My Second Extract from Wadhams' Book

Chapter 13: “The State of the Planet”

“[…] It is time to look at the planet as a whole and consider what state we are in.

First, there is no let-up in the rate of growth of greenhouse gas concentrations. Despite all the fine words of politicians and the efforts made by some countries to reduce their dependence on fossil fuels, the overwhelming effect of fuel-hungry economic growth in China and India is to continue to drive carbon dioxide concentrations ever upward. Given that levels, which have now reached 409 ppm (mid-2017), are already too high for non-disruptive climate change, the fact that they are continuing to accelerate upwards with no let-up at all is profoundly distressing. They are not even beginning to slow. And let us remember that all of the CO₂ has a potential radiative forcing associated with it. Whether it is absorbed for a while in the ocean or in plants, it has by now been taken out of the ground, put into the climate system and is able to exert that radiative forcing, now or in the future to heat the Earth. As we saw in chapter 9, methane is an even more worrying gas. When its level in the atmosphere flattened off in the late 1990s people were relieved, and thought that some law of nature was asserting itself. It wasn’t, and as of 2008 growth began again and is now approaching the growth rates of the 1980s. It is possibly significant that the resumption of methane growth coincided with large summer retreats of sea ice and associated warming of the Arctic shelf seabed; the link between Arctic offshore processes and global methane levels is becoming more and more firmly established, which means that there is worse to come.

Secondly, every planetary indicator looks negative. The human population, now 7 billion, is projected to reach 9.7 billion by 2050, and 11.2 billion by 2100. It is difficult to see how these numbers can be fed, given that we are experiencing large-scale climate disruption already, which is affecting the bread baskets of the world. Climate warming is reducing the area of cultivable land in places like sub-Saharan Africa, while theoretically improved yields at high latitudes cannot be realized because of extreme weather events. We are destroying forests. We are running out of water resources. And agriculture, which has to be an intensive, energy-hungry industry in order to feed so many people, is sensitive to shortages of vital raw industrial materials. The Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen, for instance, has drawn attention to the growing shortage of phosphorus, a vital element in the production of artificial fertilizers. The UN population predictions for 2100 are particularly worrying because they are split into continents: most continents show a large growth but one which can perhaps be coped with, while Europe shows a decline. However Africa shows a quadrupling in numbers, from 1.1 to 4.4 billion. […]

Since Africa cannot feed itself now, how will it cope with four times as many mouths, especially with global warming disrupting food supplies and causing desertification? The answer is that it won’t. The rest of the world will have to feed Africa. Given that the rest of the world is likely to be obsessed with its own problems, one can foresee a shortage of compassion and a shortage of aid; the result will inevitably be famine on a massive scale […]

The population problem is not just one of food. Every human being is a carbon emitter, and so the problem of reducing total carbon emissions is made much more difficult if there are more people. Every human being needs space for someone to grow the food that he or she requires, so we see massive destruction of forests worldwide at a time when we desperately need more afforestation to reduce carbon dioxide levels. Every human being needs water to drink, and fresh water resources are getting scarcer, so that we may have to depend more on desalination, itself an energy-intensive process that releases carbon. It is difficult to deny the equation: more people = more carbon emissions. Yet we seem to have forgotten the emphasis on the population explosion which concerned analysts of the global system in the 1970s, like the authors of Limits to Growth (1972). The problem hasn’t gone away and it hasn’t been solved, except for a while – by drastic means – in China.

[…]

What can we do?

Emission Reduction

In the past, and even today, green organisations have emphasized what we can do as individuals to mitigate climate change by reducing our carbon emissions. We can recycle our rubbish, insulate our homes, drive smaller cars, eat more vegetables and less meat. All these help, and also instil a sense of global civic virtue, of being aware of the needs of the global village as opposed to our own individual desires. But fi every person in the UK applied every possible energy-saving measure to their normal lives, the result (from those that have tried it) is a reduction of only about 20 per cent in energy use. Useful, but, as the late Professor Sir David MacKay, the UK Government’s chief scientific adviser on energy and climate, said, ‘If everyone does a little, we will achieve only a little.’

There is no doubt that to achieve more than a little, political decisions have to be made on energy production, which means that political courage must be shown by governments. Here despair sets in when one considers the history of the UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) discussions, where the early optimism of the Kyoto Protocol (1997) gave way to the terrible failure of the Copenhagen (2009) and Durban (2011) meetings. Sadly, a typical politician’s first response to the climate change criis is to only quote predictions for this century, or even less, and to assume that climate change stops as soon as the IPCC graphs go beyond the 2100 limit. Britain’s own past Secretary of State for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, Owen Paterson, said on 29 September 2013, with astounding complacency,

“I think the relief of this latest report is that it shows a really quite modest increase, half of which has already happened. They are talking one to two and a half degrees.”

Firstly, of course, ‘they’ were no the IPCC itself but an ignorant newspaper report on which he apparently relied for his knowledge. The 1-2.5­^o­C is actually forecast for 2050. The ‘half of which has already happened’ demonstrates that he imaged that climate change stops at the end of the IPCC projections instead of going on. And of course the word ‘relief’ is the real giveaway; it was also, no doubt, a relief that he thought that he could get away without taking any action at all.

A typical politician’s second response is that we can reduce our carbon emissions some time in the future (typically ’30 per cent by 2032’ or some suchlike figure) and thus stop climate change from getting out of control. This neatly lets current politicians off the hook. But it is untrue. For a start, the CO₂ already put into the atmosphere has a flywheel effect – a molecule of CO₂ lasts for much more than 100 years in the climate system and the world has yet to catch up on the potential warming of existing CO₂ (maybe only half has been ‘realized’). So reducing our emissions in the future is much less useful than reducing our emissions now, and reducing our emissions now is less useful than actually reducing carbon levels. The most useful things to do would be actually to reduce the amount of CO₂, for example by switching 100 per cent to nuclear power, which public opinion makes impossible; or to use technology to mask warming, i.e. put a sticking plaster on it, by geoengineering, buying us a little time. Nothing else can save us from serious consequences, although of course CO₂ reduction is still absolutely necessary. In this case the so-called ‘green’ organizations, such as Greenpeace and WWF, are unhelpful to humanity because of their opposition to both nuclear power and geoengineering.

The ratchet effect of carbon is rather like the ratchet effect of human population. Put very crudely, the ‘natural’ level of CO₂ in the atmosphere during interglacial periods is 280 parts per million (ppm) and thus of the present level of 409 ppm, more than 120 ppm has been put there by Man burning fossil fuels. Supposing we stopped emitting CO₂ altogether, all of a sudden. How fast would CO₂ levels go down? Well, with the survival time of added CO₂ in the Earth’s energy system being at least 100 years, we might expect a maximum of 1 per cent of the added CO₂ to ‘fall out’ of the system per year, so CO₂ levels would diminish only 1.2 ppm in the first year of carbon abstinence. It will take forty-five years to bring the level down to the 350 ppm which most scientists think is ‘safe’. Similarly, with the human population being 7 billion and an average lifetime of, say, seventy years, if humans completely ceased to reproduce it would take ten years for the population to diminish to 6 billion by natural decline. So if a food production crisis hits due to climate change and reduces our capacity to feed people by a billion, it will be impossible to match these new lower levels of food production quickly by birth control alone – nature will instead inflict mass starvation on us.

If we continue on our present path, eventually all hydrocarbons in the Earth will be extracted and burned, so our love-orgy with oil will have to come to an end. But by that time global warming will have become so extreme that life will be insufferable, if not impossible. We need a new Manhattan Project to clean up our atmosphere, an effort by the world greater than any effort that it has ever made, and it must be worldwide because we all breathe the same air. In the absence of such an effort the effects of climate change will become very apparent quite a short time into the future – in twenty or thirty years the world will be a different and much nastier place than it is now. There will never be another era for Man like the one that ended with the economic crisis of 2007. People will need to consider their personal futures and will try to live in cool countries like Norway or Canada, with low populations and many resources. This leads to the serious question, if it is now too late for us to preserve our planet by reducing or eliminating carbon emissions, because have left it too late to start the process and because we live in a society in which high carbon emissions are ‘built in’ to the social and physical fabric, what can we do? There are only two possibilities: use technical methods to reduce the rate of warming while allowing CO₂ levels to continue to increase; or develop even more advanced technical means to actually take CO₂ out of the atmosphere […]”

Wadhams’ thoughts on geoengineering will be extracted soon…