Climate Change

Preamble

While the war in the Ukraine goes on, fuel prices increase. This prompted a work colleague to stop driving their diesel car, for recreation, on the weekends. As they told me this, I thought "I ride to work everyday, to prevent just that little bit more carbon from going into the atmosphere, and you cruise around, in a huge vehicle, for pleasure?"

In the Anthropocene, each litre of petrol burnt in a car melts over a tonne of glacial ice. (Based on 652g carbon per litre of petrol) 

The Best of Times, The Worst of Times: Futures from the Frontiers of Climate Science, Paul Behrens.

Behrens calculated that from initial inputs at HOW MUCH ICE IS MELTED BY EACH CARBON DIOXIDE EMISSION?

According to the USGS, there 24,064,000 km3 of ice and snow in the world.

According to Winkelmann et al. (2015), it would take about 10,000 GtC to melt (nearly) all of this ice.

If we divide 24,064,000 km3  by 10,000 GtC, assume the density of the ice is 1 kg per liter, and do the appropriate unit conversions, we can conclude that each kg of carbon emitted as CO2 will ultimately melt about 2,400 kg of ice.

If you do the units conversion, this means that each American on average emits enough CO2 every 3 seconds to ultimately add about another liter of water to the oceans. The Europeans emit enough CO2 to add another liter to sea-level rise every 8 seconds, and the sub-Saharan Africans add a liter of seawater’s worth of CO2 emissions every minute.

[...]

Admittedly, by the time scales of our ordinary activities, ice sheets take a long time to melt. The melting caused by a CO2 emission today will extend out over thousands of years.

HOW MUCH ICE IS MELTED BY EACH CARBON DIOXIDE EMISSION?

Returning to the discussion with my colleague, it doesn't matter all that much what each of us do; whether I ride, religiously, or they drive, obsessively. We're just two people out of eight billion. Two people that have contributed vastly more carbon to the atmosphere than almost all of those other eight billion and orders of magnitude more than any humans have ever.

I've burnt tonnes of carbon over my life, in various ways. What is obscene is that I don't even know how much carbon I've dumped into the atmosphere. All the work to calculate this could have been done decades ago. The entire climate change problem could have been calculated, mitigated and resolved decades ago. It wasn't mitigated. And it won't be mitigated.

The political and media idiots think we can adapt to climate change while the billionaires think they can escape to Mars.

We have condemned the future to a world of climate chaos.

420 ppm

We hit 420 ppm of CO2 at Mauna Loa observatory in April 2022. In pre-industrial times, before 1750, CO2 was about 280 ppm. It's increased by 50%.

Our ancestors may have looked a bit like this artist's depiction of the proconsul the last time there was this much CO2 in the atmosphere.

...when was the last time that CO2 levels were this high, and what was the climate like back then? There is no single, agreed-upon answer to those questions as studies show a wide date range from between 800,000 to 15 million years ago. The Last Time CO2 Was This High, Humans Didn’t Exist

We are now a people living outside of time.

We can't get the carbon out

Unfortunately, though we absentmindedly dumped hundreds of billions of tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere (36.3 billion tonnes for 2021 alone) we don't have any way to get it back out beyond some "interesting" proposals. They are:

• Trees: This won't work because they provide no permanent means to sequester the carbon over the long term. To work, they would need to take in the carbon and lock it away for tens of thousands of years. Also, as the planet heats, trees are increasingly burning, putting the CO2 back into the atmosphere decades before they otherwise would have naturally.
• Ocean fertilisation: Fertilise the ocean with iron particles to promote algal blooms that will grow, capturing CO2, die and sink to the bottom of the ocean, sequestering the carbon as it does so. There are no figures for actual carbon sequestered by this method.
• Direct air capture (DAC): The IEA have a page on it. 19 operating plants, capturing 8000 tonnes of CO2/year, maybe getting as high as about 1,000 Mt CO2/year captured by 2050. However, that's the "maybe" future; current levels are: 0.01 Mt/year CO2 removed vs 36,300 Mt/year added (next year, the rate per year added will have increased more than the increase in the rate removed). If we wanted to use only DAC to clean-up our carbon pollution, it would have to increase by 25 million times its current level, with absolutely no extra emissions involved in any of that scaling up (building, operating, maintenance and decommission of the facilities).
• Direct seawater capture: There is a recent paper on this. Seems less daft than DAC ("water contains nearly 150 times more CO2 than air per unit volume"). There are no operating plants.
• Bioenergy with carbon capture and storage: This is taking plants that would otherwise release the CO2 when they die and using human intervention to store it. The 5 facilities are removing 1.5 Mt CO2/year. We would need to quickly ramp up to 30,000 times that rate, with no increase in emissions to achieve that, for it to deal with current emissions.
• Biochar: a process to burn organic matter to make charcoal that could pull CO2 into it. According to UKBR, we might be able to capture as much as 10 billion tonnes/year by 2100 (but we're currently dumping nearly 4 times that annual right now).

Can we bounce it back?

The other geo-engineering approach to reduce global heating is to bounce the shortwave radiation from the sun back into space before it can become outgoing longwave radiation (OLR) and then be potentially absorbed as heat by greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Below are some of the proposals.

• Space mirrors: Not even sure why anyone would suggest this. Sunlight doesn't have to be reflected in space, it's sufficient to simply absorb it; any way to reduce the amount of sunlight reaching earth.
• Space sunshield: A more complete idea than space mirrors. Although probably the most outrageous idea, something we could lose control of, and probably not even feasible in the huge scale of the shield that is required... other than all that, maybe?
• Stratospheric aerosol injection: This is what the Indian government does in the fictional book Ministry for the Future. Without reducing our carbon use, it would have to be done for all time.
• Marine cloud brightening: Create more clouds so they can bounce the sunlight back before it hits the land/ocean. We would never be able to stop doing this either. If we stopped, the sun might get through again. Also, do we want more clouds?
• Cirrus cloud thinning: Cirrus clouds are up high. Apparently they act like a blanket in the same sort of way that CO2 does. If we reduce them, maybe more of OLR will get past. But how are we going to do this without messing anything else up?
• Terrestrial mirrors: Someone calculated we'd have to cover 2.3% of the world with mirrors to stop the heating. That is an immense area. But once you build the mirror, it'll work for years (unlike the cloud/aerosol-based solutions that require constant energy inputs). It doesn't seem like anyone is seriously considering mirrors, but they seem like an okay idea to me. Low tech. Low energy input to build. Would have a local and regional effect.

Geo-engineering in general

I'm not concerned about the idea of geo-engineering. We're already doing that on a monumental scale. But the ideas above seem, as something who isn't a physicists, like they're not actually achievable given a limited amount of hydrocarbons we have to do it with. They look like bad, coffee-stained, "back of napkin" ideas by a high-schooler. Not necessarily crazy...

Why didn't we stop burning carbon?

I don't really know.

We could blame the West. They've contributed most of the carbon that's in the atmosphere, even if China and India will take over soon. However, many people in the West didn't significantly contribute to this.

We could blame overpopulation. Yet, only about 20% of the world populace alive today have significantly contributed to CO2 levels.

We could blame fossil fuel corporations. They have lied about climate change, constantly, decade after decade. For sure, these denialists are the greatest criminals that have ever existed - far worse than Hitler, Stalin, Genghis Khan, Vlad the Impaler, etc. These denialists have helped transform the future, condemning billions to suffering and death. But we went along for the ride using the petrol, diesel, plastics, fertiliser, pesticides, synthetic clothing, fossil gas for heating, electricity, kerosine for air travel. Their lies weren't very difficult to see through. It was simply easier to hop on the denial-wagon with them.

We could blame capitalism. Afterall, there is no profit in preventing climate change. Yet capitalism exists only as a vicious world religion for the ever expanding accumulation of capital.

Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets! “Industry furnishes the material which saving accumulates.” Therefore, save, save, i.e., reconvert the greatest possible portion of surplus-value, or surplus-product into capital! Accumulation for accumulation’s sake, production for production’s sake: by this formula classical economy expressed the historical mission of the bourgeoisie, and did not for a single instant deceive itself over the birth-throes of wealth. But what avails lamentation in the face of historical necessity? If to classical economy, the proletarian is but a machine for the production of surplus-value; on the other hand, the capitalist is in its eyes only a machine for the conversion of this surplus-value into additional capital.

Karl Marx, Capital volume 1, chapter 24

Capitalism trapped us in an obsession with ourselves, an obsession with value, and while we've been doing that for the past 270-odd years, we didn't notice that we've now condemned those that come after us to a life of ever increasing harshness, suffering and death. And yet, capitalism is only an ideology we created for ourselves. At every point we've had the option to ditch it and adopt a new way of interacting with each other and the world. We didn't do that.

From the 19th century (Foote 1856, Tyndall 1859, Arrenhieus 1896), to Callender 1938 and Keeling 1958 in the 20th Century, and then conclusively with GISS, Hansen and the senate enquiry 1988 and the first IPCC report 1990 we've known what we've been doing but we did it anyway. 34-166 years of an increasing level of certainty until we knew for sure, 32 years ago; followed by 32-34 years of denial and inaction.

Yet, it was only 32 years to completely transform our interpersonal and environmental relationships, globally. All 8 billion of us, cooperating to prevent what is coming after hundreds and hundreds of years (thousands?) of not doing anything remotely like that. It's not especially surprising that we failed. The denialists, corporations, policy-makers and capitalists have been especially egregious scum and villainy these last decades, but odds were extremely slim of being about to turn this around anyway.

Ultimately, I don't even blame capitalism. Anthropogenic climate change is an extremely unfortunate side-effect of treating this planet like a garbage dump. We've been doing that for a very long time already. Capitalism simply allowed us to scale that up by more than two orders of magnitude times faster than any natural rate (a rate no-one in the past 10,000 years of civilisation has even the remotest experience).

Carbon dioxide from human activity is increasing more than 250 times faster than it did from natural sources after the last Ice Age. 

https://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/

Collapse

Collapse. It's coming. It's a bit scary. It's not possible to know what it'll be like and how it'll form. When I first started thinking about it I was horrified and incredulous. I was thinking of the end of the human species. Now I think that climate change doesn't necessarily mean human extinction. Certainly, it's the end of neoliberalism and globalisation. I can imagine fascism taking hold and holding on for many decades but not "a boot stamping on a human face - forever." (George Orwell, 1984) Fascism requires large amounts of energy and stable natural conditions so that humans can turn on each other. It'll be difficult to attack yourself when you're constantly reeling from one climate catastrophe after another. Capitalism will hang on, after all those leave, for as long as it can, but it too can't survive.

We could choose planned decline, if we wanted. De-growth. De-populate. Re-wild. Keep as much of the good stuff we received from industrial society as we can. Decline while delaying collapse as long as possible. I don't think that'll happen either though. It's looking more like we'll go out in a blaze of self-immolation.

So, we're Doomed?

As a species, we're not doomed by anthropogenic climate change. However, tens of thousands of other species are already doomed to go extinct. At this rate, with no change in our activity, Capitalism and complex civilisation will not be able to continue much beyond the 21st century. Billions of people (instead of the current millions) will suffer this century and many will die from climate change (heatwaves, crop failures, increasingly intense and frequent disasters, climate wars, etc.) But humans could survive in many areas of the world well beyond this century.

Extinction Rebellion (XR), one of the groups trying to do something to stop what's coming are interesting in that they overestimate the effect of climate change (and the larger environmental devastation) on humanity, calling it an "existential crisis" - while underestimating what's required to get governments to act on climate change. They claim "evidence shows that we need the involvement of 3.5% of the population to succeed". I suspect XR believe this because of that underestimation of the scale of the challenge. It's not because oil companies, politicians and the rich nations are (merely) dickheads who don't care. They are dickheads. They're liars and they're evil. Nevertheless, they can't fix what would have required systemic change. They're dickheads but also not idiots - they're not going to do anything that would end their way of life.

XR are also correct in the statement that "we have the worst possible leaders at the worst possible time in history". This is the age - the 21st Century - when we have committed the greatest crime against humanity that any people have ever committed. It's greater than all previous crimes combined. All the holocausts and genocides, all wars and oppressive regimes, they are nothing next to the fossil fuel catastrophe.

Is there no hope?

There is no hope. Climate change is here now and we are doing nothing to prevent it. We could do much to slow it, but it's useless to be delusional about what's going to happen. We'll surpass 1.5°C of warming. We'll surpass 2°C not long after. The possibility to prevent 4°C of warming by 2100 is vanishingly small while we do nothing. For the past 32 years, we've looked at graphs like the below and talked about how we'll implement the policies. Yes, we'll all do "net zero", later.

What we need to be looking at is the following graph. The "current policies" with the only current policy in effect.

Australia

There was a federal election in Australia recently. The winners claimed to be ending "the climate wars". Presumably all they mean by that is the end of decades of denialism that has become part of the Australian pop culture. All they've done is shifted to functional denialism, with the approval of the the Scarborough-Pluto gas project (i.e., no intention to do anything - I guess that's stage 2 of The 5 stages of climate denial are on display ahead of the IPCC report). It's bad faith denialism. Doublespeak. The Australian governments UN climate agreement is only concerned with electricity. Nothing about transport, construction, agriculture, heating, fashion and all the other contributors to CO2 emissions. Nothing about mitigation.

July 2022 (as I publish this): The floods are back, again.

Acceptance

After decades of living through climate change, I kind of accept it now. That doesn't mean I don't think about it a lot. Doesn't mean I wouldn't want to be a part of doing something to stop climate change. Doesn't mean I'm a doomer.

It means I'm letting it go a bit. I won't join the nihilistic hedonists that is the Australian Way. But I accept it's happening and I'm along for the ride. I'm learning to accept the decline of complex civilisation.

I may even get to explore some of the beautiful ruins before I go.

The Changing Climate

I found two pages about climate change in a Reader's Digest Atlas, published 1987. That's one year before Hansen's US Senate committee testimony. Is that a good enough excuse? (The emphasis below is mine.)

The Changing Climate

We inhabit a thin, damp tissue of the atmosphere, where hospitable warmth and moisture are maintained in a critical balance. What we think of as the planet's "normal" weather patterns are typical only of the period in which we live.

Clues to the climate of the future lie in the facts of the past. There is every likelihood that the climatic conditions that gripped the Earth at the height of the last ice age 18,000 years ago will return one day. A drop in global average temperature of only 4°F (2°C) could initiate a new ice age. The advancing glaciers would imprison so much of the world's water that the oceans would shrink, stripping the seas from the continental shelves. New York City would lie under an ice sheet thick enough to bury the Empire State Building twice over. Montreal, Detroit, and Chicago would be entombed in snow, and the Midwestern prairies would survive only as wind-whipped steppe. Japan would become a peninsula of Asia, and you would be able to walk from England to France. On the other hand, some scientists believe that a rise of only a few degrees in global temperature would start a meltdown of the polar ice sheets and flood low-lying cities worldwide.

Many forces interact to create changes in the Earth's climate. These include tilts in the planet's axis and changes in its orbital path, sunspots that swell the stream of radiation emitted by the Sun, and spasms of volcanic activity that hurl veils of dust into the atmosphere.

1. ICE COVER. Ice sheets covered much of North America and Europe, New York, Berlin, Stockholm, Montreal, and Copenhagen would be buried beneath the ice if such conditions returned. 

2. CONTINENTAL CONNECTIONS. The sea level was lower, baring continental shelves and creating land bridges, Asian nomads migrated to America over the bridge that connected Siberia and Alaska. 

3. GREAT LAKE. Fed by melting snow from the Rockies, the now-vanished Lake Bonneville grew almost as big as today's Lake Michigan. 

4. DRY LAND. Monsoons were weaker than today, with the result that in West Africa the Sahara stretched farther south than its present extent. 

5. LARGER LAKES AND INLAND SEAS. Because of lower temperatures, there was less evaporation in arid lands, and some lakes and inland seas increased in size. 

6. POLAR HIGH. Vast high-pressure cells lingered over the polar ice sheets. Strong winds blew silt across the barren areas surrounding the ice and created dust storms.