What Matters: Our carbon catastrophe

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Our carbon catastrophe

22 February 2009

The question with climate change is this: are we facing a problem or A Problem?

If the answer is the former, if global warming is just one issue on a long list of problems we have to address, we need one kind of strategy. If it’s the latter, if global warming is the biggest problem humans have ever caused and the sole civilization-challenging trial the modern world has ever faced, the call is different.

I think it’s the latter, so I believe that the first task is to explain why I have come to this conclusion, to make people understand in their bones that climate change is the ugly bottom line of our time on Earth. I’ve thought so for a long time—way back in 1989 I wrote the first book on the subject for a general audience, with the cheery title The End of Nature. I’ve spent two decades hoping to be proved wrong but have instead watched in a kind of slow-motion horror as events have played out. In fact, global warming is happening much more quickly, and on a larger scale, than we would have guessed in 1989.

So far, the planet’s temperature has gone up little more than one degree Fahrenheit,¹ but Earth is more finely balanced than we’d realized, and that one degree has been enough to knock it off-kilter. Hydrological cycles have been destabilized—we see massive increases in both droughts and flooding because warm air holds more water vapor than cold. We see increasingly intense storms. And in the last two years we’ve seen a jaw-dropping sight: the runaway melt of Arctic sea ice. This is a sign that the warming human beings kick-started has begun to take on a life of its own; the open Northwest Passage not only proves that the planet is heating up but, because blue water absorbs sunlight that the white ice once reflected, amps up the warming.

One degree so far, but the consensus suggests that, without truly dramatic action very soon, Earth’s temperature will rise by something on the order of an additional five degrees within this century. And if anything like that happens? Picture this: monsoons shifted off their historic paths. Sea levels rising so high and so fast that you can pretty much forget the coastlines where civilization developed. In fact, we may well end up losing much of civilization. That strikes you as overblown, right? Yet the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s James Hansen, our foremost climatologist, wrote in 2008 that “if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that carbon dioxide will need to be reduced” ² to no more than 350 parts per million.

The key word in that sentence is the last one: reduced. Almost all climate policy work has focused on the idea that we’ll eventually need to cap the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, at 550 parts per million, say, or 450 parts per million. But the melt of the Arctic should kill those cozy plans. We’re at 385 parts per million of carbon dioxide right now, up from 275 before the industrial revolution. Hansen says that any number above 350 parts per million will push us past all the tipping points. We’re like the guy whose doctor says, “Your cholesterol is too high.” Not, “It will be too high if you go on like this,” but too damn high right now—you’re in the zone where strokes and heart attacks happen.

When the doctor says that, some percentage of smart people go cold turkey. They stop messing around with half measures and start eating a healthy diet, even if they don’t much care for it, and spending an hour a day on the treadmill, even if they’d rather be lying on the sofa watching TV. If they’re lucky, they get their cholesterol numbers down and avoid a stroke.

For me, the only rational work at the moment is to spread that message. This year I, along with a bunch of kids who just got out of college, launched 350.org. Our work is to ensure that people around the world know those three digits—know that they’re the most important numbers on Earth, representing the dividing point between Earth as we’ve known it and a self-created hell. This is the issue for our time, what the civil rights movement was for the last generation and the fight against fascism for the generation before that.

We’ve got colleagues on every continent organizing marches and actions and art and music. We are raising consciousness, which sounds less important than raising windmills and solar panels but in fact is even more crucial. You can’t make the math work one lightbulb at a time, so we need to change the system. The world comes together in Copenhagen, in December 2009, to strike a new climate deal, a successor to the Kyoto treaty. We now know that we have just one last chance to get it right; if this deal is too timid—and right now the working drafts are way too timid—the scientific window closes. But if we use these negotiations to restructure the world’s carbon economy so that carbon dioxide carries a stiff price that quickly works its way down through every transaction—well, then there’s an outside chance.

¹ Five-ninths of a degree Celsius.

² James Hansen et al., “Target atmospheric CO2: Where should humanity aim?” The Open Atmospheric Science Journal, 2008, Number 2, pp. 217–31.

Comment [23]

Agree? Disagree? Let us know what you think. Please include your full name with your comment. Comments may be edited.

A complex problem at a global scale with potential disastrous consequences for all is the impetus we need to pool our resources to share what we know: What are the barriers and related enablers related to causes and mitigation of climate change? In order for us to share our learning, we need to build a shared knowledge repository using a single shared glossary, with its contextual meanings; synonyms; acronyms; abbreviations; and common spelling differences. We need to organise our categorised facts and opinions, referenced, in a project management framework to analyse the problem, and its solutions. The key is to avoid free text, and to use indexes of categories and subcategories to ‘frame’ a particular answer, stating whether it is a opinion (with a level of expertise), or a fact (with level of evidence). All answers need to be referenced, so that the knowledge repository can act as a decision support system, filterable according to level of factual evidence, evidence of impact, evidence of risk, evidence of cost and benefit, and level of expertise of opinion.

The above approach necessitates the building of the semantic web as a decision support tool, limiting our communication to categorised data with metadata. No more journal articles, free text articles, book chapters, etc. Time is of the essence.

See www.semanticweb.webs.com

Posted 17 March 2009, 18:19 by Lisa New
Problem is mass mobilization in time. We are facing a complex problem with a long time span and we are not good in thinking that way. Whether the predictions are entirely true or not, lets face the potential problem. This probem could be bigger than we can control. If there is a slight chance that predictions will be true, the impact is beyond our imagination, it cannot be stopped than we are obliged to act quicker than we are doing now. Not for ourselves but for our children who will face our inheritance.

Posted 12 March 2009, 01:47 by HMJ vd Helm
The fact that the climate is changing is incontrovertible; the consequences are less clear. Humans are highly adaptable; we will survive as a species. But what will be the impact on a globalized economy that is structured so that a decrease in the rate of growth is painful, and actual economic shrinkage is a disaster? We now know that our understanding of economics is much less secure than we previously believed, and we cannot be confident in the absence of linkages that allow catastrophic collapse.

Can we afford to build the hurricane-scaled seawalls and pumping stations that would turn Miami, London, Tokyo, Shanghai and other coastal cities into modern versions of Venice, and can we afford the flood losses that will occur as we dither over whether to build those barriers?

How will we handle the humanitarian crises as nearly the entire population of Bangladesh moves to higher ground in India?

Can we even predict the effects on fisheries as salination of critical estuaries occurs?

It’s much simpler and less risky to address the root cause of the problem and stop the carbonification of the atmosphere.

Posted 7 March 2009, 17:55 by Dean Loomis
Remember the oil embargo of the 1970’s? After that blew over we went back to our gas guzzling ways. We are back in the same boat as we were then.

There have been several articles on light pollution I have read that would suggest we have too much development. Drive around any big city at night and just look at all of the lights on in buildings that are for the most part, empty.

Throughout the tenure of the Bush administration did the theme conserve ever come up?

In our home I like to use the analysis for leaving a room and lights on as the same thing as leaving a faucet running and walking out of a room. You wouldn’t do it. Everyone needs to think twice about how they use & conserve energy.

Raising awareness is just a start. For those naysayers who say this is all a sham I say, what if you’re wrong?

Posted 5 March 2009, 10:14 by J. F. Sweeney
Todays problem is the by-product of our past actions and our way of evaluating progress. There is need for a shift in our mind set, in our consciousness, if we are to tackle the issue of climate change. It needs to become the No.1 issue politically; and internationally we must all agree on a broad direction for reducing per capita energy consumption while simultaneously increasing the proportion of renewable energy.A whole new system of measuring GROWTH AND DEVELOPMENT needs to be identified and our education systems overhauled to bring about greater AWARENESS about environmental and societal issues and the role business needs to play in bringing about transformation

Posted 5 March 2009, 06:33 by Anil Nayar
Sequestration of CO2 via Biochar (or Terra Preta) production can bring GHG to under 350ppm. I am developing a project to produce biochar of agave. Agave can produce up to five hundred tonnes of biomass per hectare per year (average, since agave takes years to harvest).
When ripe, agave has 3X more sugars than sugarcane and can produce five thousand liters of ethanol per Ha per Yr.
All we need is a great plant or feedstock (cattails, algae, agave, hemp) and great technology (biochar) to save the Earth.

Please, check these websites on biochar & terra preta:

BBC video:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8993313723654914866

The Clearlight Foundation: www.clrlight.org/Biochar.htm

Time: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1864279,00.html

Natgeo: http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/09/soil/mann-text

Sciam:
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=pyrolyisis-terra-preta-could-eliminate-garbage-generate-oil-carbon-sequestration

Nature: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v442/n7103/full/442624a.html

Do it

agaveproject2@gmail.com

Posted 4 March 2009, 23:17 by Arturo Velez
Man is NOT the cause of earth’s temp changes. Core drillings at N&S poles & elsewhere prove the earth has gone through at least 10 warming periods that were far more significant than now 100’s & 1000’s of years BEFORE man’s ability to burn fossil fuels.

Check out www.earthchangesmedia.com Mitch Battros. He & thousands of REAL scientists have signed in agreement that the SUN’s solar flares,aka CME’s (Coronal Mass Ejections) are the cause.

John Coleman, founder of Weather Channel has filed a class action suit that over 30,000 scientists have signed against AlGore & the global warming “scam.”

Al Gore reportedly has made over $20Million off his fear-mongering scam which is all about more gov’t control & green house taxes to punish the USA. If you don’t understand that last statement, you need to find out who & what his father was. Marlin S. Iowa

Posted 4 March 2009, 11:57 by Marlin Scholljegerdes
The big problem is our ignorance. We must mitigate our climate ignorance and to adapt for the reality. We are observing the first step of a glacial entry. Climatology is in a deep crises made by the school of the climate modellers. Since 1975-76 there was a shift to a cool mode on the general atmospheric circulation due to an abrupt cooling of the polar icecaps in the Arctic as in the Antarctic. Old climatology is not in conditions to explain this shift marked in some index like PDO or NAO. Only modern climatology is capable to explain all phenomena that we are observing (snow storms, heat waves, p.e.). The French climatolgist, died a year ago, Marcel Leroux made an epistemological cut in old climatology. We must study their works to understand what is happen.

Posted 4 March 2009, 08:36 by Rui G. Moura
primary cause of climatic change being our position in earths cycle around the sun. note earths climatic cycles as it pulses hot and cold as ice sweeps across the globe; brought about by tree cover then as both are forced to retreat by the cosmic cycle around the sun the earth warms (as now).We are currently exacerbating the situation at a terrible cost.

We can continue to grow economically if we tighten manufacturing processes whilst gaining a deeper understanding for the majority; new fuel cells like hydrogen are just around the corner. Creating sustainable lifestyles have the potential to exist in some comfort while we adapt to the changes, as long as we know and understand change is inevitable. Government subsidies will be required during transition recoverable as benefits materialize. It will be a destructive future if we don’t.

Posted 4 March 2009, 06:50 by peter mcbeath
Let us say we have averted the immediate catastrophe and C02 levels are sensible again. What then? What does a globally sustainable economy look like?

Starting from the fact that all elements on earth have a cycle, not just carbon, any global enviro-economical system must control the cycling of material globally using ONLY the energy budget supplied by the sun and achieving everything we want in that framework, including providing resources for the natural support systems that keep us alive.

Tall order? Nope. Biology does this already. So let’s compare biology and economics.

Biology has mastered how to control the cycling of energy, material and information at the molecular level and then spread this all across the world. She can recycle readily available resources to make locally specialised solutions, by restricting which materials she uses.

All humans need are energy, material and the information on how to merge the two for their own benefit. ie Economics.

Therefore I conclude that the solution to unifying economy and ecology would be to create a global recycling technology that combines manufacturing, information technology and energy management. I suspect it would use molecular scale “lego” and would be powered by the sun and moulded by the internet.

The basic feedback control of this global system must be overseen by a global political body, formed from all nations in the world.

Notice how my solution reflect the symmetry of the problem: It must be cyclical, of finite global size and it must be decentralised because solar power is distributed, as are people.

IT and solar energy are inherently distributed already.

So the only two things missing from my solution are

i) A global enviro-political body
ii) A manufacturing platform that is the materials equivalent of the internet.

Can iPods grow on trees?

Posted 4 March 2009, 05:54 by Chris Forman

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