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If governments are serious about the global warming targets they adopted in Paris, scientists say they have two options: eliminating fossil fuels immediately or finding ways to undo their damage to the climate system in the future.
The first is politically impossible—the world is still hooked on using oil, coal and natural gas—which leaves the option of a major cleanup of the atmosphere later this century.
Yet the landmark Paris Agreement, adopted by 195 countries on Dec. 12, makes no reference to that, which has left some observers wondering whether politicians understand the implications of the goals they signed up for.
"I would say it's the single biggest issue that has to be resolved," said Glen Peters of the Cicero climate research institute in Oslo, Norway.
Scientists refer to this envisioned cleanup job as negative emissions—removing more greenhouse gases from the atmosphere than humans put in it.
Right now we're putting in a lot—about 50 billion tons a year, mostly carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels for energy.
There are methods to achieve negative emissions today but they would need to be scaled up to a level that experts say could put climate efforts in conflict with other priorities, such as eradicating hunger. Still, if the Paris climate goals are to be achieved, there's no way to avoid the issue, said Jan Minx of the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate change in Berlin.
"My view is, let's have this discussion," he said. "Let's involve ourselves in developing these technologies. We need to keep learning."
The Paris Agreement was historic. For the first time all countries agreed to jointly fight climate change, primarily by reducing the emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.
Governments vowed to keep global warming "well below" 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) compared with preindustrial times. But even 2 degrees of warming could threaten the existence of low-lying island nations faced with rising seas. So governments agreed to try to limit warming to 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees F), which is just half-a-degree above the global average temperature this year.
That goal is so ambitious—some would say far-fetched—that there's been very little research devoted to it. In Paris, politicians asked scientists to start studying how it can be done.
(Score: 2) by Gravis on Saturday December 26 2015, @11:50PM
Science is not settled on emissions and CO2 atmospheric levels over long term.
sure it is. if you alter atmospheric CO2 levels, it will affect other things on the planet. regardless of what you change, it will being to breakdown and eventual destroy various ecosystems. do we know for certain which will be destroyed? no but we know we don't want to destroy any of them. however, if the only way to know we will destroy the planet with CO2 is to actually do it, would it have been worth the cost?
(Score: 2) by gnuman on Sunday December 27 2015, @12:08AM
if you alter atmospheric CO2 levels, it will affect other things on the planet. ...
I wasn't talking about this. I was making a statement that if you change CO2 emissions, we don't know how CO2 levels in the atmosphere will behave. We CAN'T know, because no one run that experiment until we do it *AND* we don't know of all the CO2 sinks, as per my point about CO2 sinks in aquifers in deserts sequestering some carbon.
What we know is,
1. CO2 causes global warming
2. emitting CO2 at current levels causes atmospheric levels to go up
3. historical atmospheric CO2 levels correlate with some temperatures
But we DO NOT know how reducing CO2 emissions today will affect CO2 atmospheric levels in the future. Most likely, they will go down. But we don't know how much. Therefore this paper is like putting buggey in front of a horse.
Step 1 is to get CO2-neutral economy.
Step 2 is ????
Maybe Step 1 is enough. The paper argues that Step 1 is not enough ... well, who cares. Step 1 is a HUGE mother-trucking step. Let's get past that before we see where temperature rise will halt - and that will take a few hundred years regardless if it is +2C or +10C.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Sunday December 27 2015, @02:02AM
But we DO NOT know how reducing CO2 emissions today will affect CO2 atmospheric levels in the future. Most likely, they will go down. But we don't know how much. Therefore this paper is like putting buggey in front of a horse.
Agreed, but it also seems working toward a negative CO2 emissions gets us to Step 1 easier and quicker.
Do we emulate saline aquifers in the Sahara or the Australian outback by pumping sea water inland?
Do we replant the forests lost in much of Europe or the Plains States?
You can always stop these things if you find they are unnecessary, and natural sinks are working better than expected.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by gman003 on Sunday December 27 2015, @03:31AM
You are correct in that we don't know how natural CO2 sinks work. However, we're talking about artificial CO2 sinks - and while we don't know perfectly how those work, we know they have a good probability of success, and know they can't make anything worse. The worst-case scenario for artificial CO2 sinks is that they don't capture any net carbon long-term, leaving us... exactly where we'd be otherwise.
And sure, if this was a small-scale, low-impact problem, we could afford to start negative emissions only when we know we have to. But 10C warming would be apocalyptic - a very high probability of human extinction. The economic value of stopping that is literally infinite, because there won't be an economy if we go extinct. We can afford to "waste" some money on dead ends.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday December 27 2015, @07:30PM
and know they can't make anything worse
There's thing called "opportunity cost". Resources put into creating artificial carbon sinks are not used for other things, like elevating people out of poverty.
But 10C warming would be apocalyptic - a very high probability of human extinction.
Don't be silly. 10C still leaves most of the world habitable on the surface (and habitable everywhere underground or underwater, not to mention active climate control like A/C). What might kill us off then are the same things which could kill us off in the absence of global warming (nuclear war, engineered plagues, etc).
I think a big problem here is the obsessive focus on global warming to the exclusion of other, more important human problems. For example, the insincere climate change target of holding warming to 1.5C. At this point, it isn't going to happen (unless of course, the IPCC has exaggerated the temperature forcing of a doubling of CO2 by enough to be relevant) because most of the current contributors to CO2 emssions have not made a commitment to reduce those emissions.
Why aren't we taking a more nuanced, viable approach that includes both mitigation and adaptation strategies with an emphasis on the low lying fruit? Why aren't we seeing strategies that take into considerable both overpopulation and the benefits of wealthier societies? Instead we often see a denial of wealth's climate benefit with the insistence that wealthier societies are impossible due to their supposed dependence on fossil fuels. Why do we see an insistence that global warming mitigation has positive economic effects when real world mitigation has never demonstrated those effects? Why do even climatologists rely on arguments chock full of fallacy and hyperbole? Why is legitimate scientific disagreement hidden or ridiculed by these same scientists?
I think the answer here is that we're being sold the biggest batch of snake oil ever.
(Score: 4, Informative) by gman003 on Sunday December 27 2015, @09:20PM
An 8C rise in temperature caused the Permian-Triassic mass extinction - the greatest in history. 70% of vertebrates went extinct. Half of all plant species. 95% of marine animals. We can easily survive the higher temperatures and stronger storms. We may not survive all of our food species dying out.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday December 28 2015, @05:55AM
An 8C rise in temperature caused the Permian-Triassic mass extinction
Or it didn't. We don't know at present. I think this sort of assertion shows how the climate change war has perverted science. Everything is now viewed through the lens of global warming and if it can be blamed on global warming, it is. Here, the P-T mass extinction was most likely caused by the largest scale volcanic eruptions ever known and possible some secondary effects like coal fires. There are two things to note about volcanic activity. First, it does much more than release carbon dioxide. Second, it is extremely variable.
For the first point, we merely need to look at history's only known basalt flood eruption, a 1783 eruption [wikipedia.org] of Lakigigar, a fissure group in Iceland which is thought to have released about 14 cubic km of basalt lava at over the course of about a year, including over 100 million tons of sulfur dioxide and considerable hydrogen fluoride. A quarter of the population of Iceland is thought to have died of a combination of famine and fluoride poisoning. There were also large famines in France, Northern Europe, Japan, and Egypt which were attributed to this eruption as well as disruptions of monsoons in India.
Glancing over the estimated volume of the Siberian traps (1 to 4 million cubic km of basalt) over the estimated time frame of a million years of eruptions, that's a Lakigigar every ten years for a million years, assuming these things erupted evenly. If we assume that the Siberian traps had a similar sulfur dioxide content fraction to that of the estimate for the Lakigigar eruptions, then in total that's roughly 0.2% of the atmosphere by mass or about 1000 ppm (which let us note, LD50 for rats is 2500 ppm [soylentnews.org]) by molar proportion (and probably enough to kill most things with lungs over the long term). I think it very possible here that the atmosphere at times was too toxic for the more sensitive plant and animal life, anywhere on the globe.
These introductions of volcanic based chemicals would also encourage algae blooms (especially when combined with iron content from volcanic ash, of which there would have been plenty) and could directly result in global scale anoxia in addition to acidification of the oceans.
Second, if you look at any volcano or fissure swarm, you see a history of variation in volcanic activity, usually with most of the activity by mass erupted occurring in very short stretches of time. For example, most of the volume of lava expelled by Icelandic volcanoes in historical times probably came from the Lakigigar eruptions in 1783 and 1784.
When some paleoclimate researcher claims that global temperature rose by 8C, they are ignoring the real lethal problem, short term, acute variations of global climate and even weather, that might be much more relevant. The Siberian Traps era probably generated a large number of global winter situations as severe as the worst forecasts of modern nuclear winters. I think this era was probably not just a simple 8C rise in temperature, but a large rise in temperature (which might have been 8C) punctuated by bouts of nasty chemical emissions (resulting in ocean anoxia and acidication) coupled directly with global winter. Add in the occasional, perhaps even frequent methane clathrate release upon rebound from the global winters phase. This is the hellish world that life would be struggling to survive in.
Despite the relative abruptness of human activity compared to recent geological past, we likely have several things going for us that weren't present during the P-T mass extinction. First, our emissions are gradual and less toxic. I don't buy, for example, that the peak emissions or the rate of emissions at peak times of the Siberian traps era would be less than human activity. Second, we have means at our disposal for dealing with high CO2 levels. For example, we can seed the Arctic Ocean with Azolla plants against, just like what happened during the carbon drawdown after the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (of 56 million years ago) which is thought to be a nearly pure global warming event (with incidentally similar levels of warming to the P-T mass extinction event, but much lower levels of mass extinction).
Reflecting back on the original assertion of human sensitivity to a 10C increase in temperature, humanity of the modern age and their civilizations are remarkably adaptable. This is routinely ignored when someone hypes the perils of climate change. We're not the old civilizations that died off merely because no one could grow corn in the neighborhood or olives on the hill in back. It is absurd, for example, to suppose that humanity couldn't adapt to a 2C change in an 85 year period or a few meter rise in sea level over that same period of time yet we hear that threat echoed all the time. While 10C is larger and land area would be somewhat smaller due to sea level rise, it still leaves most of the Earth within the usual temperature range in which humanity thrives. I just don't see the danger, even from large temperature increases to the survival of the human species.