[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] One Shot Left

[Bill Totten]

The latest science suggests that preventing runaway climate change means
total decarbonisation.

by George Monbiot

Published in the Guardian (November 25 2008)


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
sixty 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 1500
kilometres 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 eight per cent 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 five per cent a year. But you can
answer these questions only by considering the alternatives. The
trajectory both Barack Obama and Gordon Brown have proposed - an eighty
per cent cut by 2050 - means reducing emissions by an average of two per
cent 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
fifty per cent, 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
ten per cent annual cut in energy consumption while the infrastructure
remains mostly unchanged means a ten per cent 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.

www.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, page 73.
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, pages 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 two degrees Celsius 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 two
degrees Celsius". This estimate is given in the following paper:

9. Malte Meinshausen, 2006. What Does a Two Degrees Celsius 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 three to four per cent 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 forty per cent chance of exceeding
four degrees Celsius.

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/

Copyright  (c) 2006 Monbiot.com

http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2008/11/25/one-shot-left/



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