So I was at the Wisconsin State Bowling Tournament in Green Bay over the weekend, and I'm sitting at the casino next to some folks who work for an energy company. We weren't exactly “throwing it down 200 at a time” so we had the opportunity to talk. They made an argument I've seen more and more lately. Basically it is the old technology curve issue. It goes something like this:
Yes I understand Greenhouse warming, but wouldn't it be better to do simple things now, and spend money on R&D and then really plan for a “big bang” later when technology is better? As our technology gets better we'll be able to deal with these things easier, and doing it now would be a waste. Another variant is the China and India will dwarf our emissions shortly so we'll need to do remediation anyway - or so the story goes.
This diary is my response cleaned up somewhat. The point being, strike while the iron is hot! We should deal with greenhouse gasses starting now, not later.
This is part 3 of my series on Energy Policy. I put off looking at efficiency, because I wanted to write this down to get it clear in my head for the next time it comes up.
We should attack our emissions of Greenhouse Gas with big-time resources intended to decrease them now, not later, because of two main things. Greenhouse Gas is cumulative, which means that even if we cut our current emissions, as long as they are above the removal rate in the atmosphere the problem will still be getting worse, and second, the problem is huge and we better chip away when we can. It will take so long to deal with that almost certainly there will be people in the U.S. or elsewhere in power at times who will not take action. But the cumulative nature of things works backward too, even if China is adding more, if the U.S. reduces, that does reduce the future burden.
The Snowpack Avalanche Analogy.
People have a hard time “getting” the cumulative nature of Greenhouse gasses when I try to explain it. I see other Kos diarists have similar problems. Other pollutants like soot disappear relatively quickly, but in this case the lifetime of Greenhouse gas in the atmosphere is long. Or more accurately, by adding in more Greenhouse gas it takes a long time to get the concentration back down to equilibrium. This means that any given CO2 molecule might only have a lifetime of a few years in the atmosphere before cycling to a plant and then to soil then to air again from weathering. That is the “Carbon Cycle” we learn about. That cycle will take carbon concentrations down (which is what we are interested in) much more slowly than the cycle works. We seem to be messing with that process also, as I'll discuss later. Other components of "Greenhouse Gas" like methane do act slightly different, but the main points still hold.
To try to get things across simply, I came up (maybe because of the drifts outside) with a kind of odd analogy. We'll see if you like it. Imagine we are living in towns in a valley below a mountain with a huge snowpack on it that can drop avalanches on us. There is natural snowfall and natural sun melt of this snow pack. This pack is like atmospheric Greenhouse gasses. Burning fossil fuels, making cement and other things we do to add CO2 (and other Greenhouse gas) to the atmosphere is like adding additional snow on the snowpack. It increases the thickness on top of the natural melt and snow. As long as we are adding more than the natural melt can take away over time the thickness will increase, on average. There will be natural snowstorms and hot spells making short term variations, just like El Nino's and volcanos and such can do to Greenhouse gas concentrations.
So the net effect of adding Greenhouse gas to the atmosphere, i.e. snow to the snowpack, is increasing our chance for avalanches. There is no guarantee that one will happen in any particular place, but over time the chances get bigger and bigger everywhere and the consequences get bigger also. The Greenhouse Effect avalanches are things like altered growing seasons so that we have agriculture economies disrupted and thus, there might be famines. Increased sea level so there will be forced movement of people, and increased damage to property along low lying shores due to increased surges. You can read up and add lots more. In the analogy these avalanches are magic in a bad way too – they don't remove snow from the snowpack. There is just as much chance after for another avalanche. Of course there are also low chance nasty things like turning off the gulf stream, or having Greenland's ice cap melt. These are like an avalanche totally burying one of the Towns. Millions of people would have homes under water, or suddenly really arctic winters. A “thicker snowpack” of greater greenhouse gas concentrations makes far out possibilities a little more possible.
This points up a presumption we should not have. Often when debating large changes in policy there is a “presumption” for the status quo. We can't foresee everything and there might be (and usually are) some “surprise” bad consequences from making a big change. We know the status quo is working right now, so we want significant gains from changing to overcome the unknown consequences. This does not apply to aggressive Greenhouse gas reduction measures. The status quo is currently forcing the equilibrium of the atmosphere and the oceans away from what it was and into new realms where there are unknown as well as predicted consequences. There will be some bad consequences surely if we change policy and massively attack greenhouse gas buildup, but the presumption toward the status quo is not there as that is also moving to uncharted area. When some argue that climate shifts are natural, I agree, but that doesn't make them less destructive. We have had very stable climate for the last 10,000 years or so, since the start of civilization itself, compared to times before (2). (I see Darksyde just had a nice diary on this point. ) No need to have increasing Greenhouse gas concentrations push us into a high change mode in climate that causes millions of people to be dislocated, causes many more 10 year droughts with massive famines as a result. These effects are all peanuts on the scale of geological Earthly climate changes. We are moving on foreign roads with possible fearful creatures around the bend no matter what policy we take here.
We're still thickening that snowpack faster and faster
and unexpected (bad) consequences are already appearing.
Globally the last 10 years have seen the largest injection of human produced greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere since the start of the Industrial revolution (3). Global Fossil fuel and cement emissions in 2006 were 34% higher than in 1990. That pile is increasing fast!
From 2000 to 2006 the global efficiency of the economy in terms of “carbon intensity” has gotten worse. We as a planet are less efficient per amount of oil, coal or gas burned. The global economic slowdown should alter that somewhat, less cement for building alone might reduce CO2 emissions by a percent or so. Even so we seem be forcing new equilibrium points now. Evidently, we have filled up a lot of the buffering CO2 sinks in the world. Generally 15% of the growth rate (that 34% above) seems to be caused by less efficient sinks of carbon, for example the heating of the atmosphere around Antarctica allows carbon rich ocean water to interact with the atmosphere more, and this cause the atmosphere/ocean CO2 balance to be different. These numbers (also from the PNAS paper (3)) have big error bars but still give support to the idea that we are increasing Global Greenhouse Gas concentrations at a high rate recently and the sooner we can stem that and get on a more efficient course the better. The thinner the “snowpack” the less likely the “avalanches” will be and the less damaging. If this growth continues we won't really be able to catch up though any policy other than the collapse of civilization.
For some perspective, looking at various models of how many gigatons of CO2 humanity has released and will release, the “Fate of Fossil fuel CO2 in Geological Time” paper (1) summarizes:
The carbon cycle of the biosphere will take a long time to completely neutralize and sequester anthropogenic CO2 ... For the best guess cases, which include air/seawater, CaCO3, and silicate weathering equilibria as affected by an ocean temperature feedback, we expect that 17 – 33% of the fossil fuel carbon will still reside in the atmosphere 1000 years from now, decreasing to 10 – 15% at 10,000 (10 kyr) years, and 7% at 100,000 years. The mean lifetime of fossil fuel CO2 is about 30 – 35,000 years.
A mean atmospheric lifetime of order 10,000 years is in start (stark?) contrast with the ‘‘popular ’’ perception of several hundred year lifetime for atmospheric CO2. In fairness, if the fate of anthropogenic carbon must be boiled down into a single number for popular discussion, then 300 years is a sensible number to choose, because it captures the behavior of the majority of the carbon. A single exponential decay of 300 years is arguably a better approximation than a single exponential decay of 30,000 years, if one is forced to choose. However, the 300 year simplification misses the immense longevity of the tail on the CO2 lifetime, and hence its interaction with major ice sheets, ocean methane clathrate deposits, and future glacial/interglacial cycles. One could sensibly argue that public discussion should focus on a time frame within which we live our lives, rather than concern ourselves with climate impacts tens of thousands of years in the future. On the other hand, the 10 kyr lifetime of nuclear waste seems quite relevant to public perception of nuclear energy decisions today. A better approximation of the lifetime of fossil fuel CO2 for public discussion might be ‘‘300 years, plus 25% that lasts forever.’’
This is almost the whole summary since it is more eloquent than I can be.
Big and Long Projects mean fits and starts
The second big reason to start now is more a general point about big projects of any kind, government or private. This will take several large projects and thousands of small ones. Anyone who has worked on a large project with even as little as 100's of people working on it over a couple of years knows that humans aren't real efficient when things get large. We work in fits and starts, Good and bad managers come and go. The reason “Rocket Science” (really people mean Rocket Engineering, but anyway) is used as an example of something hard, I think, is that it is a large project that exposes small mistakes in a large way (boom). We see how hard it is to build reliable rockets or do things right the first time. Well that will be magnified in projects to reduce Greenhouse Gas emissions because there won't be immediate feedback, but we will still make the mistakes. We need to push and keep pushing since there will always be issues that can be used to oppose. We cannot guarantee a continued government effort. If we look over the next 40 years there will be administrations who will behave like the last one and advocate policies of using more fossil fuels for economic growth. If we want to really mitigate Greenhouse emissions we then must take every opportunity.
The fact that several options for reducing oil use also have excellent strategic consequences for the United States in areas like trade balance and risk for economic disruption due to change or violence far away do make a better case for action in this area also. There are many more links like this and they add to the call for action now, not later.
One other thing. No matter what policy we are likely to have a much thicker “snowpack” of Greenhouse Gas. Thus there will be more “avalanches” of bad effects. We should be looking at mitigation policies like reducing insurance for homes on coasts, toughening up energy and transportation infrastructure to handle more problems. Growing types of crops that will survive hot spells. Planning for draughts. These things will be needed. Trying to say we should push funds only for trying to stop Greenhouse Gas emissions, and not for dealing with the effects is bad policy. The half empty side of me says that kind of spending should probably be targeted. I don't think we'll be able to pour a little salt and pretend our CO2 and other Greenhouse gasses were never here, but we will be dealing with these effects for our and our children's lifetimes and better plan for that.
Notes
(1) Fate of fossil fuel CO2 in geologic time. Journal of Geophysical Research.
(2) Climate History: Exploring Climate Events and Human Development NOAA
(3) Contributions to accelerating atmospheric CO2 growth PNAS