Global Climate War – Is This Where We Are Headed as a Planet?

January 17, 2019 – The Paris Climate Agreement of 2015 received non-binding commitments from almost every nation on the planet to limit global warming to less than 2 Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit).

How did we get to this point on the only inhabitable planet in our Solar System? We did it by extracting and burning carbon accumulated over hundreds of millions of years through natural geological and climatological processes. And we did it in two centuries. From the beginning of the Industrial Revolution until 1970 our burning of fossil fuels, our cement making, our manufacturing industries, our heating requirements, and our use in transportation produced 420 billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions of which the majority was carbon dioxide. But between 1970 and 2011 we tripled the amount of greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere reaching more than 1.3 trillion tons.

Asking our atmosphere to absorb that much carbon in gaseous form without expecting changes to its chemical balance would be naive, to say the least.

And expecting the rest of the planet to absorb the extra carbon within the atmosphere through natural carbon sinks in light of continued human activity — industrial expansion, further fossil fuel resource development and extraction, the growth in marine and land transportation, and the enormous explosion in world population, approximately double what it was in 1970, without something giving, would also be naive.

Some interesting statistics:

• the worldwide steel and cement industry today produces more carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions than all countries other than China and the United States.
• every ton of cement we create produces 3/4 tons of CO2 emissions.
• the amount of CO2 generated by human activity in the atmosphere today is equivalent to 1,200 times the weight of everyone living on the planet today.
• next to power generation, transportation is the largest contributor of CO2 emissions.
• 25% of CO2 emissions come from agriculture, forestry and other forms of land use.
• 26% of CO2 emissions produced since 1970 have been absorbed by the world’s oceans.
• 28% of CO2 emissions have been absorbed by plants.
• 44% of all CO2 emissions remain in the atmosphere.

What’s so special about CO2 and why we have to pay attention to the amount we emit?

• Right now it represents about .04% of our atmosphere (that’s not much) with the rest largely nitrogen and oxygen.
• Unlike nitrogen and oxygen which do not respond to radiation from the Sun and play no part in regulating atmospheric temperature, CO2 is entirely another matter.
• CO2 absorbs what is called long-wave radiation which is converted from light to heat.
• If there were no CO2 in our atmosphere the global mean average temperature would be 33.3 Celsius (60 Fahrenheit) degrees cooler.

So having CO2 in our atmosphere is a good thing if kept in balance.

For climate change skeptics who argue that more CO2 will mean more lush vegetation and higher crop yields, the most recent search points out that other factors such as precipitation and soil nutrients play a much more important role.

Then there is the presence of natural carbon sinks on the planet. These include:

• oceans
• forests
• soil

As we stated before, the oceans since 1970 have absorbed more than a quarter of all the CO2 we have emitted into the atmosphere. That amount of CO2 has created a noticeable impact on the ocean’s pH balance which has gone from 8.2 to 8.1 meaning the ocean is getting more acidic. With so much ocean life dependent on a higher pH to allow for shell formation, this type of drop has potential negative ecological consequences. With more CO2 in the ocean it is absorbing long-wave radiation in increasing amounts and getting warmer as well. And warmer water expands raising sea levels. And sea levels rise too when sea ice melts because it is in contact with warmer water.

As for the atmosphere, the consequences of increased CO2 have coincided with a warming of 1.0 Celsius (1.8 Fahrenheit) above mean values from less than 150 years ago when we first started keeping accurate temperature records. Coincidence or correlation? I’ll let you decide.

The world’s climatologists and scientists already have and the result has led to a culmination with a worldwide agreement signed in Paris to address carbon in the atmosphere, and in particular CO2 levels. Countries have pledged to reduce emissions but since the 2015 signing, CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions have increased.

So the world’s nations have looked at their options of which there are four.

1. Do nothing, just keep plugging away generating emissions and hope for the best.
2. Reduce industrial emissions from 50 to 80% by 2050 from current levels.
3. Reduce emissions less than those numbers by introducing technology to capture the carbon and make it inert, or bury it permanently in the ground from which it came.
4. Tinker with the atmosphere by blocking solar radiation through the use of aerosols sprayed into our stratosphere to create a similar effect to what happens when volcanoes erupt.

Option #1 is the Trump option. The U.S. under Trump has announced its withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement. The administration has loosened regulations governing sources of carbon pollution. And although there is resistance from lots of American cities and a number of states, the results have seen American emissions go up since Trump took office.

And don’t think China is off the hook even though it professes to be committed to the Paris Climate Agreement. Although China has been building renewable energy resources at a dramatic pace until very recently, and has closed or is phasing out domestic coal-fired power plants, it has chosen to export its carbon emissions by being a prime contractor for the building of coal-fired power plants throughout the Developing World.

Without the U.S. and China committed to emission reductions that are real and measurable, the world is going along in Option #1 and the rest of us are along for the ride.

Option #2 is what Paris was all about if the agreement had been binding, rather than non-binding. The political will of leadership to make the hard choices of decarbonizing seems to be absent with exception of those countries already being overwhelmed by visible and measurable changes associated with atmospheric and oceanic warming (Pacific and Indian Ocean island nations in particular, and low-lying countries like Bangladesh).

Part of the problem of achieving Option #2 is the lack of alternatives to the status quo. What do we do about cement and steel? What do we do to decarbonize transportation rapidly? Can we abandon the internal combustion engine in a flash? And what about air travel and marine shipping and the emissions these two methods of transportation produce? Should we be grounding all planes and keeping marine shipping anchored? And what about shutting down coal-burning power plants when countries in the Developing World are energy hungry as their economies expand?

So far, a few countries have attempted to introduce market mechanisms to inhibit carbon emissions. These have included pricing carbon through a levy or tax based on tonnage, and industry sector caps with companies buying and selling carbon credits. China has rolled out a carbon trading program for the entire country but how reliable will its reporting be? California is the paradigm for cap-and-trade. And Canada is attempting to become the first G7 nation to impose a progressively higher price on every ton of carbon pollution beginning this year. Will such market-based strategies keep warming to under 2 Celsius? Highly unlikely unless universally adopted to alter human behaviour on a global scale.

Option #3 comes with two acronyms, CCS, and CCUS. The first stands for carbon capture and sequestration. The second stands for carbon capture utilization and storage. Option #3 involves full-scale carbon removal from the atmosphere to achieve zero emissions. And going beyond that Option #3 can reverse the amount of CO2 over time to produce negative emissions.

The problem with Option #3 is startup costs. Every CCS and CCUS project so far have been very expensive. Without government money, all would never come to fruition. And although there are hundreds of sites where CCS and CCUS projects are in the works, the scale of the requirement requires tens of thousands of these installations.

There is also the issue of finding sufficient places to store captured carbon beneath the surface of our planet. An inventory of stable underground containment needs to be explored before we can pump CO2 into these natural geological subterranean structures. Some CCS proponents have suggested we create impermeable storage tanks sunk into the ocean where we can fill them with CO2. Should some of these “permanent” sequestration sites start leaking as is bound to happen then we will need a further remedy.

The cost, based on estimates by the Energy Transitions Commission, a global body, for net-zero technological solutions would be in the trillions of dollars annually to get to atmospheric carbon levels circa 1970.

Option #4 is by far the most problematic. Blocking the sun through human manipulation of the atmosphere is not a trivial thing. What would be involved? Countries would send aircraft into the stratosphere to spray aerosols to reflect sunlight. This geoengineering of the atmosphere would require repetition. Once started you couldn’t stop because the effect of the aerosols would wear off and the blowback could mean sudden spikes in mean global temperatures. And then there is the unknown? How much aerosol volume would produce how much of a drop in mean global temperatures? How would aerosols in the stratosphere affect global precipitation patterns? What if blocking the sun caused a drought in an area of the world, or altered ocean circulation, or impacted extreme weather events like hurricanes and typhoons?

What if some countries turned Option #4 into a weapon? Whether wittingly or unwittingly, deploying aerosols can easily set off unintended consequences. Spraying aerosols in one area could lead to significant climate change far away from the deployment. And a country could begin to use aerosols as a weapon to damage the agricultural production of a rival or cause its freshwater resources to be negatively impacted. With little in the way of international agreement on the technology and its deployment, we could see weather wars emerge. So Option #4 could be the worst of all the technological fixes we humans have ever thought of as a means to address atmospheric warming.

I’m betting that getting international agreement on deploying aerosols in the stratosphere will certainly be as difficult as it was to get a non-binding climate agreement such as the one signed in 2015 in Paris. And finally, when looking at Option #4, it will do nothing to reverse the acidification of the world’s oceans.

So there you have it. Four options and its decision time according to the latest scientific reports on our warming planet. Which to choose? What level of sacrifice are humans willing to make to ensure a sustainable environment for future generations?