So what would constitute a climate solution?
Even if rich countries somehow achieve zero emissions, the developing countries attempting to modernize are likely to continue burning their own coal and oil. (They already emit more than half of the yearly total).
Some will surely continue doing this for many decades, so we must continuously bury equivalent amounts of carbon dioxide elsewhere. Any “climate solution” that does not handle out-of-control emissions is unworthy of the name.
The obvious climate fix is to clean up the 43 percent carbon dioxide excess, taking it out of circulation to reverse the overheating and most of sea level rise. And then continuing to counter the out-of-control emissions. An emergency cleanup of the atmosphere is also the only intervention that stands a chance of reversing ocean acidification.
And unless we clean things up in the next decade or two, as today’s cute toddlers grow up, we stand a good chance of losing any ability to keep climate from spiraling into irreversible disaster. Like rotten teeth, climate disasters can become pretty ugly. Many of us will not survive the population crash.
What we need is a paradigm shift. The old one is plainly inadequate, dangerously so.
Most suggestions for what to do about climate were not created by the climate experts. They were carried over from the excellent 1970 environmental agenda and given new urgency.
Indeed, most climate scientists consider climate repairs as outside their expertise, someone else's business. The low emission scenarios they endorse are simply the low end of the scenarios crafted by the economists—which, for the mid-century time frame, are about as effective as a placebo drug.
Nonetheless, climate scientists are going to be the most knowledgeable people available to critique a climate repair proposal. Some cautions, however: Ph.D. scientists’ training is not about giving timely advice. Instead we’re supposed to take the time to be dead sure.
We are seldom trained in crisis management, where decisions must be made in a hurry, balancing the time it takes to investigate further with the time window within which you can still act effectively. We are, however, excellent critics.
But as my medical school colleagues emphasize, he who hesitates to act until dead sure of the diagnosis can wind up with a dead patient. Curiously, a carbon dioxide cleanup is seldom mentioned by anyone. Ever wonder why? Scrubbers that remove carbon dioxide from the air are standard on submarines. But to clean up the planet’s air, massive amounts of new power would be needed to run enough of them. It would have to be clean power; run them with fossil fuels and the effort will just make things worse. That much clean power takes decades to build.
Given the increasingly extreme weather, our civilization could be in deep trouble by the time massive scrubbers began scrubbing.
Nature’s scrubbing system mostly uses leaves and algae to remove carbon dioxide from the air. Photosynthesis releases the oxygen from the CO2 molecule while incorporating the carbon into sugar and such.
The obvious strategy is more leaves and more algae. Freeman Dyson laid out the reforestation strategy in 1977. But with the accumulation since then, planting more forests has become too little, too late. To do the job, we would need to quickly double the world’s forests –and then prevent them from rotting and burning. Currently, we cannot prevent this from happening even in rain forests like the Amazon.
Fire and drought are not a problem in the ocean. Algae can, in 24 hours, double and redouble their numbers. But the prospects for fertilizing enough blooms of algae have not looked good.
Only about one-fourth of the new life manages to settle into deep waters before decomposing. Removing the excess carbon via settling alone would require a four-fold increase in productivity for 20 years in all the oceans, 71 percent of the earth’s surface. Not likely.
Perhaps you see now why cleanup possibilities are seldom mentioned by the experts. Only fans of the apocalypse (remember Aum Shinriyko?) could like our present situation. We are just about out of repair options capable of quickly resetting our climate–but not entirely.
For climate disease, there is no doubt remaining about the diagnosis: global overheating, mostly from an insulating blanket of the carbon dioxide produced by burning fossil fuels. That’s what stirs up such knock-on effects as extreme weather and expanding subtropical deserts.
It's now dishonest to claim that the overheating hypothesis fails, just because some line of evidence seems dubious to you. Even if you were right to be suspicious, there would still be a dozen independent lines of evidence, all firmly pointing at global warming destroying the climate that supports 7 billion people. Anyone still dubious about global warming immediately labels themselves as either a quarter-century out of date or a profit-making promoter of climate confusion.
The climate scientists’ forecast is also impressive–so far as it goes. However, their state-of-the-art climate simulations leave out components where they are not sure enough about the numbers. "When in doubt, leave it out." Vicious-cycle feedback loops were originally omitted as insufficiently understood.
When only the slow accumulation of heat-trapping gases are included in simulations, it’s no surprise that they show the heat waves slowly getting worse.
But what’s left out of most simulations are the equally important rapid change mechanisms, where good numbers are still hard to come by. “Are you really, really sure?” pressures have only aggravated the experts’ understatement of our climate problem.
A familiar example of the forecast's incompleteness is the loss of Arctic summer sea ice, long predicted to disappear sometime after 2100. Instead, the track record since 2000 suggests the ice might disappear in the next decade. Obviously, something was left out of the simulation forecast. The Arctic overheating is already causing strange winter weather farther south.
We also cannot count on gradual transitions like the ones seen in current climate simulations. When forced to move, climate can jump into a new regime with no warning. For example, the world drought acreage suddenly doubled during 1982 and has never gone back . It does not require a sudden jump in temperature to trigger such a change-of-state transition.
What makes them sudden? Vicious-cycle feedback loops are often involved but a shift in the winds will suffice. Air and ocean circulation patterns can radically shift in mere months (a big El Niño is the classic example). If you live somewhere that fails to get its usual wind-borne delivery of ocean moisture, you will experience drought, wildfires, and crop failures. Somewhere else, they get flash floods and soil erosion. In human terms, one region's loss is not another's gain.
No one has a clue about when additional climate jumps will occur as the overheating continues. The obsession with precise numbers usually causes the subject to be omitted from the climate forecast.
Is this “scientific understatement” wise, when it amounts to seeing fire but reporting smoke? Physicians would not omit a warning simply because they couldn’t attach reliable numbers to it. Using the slow-only simulations as a forecast is grossly inadequate to the task of warning the public and policymakers of the dangers ahead.
Thus the typical climate forecast ought to be firmly labeled “At least this bad but probably worse.” And probably sooner, too. We must bear in mind that the extreme weather episodes that are forecast for 2028 could happen this year instead.
In our race to overheat the planet, hot spots have developed. Unless you reside on a yacht, you probably live atop one.
A fireplace is merely a mini hot spot. As warm air rises, cooler air comes rushing in to replace it (the “draw”). With hotter spots, you get a stronger breeze.
The planet’s new hot spots are, naturally enough, busy rearranging when the winds blow and where the rain falls. Climate change, in other words. (Climate is what you expect. Weather is what you get.)
Since 1977, the continents have been warming twice as fast as the ocean surface.
Global mean temperature rise (AKA global warming) is just the weighted sum of land and sea surface temperature averages; there is twice as much ocean surface as land. So the difference between land and sea continued to increase. And thus the temperature contrast across coastlines.
That can strengthen the moisture-laden winds coming off the ocean. But a stronger wind need not follow the customary path and may well deliver its moisture somewhere else.
Result? Some places will get unexpected rain, others will lack enough. Flood here, drought there, and who knows when?
This generality tells us quite a lot about what’s ahead. Even minor rearrangements in wind can produce trouble. Change the month when the rains arrive and fields that supported two crops each year may only support one, cutting food yield in half.
Note that no change in the annual rainfall is required for trouble—nor does it take extreme weather, as when prolonged heat waves suck all of the water out of the topsoil so that plants collapse.
Were a new pattern of moisture delivery to stick around for decades, we might slowly adapt. But no. That’s because the laggard in the global warming race just keeps falling further behind with the years, thanks to all of that evaporative cooling of the ocean surface and its greater heat capacity.
As long as “Hot-Spot Temperature” keeps increasing its lead over “Sea Surface Temperature” in this horse race to Hell, the strengthening temperature contrast over coastlines will keep producing newer and newer patterns of moisture delivery. Tracking a staggering target is far more difficult than slow adaptation to a new arrangement.
Welcome to climate instability, where all bets are off because history doesn’t help anymore.
There will be many more bad years for regional agriculture. And that increases the chance of a global bad year, as when Russia and the U.S. both got hit in 2010.
You would think that governments would return to stockpiling grain, and on a far grander scale than the pharaoh’s seven-year plan. Consider what can happen to governments relying on just-in-time supply lines.
The record heat of summer 2010 led to food shortages the following winter—and the world turned out to be surprisingly vulnerable, with lethal food riots in many countries. By the spring of 2011, a number of improvident governments started falling.
Projecting ahead, enough repetition of extreme weather—hurricanes and windstorms, deluge and drought, heat wave and Arctic outbreak—can seriously disorganize our civilization. They can lead to instant slums, a failing economy, climate refugees, resource wars, and a great difficulty in getting anything done—even crucial climate repairs.
Before collapse threatens in the emergency room, physicians institute a number of measures to “stabilize the patient.” You have to start them early to avoid the slippery slope to shock. For climate, we now need that crisis-manager way of thinking, but there is not much of it to be seen in those voluminous climate reports.
Prevention measures such as emissions reduction no longer suffice, however important they remain for the long run. To get there, however, we now need climate repairs, such as cleaning up the 43% excess of carbon dioxide that has accumulated in the air, in order to back us out of the danger zone.
The standard “take” on climate’s future by most well-informed people currently rests on predicted climate at mid-century, a gradual approach to it, and preventing worse through reduced emissions. That won’t do anymore.
In this new era of climate instability, don’t make the mistake of thinking things will change gradually. Or predictably. Or that prevention is still the obvious answer. Think repair and restoration.
William H. Calvin is a professor emeritus at the University of Washington’s medical school in Seattle and the author of Global Fever: How to Treat Climate Change (University of Chicago Press, 2008). The latest version of the CO2 cleanup was a finalist in MIT's 2013 climate contest.
