Essay About Choosing Our Future
This Hub is the final part of a larger series examining in detail Mark Lynas’s 2008 classic, Six Degrees. The book looks at what science says about the consequences of various levels of climate change, from one degree of warming to the six degrees of the title. The ‘main article’ describes and evaluates the book as a whole, chapter by chapter.
Each chapter also has a summary Hub, which gives Lynas’s points in tabular form for easy reference. Because the science has been rapidly advancing, and continues to do so, I will provide periodic updates, usually in these ‘summary’ Hubs. (Note: the first update has been posted; see below.)
The present Hub is the summary for the crucial final chapter, Choosing Our Future. It’s about options: what can humans do to improve our chances of a reasonably prosperous and secure future?
Lynas, always a realist, gives unblinking assessments of our choices–but still finds possibilities for hope.
Note–Update, 12/14/13: Making realistic choices about our future is far more urgent than most of us realize. As shown in the table below, Lynas assessed the available time for emissions reductions as being roughly “a decade.” That time frame seems seems as realistic as it is dismaying, according to the recently released draft of the International Panel on Climate Change’s Fifth Assessment Report. (The “IPCC AR5,” for short.)
Given this urgency, I’m placing this update before the summary table, in order to highlight it as much as I can.
A really excellent summary of the AR5 was made by Canadian blogger Steve Easterbrook. It can be found via the sidebar link at the right. In this update I will focus on one implication of AR5, as highlighted by Mr. Easterbrook’s comments. It is his point #8:
To stay below 2°C of warming, most fossil fuels must stay buried in the ground.
That is a radical idea; rarely, if ever, have humans collectively deliberately renounced a wealth-creating resource available for the exploitation–let alone one which is central to the existing economy. But that is what the science says.
Two degrees of warming is the consensus ‘danger level.’ Partly that reflects the fact that costs begin rapidly to escalate beyond that amount of warming; partly it reflects the possibility (discussed in considerable detail by Mr. Lynas) that that may be enough warming to trigger climate feedbacks that would make yet more warming inevitable even without additional greenhouse gas emissions.
And what is the “cumulative emissions budget” for 2 degrees?
AR5 gives the budget in terms of probabilities, since there are still too many uncertainties for complete precision. To have one chance in three of avoiding 2 C, we must not emit more than 880 gigatons of carbon to the atmosphere. If that seems a bit risky–as it seems to this writer!–then we can flip the odds to 2 chance in three by holding emissions to just 800 gigatons.
The trouble is, we’ve already emitted 500 gigatons since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, leaving a budget of only 300 gigatons. Unfortunately, proven reserves amount to three times that amount, amply validating Lynas’ 2008 assessment that peak oil will not save us.
Mr. Easterbrook summarizes this well, if not encouragingly:
There is no political or economic system anywhere in the world currently that can persuade an energy company to leave a valuable fossil fuel resource untapped. There is no government in the world that has demonstrated the ability to forgo the economic wealth from natural resource extraction, for the good of the planet as a whole. We’re lacking both the political will and the political institutions to achieve this. Finding a way to achieve this presents us with a challenge far bigger than we ever imagined.
Nevertheless, there are options, and even some reasons for hope. Some are given by Mr. Lynas; others will be subject for future updates. Read on, and ‘stay tuned.’
Summary Table for “Choosing Our Future”
| Section | Content |
|---|---|
| Intro–p. 269 | It is probably too late for “the Alpine glaciers, the Nebraska grazing lands, and the resplendent coral reefs.” Perhaps too late for the Arctic ice cap. Possibly (by the Pliocene analogy) it is too late too avoid 3 C warming–and an eventual 25 meters of sea level rise. “My conclusion in this book… is that we have less than a decade remaining to peak and begin cutting global emissions. This is an urgent timetable, but not an impossible one. It seems to me that the dire situation that we find ourselves in argues no for fatalism, but for radicalism.” |
| Knowing What we Don’t Know–p. 271 | Uncertainties affecting the prediction of climate change and its speed: future emissions, climate sensitivity, aerosols, characteristic time scales. |
| Setting A Target–p. 275 | Why avoid 2 C warming? Because Amazonian collapse–considered possible at such a level–could yield 250 ppm CO2, and an additional 1.5 C warming. (Presto! We’d be in the 4 C world.) Permafrost melt could then do likewise. (Hey! 5 C!) Would that perhaps then lead to methane hydrate release and a 6 C ‘extinctron’ world? “Contraction and convergence” is explained on p. 281. In essence, the historic emitters would cut emissions much more heavily in proportion to countries in the developing world. Overall emissions would contract and per capita emissions would converge Carbon trading would allow for flexibility and economic efficiency. “The poor would get equality, while all (including the rich) would get survival.” |
| A Reality Check–p. 282. | Kicking fossil fuels is hard, and for good reason–they provide enormous benefits and are intertwined with modern life in innumerable ways. |
| States of Denial–p. 286. | The psychology of climate denialism (mostly as phenomenon, not as an organized ideology.) “…one could argue that the whole economic system of modern Western society is founded on denial, in particular the denial of resource limitations. Schoolchildren are taught–and Nobel Prize-winning economics professors apparently still believe–that Earth-provided resources, from iron ore to fisheries, come into the category of “free goods,” appearing as if by magic at the start of the economic process.” |
| Peak Oil, p. 290. | Rarity of oil fields discussed. However: “The picture is complicated, but it seems unlikely that peak oil will save us from global warming. Even if cheap oil does indeed begin to run out sooner rather than later, the world is a long way from running short of hydrocarbons. More’s the pity.” |
| Knocking In Wedges, p. 293. | Useful discussion of Socolow and Pacala’s ‘Stabilization Wedges’ concept. In it, each technology/technique for reducing emissions by one billion tonnes of carbon by 2055 counts as a ‘wedge.’ As of writing ‘6 Degrees,’ seven wedges were needed to stabilize emissions by 2055. All represent existing technologies or practices. (See list of wedges below.) |
