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Climate Change: Avoiding Catastrophe

Nafeez Ahmed | 28.11.2010 14:37 | Analysis | Climate Chaos | Energy Crisis | Sheffield | World

The revelation that carbon dioxide emissions are set to increase this year by over 3 per cent, despite temporarily falling 1.3 per cent between 2008 and 2009 due to global recession, signals an urgent warning that current efforts on climate change have simply failed. Even while we are still in the midst of recession - where the recovery is so fragile that another bank bailout is being pushed through in hopes of preventing a full-blown eurozone crisis - fossil fuel emissions have never been higher, and are projected to accelerate in coming years.


Officially, climate policy targets are aiming to cap emissions at around 450 parts per million (ppm), which would theoretically prevent global average temperatures rising beyond a 'safe' 2 degrees Celsius. The first problem is that we are long passed the danger point. In mid-2005, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) confirmed that the total atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases (accounting for nitrous oxide, methane and so on) was already 455 ppm. This implies that we are already well on course to surpass 2 degrees.

The second problem is that as a growing number of leading climate scientists are now telling us, climate policy targets lag far behind the peer-reviewed science. The IPCC's and most other conventional climate models used to inform policy, do not sufficiently account for the complex role of uncertainties linked to positive-feedbacks - that is, the capacity of global warming to trigger changes which, in turn, trigger further changes, leading to a self-reinforcing feedback-cycle.

A disturbing body of data indicates that if we stray for too long above 350 ppm, as we are already, we are in grave danger of raising global temperatures by 1C (we are now at 0.8C), triggering exactly such positive-feedbacks with the potential to lead to dramatic, irreversible changes that could possibly culminate in runaway global warming. We don't even need to get to 2C.

James Hansen, who heads the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, warns that if our "present overshoot" of the 350 ppm upper limit "is not brief, there is a possibility of seeding irreversible catastrophic effects." According to a 2009 paper in Nature co-authored by 28 international climate scientists, these effects would include "the risk of irreversible climate change, such as the loss of major ice sheets, accelerated sea-level rise and abrupt shifts in forest and agricultural systems."

It is likely that some of these feedbacks are already underway. The IPCC had originally projected the disappearance of the Arctic's late summer sea ice by the end of the century. But this year, Mark Serreze, head of the US National Snow and Ice Data Center, reported: "The Arctic sea ice has reached its four lowest summer extents (area covered) in the last four years. I stand by my previous statements that the Arctic summer sea ice cover is in a death spiral. It's not going to recover." Scientists fear the summer sea ice could disappear within three years.

The implications could be catastrophic. The accelerating sea ice melt is linked to the thawing of the Arctic permafrost, beneath which is trapped in the form of methane double the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. Current emissions levels, if unchanged, would lead local Arctic temperatures to rise up to around 8C. World permafrost expert Vladimir Romanovsky of the University of Alaska notes that this would be enough for half the world's permafrost to thaw to a depth of several metres, releasing the vast stores of methane into the atmosphere. Another permafrost expert, Ted Schuur of the University of Florida, observes that the process of thawing and methane release could rapidly accelerate over decades, most likely in the form of a 50-year meltdown intensifying due to rapid feedbacks. The result would be a process of irreversible, runaway warming that would make life on earth largely uninhabitable - "Venus syndrome", in Hansen's words.

Unfortunately, even peak oil will not save us. While the International Energy Agency recently confirmed that world crude oil production most likely peaked in 2006 - leading the watchdog's chief economist Fatih Birol to observe that "the age of cheap oil is over" - there is still enough oil shale, tar sands, coal and natural gas to burn through the first quarter of this century. To be sure, that is not long - but it is long enough to potentially push us off a climate cliff.

Rapid decarbonisation of the economy is therefore not an option. It is a last ditch emergency response necessary for our survival in the emerging post-carbon age. But we cannot achieve this as long as we cling to the mantra of unlimited economic growth on a finite planet. As University of Surrey economist Tim Jackson proves in his Prosperity Without Growth, efforts to 'decouple' growth from availability of cheap fossil fuels have not only failed, they have actually gone in reverse.

This means we need to fundamentally re-think the very definition of prosperity if we are to ensure that our children inherit viable societies on a liveable planet. The economics of the fossil fuel age is now obsolete. It needs to be written for the post-carbon age.

Nafeez Ahmed
- Homepage: http://nafeez.blogspot.com/2010/11/avoiding-catastrophe.html

Comments

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Leave the carbon thought trap. Economic blockade!

28.11.2010 17:54

Nafeez

The catastrophe is already here for the majority population on the planet, and when environmentalists talk about "our children's future" it betrays an attachment to the wealth of the minority population. . "Decarbonising the economy" seems to leave the economy intact. De-capitalising life is, I believe, the only option.
We need to go further than "fundamentally re-think the very definition of prosperity". We need to actually re-distribute wealth. It is no coincidence that the capital crisis and the ecological crisis are occurring together. The problem is the Capitalists are reorganising (see  http://ftalphaville.ft.com/blog/2010/11/28/417641/jonathan-wilmot-hell-or-heaven-in-2011-2/#comments) and if their bail-out/austerity response to their crisis is allowed to succede, then the catastrophists of environmentalism will sadly be proved correct- we will be toast.

Our children are currently showing us the way. Come on workers, environmentalists. Economic Blockade for the future of all life on the planet!

local correspondent
- Homepage: http://hebdenheckler.wordpress.com/


Wrong way Hebden

29.11.2010 19:55

80 years ago extreme-right racist dictatorships took power over most parts of West-Europe. According to many marxist analysts, these extreme-right dictatorships were also emanations of capitalism. Still, in face of the tremendous catastrophy that was developing through the Holocaust, there was no time for class struggle or economic blockade. Most communists and socialists from all over the World cooperated with capitalists, religeous people, etc… in order to stop one of the biggest crimes and catastrophies in human history.
We are facing a similar challenge. We need to concentrate all our forces, nationally and internationally, to get the green house gasses concentrations below danger limits. We just have a few years left. The same way the capitalist United States and the capitalist United Kingdom turned their economies into war-economies in order to beat extreme right realm on the main land, the same way we have to turn our economies now into climate-economies. War-economies were caracterised by quite socialist measures like increased state control, state planning, debt financing and taxation financing, factories that were rebuilt in order to supply weaponry, rationing of certain goods, eventually confiscations….
Communists and socialists 80 years ago had the wisdom in face of the danger, to bury their class struggle for some time. I hope they will have the same wisdom today. We need everybody in order to grow the awareness about the state of climate and sustainability emergency. Without that awareness nothing will happen. Those who want to complicate the whole thing by adding some kind of class struggle to it, weaken the movement by deviding it, by shifting the focus away, and by doing so take a very huge responsability on them towards future generations.
Concerning your analytical part :
* as you know is it proper to capitalism that at regular times it gets itself into crisis. To imply that it’s “no coincidence” that the actual crisis of capitalism is occuring together with the ecological crisis, doesn’t stand any scientific marxian critical analysis. The economic crisis of capitalism today has purely economic reasons. The ecological crisis didn’t start today, so talking about coincidance is not at its place. It rather started with the industrialisation and the growth of the World population, indipendent from the system in which it was occuring, a communist or a capitalist.

Beno Klee


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