“How much does Zero Emissions cool us off?”
The next time that a public figure or a reporter explains emissions reduction as the fix for our global overheating, consider asking them, “How much does zero emissions cool us off?”
This is considered an unkind question; I would not ask it, except that it is currently important — in the sense of civilization surviving until mid-century.
The proper answer is “It will not cool us at all.” Even a thousand years from now, 19% of the CO2 emitted this year will still be hanging around. And until the rate of CO2 removal exceeds the annual anthropogenic emissions, we will not cool off even a half-degree from the present surface temperature — and that is what it will likely take to back out of the recent surges in extreme weather.
Emissions reduction and other conservation measures are, however, still worth doing for the long run. It is just that they are now insufficient to fix what ails us. And we must first survive the short run in order to enjoy the long run.
Stopping smoking is a good idea, but that alone will not fix lung cancer, once it has started. That is now our situation with climate pathology, with five types of extreme weather having surged about a dozen years ago.
Cooling off might help minimize them, but merely slowing the rate of warming will not. Remember that “emissions” is short for “annual emissions.” How many times have you heard someone confuse miles per hour with miles traveled? Yet people regularly confuse the rate of CO2 addition with the total accumulation — and the latter is what promotes the overheating which is the root cause of our climate problems. If the big heap at the garbage dump is contaminating well water nearby, stopping the yearly additions to the accumulation (by sending garbage trucks elsewhere) will not make that contamination problem go away; one must also clean up the pile. In psychology, this is known as the stock-and-flow conflation. Emissions is a flow rate, not the stockpile.
Overheating (and the surges in extreme weather) arise from the accumulation of excess greenhouse gases in the air. Unless we remove the excess CO2 a hundred times faster than the natural cleanup processes (see figure), we are not going to cool off before 2040. Minimizing the climate problem as a rate-of-additions problem wastes valuable time.
Why haven’t you heard of the urgent need for a CO2 cleanup before? Because no one talks about it. I don’t know why this is, but you can verify this sad state of affairs by searching the websites of your favorite climate action organizations for “CDR” (that’s Carbon Dioxide Removal” or “negative emissions.” I would also suggest playing around with the MIT Bathtub Simulator, just to see how ramping up various fixes fail to cool us off, even when max’d out.
