Ken Caldeira, Atmospheric Scientist Ken Caldeira Argues That the Paris Climate Talks Won’t Go Far Enough
Recently, my colleagues and I studied what will happen in the long term if we continue pulling fossil carbon out of the ground and releasing it into the atmosphere. We found that it would take many thousands of years for the planet to recover from this insult. If we burn all available fossil-fuel resources and dump the resulting carbon dioxide waste in the sky, we can expect global average temperatures to be 9 °C (15 °F) warmer than today even 10,000 years into the future. We can expect sea levels to be about 60 meters (200 feet) higher than today. In much of the tropics, it is possible that mammals (including us) would not be able to survive outdoors in the daytime heat. Thus, it is essential to our long-term well-being that fossil-fuel carbon does not go into our atmosphere.
If we want to reduce the threat of climate change in the near future, there are actions to take now: reduce emissions of short-lived pollutants such as black carbon, cut emissions of methane from natural-gas fields and landfills, and so on. We need to slow and then reverse deforestation, adopt electric cars, and build solar, wind, and nuclear plants.
But while existing technologies can start us down the path, they can’t get us to our goal. Most analysts believe we should decarbonize electricity generation and use electricity for transportation, industry, and even home heating. (Using electricity for heating is wildly inefficient, but there may be no better solution in a carbon-constrained world.) This would require a system of electricity generation several times larger than the one we have now. Can we really use existing technology to scale up our system so dramatically while markedly reducing emissions from that sector?
Solar power is the only energy source that we know can power civilization indefinitely. Unfortunately, we do not have global-scale electricity grids that could wheel solar energy from day to night. At the scale of the regional electric grid, we do not have batteries that can balance daytime electricity generation with nighttime demand.
We should do what we know how to do. But all the while, we need to be thinking about what we don’t know how to do. We need to find better ways to generate, store, and transmit electricity. We also need better zero-carbon fuels for the parts of the economy that can’t be electrified. And most important, perhaps, we need better ways of using energy.
[…]
If we want to destroy neither our environment nor our economy, we need to reduce the emissions per energy service provided by a factor of 100. This requires something of an energy miracle.
This is a terrifying article that we should all read, and share.
At the core is the perception that widespread denialism could be heading us to our collective doom. An increase of 9ºC (15ºF) is an extinction event, not just a portent of more aggressive weather patterns.
from Stowe Boyd http://stoweboyd.com/post/134584728227
