From the Peter Foster column, The Copenhagen emissions gap, in the Financial Post comes the following graph, which compares what the Copenhagen Accord says we need to do regarding emissions to avoid severe climate impacts, and what the IEA says we’re on a path to do:
I feel compelled to point out yet again that the 2C/450 ppm line in the sand is not nearly as certain as a lot of people would like us to believe; increasingly, it feels like an exercise in whistling past a graveyard. We’re currently at a warming of about 0.8C above pre-industrial times, and we’re already awash in “it’s worse than we thought” observations, with decades of additional warming already unavoidable, barring the extremely rapid, massive roll out of a CO2 extraction technology.[1] I find it increasingly hard to convince myself that the “right” level of CO2, meaning one that avoids catastrophic sea level rise, a freshwater crisis far worse than the drought gripping various places around the world today, acidified oceans, increasingly severe tropical storms, etc., isn’t much closer to James Hansen’s 350 ppm than the “official” level of 450 ppm. In other words, since we’re currently right around 390 ppm, the chances are good that we’ve already passed the maximum “acceptable” CO2 level.
For those who didn’t get the perhaps too subtle title, it’s a reference to one of my favorite moments in a movie, the scene in Apollo 13 where an engineer and one of the astronauts not on the mission are struggling to come up with a way to power-up the Command Module, and the engineer finally says in exasperation, “You’re telling me what you need, and I’m telling you what you’ve got.” In the case of our emissions, far too many people are still saying, in effect, that because it’s too “hard” (read:expensive or inconvenient) to decarbonize at the rate science says we must that we therefore “need” to emit a lot of CO2 for decades. What we’ve got, in terms of our remaining emissions allowance, is far less. Spaceship Earth, like Apollo 13, illustrates what happens when a human view of the universe comes into conflict with the universe itself.
[1] I’ve become convinced that the single least convenient fact about climate change is CO2′s long atmospheric lifetime. Virtually every time I talk to a newcomer about climate change I find that he or she holds the often unstated assumption that if we got serious about CO2 and cut emissions “a lot” that the level of it in the atmosphere would drop in a matter of weeks or months and we’d be well on our way to defusing climate change. The fact that we’re locked into our past and current emissions essentially forever in human terms almost universally terrifies lay people when they first hear it.
Carbon capture… it’s the only way.
It’s like the Kobayashi Maru test; you tell people willing to listen the details of what we face and they are stunned that there is no option to hit 350 ppm that also preserves their current western world way of life…
The Yooper
Re your footnote, I assume you’re familar with John Sterman’s work documenting the perceptual error. Also, have you read the latest from Solomon et al. (Hansen ed.) detailing the GHG lifetime issue and its implications?
BMUS: I assume that by “carbon capture” you’re not talking about CCS, but extracting CO2 from the air and then sequestering it, to lower the atmospheric level, right?
Daniel: Bingo!
Steve: Nope, I haven’t seen either one. If you can, please provide links. I should be able to track down Sterman’s work, but I’m puzzled that I missed something by (Susan?) Solomon and Hansen. They’re both people I try to pay attention to.
The paper is here.
Sterman’s site is here. His on-line pubs page has pdfs of everything. My favorites are “Understanding Public Complacency About Climate Change: Adults’ mental models of climate change violate conservation of matter” and “Why Don’t Well-Educated Adults Understand Accumulation? A Challenge to Researchers, Educators, and Citizens.” Check out the CO2 flight simulator also.
BMUS:
We already have carbon capture. In fact, it is that carbon capture which has made this planet hospitable to human life. It’s called taking carbon out of the atmosphere, turning it into oil and coal, and sequestering it underground.
What we are hell-bent on is uncapturing it, make no mistake, and with grand delusions about CCS we’re trying to have our cake and eat it.
But even if, in a moment of wild desperation, we countenance a technofix to bury carbon, we need to ask a few salient questions.
Given that the CO2 we’ve already spewed into the atmosphere will affect the climate for tens, nay, hundreds, of thousands of years, how long do we have to store it for, and what leakage rates are acceptable? How long do we have to run a pilot project for before deciding that we can safely sequester it for a one or two orders of magnitude longer than the lifetime of any human technological society?
I think that this pretty much rules out CCS and nuclear technofixes as reckless gambles.
Lou has also said a few good words on CCS in this blog. For example, “Carbon capture: Easier said than done”:
http://www.grinzo.com/energy/index.php/2010/06/28/carbon-capture-easier-said-than-done/
Steve: Thanks for the help.
Phil: Some of the “little” details about CCS are, I think, too often overlooked. High on my list is one you mentioned, leakage. If you’re trying to store a gas underground essentially forever, then even a low leakage rate turns out to be a very big deal over decades. Funny how math works that way.
Lou, Phil — that is why it is tendentious to ignore surface sequestration, which has, so to speak, up and demonstrated itself (http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2005AGUFM.B33A1014W ).
It would *not* be tendentious to speak *only* of surface sequestration, and ignore the fluid-burying schemes.
GRLC: And what amount of CO2 can surface sequestration accomplish? The abstract you linked to refers to 100 million tons/year of carbon, which is a pittance compared to the roughly ten of billion ton of C emitted from energy use worldwide every year.
And how many years in a row can we sequester another 100 million tons of C via this mechanism? In other words, does it scale in time?
Schemes like that feel like the plans to converts everyone very quickly to driving a hybrid or other 50 MPG car. In absolute terms it sounds great, but compared to what we need to do and the time we have left in which to do it, it’s not nearly as promising.
“The abstract you linked to refers to 100 million tons/year of carbon …”
As a by-effect. The idea of CCS is that the C is S’d as the main effect.
Because capture is thermodynamically favoured, and the leakage that, according to Phil, “pretty much rules out CCS” is TD’ly forbidden, it’s pretty much ruled in, is it not?
GRLC: This is getting tiresome.
How much CO2 this technique can sequester, on a continual basis, how sure we can be that it will remain sequestered, and what it will cost to implement it on the scale given by your answer to the “how much” question. If those answers, supported by independent experts, show this to be a viable part of dealing with CO2, then that’s great news. If you can’t make a solid case for it, then stop wasting everyone’s time.
Remember:
Not enough sequestration per year = not interesting.
Not enough sequestration over many years = not interesting.
Sequestration that isn’t permanent = not interesting.
Sequestration that’s too expensive = not interesting.
Excellent piece Lou. A grim chart (based on its implications for CO2 levels, current emissions behavior and the idea that we need to turn this thing around in time) – we’re so going in the wrong direction.
That CO2 lifetime is one of those things the general public is normally totally unaware of (along with the length of time the world will continue to warm if we stopped all CO2 emissions immediately, which would be 30-40 more years of warming. I find this second fact normally elicits a stunned response as the consequences – at a very surface level – are thought about a little, at least).