Something is going very, very wrong. Haywire. It’s hotter in Washington, DC and New York than it is in Lahore, Pakistan. London got more than a month’s worth of rain in a few minutes. Entire regions of Germany are flooded. California’s burning — again. Parts of Canada rivalled the hottest places on earth — and went up like tinder. Is This the Beginning of Runaway Global Warming?
Daniel Swain, a climate scientist says we are currently in “a coherent global pattern” of extreme weather events which no scientists would have predicted at this stage in the global heating phenomena.
“This is such an exceptional event that we can’t rule out the possibility that we’re experiencing heat extremes today that we only expected to come at higher levels of global warming. The obvious acceleration of the breakdown of our stable climate simply confirms that — when it comes to the climate emergency — we are in deep, deep shit.”
Meanwhile, a new article published in Bloomberg Green discusses the concept of the “mortality cost of carbon,” predicting that prohibitively high costs on carbon use could incentivize the switch to clean energy. The article projects that, without aggressive action, 83 million people could die in the next 80 years from the effects of climate change.
“Based on the decisions made by individuals, businesses or governments, this tells you how many lives will be lost or saved,” said Columbia’s Daniel Bressler, whose research was published last Thursday in the journal Nature Communications. “It quantifies the mortality impact of those decisions” by reducing questions down “to a more personal, understandable level.”
Background: The Social Costs of Carbon
The social cost of carbon (SCC) is used to estimate in dollars all economic damage that would result from emitting one ton of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. It indicates how much it is worth to us today to avoid the damage that is projected for the future.
The social cost of carbon is used to help policy makers determine whether the costs and benefits of a proposed policy to curb climate change are justified. A higher SCC generally means that the benefits of a particular climate policy to cut CO2 justify its cost; a low SCC makes a policy seemingly cost more than the benefits it ultimately delivers. Theoretically, the SCC should increase over time because physical and economic systems will become more stressed as the impacts of climate change accumulate. www.nature.com/...
The Social Cost of Carbon emerged as a policy in 2008 when the Center for Biological Diversity won a suit against the federal government, which claimed that since the government had not taken into account future costs of climate impacts, benefits from such impacts were “effectively zero.” After the Center won the case, federal agencies were required “to thereafter include the impacts of the cumulative effects of greenhouse gas emissions in their cost-benefit analyses. An Interagency Working Group was established to develop an estimate for the social cost of carbon to be used by the federal government. Over the years, the group has periodically updated its modeling and the SCC to incorporate the latest science.”
During the Trump administration, the SCC was cut to $1 a ton, “a price too low to make climate policies economically justifiable. Trump’s EPA reached this figure because it did not include global impacts in its calculations; it also used a 7 percent discount rate, which put more burden on future generations.” Both the Biden and Obama administrations put a value on the SCC of $51 per ton.
Good News
Seven solutions to climate change that need to happen now
From simple things like cutting down on consuming and doing more recycling to creating new carbon sinks and electrifying transportation, there are solutions we can embrace and support right now.
Boosting nature’s capacity to absorb carbon is one of the more rewarding solutions to climate change, as doing so also provides vital habitats for wildlife. With the Amazon and other vast forests turning from a carbon sink into an emissions source, the race is on to conserve, restore and create forests on a grand scale. Rich countries must incentivise poorer ones to keep forests intact. In some cases, putting more power and resource in the hands of their indigenous inhabitants is the answer.
For an object lesson in recovery, look to Costa Rica, which has doubled its rainforest cover in the last 30 years, by cutting logging permits, paying landowners to conserve woodland, and investing in forest-origin pharmaceuticals and ecotourism.
Meanwhile, a recent study showed that 11 per cent of the world – the size of the US and China combined – is fit for a trillion tree reforestation drive.
Beyond trees, we need to farm in a way that locks carbon in the soil, rather than releasing it, using low- and zero-till methods, rewilding land where appropriate, and boosting agroforestry and other sustainably intensive approaches. The seas matter too: we need to adopt fishing methods that conserve marine carbon sinks and encourage habitats like mangroves and seagrass, which captures carbon up to 35 times faster than rainforests.
After several recent disasters – this video explores the complex links between climate, disasters, and the movement of people.