Avoiding “Too Little, Too Late”
An appraisal of climate actions
Global warming is no longer a future problem, nor is emissions reduction its most effective treatment. An additional approach to climate relief is now needed, one that can produce faster results.
Our current approach is to reduce the carbon dioxide (CO2) emitted from tailpipes and smokestacks. They add to the excess carbon dioxide already in the air, which warms up things to change the climate. But doubling down on clean energy, while still a good idea for the long run, is not likely to improve things in the next few decades. And zero emissions globally are impossible because the developing countries are going to burn their local fossil fuels trying to modernize — and as warming continues, they are going to need much more electricity for air-conditioning.
Let us boldly assume that half of the annual emissions come from developing countries and that half comes from countries that can eliminate their fossil fuels tomorrow. How fast does the carbon dioxide in the air then decline if nature is left to do the cleanup of the excess carbon dioxide (CO2) overhead? About one-sixth (half of one-third) of the 128 parts per million excess, or 21 ppm, might be gone by mid-century. That’s not very much, merely the amount that we’ve added in the last ten years and, at the current rate, it will only take seven years to add another 21 ppm. Yet this 21 ppm would appear to be the most we can expect to accomplish from emissions reduction in the countries that could do it.
How much might the developing countries increase their consumption, because of their need for more air conditioning to help survive a series of hot nights? Probably more than 21 ppm.
So major emissions reduction — what scientists recommended fifty years ago and each year thereafter — has become the equivalent of putting a band-aid on a cut that now requires a dozen stitches. Yes, our climate band-aid is still worthwhile, but it has become insufficient to the need. Still, let us suppose that emissions reduction accomplishes everything we once hoped for, and does it in twenty years. That still would not get us out of the new climate danger zone fast enough.
Zero emissions would still leave the present accumulation for nature to clean up. All of our enhanced extreme weather would continue. How fast does nature’s clean-up happen? Most people assume that carbon dioxide goes away as fast as the visible air pollution does — the time until the next good rain. Actually, it takes a thousand years for nature to remove 80 percent of the excess, though nature should be able to reduce the excess by about one-third before mid-century, mostly by sinking CO2 into the ocean depths.
In recent years, a number of commentators have despaired, saying — usually from economic arguments rather than scientific ones — that emissions reduction was not going to succeed. They then conclude that we are going to be in terrible climate trouble because of our failure.
But that conclusion does not follow — that’s because they seem to think that emissions reduction is the only game in town. There has been a monoculture of ideas. Carbon dioxide removal is seldom mentioned. This omission of a cleanup is not surprising, given their information sources. Emissions reduction has been the only remedy mentioned, even on such action-oriented websites as ClimateReality.org and 350.org — and indeed in all but the most recent IPCC climate reports, from which they have been talking their lead. Governments have not been spending much money on carbon dioxide removal (or, as some are trying to re-label it, “negative emissions technologies”). Yet several dozen carbon dioxide removal techniques have been seriously proposed.
Re-forestation, first proposed in 1977 by the physicist Freeman Dyson, is the easiest to describe; I’ll use modern numbers. If we doubled forest acreage, taking the total back to where it was eight thousand years ago before agriculture began to encroach, it would remove most of the excess carbon dioxide from our air and make trees out of it. But don’t cheer yet because, like all of the proposals, reforestation has some limitations and side effects to consider first.
Growing a forest to maturity — until it reaches the stage where as much wood rots as new wood is produced — takes about fifty years. After that, there is no more net removal of CO2; one has to cut the forest down, replant, and then protect the harvested lumber from burning or rotting, perhaps by sinking it to the anoxic ocean floor. If the forest burns down while growing, all of the captured carbon dioxide goes right back into the air. Re-forestation would take away acreage from agriculture; hungry people in a future decade would likely cut down the new forest to grow food. Not a good plan.
Protecting the new forest from fire would require fresh water from somewhere, all year; California, for example, is already short on water and diverting it to wetting down forests is unthinkable. And don’t forget the equivalent of a mountain pine beetle infestation that kills trees by fracturing their bark following a warm winter, the major cause of those forest fires in Canada. I could add the extreme weather surges, but you get the idea: besides not being quick enough, re-forestation is not a secure way of doing the job. Still, if we had a few centuries to do the job, it would be worth trying.
We have, instead, a few decades to complete a cleanup — if we are lucky. Here is why: the five big extreme weather surges that surprised scientists 5 to 15 years ago — billion-dollar windstorms and floods, mega heat waves, stalled hurricanes, and lots more “fire weather” — are scary. I describe them elsewhere. They suggest that we cannot wait until mid-century to finish fixing the climate. More such climate surprises can create a world filled with climate refugees lacking jobs, many housed in a country that, because of a collapsed economy, increasingly finds it difficult to educate or support them. If history is any lesson, genocides will occur in some cases.
But there do remain some ways to avoid this, if we hurry. A carbon dioxide removal project will need to be big, quick, sure-fire, and without major side effects. Leaving this job to profit-seeking private entrepreneurs, as we have done, is absurd; why should we trust our future to bankruptcy-prone private projects? Large government projects to remove carbon dioxide need to begin immediately, without waiting for cost-sharing treaties to be negotiated. That’s because even the biggest removal project will take at least eight years before it begins to cool us off (one has to first cancel the continuing emissions before cooling can begin). It then takes another dozen years for this biggest project to back us out of the danger zone.
Lots could happen in the meantime, even without another surprise surge in extreme weather. Big-and-quick carbon dioxide removal is now our survival strategy. Our situation is now the equivalent of having to prepare for a great war, already looming on the horizon. Clearly, we are starting late — but there are still possible ways of fixing the problem, if we treat this as an emergency. There is nothing hopeless about our situation. Like war, it is risky — but properly focused climate actions can greatly improve our chances. The trip to Hell is not a sure thing.
William H. Calvin, Ph.D., is a professor emeritus at the University of Washington’s School of Medicine in Seattle and president of CO2Foundation.org. Email WCalvin@UW.edu
The Series:
1. Extreme Weather Has Created a Climate Emergency: Our CO2 cleanup must be big and quick.
2. Avoiding “Too Little, Too Late“ — An appraisal of climate actions.
3. Why a Climate Emergency? Emergency from a medical perspective.
These brief articles are adapted from my forthcoming book, Fixing the New Extreme Weather. My earlier books on the subject include Global Fever (University of Chicago Press, 2008); more illustrations and sources are at CO2Foundation.org. I wrote the first major magazine article on climate instability, “The Great Climate Flip-flop” which was The Atlantic’s cover story for January 1998.
Here are some links — in addition to the IPCC and the major National Academies (US), European, and Royal Society (UK) reports on removing CO2 — that reviewers might find useful.
NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information (2016), U.S. billion-dollar weather and climate disasters. www.ncdc.noaa.gov/billions/time-series.
D. Archer (2005), Fate of fossil fuel CO2 in geologic time. J. Geophys. Res. 110, C09S05, doi: 10.1029/2004JC002625.
W. H. Calvin (2008), Global Fever: How to Treat Climate Change. London and Chicago: University of Chicago Press. faculty.washington.edu/wcalvin/bk14
R Dryden, MG Morgan, A Bostrom, W Bruine de Bruin (2018) Public perceptions of how long air pollution and carbon dioxide remain in the atmosphere. Risk Anal. 38(3):525–534. doi.org/10.1111/risa.12856.
Dyson, F. J. (1977) Can we control the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere? Energy J. 2, 287–291.
G. F. Nemet, et al (2018) Negative emissions — Part 3: Innovation and upscaling. Environ. Res. Lett. 13, 063003, doi: 10.1088/1748–9326/aabff4.
Robine, J.-M., et al. (2008), Death toll exceeded 70,000 in Europe during the summer of 2003. C. R. Biologies 331, doi.org/10.1016/j.crvi.2007.12.001
Trenberth, K. E. & Fasullo, J. (2012) Climate extremes and climate change: The Russian heat wave and other climate extremes of 2010. J. Geophys. Res. 117, D17103. doi.org/10.1007/s10584–012–0441–5
Wuebbles, D.J., D.W. Fahey, K.A. Hibbard, D.J. Dokken, B.C. Stewart, and T.K. Maycock (eds.) (2017). Climate Science Special Report: Fourth National Climate Assessment, Volume I. U.S. Global Change Research Program, Washington, DC, USA, doi.org/10.7930/J0DJ5CTG
