Steve Easterbrook has a short, terrific piece up about Bill Gates’ recent opining about how we need “innovation not insulation”, Bill Gates is very wrong (emphasis added):
In a blog post that was picked up by the Huffington post, Bill Gates writes about why we need innovation, not insulation. He sets up the piece as a choice of emphasis between two emissions targets: 30% reduction by 2025, and 80% reduction by 2050. He argues that the latter target is much more important, and hence we should focus on big R&D efforts to innovate our way to zero-carbon energy sources for transportation and power generation. In doing so, he pours scorn on energy conservation efforts, arguing (effectively) that they are a waste of time. Which means Bill Gates didn’t do his homework.
What matters is not some arbitrary target for any given year. What matters is the path we choose to get there. This is a prime example of the communications failure over climate change. Non-scientists don’t bother to learn the basic principles of climate science, and scientists completely fail to get the most important ideas across in a way that helps people make good judgements about strategy.
The key problem in climate change is not the actual emissions in any given year. It’s the cumulative emissions over time. The carbon we emit by burning fossil fuels doesn’t magically disappear. About half is absorbed by the oceans (making them more acidic). The rest cycles back and forth between the atmosphere and the biosphere, for centuries. And there is also tremendous lag in the system. The ocean warms up very slowly, so it take decades for the Earth to reach a new equilibrium temperature once concentrations in the atmosphere stabilize. This means even if we could turn off emissions today, the earth would keep warming for decades, and wouldn’t cool off again for centuries. It’s going to be tough adapting to the warming we’re already committed to. For every additional year that we fail to get emissions under control we compound the problem.
Bingo!
I often mention (read: stand on the table and scream about) the very points Steve makes above–the huge latency in the Earth system, the long lifetime of CO2 emissions, the need to think in terms of total emission, the “area under the curve” approach, etc.
Somewhat more generally, I think there’s a basic conceptual toolkit that we all need in talking about this stuff beyond the average depressingly shallow newspaper article or (shudder) blog posting:
- A firm grasp of the difference between stocks and flows. This shows up most obviously and often when talking about peak oil and the oil sands. Proponents of the virtually infinite oil supply mind set love to talk about how there’s this immense amount of oil in Canada or Colorado or wherever. While true–that oil really is there–it’s a simplistic view that ignores the nasty reality that we don’t directly consume a stock of oil in the ground (or in an ultra deepwater well or …); we consume a flow of oil derived from that stock. If you found a deposit of oil that was a trillion barrels of very high quality crude, but you could extract it at a paltry pace of only a million barrels a day (about 1.2% of current world consumption) it would have virtually no effect on the peak oil situation.
- An appreciation for really large numbers. I know this sounds silly, but it’s a pervasive, nasty problem that everyone who writes about energy and environmental issues has to struggle with. We’re constantly looking for ways to humanize numbers by saying things like, “the new wind farm will produce enough electricity to supply 10,000 average homes”, or “this project will reduce CO2 emissions by X tons per year, the equivalent of taking Y cars off the road”, etc. Human beings who lack specific training very often have trouble with large units (e.g. tons instead of pounds or kilograms), and large quantities. The ultimate examples of this are reports of Antarctica losing 189 billion tons of ice per year, for example. There, we’re stuck with both big numbers and big units.
- An intuitive grasp of timing. As Steve mentions above, we’re already behind a really big eight-ball on the climate front, thanks to the timing involved. I doubt many people appreciate just how bad it is. On a related note, this is why I mention the 40% bonus we’ve arbitrarily allotted ourselves by fixating on the year 2100. (40% of the warming from our CO2 emissions up to 2100 will only happen after that date.)
- An understanding of how precarious an equilibrium can be. I’ve mentioned before the old analogy of the bowl vs. the dome, and how the steady drip of “it’s worse than we thought” climate revelations strongly suggests that our situation is more like a ball on top of a dome instead of a ball at the bottom of a bowl. It might not take too much more jostling of the system before we kick off a feedback, like Arctic methane, that sends the ball rolling off the dome and us away from the equilibrium state we call home.
- Related to the prior point is the interconnectedness of the Earth system. I often joke that “everything is a function of everything else”, which is obviously not literally true, but it hints at the direction we should be leaning. Human beings tend to isolate and compartmentalize things–other people (sometimes with horrific results), technologies, government vs. NGOs vs. big business vs. small business vs. consumers, etc. Such abstractions can often be useful in understanding our world, but they can also lead us to make false assumptions about the nature of the world and the degree to which all those boxes on our org charts interact.
- Finally, respect for how little reality cares about what we need or want. The indifference of the universe to humanity is both breathtaking and terrifying; the less we think in terms of “humanity getting what it deserved for mistreating the planet” or “everything will work out just fine on its own” or any of the other fairy tales that have run rampant in our collective consciousness, the better.
Oh, and as for Bill Gates: Why should we pay attention to him on this issue? His company brought us Clippy the Office “assistant”, Microsoft Bob, and an operating system that has more security and usability holes than a wheel of Swiss cheese the size of the Large Hadron Collider. It be in our own best interest if we ditched the absurd implicit assumption that “rich guy” = “knows a lot about everything and we should therefore pay attention to what he says”.
