As I’ve written about before, the carbon humanity has already added to the atmosphere is already at a level likely to cause devastating climate change in the coming years and decades. Nor have any political efforts succeeded at even reducing the pace of increases in global carbon emissions.
The optimistic among us assume that, eventually, new technology or new political movements will stop carbon release into the atmosphere. One of the comforting assumptions about climate change is that the effects of humans putting carbon into the atmosphere can be reversed. Plants remove carbon from the atmosphere, right? So, if we just stop adding more, eventually carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere should drop, and the adverse climate changes should reverse.
Nope, at least not according to Irreversible climate change due to carbon dioxide emissions in this week’s PNAS.
Now, that’s a provocative title. The authors made such a claim very carefully. (I suggest reading the paper in whole, I’ll just summarize it here.)
This is a damning and bleak report—made all the more so by the obvious care and caution that went into the analysis. I’m taking it seriously. You should too. (Summary after the jump.)
First, they only considered climate changes that are:
1. going on now—not predicted for the future in a computer model, but instead directly observable today.
2. by direct evidence, caused by human activities.
3. caused by a basic physical process that is well understood by science.
4. projected by multiple and reliable computer models to worsen with increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide levels.
That is a very strict set of criteria. As far as irreversible, the authors considered effects that would remain around until at least the year 3000, even if humans totally stopped adding new greenhouse gases into the atmosphere today.
Well, what made the cut?
1. Atmospheric CO2 levels are staying high, no matter what.
When CO2 is dumped into the atmosphere, only about 20% remains in the air. About 80% dissolves into the oceans, becoming carbonic acid in the process.
CO2 (carbon dioxide) + H20 (water) H2CO3 (Carbonic Acid) H+ + HCO3-
This absorption of carbon dioxide into the oceans is reversible, but only in the surface water. Since the deep waters of the ocean are only rarely overturned to the surface, this happens very slowly. How slow can be observed by comparing the ratio of radioactive carbon-14 CO2 to non-radioactive carbon-12 CO2 in the air versus the ocean water, giving us a very good sense of the pace.
The results:
If we stopped adding carbon to the atmosphere right now, even a thousand years from now we still wouldn’t return back to pre-industrial levels. In fact, we can expect that carbon levels would only drop by about 60% from the peak. Since human carbon emissions have been growing by about 2% a year since the industrial revolution, this peak is still rocketing upwards.
This is nasty business.
Acidification of the oceans causes a whole mess of problems, including the potential collapse of the entire aquatic food chain, or the loss of all shelled ocean life forms (as acidic ocean water dissolves away shells.)
2. Global surface temperatures are going up.
The persistence of the carbon means global average surface temperatures will remain elevated for millennium after the last bit of human-produced carbon is added. All that carbon keeps trapping solar energy. If you recall from my earlier writing, increased temperatures alone are going to cause serious problems for food crops, regardless of water supply.
3. Ocean levels are going persistently higher
Ocean levels are rising will stay that way, not just by melting of glaciers but just by simple thermal expansion of the existing oceans. Warm water takes up more volume than cold. The expansion in ocean volume we can expect from even very modest increases in average surface temperature are likely to cause serious problems for coastal areas worldwide, with ocean levels staying about 1-2 meters higher long after we’ve stopped adding CO2 to the atmosphere.
4. Precipitation patterns are going to change.
Rainfall is going to go down in the Mediterranean, southern Africa, and parts of southwestern North America and become less predictable everywhere.
Crazy! I watched an episode of SeaQuest DSV last night which talked about global warming and pollution and how it still hadn’t been fixed yet in their time.
Actually, we’ve got about 4 years before it accelerates.
We’re still not certain how acidic the seas will get.
Oh Will.
Where’s your reference? Did you even read the PNAS paper, or this post, before commenting?
So Golob what to do? Party til its over?
You need to balance these posts out with something providing a reason to keep living.
Or not.
McG:
I think the take home from this analysis is, we better stop adding carbon to the atmosphere now. Right now. It’s senseless to think of small, incremental changes.
We should also start to plan now for the concequences of these long-lasting changes. Bigger reservoirs. Bigger stores of food (to account for less predictable precipitation.) Better seawalls.
The United States, with the exception of the Southeast, is pretty secure, even in the worst-cases imagined here. The developing world is totally fucked. The geopolitical concequences of this are also worth considering.
What do I think you should do, as an individual? Cut back on the amount of meat and dairy you consume. Drive less (by moving closer to your grocery store, bank, work, school, etc.) Travel by train rather than plane or car, when possible. Buy some canned food. Then party.
So… um… should I carry on planting more trees, or would that just be completely pointless?
… and, of course, watch Futurama to see the year 3000 firsthand.
@4: Invest in wind farms.
On a tangent: why aren’t more research papers available for free or at-cost printing prices? Especially papers from research funded with public money.
golob how about we look at things like the ST investment that won’t be GHG neutral for at least twenty years, if not fifty when considering the GHG created during construction. we should be building low GHG impact energy sources, both in construction and operation, such as wind, solar, geo, hot rock, wave et al. We should push car battery technology and converting ICE cars over to electric power.
the viaduct should be retrofitted rather than a tunnel or a new viaduct but for sure GHG should be a major factor in deciding.
major subsidies for retrofitting houses to become as close to passive houses as possible.
party locally
The scientists that created that study have hit the jackpot. They will have grants coming out of their ass for decades. Too bad the science is kind of a stretch.
The world is not ending Golob. Stop pretending to be an intelligent person.
@Greg:
The NIH just demanded that all publicly funded research be available for free no later than six months after first publication. So, yay!
@ McG. I’d have to sit down and honestly calculate the carbon impact of those choices before I could give you an answer. Driving is pretty damn wasteful; trains are astonishingly efficient, carbon-wise, per person-mile. Plus they promote denser development. Could be a fun game to honestly figure out.
@lily:
Please, please, please keep planting trees. That’s the only carbon offset I’ve ever seen compelling data demonstrating worth. Please!
@9
Because science journals, particularly in the environmental sciences, only survive by subscriptions (i.e., major research universities – like UW) – open access (no fee) would slay them. It’s a fair argument: federal funding for research should result in publicly accessible dissemination of results. I believe this may be recently mandated by Congress for all NIH/health sciences research, but other fields maybe received a temporary stay of execution.
Scientific journals are facing the same problems as all print media: declining profits (or in the case of most journals, a failure to break even) in the face of electronic media. For example: if there’s a prof or researcher who’s work you’re really, really interested in, but you can’t access their articles through Google Scholar, head on over to their personal website. I’ll give you 50/50 odds you can rip a PDF right off it, regardless of the journal holding copyright, and if you send them an e-mail I’ll give you a 100% chance that they’ll e-mail you a PDF “reprint.” That’s good for you, but bad for the journal – because no one actual “has” to pay for their product (besides the prof, who probably chipped in hundreds to thousands of dollars of page fees – but not enough to keep a journal afloat in the face of declining library and personal subscriptions).
Why keep journals around if they a.) can’t cover their expenses and b.) it would expedite dissemination of results to self-publish results online, like a blog? Well, because then what’s the difference between your NSF funded, credible paleontology research and some random creationist nut’s ravings? That difference is usually peer review. How do you enforce peer review in the absence of the existing journal infrastructure?
@11: That’s right, if you keep telling yourself it isn’t happening then everything will be fine. Did you know you’re never going to die? Not if you don’t believe you aren’t.
OH GOD! WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE!!!!! OH NO!!
@15: Except you. You’re the one exception.
golob to get density just zone it. we don’t have time according to your post to build rail and have density follow. rail is not as efficient as you may think when considering getting to the station. electric cars using wind, solar etc. will be totally non-polluting. the buses will much harder to bring to zero.
do the math but it’s pretty clear that our billions dedicated to ST could build so much wind, geo, etc. etc. that it would do us better than rail. buying everyone a hybrid or electric car would do so much more to drop GHG now.
Yeah, scientists are just rolling in dough. Christ.
Jonathan, what do you think of fertilizing the sea with iron in order to promote phytoplankton growth? It certainly looks promising as a way to rid the atmosphere of CO2 in a relatively short time, but the side effects could be very nasty and unpredictable. Do you think this is something worth looking into, or do you think its just madness?
Thanks.
@6
all that, but most of all run around screaming at the top of your lungs:
“THE SKY IS FALLING!
THE FU¢KING SKY IS FALLING!!!”
Jonathan, what do you think of fertilizing the sea with iron in order to promote phytoplankton growth? It certainly looks promising as a way to rid the atmosphere of CO2 in a relatively short time, but the side effects could be very nasty and unpredictable. Do you think this is something worth looking into, or do you think its just madness?
Thanks.
Maybe the change is irreversible because it will happen no matter what mankind does.
Climate changed before we came along and will long after we are gone.
Look, I’m telling you what they’re saying in Switzerland right now in the Davos conference.
Which pretty much maps to some of the other papers that I read.
But it’s not that exact a science, because we don’t actually measure the inputs and there is no carbon tax in China or the USA so we have no real idea, other than what measurements we do have.
Is it getting worse? Yes. Do we have 20 years to fool around? No. Do we have maybe 4? Possibly, but it takes that long just to put programs in place and change consumption habits.
Easy solution? Carbon tax at a very high rate.
@19 – Fertilizing with iron only “works” if iron is genuinely the limiting element for phytoplankton. That may only be the case under very particular circumstances.
@22 – It’s a matter of rates; not that climate changes, but that’s it presently changing faster than we (and the rest of the planet) can adapt to.
@21 – It only matters if iron is actually a limiting resource for phytoplankton, which may only be true under very particular circumstances.
@22 – It’s a matter of rate. It’s not that climate doesn’t change or hasn’t changed in the past, but that it’s currently changing at a rate in excess of what we (and the rest of the planet) can readily adapt to.
And a sweet double post…
Will if we can do anything, and if the GHG are a major cause, we are already too late to do anything that will prevent significant climate impacts.
your 4 year number, as per usual, is straight out of your ass.
hey 20- very original!
sorry 15, that’s what I get for not reading the other posts before putting my 2¢ in.
Bummer indeed. This sort of nasty realization is, of course, the flip side of all that “uncertainty” the business as usual crowd has been promoting for the last twenty years. When you’re faced with a potentially huge risk uncertainty isn’t your friend.
Not doing anything about GW for the last two decades was like driving really fast with no headlights in the dark. Now the lights are starting to work and Surprise! it turns out that it’s a brick wall we’ve all been speeding towards.
I wait with anticipation the next major area the right can fuck up.
So if the change is irreversible why can’t we forget cutting emissions?
Cosmic where the sun don’t shine:
Published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters and led by scientists from the UK’s National Centre for Atmospheric Science (NCAS) and the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), this remarkable study shows how the number of high-energy cosmic-rays reaching a detector deep underground, closely matches temperature measurements in the upper atmosphere (known as the stratosphere).
http://you-read-it-here-first.com/viewto…
@24 and @25 for the double win.
Meanwhile, we’ll sit on our asses and whine some more.
And so will China.
Doesn’t matter what we do.
The Chinese will determine the future.
Ah fuck it. I’m almost 33. I’ll be dead by the time its starts to get really bad.
But think about…maybe its time for a good cleansing. If global warming is as bad as everyone says then the earth is gonna shed about 4 billion souls in the next 100-200 years. The surviving population will be much more inclined to live in harmonious balance with the earth. Sure the ensuing die off will be horrific, but hey man, it could be a brillaint new world. Maybe a post industrial socialist utopia. I’m kind of picturing the society in the novel We. Can’t remember the author. I’m kind of going off on a rant here. Anywho… who am I to complain about global warming?
Since we can’t do much about China, let’s reduce our own emissions while exploring ways to incorporate carbon into building materials.
it’s worse than you think
http://www.work-ethic.net
Check out Eric Chaisson’s paper in Eos, v 89, No. 28, 8 July 2008. He points out that in addition to CO2, we’re adding tons of heat energy to the planet. Since nothing is ideal, a portion of all energy is converted to heat, in addition to general waste heat produced by many processes. An electric car isn’t going to solve this problem.
Jonathan is completely right. Carbon emissions need to be reduced immediately, massive crop failures are imminent, marine ecosystem indicators are all pointing toward collapse, fresh water scarcity will only worsen, and sadly, the developing world is going to see population reductions of 10 – 20% over the next century unless we come up with an effective technological fix.
“If I drop a box of baking soda into the Sound every day after work, can I still drive my SUV and eat steak for dinner?” — Eastside Resident