We have all had the Q posed as the title of this post. I found very elegant and simple answers from Quantumrun Forecasting from whose website this post is excepted.
Most of the international organizations responsible for organizing the global effort on climate change agree that the limit we can allow greenhouse gas concentrations to buildup to in our atmosphere is 450 parts per million (ppm). That more or less equals a two degree Celsius temperature increase in our climate, hence its nickname: the “2-degrees-Celsius limit.” To avoid it, the world would have to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by 50% by 2050 (based on 1990 levels) and by almost 100% by 2100.
Presently, politicians and climate change don’t exactly mix. The reality of today is that even with innovations in the pipeline, cutting emissions will still mean purposefully slowing down the economy. Politicians who do that don’t normally stay in power.
This choice between environmental stewardship and economic progress is hardest on developing countries. They've seen how first world nations have grown wealthy off the back of the environment, so asking them to avoid that same growth is a hard sell. These developing nations point out that since first world nations caused most of the atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations, they should be the ones to bear most of the burden to clean it up. Meanwhile, first world nations don’t want to lower their emissions—and put themselves at an economic disadvantage—if their cuts are cancelled out by runaway emissions in countries like India and China. It’s a bit of a chicken and egg situation.
According to David Keith, Harvard Professor and President of Carbon Engineering, from an economist’s perspective, if you spend a lot of money cutting emissions in your country, you end up distributing the benefits of those cuts around the world, but all the costs of those cuts are in your country. That’s why governments prefer to invest in adaptation to climate change over cutting emissions, because the benefits and investments stay in their countries.
Nations throughout the world recognize that passing the 450 red line means pain and instability for everyone within the next 20-30 years. However, there’s also this feeling that there’s not enough pie to go around, forcing everyone to eat as much of it as they can so they can be in the best position once it runs out. That’s why Kyoto failed. That’s why Copenhagen failed. And that’s why the next meeting will fail unless we can prove the economics behind climate change reduction are positive, instead of negative.
Most of the international organizations responsible for organizing the global effort on climate change agree that the limit we can allow greenhouse gas concentrations to buildup to in our atmosphere is 450 parts per million (ppm). That more or less equals a two degree Celsius temperature increase in our climate, hence its nickname: the “2-degrees-Celsius limit.” To avoid it, the world would have to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by 50% by 2050 (based on 1990 levels) and by almost 100% by 2100.
Presently, politicians and climate change don’t exactly mix. The reality of today is that even with innovations in the pipeline, cutting emissions will still mean purposefully slowing down the economy. Politicians who do that don’t normally stay in power.
This choice between environmental stewardship and economic progress is hardest on developing countries. They've seen how first world nations have grown wealthy off the back of the environment, so asking them to avoid that same growth is a hard sell. These developing nations point out that since first world nations caused most of the atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations, they should be the ones to bear most of the burden to clean it up. Meanwhile, first world nations don’t want to lower their emissions—and put themselves at an economic disadvantage—if their cuts are cancelled out by runaway emissions in countries like India and China. It’s a bit of a chicken and egg situation.
According to David Keith, Harvard Professor and President of Carbon Engineering, from an economist’s perspective, if you spend a lot of money cutting emissions in your country, you end up distributing the benefits of those cuts around the world, but all the costs of those cuts are in your country. That’s why governments prefer to invest in adaptation to climate change over cutting emissions, because the benefits and investments stay in their countries.
Nations throughout the world recognize that passing the 450 red line means pain and instability for everyone within the next 20-30 years. However, there’s also this feeling that there’s not enough pie to go around, forcing everyone to eat as much of it as they can so they can be in the best position once it runs out. That’s why Kyoto failed. That’s why Copenhagen failed. And that’s why the next meeting will fail unless we can prove the economics behind climate change reduction are positive, instead of negative.
Another factor that makes climate change so much harder than any challenge humanity has faced in its past is the timescale it operates on. The changes we make today to lower our emissions will impact future generations the most. Think about this from a politician’s perspective: she needs to convince her voters to agree to expensive investments in environmental initiatives, which will probably be paid for by increasing taxes and whose benefits will only be enjoyed by future generations. As much as people might say otherwise, most people have a tough time putting aside $20 a week into their retirement fund, let alone worrying about the lives of grandchildren they've never met.
And it will get worse. Even if we succeed in transitioning to a low-carbon economy by 2040-50 by doing everything mentioned above, the greenhouse gas emissions we’ll emit between now and then will fester in the atmosphere for decades. These emissions will lead to positive feedback loops that could accelerate climate change, making a return to “normal” 1990s weather take even longer—possibly until the 2100s. Sadly, humans don’t make decisions on those time scales. Anything longer than 10 years might as well not exist to us.
As much as Kyoto and Copenhagen may give the impression that world politicians are clueless about how to resolve climate change, the reality is quite the opposite. The top tier powers know exactly what the final solution will look like. It’s just the final solution won’t be very popular among voters in most parts of the world, so leaders are delaying said final solution until either science and the private sector innovate our way out of climate change or climate change wreaks enough havoc over the world that voters will agree to vote for unpopular solutions to this very big problem.
Here’s the final solution in a nutshell: The rich and heavily industrialized countries must accept deep and real cuts to their carbon emissions. The cuts have to be deep enough to cover the emissions from those smaller, developing countries who must continue to pollute in order to complete the short term goal of pulling their populations out of extreme poverty and hunger.
On top of that, the richer countries must band together to create a 21st century Marshall Plan whose goal will be to create a global fund to accelerate Third World development and shift to a post-carbon world. A quarter of this fund will stay in the developed world for strategic subsidies to speed up the revolutions in energy conservation and production outlined at the beginning of this article. The fund’s remaining three quarters will be used for massive scale technology transfers and financial subsidies to help Third World countries leapfrog over conventional infrastructure and power generation towards a decentralized infrastructure and power network that will be cheaper, more resilient, easier to scale, and largely carbon neutral.
The details of this plan might vary—hell, aspects of it might even be entirely private sector led—but the overall outline look much like what was just described.
At the end of the day, it’s about fairness. World leaders will have to agree to work together to stabilize the environment and gradually heal it back to 1990 levels. And in so doing, these leaders will have to agree on a new global entitlement, a new basic right for every human being on the planet, where everyone will be allowed a yearly, personal allocation of greenhouse gas emissions. If you exceed that allocation, if you pollute more than your yearly fair share, then you pay a carbon tax to put yourself back into balance.
Once that global right is agreed on, people in first world nations will immediately start paying a carbon tax for the luxurious, high carbon lifestyles they already live. That carbon tax will pay to develop poorer countries, so their people can one day enjoy the same lifestyles as those in the West.
Now I know what you’re thinking: if everyone lives an industrialized lifestyle, wouldn't that be too much for the environment to support? At present, yes. For the environment to survive given today’s economy and technology, the majority of the world’s population needs to be trapped in abject poverty. But if we accelerate the coming revolutions in food, transportation, housing, and energy, then it will be possible for the world’s population to all live First World lifestyles—without ruining the planet. And isn't that a goal we’re striving for anyway?
Finally, there’s one scientific field that humanity could (and probably will) use in the future to combat climate change in the short term: geoengineering.
The dictionary.com definition for geoengineering is “the deliberate large-scale manipulation of an environmental process that affects the earth's climate, in an attempt to counteract the effects of global warming.” Basically, its climate control. And we’ll use it to temporarily reduce global temperatures.
Two of the most promising options are : stratospheric sulfur seeding and iron fertilization of the ocean.
When especially large volcanoes erupt, they shoot huge plumes of sulfur ash into the stratosphere, naturally and temporarily reducing global temperatures by less than one percent. How? Because as that sulfur swirls around the stratosphere, it reflects enough sunlight from hitting the Earth to reduce global temperatures. Scientists like Professor Alan Robock of Rutgers University believe humans can do the same. Robock suggests that with a few billion dollars and about nine giant cargo aircraft flying about three times a day, we could unload a million tonnes of sulfur into the stratosphere each year to artificially bring global temperatures down by one to two degrees.
The oceans are made up of a giant food chain. At the very bottom of this food chain are phytoplankton (microscopic plants). These plants feed on minerals that mostly come from wind-blown dust from the continents. One of the most important minerals is iron.
Now bankrupt, California-based start-ups Climos and Planktos experimented with dumping huge amounts of powdered iron dust across large areas of the deep ocean to artificially stimulate phytoplankton blooms. Studies suggest that one kilogram of powdered iron could generate about 100,000 kilograms of phytoplankton. These phytoplankton would then absorb massive amounts of carbon as they grew. Basically, whatever amount of this plant that doesn’t get eaten by the food chain (creating a much needed population boom of marine life by the way) will fall to the bottom of the ocean, dragging down mega tonnes of carbon with it.
That sounds great, you say. But why did those two start-ups go bust?
Geoengineering is a relatively new science that’s chronically underfunded and extremely unpopular among climate scientists. Why? Because scientists believe (and rightly so) that if the world uses easy and low cost geoengineering techniques to keep the climate stable instead of the hard work involved with reducing our carbon emissions, then world governments may opt to use geoengineering permanently.
If it were true that we could use geoengineering to permanently solve our climate problems, then governments would in fact do just that. Unfortunately, using geoengineering to solve climate change is like treating a heroin addict by giving him more heroin—it sure might make him feel better in the short term, but eventually the addiction will kill him.
If we keep the temperature stable artificially while allowing carbon dioxide concentrations to grow, the increased carbon would overwhelm our oceans, making them acidic. If the oceans become too acidic, all life in the oceans will die out, a 21st century mass extinction event. That’s something we’d all like to avoid.
In the end, geoengineering should only be used as a last resort for no more than 5-10 years, enough time for the world to take emergency measures should we ever pass the 450 ppm mark.
An addiction gets harder to quit the longer you have it. The same can be said about our addiction to polluting our biosphere with carbon. The longer we put off kicking the habit, the longer and harder it will be to recover. Every decade world governments put off making real and substantial efforts to limit climate change today could mean several decades and trillions of dollars more to reverse its effects in the future.
We shouldn’t have to resort to geoengineering to fix our world. We shouldn’t have to wait until a billion people die of starvation and violent conflict before we act. Small actions today can avoid the disasters and horrible moral choices of tomorrow.
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