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A few decades of prevention vs 1000 years of Hell …

January 27th, 2009 · No Comments

Whether it is avoiding fatty foods, saving money for the future, or taking cod liver oil regularly, somewhat unpleasant actions today to prevent disaster tomorrow are a struggle against our very nature. This struggle extends from individuals to society, as present consumption and today’s concerns too often triumph over a ‘discounted’ future.

With climate change, this problem is taken to nearly the penultimate extreme. Either we (invidually, collectively as a nation, collectively as a global society, collectively intergenerationally) get our act together or we’re discounting future into catastrophe.

Now that we have an Administration where scientists will be able to speak about science without fossil fuel lobbyists or 20-something ideologues taking red ink to their science, the US government will be speaking more forcefully about Global Warming. Overshadowed by the President’s statement on energy and Global Warming, we have news of a new NOAA report that paints a very ugly and dry picture for a 1000 years out if we don’t get serious about our societal spoons of cod liver oil.

Listen to Susan Solomon, of NOAA,

When it comes to CO2, “We must think about it like nuclear waste rather than smog or acid rain. When it comes to carbon dioxide, it is forever.”

As per narrator, “It means the warming will last a 1000 years, even if emissions stop immediately.”

Solomon

It evokes, clearly, what is really at stake here, which is the future of the planet in the long, long term.

Changes that this generation could make, could choose to make or not to make, which will affect the world for a thousand years or more.

A note on battle lines

A tiny windon on the that we are in, literally a fight for survival. With each passing day of inadequate action, individually / domestically / globally, the challenges get stronger and the task more Heruclean. We are talking about World War II levels of effort, cooperatively rather than competitively globally, for decades to come. We do have the potential for massively changing humanity’s cource toward something better.

Yet, this is a struggle on so many levels. There is the simple (simple?) techological challenge. The fiscal challenges. The focus issue. Need for international agreement. And, well, there is the sad reality that we have a very ugly Fifth Column in the United States that has worked hard and continues to struggle to prevent action and distort the science and confuse the discussion. The advertisement on YouTube when opening up the video above: from a Global Warming denier organization …

Back to the science
To give a feel for the study, the NOAA Press Release is entitled New Study Shows Climate Change Largely Irreversible, a title that would have been unlikely to survive the ‘previous Administration’ (how nice to write that) and its light hand when it came to climate science.

The pioneering study, led by NOAA senior scientist Susan Solomon, shows how changes in surface temperature, rainfall, and sea level are largely irreversible for more than 1,000 years after carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are completely stopped. The findings appear during the week of January 26 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“Our study convinced us that current choices regarding carbon dioxide emissions will have legacies that will irreversibly change the planet,” said Solomon, who is based at NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colo.

“It has long been known that some of the carbon dioxide emitted by human activities stays in the atmosphere for thousands of years,” Solomon said. “But the new study advances the understanding of how this affects the climate system.”

What are some of the irreversible impacts? What if we actually succeeding in stabilizing at 450 parts per million (ppm) of CO2 equivalent in the atmosphere?

The authors found that the scientific evidence is strong enough to quantify some irreversible climate impacts, including rainfall changes in certain key regions, and global sea level rise.

  • If CO2 is allowed to peak at 450-600 parts per million, the results would include persistent decreases in dry-season rainfall that are comparable to the 1930s North American Dust Bowl in zones including southern Europe, northern Africa, southwestern North America, southern Africa and western Australia.
  • The study notes that decreases in rainfall that last not just for a few decades but over centuries are expected to have a range of impacts that differ by region. Such regional impacts include decreasing human water supplies, increased fire frequency, ecosystem change and expanded deserts. Dry-season wheat and maize agriculture in regions of rain-fed farming, such as Africa, would also be affected.
  • The scientists emphasize that increases in CO2 that occur in this century “lock in” sea level rise that would slowly follow in the next 1,000 years.
  • Rising sea levels would cause “…irreversible commitments to future changes in the geography of the Earth, since many coastal and island features would ultimately become submerged,”
  • We’ve known this all, haven’t we?

    Let’s be clear, our current path will drive CO2 levels above 1000 ppm. This report examines “peak” CO2 from 450 to 650 ppm. We, collectively, will have to struggle to avoiding peaking above 450. We are still below 400 ppm and already seeing significant impacts from climate change. We should be striving not just to avoid such a peak, but to reverse our collective path to drive CO2 levels in the other direction. As some say, “350 is the most important number in the world.”

    A personal moment …

    It has not penetrated into our collective consciousness, it remains An Inconvenient Truth, to be mentioned and forgotten as we go on with our daily lives and consider the latest gossip from Hollywood or Bollywood. Amid fears over lost jobs, health care costs, economic malaise, educating our children, cleaning the house, celebrating a Presidential inuguration, it slips into the back of the mind, to be forgotten by all too many of us.

    I’m either a pessimistic optimist or an optimistic pessimist. With young children, one is driven toward optimism and hope. We are, today, one week into the Obama Administration, with someone in the Oval Office who actually merits respect. Desire for Change. Hope. Powerful, compelling emotions. On reading this report last night, those emotions were swept aside as I looked on my sleeping children with tears in my eyes. The prospects ahead, for ourselves and our children, are quite terrifying if we do not act.

    Amid the struggles for the Stimulus Package and other packages to come, there is one major shining light. The smartest path toward dealing with our economic challenges happens to be the smartest path toward fostering energy security which also is among the smartest options for mitigating global warming.

    Energy efficiency … renewable energy … electrification of transportation (starting with rail) … efficiency in all resource use … There are actions that “we” know to take, that we can take, that we must take.

    While the Stimulus Package is, at this time, “Green” to an extent seemingly unimagineable just a few months ago, we must make it “GREEN” and even “GREENER”. Our best path to making green in the economy, for today and decades to comes, is to go GREEN. And, that path might be our only hope toward avoiding the utter catastrophe that scientific study is laying out as a too likely possibility.

    NOTE: For discussion of this report, see Joe Romm, at Climate Progress, reported on the NOAA article yesterday in NOAA stunner: Climate change “largely irreversible for 1000 years,” with permanent Dust Bowls in Southwest and around the globe. From Joe,

    Bottom line: A few decades of prevention is worth 1,000 years of cure misery.

    Tags: climate change · Global Warming