Is the case for Climate Change Overstated?

Some that it was, tut this was before the summer Arctic ice melt of 2007.

This year, Arctic ice reached a minimum extent of 4.13 million square kilometers, compared to the previous record low of 5.32 million square kilometers in 2005. This represented a decline of 22 per cent in just two years; the difference amounted to an expanse of ice roughly the size of Texas and California [or the size of South Africa, or 5 X the United Kingdom] combined.

Between 1979 and 2005, the rate of Arctic ice retreat had averaged 7 percent per decade; in the two years from September 2005 to September 2007 that rate increased to more than 20 percent. Moreover, the average thickness of the ice has declined by about half since 2001.

Altogether, taking into account both geographic extent and thickness, summer Arctic sea ice has lost more than 80 per cent of its volume in four decades. While sea levels will not be directly affected by the total melting of the northern icecap since it floats on and thus displaces ocean water, that event will severely destabilize Greenland's ice pack - whose disappearance would cause sea levels to rise by several meters, inundating coastal cities home to hundreds of millions.

The organization Carbon Equity issued a report last month, "The Big Melt: Lessons from the Arctic Summer of 2007" (www.carbonequity.info/PDFs/Arctic.pdf), which draws conclusions from this disturbing new information:

The data surveyed suggests strongly that in many key areas the IPCC process has been so deficient as to be an unreliable and indeed a misleading basis for policy-making. . . . Take just one example: the most fundamental and widely supported tenet - that 2°C represents a reasonable maximum target if we are to avoid dangerous climate change - can no longer be defended. Today at less than a 1°C rise the Arctic sea ice is headed for very rapid disintegration, in all likelihood triggering the irreversible loss of the Greenland ice sheet and catastrophic sea level increases. Many species are on the precipice, climatechange- induced drought or changing monsoon patterns are sweeping every continent, the carbon sinks are losing capacity and the seas are acidifying. . . .

The Arctic began to lose volume at least 20 years ago when the global temperature was about 0.5°C over the pre-industrial level. So we can now see that to protect the Arctic the average global temperature rise should be under 0.5°C.

According to the report, if this suggested 0.5°C precautionary warming cap were adopted, the target for allowable concentrations of atmospheric greenhouse gases would have to be about 320 ppm CO2 equivalents, a level that was passed more than 50 years ago.

Another report published this month, this one in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2007/oct/23/climatechange.carbonemissions), documents that carbon is accumulating in the atmosphere much faster than previously thought, and only adds weight to the Carbon Equity recommendations. While global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel burning rose annually by 0.7 percent in the 1990s, the new study shows they have increased by an average 2.9 percent each year since 2000.

What would targets of 0.5 degrees warming over pre-industrial levels, and 320 ppm CO2e, mean in terms of policy?

While the Carbon Equity report doesn't say so, if all nations were to bear the brunt of equal emissions cuts the latter would have to be huge - well over 90 percent in just three or four decades. But if international equity is also targeted, this means that for the wealthy nations more than 100 percent reduction would be needed. In other words, leaving aside the notion of carbon capture and storage (discussed below), not only would wealthy nations have to transform their economies to run entirely without fossil fuels (which currently supply 85 percent of world energy), but they would need to spend considerable capital on efforts to capture and sequester existing atmospheric carbon - for example, through massive reforestation projects.

One has to wonder: With all the energy and investment that would be needed to de-carbonize industrial economies (by developing renewable energy sources, building public transportation infrastructure, and so on) and store carbon, what money and energy would be left to run existing economies, much less to fuel growth in goods and services to the population?

Politics: An Alternate Reality

Climate science exists in a different world from the one peopled by politicians. Inhabitants of both worlds think of themselves as realists: while scientists study the real physical world, politicians are arbiters of what can and will get done in the real human socio-economic world.
In general, any policy that means voluntary economic contraction of any noticeable magnitude doesn't stand much of a chance in the real world of politics. At least in the current political climate, absent a massive public education effort, voters will not support it and no politician will stake her career on it.

This in itself constitutes an enormous roadblock to the achievement even of the IPCC recommendations, much less the far more stringent targets (but more "realistic" ones in the scientific sense) that Carbon Equity is proposing. Faced with this roadblock, climate activists typically respond by minimizing the estimated cost of de-carbonizing economies, and by assuring one and all that economic growth can continue into the indefinite future while industrial nations radically reduce their consumption of the very fuels that made the industrial revolution possible. But if this sanguine, politically acceptable notion is at least arguable in the case of the IPCC reduction targets, it is hardly credible when it comes to the emissions reduction trajectory suggested by Carbon Equity.

Take the US as an atypical but essential example. One can realistically calculate a possible 50 percent reduction in fossil fuel consumption for the country through conservation (though that will be an enormous job, requiring extensive new electrified public transport infrastructure, new housing codes, subsidized energy retrofit programs, and so on). Another 25 percent of current fossil fuel consumption could be offset with renewable energy sources. All of this would take a few decades, and during that time we have to assume no population growth and no economic growth. That gets us to 75 percent reduction from current levels. Beyond that, it is difficult to see how more could be achieved - unless America continues burning fossil fuels but captures and stores the carbon. Suddenly with that possibility a relief valve is opened: coal-based electricity could flow in to fill the void.

Extract from Richard Heinberg's Museletter.

NVDL: Is the case for Climate Change overstated? Unfortunately, far from it. We all wish it was.