The latest United Nations climate report is arresting because it confirms prior trends of climate change and emphasizes for the first time that dramatic climate change could hit us suddenly. The scientists therefore propose that mankind should use new technology to take a portion of the CO2 we placed in the sky back out of the sky.
Short-run its methane. Scientists have known that methane (natural gas) is a very powerful “earth-blanket-warmer” for many years. Indeed, methane traps around 100 times more heat per ton than does CO2, but only for a relatively short time of around 20 years. The news here is that fracking for oil and gas, oil wells, and pipelines are allowing much more methane to escape into the air than was previously thought. In addition, the melting of Arctic permafrost is emitting twice the methane previously estimated. These major emissions of greenhouse gases push temperatures up sharply.
The possibility of abrupt and severe climate change. The second key piece of research reveals that the climate stability of the last 20,000 years is the exception not the rule. Many of us think climate change is always gradual, giving us time to adjust. Not so, says the report. “The ice record shows rapid temperature changes from 9 to 15 degrees Fahrenheit across the globe have appeared 23 times in the last 100,000 years. The changes lasted for centuries and millennia, and they happened in centuries and decades. The fastest and biggest of all happened in only two to three years. Across Greenland the temperature change was 25 to 35 degrees F.”
Scientists believe that the abrupt changes came after global warming had removed reflective sea ice and melted the great ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica. Were such a warming threshold breached in our time, mankind would become a mere spectator to events beyond his control, no longer a player. No one can predict where or if such a threshold exists today, but conditions similar to those today have caused sudden bursts of runaway climate change in the past. Thus our policy procrastination has brought mankind to the point where just slowing carbon emissions and moving to green fuels will be unlikely to prevent our human canoe from entering the whitewater of self-accelerating climate change.
What is needed? The thunderbolt hurled at us from the latest IPCC report (International Panel on Climate Control) is that “New climate policy is no longer about carbon dioxide emissions reduction alone; it is about negative emissions.” CO2 density in our air is now more than 400 ppm and rising each year. To go back to 350 ppm we must both cut back emissions of methane and CO2 sharply and vacuum out of the air some of the CO2 we previously put in. That is what negative emissions means: more out than we put in. If we get back to 350ppm this should slow the ice melt and in time perhaps start refreezing the Arctic Ice Pack which controls much of the world climate. The nations of the world would have to move quickly to eliminate all carbon-based fuels and install technology that removes CO2 and methane from the air. Current estimates suggest that this vacuuming of the air might cost at least $8 trillion. Our last two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan cost around $3 trillion.
Priorities. The U.S. would have to take the lead simply because no one else would. The key is for the president to appoint the top climate scientists and technologists to advise where the government should place its research priorities. With a clear public mandate, a Manhattan Project to vacuum the air might yet save us from a future none of us can imagine or could endure.
Roy Wehrle is an emeritus professor at University of Illinois Springfield who teaches in the areas of climate change, the environment and international economics and politics.
This article appears in Jan 29 – Feb 4, 2015.
