"Carbon emissions should be reduced, somehow, sometime, by someone. If it doesn't cost too much."
"People should be nice to each other."
I have great hopes for the coming agreement.
Meanwhile, one of the reasons that our leaders have agreed to do nothing may well be that few people seem to believe climate change is a serious threat, or that it's caused by us at all. Here's a survey showing that only 41% of britons think that climate change is largely man made. And in America, support for that idea has dropped by 11% in a year, so that now only 36% of people though global warming was happening and was man made.
Harrumph. George Monbiot speculates that this denial is related to our fear of death, and as the scientific evidence has become stronger and more frightening, people are turning away from it.
Maybe? Or maybe now that Obama is in the White House, and the Republicans have lost all restraint, more people are starting to hear and accept their messages of climate change denial.
Reality will press forward regardless, heedless of the fondest wishes of those who would stick their heads in the sand. Here's a good post from the resident blogger on climate change at Shell, making clear that we must get rid of carbon emissions entirely, and that it is the total amount of carbon in the atmosphere rather than our annual emissions which is the real measure of the problem.
I actually used to be confused on this point. A good analogy would be that we're drowning in a tank, slowly filling with water. When it fills, we drown. The water is already at a dangerously high level, and more is being pumped in. The big question debated in the media is how much to cut the levels of water pumped into the tank. This is important, but it misses the real issue, which is how high the water level in the tank is.
Our discussion on climate change is similar. The most important thing is how much total CO2 and other warming agents are in the atmosphere.
He points us to this website, which shows how much we would have to cut carbon emissions per year to avoid putting a total of one trillion tons of carbon into the atmosphere. It's currently 2.14% per year, until we hit zero emissions. That's the goal politicians are currently shooting for, and hoping that it would keep us under 2 degrees Celsius of warming.
The website also shows how much we would have to cut emissions to reach a safer goal of 750 billion tons, and we would have to start reducing emissions now by 4.5% per year. It says that if we keep under this limit, there is less than a one in four chance of the planet warming more than 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels.
Meanwhile, emissions are actually rising. Every bit of delay makes the eventually change harder, as we'll have already increased the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, and gotten closer to emitting one trillion tons.
Of course, the really scary fact is that both of those measures might be too lenient, and that we may already have put too much carbon into the atmosphere. The correct goal in that case for CO2 concentrations would be somewhere in the past.
We're seeing evidence for this. We're told, for example, that arctic sea ice is now effectively gone in the summers. The thick ice that used to build up over many years has now been replaced by thin ice that forms over one winter and melts in the summer. This is decades ahead of predictions made just a few years ago.
What would even more CO2 and warming do?
I recommend not thinking about that question, and instead pretending that nothing is happening, and that if something is happening, then it certainly isn't caused by us. Certainly we shouldn't try and do anything about all of this if it costs any money. After all, we wouldn't want to hurt the economy.
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