A recently released analysis from Canada’s Department of National Defence highlights some of the risks associated with fossil fuel dependence and climate change.
Canada’s armed forces are not the first to identify these risks. Indeed, analyses conducted by the American military have been doing so for some time now.
This does not look encouraging:
Spot three reasons why!
RealClimate has an interesting post up about reconstructing 2000 years worth of sea level data. They conclude that: “According to this reconstruction, 20th-Century sea-level rise on the U.S. Atlantic coast is faster than at any time in the past two millennia.”
As reported in The New York Times, former US Vice President Al Gore has written a long essay for Rolling Stone criticizing the climate policies of President Barack Obama.
Gore argues that Obama understands the scale of the problem and has appointed some good people to work on it, but that he has failed to effectively press the case for action.
Gore is clear about the uncertainty of whether America’s political system can deal with this key challenge: “It is about whether or not we are still capable — given the ill health of our democracy and the current dominance of wealth over reason — of perceiving important and complex realities clearly enough to promote and protect the sustainable well-being of the many. What hangs in the balance is the future of civilization as we know it”.
Here’s hoping Gore’s comments help to drive more serious attention to the problem of getting America to take world-leading action in response to this enormous threat.
The recent state of global environmental policy reminds me of a quote from Hunter S. Thompson (or from his most famous character, if you prefer). Talking about the drug-related movement he had been a part of, he says: “So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark – that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back”.
It seems that way a bit with climate policy. For a couple of years, it seemed like things were coming together. People agreed about the science (reason to worry), and they agreed about the policy (domestic price on carbon, international agreement on targets).
Now, it seems like the energy of the movement has been sapped, even though the moral and economic arguments are as strong as ever. Activists, journalists, scientists, politicians, and bureaucrats are still right to point to the danger of climate change, the costs of fossil fuels, and the opportunity to power the world renewably. Despite that, the focus of political attention has moved on and the public doesn’t care. Maybe we will need to wait for real catastrophes for that to change.
Or maybe activists need to go back to building that energy, as dispiriting as it has been to be knocked back by a bunch of coal-fired corporations and mega-libertarians. I hope we will rebuild the personal energy required to do that. We can slowly convince people that fossil fuels are not safe bets, that forests and other carbon sinks need to be protected, and that we need to find a new way to get our energy. At the moment, people may be distracted. They have definitely lost their focus on the environment. But people do ultimately care about passing on a decent world. In order to do that, we need to stay on top of the risk posed by climate change, since it threatens to transform everything.
The situation of those who are pushing for stronger action to combat climate change today seems a bit akin to the situation of paramedics watching a daredevil prepare for an insane stunt.
In the case of the daredevil, the stunt might be trying to jump across a canyon on a rocket-propelled motorcycle. In the case of the world today, it consists of burning a large portion of the world’s remaining fossil fuels, increasing the risk of catastrophic or runaway climate change.
The ideal option
In both cases, it is good advice to call off the whole thing. The daredevil risks plunging to his death (and I use the male pronoun advisedly here), being blown up by rockets, and so on. The world risks melting the icecaps, turning the sea to acid, severely disrupting global agriculture, dramatically increasing sea levels, and so on.
In both cases, the people with the power to choose the future course of action are unconcerned about the risks and keen to plow ahead forward despite them.
Fallback options
So where are we left, as paramedics/concerned citizens? Our fallback option is to do what we can to reduce the seriousness of the risks associated with the reckless course of action that has been chosen.
Paramedics can make sure they are prepared to deal with horrible burns and broken bones. They can carefully check the rockets on the motorcycle, and make sure they have plenty of the right sort of blood available for transfusions.
Those concerned about climate change can perform similar operations. We can try to improve the world’s resilience, when it comes to any radical changes that may occur in the future. This includes everything from trying to improve international cooperation to stockpiling potentially useful seeds to researching geoengineering techniques.
One big difference between the daredevil biker situation and the daredevil climate-alterer situation is that the man on the rocket bike is only really putting himself in peril. By contrast, all our our fates are connected to the choices of those now heedlessly digging up and burning fossil fuels. Rather than being like a crazed solitary motorcyclist, they are like the crazed driver of a bus which we are all riding. It would be nice to be able to convince them to behave in a less insane way. Failing that, we should be doing all we can to prepare for the likely consequences of their insanity.
Interesting article in The Economist:
They do understand the science of climate change, but they don’t seem to have accepted the scale of effort required to keep it from becoming dangerous.
The idea that people are smart enough to foresee hazards and take steps to avoid them is a comforting one; certainly, it holds more appeal than the idea that we are doomed to blunder into disaster after disaster. That being said, the task is a distinctly challenging one, and one that brushes up against the limits of knowledge and even of what can be known.
Evaluating how dangerous something is is a challenging undertaking, particularly when the thing being considered is new and novel. In many circumstances, it is only when an individual, state, or firm has been substantially harmed by some new phenomenon that they begin thinking seriously about how to deal with it. It is possible that climate change will offer such an opportunity, but only if some specific criteria are met:
Quite possibly, this combination will never transpire. It may be that the effects of climate change creep up gradually while the public debate remains confused and that, by the time the effects are clear enough to motivate action, it will be too late to prevent radical and dangerous changes like the disintegration of ice sheets.
Overwhelmingly, human beings behave like an uncoordinated flock of birds or school of fish. Each one responds to its local environment – what it can see, and the incentives presented to it – and the behaviour of the mass emerges from the accumulation of those small choices. While there are mechanisms for large-scale organization, such as national governments, their priorities are often defined by short-term concerns, and designed according to an imperfect understanding of what was going on.
All that was adequate when the challenges facing humanity were relatively short-term and manageable: cold winters, failed harvests, hostile animals and microorganisms, etc. When it comes to complex global problems that unfold on the scale of decades, centuries, and millennia, there seems to be much less reason to be optimistic that humanity will cope. Here’s hoping we manage to rise above that pessimistic appraisal, and that nature gives us a nudge in the right direction in the next few years. Otherwise, we may find ourselves a regretful collection of billions in a few decades’ time.
The logic of inaction is very powerful. I feel it myself. When voters again and again reject the option of taking action on climate change, it becomes dispiriting and exhausting to keep advocating policies to decarbonize the economy. At the same time, personal commitments like avoiding flying can be hard to maintain when nobody else is making similar sacrifices, as well as when opportunities to see interesting parts of the world are slipping away.
In addition to being the primary constituent of natural gas, methane is itself a powerful greenhouse gas. Indeed, it is one of the reasons why livestock agriculture and landfills contribute to climate change.
As discussed in The New York Times, one reason why the expanded production of natural gas is worrisome from a climatic perspective is that drilling for and extracting gas causes some of it to leak directly into the atmosphere. These are called ‘fugitive emissions’. According to the article, as much as 7.9% of the gas extracted from shale gas wells is released directly into the atmosphere in this way.
Of course, the gas that is put through pipelines and burned for heat or electricity is also problematic from a climate change perspective. One molecule of methane (CH4) combines with two molecules of oxygen (O2) to form one molecule of carbon dioxide (CO2) and two molecules of water (H2O). That basically means that for every cubic metre of natural gas that gets burned, a cubic metre of carbon dioxide gets added to the atmosphere.
The article repeatedly quotes Robert Howarth, a professor of ecology and environmental biology at Cornell University. He points out several studies that identify the problematic effects of natural gas production on the Earth’s climate, concluding that “[w]hen all is factored together… the greenhouse gas footprint of shale gas can be as much as 20 percent greater than, and perhaps twice as high as, coal per unit of energy”.
That certainly raises questions about the idea that natural gas is a clean-burning fuel that can help us deal with climate change.
The question of exactly how bad any particular degree of climate change would be is extremely challenging to answer in advance. How much net human suffering would result from warming the planet 1°C? What about 2°C? 5°C? 10°C?
The answer to this question is important, since it helps to determine what the best course of action for humanity is. In theory, we could ban the use of fossil fuels tomorrow, shut down the world’s coal-fired power stations, park cars, ground airplanes, and start re-building the energy basis of society without the use of planet-warming sources of energy. Alternatively, we could ignore the problem for years, decades, or even centuries – allowing the planet to get ever-hotter until we completely run out of fossil fuels.
Here’s one way to simplify the problem: just think about the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets. These massive slabs of frozen water could raise global sea levels by 14 metres if they melted completely. That would have a gigantic human impact. Major cities like New York, Vancouver, Tokyo, and London would be seriously inundated. Whole countries like the Netherlands and Bangladesh would largely cease to exist as dry land.
Bearing in mind that we are eventually going to have to abandon fossil fuels anyhow (because they exist in finite quantities), it seems sensible to say that it is worth switching away from them early to prevent the loss of these ice sheets. That is just one of the many climatic consequences that would arise from a particular level of warming. It would be accompanied by droughts, floods, agricultural changes, species relocating, ocean acidification, loss of glaciers, and much else besides. But – to simplify – we can just think about the ice sheets. That lets us set an upper bound for how much warming we can tolerate, which in turn establishes an upper bound for how many fossil fuels we can burn.
Where exactly does that boundary lie? One suggestive fact is that the ice sheets in question formed when the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide was about 450 parts per million (ppm). Before the Industrial Revolution, it was at around 280 ppm. Now, it is around 392 ppm and increasing by about 3 ppm per year. Based on a very crude calculation, it may be plausible to say that if we continue on our present course for twenty years or so, we will seriously endanger the integrity of the ice sheets.
The implications of that are pretty huge. Humanity needs to substantially cut greenhouse gas pollution not over the span of 50, or 500, or 1000 years, but over the next couple of decades. Furthermore, for it to be plausible that this change will occur successfully, rich developed countries like Canada need to cut first and fastest. Thus, just by considering one likely consequence of unmitigated climate change, we can make an argument that the complacent attitude of politicians who think we can concentrate on other issues is unrealistic. If we don’t handle this problem now, and we commit those ice sheets to eventual disintegration, people living during the time of inexorable sea level rise will quite rightly view our leaders and our generation as failures, when it comes to taking the most basic precautions to respect the welfare and rights of those who will come after us.