Debunking Climate Activist Prebunk

"Pick your story: the Four Horsemen or Easter Island."

 

The population of Phoenix adds about 13,270 people per year. The city sits above the ruins of Hohokum cities. With peak populations only the size of Phoenix’s annual growth, they died from resource degradation and drought.

Recently I stumbled upon a petition that was circulating in the run-up to the next UN climate conference (COP-28) to be hosted this fall by the United Arab Emirates.

Dated July 6, 2023, the petition, “Civil Society cross-constituency open letter regarding Article 6.4 of the Paris Agreement” has already garnered 125 signatories, including big names like 350.org, Climate Action Network, Friends of the Earth, Institute for Policy Studies, ETC group, Environmental Defence Canada, and Center for International Environmental Law.

The petition aims to curb UN support of carbon trading markets as a mechanism for reversing climate change and targets “[l]and-based removals, or so-called ‘nature-based solutions’” as presenting too great a moral hazard. The hazard, these groups argue, is that “[t]echnological removals, or geoengineering, provide the illusion that polluters can keep on emitting based on the promise of future technologies that would allow for the removal of carbon from the atmosphere.”

To include removals in such mechanisms is profoundly dangerous, due to continuing concerns about lack of permanence, additionality, the negative impacts and pose high risk on people and the environment, and reliance on speculative technology that is unproven or/and unable to be proven at scale, among others.

Of course, anyone who regularly follows this blog will quickly recognize how false this conception is. While the petitioners raise legitimate concerns about carbon trading, those markets are going through the usual growing pains and winnowing out flaws and bad actors, thanks to auditing firms like Verra, Puro, Nori, Gold Standard and others. This evolutionary process—which is democratic at its core and therefore slower—is ignored by the petitioners.

There is a nastier seam in this controversy, however. That is the (false) notion that all ‘nature-based solutions’ are inherently evil. Neither biochar nor remineralization are “future technologies.” Indeed they are well-proven, carbon-balancing, farming and foresting innovations from indigenous peoples extending back nearly to the last major glaciation event 12,000 years ago.

Moreover, there is a weird controversy circulating among climate activists, even among some climate scientists, that holds out for some modified version of the civilization we know (not quite business as usual—more like voluntary simplicity, but with cars and internet) by arguing that once we reduce our greenhouse gas emissions sufficiently, all will be right with the universe.

Sorry, Virginia, but there is no Santa Claus.

A climate scientist I mentioned this to remarked that “the signatories seem unaware that emission reduction is not capable of delivering a stable climate.” “ERA” (Emission Reductions Alone) is not just inadequate as a policy, but catastrophic. Bill McKibben should know this.

 

Points of no return without carbon dioxide removal (Randers & Goluke 2020).

The atmospheric half-life of a greenhouse gas is the time it takes for half of the gas to be removed from the atmosphere. This can happen through a variety of processes, including chemical reactions, absorption by the oceans, and deposition onto land surfaces.

Here are the atmospheric half-lives of the major greenhouse gases:

• Carbon dioxide (CO2): 120 years

• Methane (CH4): 10.5 years

• Nitrous oxide (N2O): 132 years

• Hydrofluorocarbon-23 (CHF3): 264 years

• Perfluorocarbon-12 (CF2Cl2): 500 years

• Sulfur hexafluoride (SF6): 3,200 years

Here are the relative heat-trapping potentials and concentrations of each:

Greenhouse Gas: potency compared to CO2, present burden, annual additions

• Sulfur hexafluoride: 23,900x, 0.0001 ppm, growing 0.01 ppb/y

• Perfluorocarbon-12: 8,200x, 0.02 ppm, growing 0.04 ppb/y

• Hydrofluorocarbon-23: 11,700x, 0.08 ppm, growing 0.12 ppb/y

• Nitrous oxide: 310x, 0.3 ppm, growing 0.25 ppb/y

• Methane: 25-100x, 1.8 ppm, growing 9 ppb/y

• Carbon dioxide: 1, 415-420 ppm, growing 2.4 ppm/y

There are some nuances I’ll not dive into, like that it takes 8 half-lives for something to decay to less than one percent of its former value; or that Methane decays into two other potent greenhouse gases.

CO2—now double the natural level—would take 120 years to decay to its pre-industrial concentration if human emissions suddenly stopped and tipping elements like permafrost stayed cool. Methane will take about 110 years. Nitrous Oxide—which comes from fertilizers, fossil fuels, and deforestation— will take about 2,640 years were we to give up fertilizers, fossil fuels, and deforestation today.

The Four Horsemen or Easter Island

That said, even eliminating humans would not necessarily restore the comfortable Holocene. If human extinction or a return to the stone age were accomplished by a nuclear exchange—something that is growing in likelihood with each new device created, every nuclear power plant constructed (read: bomb factory), and every confrontation—hot or cold—between nuclear powers—it could deplete the ozone shield that protects all terrestrial life from space radiation.

If the extinction were accomplished by starvation, pestilence, disease and war, the last humans would likely take out every last fish, frog, tree and blade of grass in the futile effort to survive. Pick your story: the Four Horsemen or Easter Island.

A distressing fact is that climate restoration to the Holocene may not even be achievable at this late hour. Given the scale of disturbance we’ve already witnessed, the distribution of temperatures, weather extremes, rainfall and functioning ecosystems would inevitably differ were we to change our ways now in an effort at restoration. What we can try to do is to regenerate a climate roughly as safe as earlier climates experienced by humans. We are not yet doing that. We are still accelerating in the opposite direction.

 

Nuclear energy’s risk of near-term human extinction by accident or miscalculation.

James Hansen, former director of the NASA Goddard Center has created models that strongly indicate that cascading tipping points are likely to take hold well before emissions abatement and carbon removals can scale. He warns about once every month that we are pushing surface temperature to levels beyond the adaptive capacity of ecosystems.

Stephen Salter, Emeritus Professor of Engineering Design at the University of Edinburgh and inventor of the Salter duck wave energy device, quipped:

Hansen’s work shows the extreme importance of getting reliable time travel,  a technology shamefully neglected by our leaders.

Orthodoxy

 

There are no prominent climate scientists who believe that limiting greenhouse gas emissions without active carbon dioxide removal will suffice to reverse climate change. In fact, most climate scientists agree that we need to do both in order to avoid the worst effects of climate change.

• Michael Mann, Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science at Penn State University: "We need to both reduce emissions and remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. We can't do this with emissions alone."

• James Hansen, Distinguished Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University: "We need to start removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as soon as possible. We can't wait until we reach net-zero emissions."

• Katharine Hayhoe, Chief Scientist at the Nature Conservancy: "We need to do everything we can to reduce emissions, but we also need to start removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. This is the only way to avoid the worst effects of climate change.”

The IPCC has also stated that active carbon dioxide removal is essential to avoid the worst effects of climate change. In its Sixth Assessment Report, the IPCC said that "negative emissions technologies will be needed to achieve net-zero emissions by mid-century."

Andrew Yang’s Climate Pla

UN Climate Roadmap (Paris Agreement)

International Energy Agency, Net Zero by 2050

 

World Economic Forum, Net Zero Emissions Milestones

 

Despite this knowledge, Zeke Hausfather, climate scientist at Berkeley Earth Lab and IPCC lead author, tweeted recently:

There is likely no warming "in the pipeline" once emissions get to zero. Rather, CO2 concentrations fall and temperatures stabilize.

Of course, there are some caveats. The zero emissions commitment has some uncertainty (+/- 0.3C) across models. Adding in non-CO2 GHGs complicates the picture. And most scenarios examined focus on limiting warming to ~2C at net zero; higher warming might trigger more feedbacks.

Another caveat is the time it will take to drop temperature back once emissions get to zero. We're not talking a few years, or even a few decades. Absent carbon dioxide removal, it would take centuries to millennia, and the worst is yet to come.

References:

 

Bardeen, C. G., Kinnison, D. E., Toon, O. B., Mills, M. J., Vitt, F., Xia, L., Jägermeyr, J., Lovenduski, N. S., Scherrer, K. J. N., Clyne, M., & Robock, A. (2021). Extreme ozone loss following nuclear war results in enhanced surface ultraviolet radiation. Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, 126(18), e2021JD035079.

Masson-Delmotte, Valérie, et al. Global Warming of 1.5 C: IPCC special report on impacts of global warming of 1.5 C above pre-industrial levels in context of strengthening response to climate change, sustainable development, and efforts to eradicate poverty. Cambridge University Press, 2022.

Randers, J., & Goluke, U. (2020). An earth system model shows self-sustained thawing of permafrost even if all man-made GHG emissions stop in 2020. Scientific Reports, 10(1), 18456.

 

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courtesy Alessio Mamo, The Guardian: Vira Chernukha in Dementiivka

Meanwhile, let’s end this war. Towns, villages, and cities in Ukraine are being bombed every day. Ecovillages and permaculture farms have organized something like an underground railroad to shelter families fleeing the cities, either on a long-term basis or temporarily, as people wait for the best moments to cross the border to a safer place or to return to their homes if that becomes possible. There are 70 sites in Ukraine and 500 around the region. As you read this, 24 Ukrainian ecovillages have given shelter to more than 2500 people (up to 500 children) and now host up to 1400 persons (around 200 children). We call our project “The Green Road.”

For most of the children refugees, this will be their first experience in ecovillage living. They will directly experience its wonders, skills, and safety. They may never want to go back. Those that do will carry the seeds within them of the better world they glimpsed through the eyes of a child.

Those wishing to make a tax-deductible gift can do so through Global Village Institute by going to http://PayPal.me/greenroad2022 or by directing donations to greenroad@thefarm.org.

There is more info on the Global Village Institute website at https://www.gvix.org/greenroad or you can listen to this NPR Podcast and read this recent article in Mother Jones. Thank you for your help.

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The COVID-19 pandemic destroyed lives, livelihoods, and economies. But it has not slowed climate change, a juggernaut threat to all life, humans included. We had a trial run at emergency problem-solving on a global scale with COVID — and we failed. 6.88 million people, and counting, have died. We ignored well-laid plans to isolate and contact trace early cases; overloaded our ICUs; parked morgue trucks on the streets; incinerated bodies until the smoke obscured our cities as much as the raging wildfires. The modern world took a masterclass in how abysmally, unbelievably, shockingly bad we could fail, despite our amazing science, vast wealth, and singular talents as a species.

Having failed so dramatically, so convincingly, with such breathtaking ineptitude, do we imagine we will now do better with climate? Having demonstrated such extreme disorientation in the face of a few simple strands of RNA, do we imagine we can call upon some magic power that will arrest all our planetary-ecosystem-destroying activities?

As the world emerges into pandemic recovery (maybe), there is growing recognition that we must learn to do better. We must chart a pathway to a new carbon economy that goes beyond zero emissions and runs the industrial carbon cycle backward — taking CO2 from the atmosphere and ocean, turning it into coal and oil, and burying it in the ground. The triple bottom line of this new economy is antifragility, regeneration, and resilience. We must lead by good examples; carrots, not sticks; ecovillages, not carbon indulgences. We must attract a broad swath of people to this work by honoring it, rewarding it, and making it fun. That is our challenge now.

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