As we debate reducing carbon emissions, we set records for producing them. Projections for a hot future keep rising.
This fall the UK's Met Office released updated projections showing global temperature scenarios for 2100 as we continue pumping planet-warming carbon dioxide, CO2, into the atmosphere.
About the same time the Global Carbon Project reported the world's record rate of CO2 production: we are burning ever more fossil carbon coal, oil, and gas to produce energy, and we keep cutting down our forests.
Our activities drive rising atmospheric CO2 levels, which alter the natural carbon cycle that gives us oxygen to breathe, soaks up CO2, and serves as our climate's thermostat. These recently reported CO2 emission rates are beyond the highest 2007 IPCC projections for climate warming carbon emissions.
A Rising Heat Path
The top arrow on the graphic here shows our temperature pathway unless we radically change our ways.
Changing our ways means reducing our use of fossil fuels, finding alternative energy sources on a massive scale, capturing and storing the carbon pollution from coal burning, and using energy much more efficiently than we do now.
Even if we change how we use energy, a hot future awaits. We will also need to adapt, change how and where we live.
10 Degrees Warmer
According to the Met Office scenario, at current emission rates (emissions rising by 132 percent) temperature increases by the end of this century will range between 5.5 and 7.1 degrees C. (9.9 to 12.7 degrees F.)
Let's just say 10 degrees F. warmer for discussion sake.
Even if we reduce our mid-century emissions to levels of 20 years ago, we can still expect to see temperature rises at century's end of 2.9 to 3.8 degrees C. (5.2 to 6.8 degrees F.) But our emissions are way higher than 1990 levels now. Can we actually lower emissions, let alone flatten them?
My children's children will be alive in 2100. What kind of world will they live in when when temperatures are 10 degrees (F.) higher?
Barring some radical shift in the way we acquire and use energy, our world is on track to become a different place for people, plants, animals, and the ecosystems we inhabit and need for survival.
Food, Water, People?
A 10-degree rise, arriving so quickly, will make it virtually impossible to dependably grow cereal grain crops in the places where we grow them now. A 10-degree temperature rise will,
according to the IPCC, cause crop yield declines in all regions, and increasingly rain will fall in deluges, not at all, or at the wrong time.
We count on reliable rain to fill our rivers and lakes and to make our crops grow.
World population is now about 6.8 billion people, and by mid-century projections have us between nine and 10 billion. Given these temperature scenarios, one wonders where the food and water will come from to keep us all alive.
We already see
signs and harbingers in places like slowly-flooding Bangladesh, dessicated southeast Australia, and our own drying Southwest. Ice caps are melting, mountain glaciers and snowpacks are shrinking, and coral reefs are dying as ocean waters warm and acidify. The rising number of accompanying floods, droughts, and fires becomes just so much background noise on a changing planet.
CO2 Needs a Face
In December 2008 policymakers gathered in Poland to again try setting standards for limiting future carbon emissions. They tried, they talked, they set no standards. Setting policy for limiting emissions is an excruciatingly hard challenge, like herding cats. Global warming is a creeping, invisible change that wraps itself around us so slowly and incrementally we don't notice the world has changed before our eyes. If only CO2 had a face, and was something we could see and recognize, perhaps progress could result. We could see what we are aiming at.
Though we cannot see it, it surrounds us, lasts for many decades, and we see only its effects. Trying to reduce the presence of something we cannot see or smell presents frustration, and the effects of our work may not be seen until long after we are gone.
CO2 becomes a legacy challenge. We add it to the atmosphere today as a sort of perverse gift to future generations. If we try now to reduce its presence, the effects of our work likely will be seen only by those who come after us, our children and theirs.
If we could see it would it matter? Pink or not, as each year passes and we fail to change our ways, our emissions path, we lose time to act.
Ten degrees warmer could produce a world we don't recognize.
The road ahead is long, and steep. We may not stabilize emissions in my life, or in my children's. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't try.
What we try now will help us realize what work remains, and what kind of world our heirs inherit.
-DD
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