marklynas.orgCarbon emissions just keep on rising 11 December 06
Global carbon dioxide emissions rose by 200 million tonnes in 2005, according to the latest estimates. This continues a trend that has seen global carbon emissions soar by 28 percent since 1990. I should know better by now, but I still find this shocking.
The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change was signed back in 1992, and was supposed to freeze carbon emissions; but it was voluntary, and no-one did anything. Then came the Kyoto Protocol, in 1997, which aimed to give the Convention teeth. But that was torpedoed by the US, and everyone’s emissions carried on rising – with the single exception of some parts of Europe, though more by accident there than design. So, after 15 years of climate policy-making, we’re… well, far worse off than before.
I think the struggle now will be to remain optimistic, as most of humanity remains set on business-as-usual, whilst at the same time the Earth system begins to change beyond recognition. (Here’s the latest ‘warm autumn’ story, this time from France.) I’ve just finished re-writing Six Degrees, and have had to shift various impacts forward: I’d put them later on, after global warming is three or four degrees, but they are already happening! Accordingly, I’ve also had to revise my estimate of the likelihood that we are already over the crucial ‘tipping point’ of runaway warming – I think the odds are now fifty-fifty. So I guess I’m moving closer to Lovelock’s position here. I can’t see any way to avoid it, except perhaps through wishful thinking.
But isn’t Lovelock just defeatist? Isn’t it akin to the British government making a deal with Hitler in 1941 when it looked almost certain that the war was lost? I think there is something in this – which is why so many prominent environmentalists will admit privately that they think we have lost this war on climate change, but will never say so on the media or in public. If Churchill had thrown up his hands, rather than pledging to stand and fight, the war would certainly have been lost. So we are left with a conundrum, where pessimistic predictions become self-fulfilling prophecies – however honest they might sound at the time. After all, the only certain way to ensure that we do lose on global warming is to become so despondent that we declare defeat too early. Not much there to boast about to our grandchildren – assuming we have any.
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Awful
Awful
I think I mentioned to go ahead & make your book’s scenarios worse than what the scientists were telling us…since that’s been the direction all along (science keeps finding it’s worse than previously thought), and that by the time your book came out, the science would have caught up to your worse scenario.
I just didn’t expect the raw evidence to have caught up with it!
It’s like science has turned into a history project—documenting what is happening, then trying to explain it in hindsight.
I’ve also been telling my students that it’s about 50-50 that we’ve already passed the tipping point.
But another way to look at the situation is that every little bit we can reduce (even if past the tipping point) will have all that more importance. When things get really bad, then even the tiniest of help will seem so much greater. It’s like a dollar being so much more valuable to a poor person than to a millionnaire.
How about runaway conditions (positive feedbacks from nature)? Are the atmopheric GHGs surging up higher than the human emissions would indicate? Or is this willy-nilly surge in human emissions masking runaway conditions?
Let’s keep our fingers crossed that someone will invent a GHG converting machine based on perpetual motion dynamics—maybe spitting out, I don’t know, furniture out the back end.
War not lost yet
War not lost yet
I attended last week’s Pugwash public meeting in London at which James Lovelock spoke. He said that man-made dimming was holding down temperatures by about 2°C; Peter Cox, who was present, came across as saying we need to get used to the idea of at least 3-4°C temperature rises.
Lovelock told the meeting he believed that failure to curb emissions could result in a locking change whereby the seas become so warm they cease to act as a sink (I don’t know which process(es) he was particularly referring to) and one would have to wait for terrestrial deposition to do the job.
But I am still of the impression that, before we reach this point, the greater a cap we succeed in placing on emissions, the lower temperatures will rise to before falling back?
What was clear from the meeting was that if ‘Pugwash for the climate’ or for sustainability is to take shape, this requires the will and dynamism of activists like us to make this happen by whatever means. There is simply not the energy or even informedness among existing Pugwash members or senior scientists.
As for fighting the war, it is clear that environmentalists’ existing models of campaigning and influence aren’t up to the job, any more than Germany’s Jews were able to stop Hitler. We need to consider radically different ways of influencing people, such as compulsory screenings of “An Inconvenient Truth” (see here). Environmentalism is dead, organised moralisation may yet make a comeback.