposes are now hopelessly out of date. The science
has moved on. The events the Earth Summit and the Kyoto process were
supposed to have prevented are already beginning. Thanks to the wrecking
tactics of Bush the elder, Clinton (and Gore) and Bush the younger, steady,
sensible programmes of the kind that Obama proposes are now irrelevant. As
the PIRC report suggests, the years of sabotage and procrastination have
left us with only one remaining shot: a crash programme of total energy
replacement.
A paper by the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research shows that if we
are to give ourselves a roughly even chance(8,9) of preventing more than two
degrees of warming, global emissions from energy must peak by 2015 and
decline by between six and eight per cent per year from 2020 to 2040,
leading to a complete decarbonisation of the global economy soon after
2050(10). Even this programme would work only if some optimistic assumptions
about the response of the biosphere hold true. Delivering a high chance of
preventing two degrees of warming would mean cutting global emissions by
over 8% a year.
Is this possible? Is this acceptable? The Tyndall paper points out that
annual emission reductions greater than one per cent have "been associated
only with economic recession or upheaval." When the Soviet Union collapsed,
they fell by some 5% a year. But you can answer these questions only by
considering the alternatives. The trajectory both Barack Obama and Gordon
Brown have proposed - an 80% cut by 2050 - means reducing emissions by an
average of 2% a year. This programme, the figures in the Tyndall paper
suggest, is likely to commit the world to at least four or five degrees of
warming(11), which means the likely collapse of human civilisation across
much of the planet. Is this acceptable?
The costs of a total energy replacement and conservation plan would be
astronomical, the speed improbable. But the governments of the rich nations
have already deployed a scheme like this for another purpose. A survey by
the broadcasting network CNBC suggests that the US federal government has
now spent $4.2 trillion in response to the financial crisis, more than the
total spending on World War Two when adjusted for inflation(12). Do we want
to be remembered as the generation that saved the banks and let the
biosphere collapse?
This approach is challenged by the American thinker Sharon Astyk. In an
interesting new essay, she points out that replacing the world's energy
infrastructure involves "an enormous front-load of fossil fuels", which are
required to manufacture wind turbines, electric cars, new grid connections,
insulation and all the rest(13). This could push us past the climate tipping
point. Instead, she proposes, we must ask people "to make short term,
radical sacrifices", cutting our energy consumption by 50%, with little
technological assistance, in five years. There are two problems: the first
is that all previous attempts show that relying on voluntary abstinence does
not work. The second is that a 10% annual cut in energy consumption while
the infrastructure remains mostly unchanged means a 10% annual cut in total
consumption: a deeper depression than the modern world has ever experienced.
No political system - even an absolute monarchy - could survive an economic
collapse on this scale.
She is right about the risks of a technological green new deal, but these
are risks we have to take. Astyk's proposals travel far into the realm of
wishful thinking. Even the technological solution I favour inhabits the
distant margins of possibility.
Can we do it? Search me. Reviewing the new evidence, I have to admit that we
might have left it too late. But there is another question I can answer more
easily. Can we afford not to try? No we can't.
© Guardian News and Media Limited 2008
wwww.monbiot.com
References:
1. Suzanne Goldenberg, 20th November 2008. President for 60 more days, Bush
tearing apart protection for America's wilderness. The Guardian.
2. Public Interest Research Centre, 25th November 2008. Climate Safety.
www.pirc.info
3. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Working Group I. Technical
Summary, p73.
http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg1/ar4-wg1-ts.pdf
4. David M. Lawrence et al., 2008. Accelerated Arctic land warming and
permafrost degradation
during rapid sea ice loss. Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 35, 11506.
doi:10.1029/2008GL033985.
http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/ccr/dlawren/publications/lawrence.grl.submit.2008.pdf
5. Edward A. G. Schuur et al, September 2008. Vulnerability of permafrost
carbon to climate change: implications for the global carbon cycle.
Bioscience, Vol. 58, No. 8, pp.
701-714. doi:10.1641/B580807
http://www.bioone.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1641%2FB580807
6. United Nations Environment Project, 4 June 2007. Melting Ice - a Hot
Topic? Press
Release.
http://www.unep.org/Documents.Multilingual/Default.asp?DocumentID=512&ArticleID=5599&l=en
7.
http://www.congresscheck.com/2008/11/18/obama-promises-return-to-global-climate-change-negotiations/
8. Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows, 2008. Reframing the climate change
challenge in light of post-2000 emission trends. Philosophical Transactions
of the Royal Society A. Published online. doi:10.1098/rsta.2008.0138
http://www.tyndall.ac.uk/publications/journal_papers/fulltext.pdf
Anderson and Bows state that "The framing of climate change policy is
typically informed by the 2 degrees C threshold; however, even stabilizing
at 450 ppmv CO2e [parts per million of carbon dioxide equivalent] offers
only a 46 per cent chance of not exceeding 2 degrees C." This estimate is
given in the following paper:
9. Malte Meinshausen, 2006. What Does a 2°C Target Mean for Greenhouse Gas
Concentrations? A Brief Analysis Based on Multi-Gas Emission Pathways and
Several Climate Sensitivity Uncertainty Estimates. In Hans Joachim
Schellnhuber (Ed in Chief). Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change. Cambridge
University Press.
10. This is for stabilisation at 450 ppmv CO2e - well above the level that
James Hansen and other climate scientists are now calling for.
11. Anderson and Bows note that stabilising atmospheric concentrations even
at 650 ppmv CO2e requires that global emissions peak by 2020, followed by
global cuts of 3-4% a year. This means that OECD nations will have to cut
emissions by even more than this to prevent concentrations from rising above
650. Meinshausen estimates that stabilisation at 650ppmv CO2e gives a 40%
chance of exceeding 4 degrees C.
12. CNBC.com, 17th November 2008. Financial Crisis Tab Already In The
Trillions.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article21263.htm
13. Sharon Astyk, 11th November 2008. A New Deal or a War Footing? Thinking
Through Our Response to Climate Change.
http://sharonastyk.com/2008/11/11/a-new-deal-or-a-war-footing-thinking-through-our-response-to-climate-change/
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