I’m afraid not. Since we first understood climate change in the 1970s from studying Venus’ and Earth’s atmospheres in detail, humans in the developed world have been too slow, too stupid and too late.
Humans in the developing world have just been trying to survive.
Produced by 13 federal agencies and reluctantly released by the Trump Administration on Black Friday, the Fourth National Climate Assessment reiterates that the effects of global warming are here already, and it poses a profound threat to Americans’ well-being.
The report warns that Earth’s climate is now changing faster than at any point in the history of modern civilization, and much of it results from human activities. Average temperatures in America have increased almost 2°F since WWI.
The report even spelled out financial impacts, saying that climate change could slash up to 10% of our gross domestic product by 2100, or about $2 trillion a year, more than double the losses of the Great Recession a decade ago.
The 1,656-page assessment lays out the devastating effects of a changing climate on the economy, health and the environment. Wildfires off the charts and spreading across the continent, crop failures causing agricultural yields to fall drastically, crumbling infrastructure, disrupted supply chains and U.S. exports, and rising sea level that already threaten coastal areas…the report is pretty clear - ignoring this threat will be costly in both blood and treasure.
We geologists have a good understanding of changes in global temperatures through time (see figure below) and some things are pretty clear.
First, major climatic changes have happened over and over again for the last billion years. Whenever it occurs rapidly, there follows lots and lots of death. We call them major extinction events.
Second, we have been in a major cooling period for the last 10 million years, with glaciation for the last 2.3 million years. Both average temperatures and CO2 levels are quite low relative to most of the past, a rarity in Earth’s history (Judith Parrish and Gerilyn Soreghan).
Third, it’s not about the absolute temperature or the absolute amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. It’s all about the rate of change. Atmospheric CO2 levels have been much higher than today many times in the past. Temperatures have generally been higher in the past. When it does change, every life form adapts to it or dies.
The figure shows our present understanding of the relative changes in global average temperature for the past 550 million years (Paleotemperatures through Time; Berner 2006 and others). Be careful in reading this graph as the time scale is vastly different for each of the five general time segments, going from hundreds of millions of years per segment on the left, to millions of years, to thousands of years, as the more recent periods have greater detail in the data.
The Earth goes through minor changes often within these overall cold or hot periods. So we shouldn’t be worried since this is all natural, right?
Wrong.
The rate of temperature change is pretty fast this time, and the number of species that go extinct is a direct function of the rate at which the temperature changes. We’re seeing serious effects even within a single human lifetime.
We should be very, very concerned. The present rate of change is dramatic even for the big kill times in the distant past. (Remember the last ten thousand years on the graph is really stretched out, so it looks flatter).
Food does not actually come from a supermarket. It comes from the ecosystem, and we need a certain amount of co-existing plants and animals on this planet to live. When too many of those we depend on die too quickly, our own survival is at stake. Bees, which pollinate half of what we eat, are a perfect example.
In a purely selfish way, that’s why everyone needs to care about this. The Earth doesn’t care about us. We have to.
But we are just not ready for this.
Ironically, the only thing that will help us is the very thing that got us into this mess in the first place – energy. Lots and lots of energy. Whether it’s for cooling, for massive irrigation, for desalinization of seawater to make up for the loss of freshwater, building dikes, storm-hardening our infrastructure, moving whole cities to higher ground, trying to remove CO2 from the air, or creating food for billions from algae and cockroaches, pushing back the effects of global temperature increases will require several times the entire energy output of all human history.
Which brings us back to what is a good energy mix that gives us sufficient, reliable power for 10 billion people to survive in a warming world, without trashing the planet even more?
To limit the rise in global mean temperatures to 2°C, the global power sector will need to be virtually decarbonized by mid-century (see figure below). The urgency is clear - in order to limit global warming to only a few degrees, we need to reduce emissions as fast as possible and reach near-zero human-made by 2050.
But the longer we wait to begin decreasing, the faster we have to decrease every year. We have missed the previous two deadlines and 2020 doesn’t look to be on target either, because global emissions are still increasing:
- Coal consumption grew by 36 million tons in 2017
- Natural gas use grew by 96 billion cubic meters in 2017
- Oil consumption grew by 600 million barrels in 2017
The only way to do this is with a mix of technologies including nuclear and renewables. And replacing internal combustion engines with mostly electric vehicles charged with non-fossil fuel-generated electricity.
Nuclear power is already a mature technology and the latest generation designs are even better - they just cannot melt-down. And we know what to do with the waste.
The barriers to deploying more nuclear are political and social, not technical, nor safety, nor scientific. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development projects that, in order to meet any desired emissions goals, the share of nuclear energy in global electricity production needs to rise from about 400 GW to over 1,000 GW by 2050, producing about 9 trillion kWhs/year, at a construction cost of about $8 trillion.
This also assumes wind and solar reach about 2,000 GW each over the same time period, producing a combined 10 trillion kWhs/year at a construction cost of about $20 trillion.
The world’s top climate scientists, including Dr. James Hansen, Dr. Tom Wigley, Dr. Ken Caldeira and Dr. Kerry Emanuel, have all urged world leaders and environmental campaigners to stop their unscientific and ideological attacks on nuclear energy and support its expansion. They have also warned that the anti-nuclear position of environmental leaders is causing unnecessary and severe harm to the environment and to our planet’s future by prolonging carbon emissions.
Even the Union of Concerned Scientists says we need nuclear to address global warming.
What this report drives home is that we ignore them at our own peril.
