Disclaimer: I am now retired, and am therefore no longer
an expert on anything. This blog post
presents only my opinions, and anything in it should not be relied on.
This April (after a long hiatus from blog posting) I hoped
to be able to post a climate change piece with a few bits of good news among
the bad. CO2 as measured at Mauna Loa,
it appeared, had cut its year-to-year growth rate nearly in half. The use of solar power rather than coal or
oil for energy in homes and cars was slowly growing as price drops for solar
continued and the US passed the Inflation Reduction Act with incentives for
solar and electric-vehicle use, as well as embedding climate change efforts
more deeply in the US government bureaucracy.
Arctic sea ice appeared for the last six years to have reached a new
equilibrium level, never breaching the 2016 lows.
And then, from April to July, several things happened almost
simultaneously:
1.
James Hansen et al published a paper arguing
that (a) global warming for a doubling of CO2 was most likely to be not 4
degrees C as he had previously estimated, but 4.5 degrees C, (b) this would be
increased by an inevitable decrease in human-caused aerosols starting a few
years ago, and (c) it was now possible to project to some extent the degree to
which this warming would happen over the next century.
2.
“Hothouse Earth”, by Bill McGuire, talks
specifically about what we may expect in the next 30-50 years in particular,
including a halving of global food production.
3.
Monthly CO2 (Mauna Loa) saw a very large rise in
April, to a rate 3 ppm above April 2022, and May and June show similar jumps,
while our best measure of yearly CO2 jumped to 421 ppm in June, more than 50% above
its 1850 280-ppm baseline – implying, together with Hansen et al’s work, that 3
degrees C of global warming above that time period is now “baked in” and
unavoidable.
4.
Global sea surface temperatures are now well
into record territory, and sea temperatures around Florida are now around 95
degrees, hot enough to kill coral and some fish.
5.
Antarctic sea ice has diverged dramatically from
recorded extents – since it is winter in the Antarctic, this means that warm
winds from an incipient equatorial El Nino have prevented as much as 1/3 of
historical sea ice refreezing. It would
seem inevitable that new record lows will continue to be set all the way to
Antarctic sea ice minimum in late January, with follow-on effects on Antarctic
land ice melting and hence ocean level rise.
6.
Dangerous air quality from Canadian wildfires
has affected the northern US, while record heat, often around 110 F, is
affecting the southern US.
7.
From July 3rd to the 5th,
global record land temperatures for apparently the last 125,000 years occurred,
reaching above 17 degrees C.
Looking Forward with Great Wariness
All of this is worrying enough. But it is also the case that by all accounts,
a new El Nino is starting, and may well last for a year or more. The past few times an El Nino has occurred,
if I remember correctly, CO2 has spiked upwards at a record pace and global
land temperatures have also risen significantly. The prospect of grueling heat waves not just
this summer but next is certainly a cause for major concern.
I should also, I suppose, mention articles suggesting that
the melting of permafrost with attendant methane release is continuing to ramp
up. It is not clear how much this increases
global warming independent of CO2 increases:
methane (CO4) is more powerful in the atmosphere as a greenhouse gas,
but much less prevalent than CO2. At the
same time, a certain amount of methane breaks down in the atmosphere to CO2,
thus increasing carbon dioxide concentration.
Overall
My conclusion from all of the above is that most if not all
of our decrease in CO2 emissions is being “drowned out” by the shift to El Nino,
economic rebound from COVID, decreases in aerosols, and increased permafrost
melting.
One good thing is that popular news outlets aside from The
Guardian – including CNN, AP, and the New York Times – are willing to report
that today’s weather extremes are indeed caused by climate change. On the other hand, I see not only that
150-odd Republican Representatives (a majority of Republicans in the US House
of Representatives) are still classed as “climate deniers”, but also that an
increasing number of people at the other extreme have given up hope of doing anything
about climate change – often because they sense correctly that the 1.5 degree C
target for “avoiding disaster”, and also the 2 degree target for “avoiding catastrophe”
are certain to be overrun.
However, this, I must emphasize, is not, in my view, the
proper way to view the future. What lies
beyond these targets – the next doubling of CO2, and the next – increases the scale
of the disaster almost tenfold. It is
true, I think, that once one target is breached, the next is harder to stop
short of, because both of feedbacks from initial warming and increasing sunk
costs of fossil-fuel infrastructure that makes its replacement harder. However, those feedbacks decrease over time
to nothing if we succeed in slowing CO2 emissions dramatically, and the success
of solar power shows that green energy can succeed even if it means uprooting
what’s there for a whole new system.
And so, our initial successes count far more towards preventing
disasters numbers 2 and 3 than they do towards avoiding today’s disaster; and
the consequences of success or failure in our quest are far greater. Think 2 billion lives lost or 8 billion rather
than 500 million and that may give you an idea of what is at stake. Thus, what is happening is a matter for
heartbreak and anger at those responsible, but not for despair. On the contrary, it is a matter for steadfast
effort.
As was once said, it’s the only game in town, and you lose no
matter what you do. But if you do it
right, you won’t go broke before the game ends.
Or, to put it another way, humanity and nature will not by and large die
if we try well enough, although we cannot prevent mass murder, both before and
after we die. And that’s the best
obituary we can hope for.
