Storms of My Grandchildren (26 page)

Figure 21 shows that the region of low temperature in the United States and Canada was the exception, not the rule during the summer of 2009. Indeed, the global average anomaly for June–August 2009 was + 0.6 degree Celsius, making it the second warmest in the period of instrumental data (1880–2009). It may have been a cool summer in the U.S., but unusual cool in one spot does not mean that global warming has gone away. People in the United States need to remember that the entire contiguous forty-eight states represent only 1.5 percent of Earth’s surface.

The message is that we must not confuse weather and climate, which is the average weather. A three-month average, because three months is too brief to average out the effect of slow-moving weather systems, still contains a large amount of weather noise. That is the reason for the blobs of negative and positive temperature anomalies in figure 21. (My relatives in the Midwest just happened to be living under the coldest blob in the world, relative to normal local temperatures, during the summer of 2009.) As a result, when I used a colored die to represent the effect of global warming on the frequency of warm seasons, I showed that one side of the die for the present decade is still blue—at any given location we expect a given season to have about a one-in-six chance of being unusually cool relative to the 1951–1980 climatology.

The gap between public perception and scientific reality is now enormous. While some of the public is just becoming aware of the existence of global warming, the relevant scientists—those who know what they are talking about—realize that the climate system is on the verge of tipping points. If the world does not make a dramatic shift in energy policies over the next few years, we may well pass the point of no return.

A
SIMPLE, CLEAR, URGENT CONCLUSION leaped out from our research on the appropriate target level of atmospheric carbon dioxide: Coal emissions must be phased out as rapidly as possible or global climate disasters will be a dead certainty. The rationale for that statement was straightforward. But would it be clear to the people who need to know, the public and policy makers?

Wrong. The problem is that the act of slowing down emissions, by itself, does almost no good. The reason is that the lifetime of carbon dioxide added to the atmosphere-ocean system is millennia. So it does not matter much whether the fossil fuel is burned this year or next year. Energy efficiency is certainly an essential part of the solution to global warming, but it must be part of a strategic approach that leaves most of the fossil fuels in the ground.

Yes, most of the fossil fuels must be left in the ground. That is the explicit message that the science provides. Once science has delivered this conclusion, should the scientist leave it at that, allowing the politicians to deal with the problem? Any doubt about the right answer to that question should be erased by the experiences I will relate in this chapter.

Figure 22 also shows an estimate for the net amount of carbon that humans have added to the atmosphere from land use—with the primary effect being deforestation that is partially balanced by regrowth. The vertical whisker is an indication of the substantial uncertainty in the net land-use emissions. In the future the land-use bar may get bigger from further deforestation, or it could decrease with the help of improved forestry and agricultural practices.

Unconventional fossil fuels such as tar sands, shale oil, and methane hydrates are not included in figure 22. So far these fuels have barely been tapped and have contributed little to carbon in the air, but their estimated reserves are even greater than those of coal. Policy makers need to understand that these unconventional fossil fuels, which are as dirty and polluting as coal, must be left in the ground if we wish future generations to have a livable planet.

If coal emissions are phased out rapidly—a tall order, but a feasible one—the climate problem is solvable. It is coal emissions that must be eliminated, not necessarily coal use. If the carbon dioxide from coal burning can be captured and safely stored, coal, in principle, could continue to be used. But “carbon capture and sequestration,” as it is called, makes coal use less efficient and much more expensive, because of the energy needed to capture and store the carbon dioxide. It is also important to keep in mind that this process will not eliminate all air and water pollution from coal, nor will it eliminate damage due to coal mining. “Clean coal” is an oxymoron. The clean-coal concept, at least so far, has been an illusion, a diversion that the coal industry and its government supporters employ to allow dirty-coal uses to continue. Present efforts to develop carbon capture and storage, in Germany, the United States, and elsewhere, are more serious, but whether the technology will ever be accepted and adopted on a large scale—given its likely high cost, possible leakage of carbon dioxide from storage sites, and environmental damage from coal mining—are open questions.

There is no need to debate whether carbon capture and sequestration is realistic. The science demands a simple rule: Coal use must be prohibited unless and until the emissions can be captured and safely disposed of. If such a requirement were in place, it is uncertain whether utilities would build more coal-fired power plants—but that decision can be left to the marketplace. The point is that for the sake of our children and grandchildren, we cannot allow our government to continue to connive with the coal industry in subterfuges that allow dirty-coal use to continue.

Carbon dioxide would peak early (about 2025) and at around 400 ppm in the case of the IPCC oil and gas reserves estimate (figure 22). This lower estimate of reserves is relevant if we do not go after every last drop in the ground but instead focus on developing energy sources for the era “beyond fossil fuels.” In this optimistic case, it would be possible to bring carbon dioxide back below the 350 ppm level by the end of this century via an extensive effort to increase storage of carbon in forests and soils. An even earlier return to 350 ppm is conceivable via further actions such as the use of carbon capture and storage at power plants that burn gas, oil, or biofuels. (These cases are discussed in more detail in our 2008 “Target Atmospheric CO2” paper, along with the appropriate qualifications and caveats, especially in the supplementary material.)

Projections such as those in figure 23 are based on models of the carbon cycle that have various uncertainties, including the degree to which Earth’s system will continue to be able to take up carbon when climate change accelerates. These uncertainties are important, but they should remain relatively small if climate change is kept to a minimum, as it would be in the coal phaseout scenarios that we investigate. I also want to emphasize that the use of biofuels should not be at the expense of food crops. Biofuels make global sense only when they are grown on marginal or degraded land or made with fuel derived from waste material.

No. That is not plausible, and here’s why: The large pools of oil and gas are owned by Russia and Middle East countries such as Saudi Arabia. How would we convince them to leave their oil in the ground? It is not going to happen. Besides, we would not want it to happen. We just barely have time to phase in technologies for the era beyond fossil fuels, even if we begin now with an “all hands on deck” strategy. We’re simply not ready to suddenly stop using gas and oil.

So, if we want to solve the climate problem, we must phase out coal emissions. Period.

Coal’s global pollution effects are compounded by the devastating regional effects of the various techniques for dredging the dirty stuff to the surface. The most barbaric approach, mountaintop removal, can only be described as blasphemous, whether or not nature is one’s only religion. Mountaintop-removal mining does more than irreparably scar our mountain ranges. Toxic sludge ponds and mining waste dumped into valleys poison the water supply, causing multiple documented health problems for nearby populations.

While mountaintop removal is an emotional topic, the focus needs to be on the big picture. What policies are needed to rapidly phase out carbon dioxide emissions?

Let me try to clarify matters by recounting my experiences in a few countries. The publicity surrounding the “censorship” episode of January 2006 generated many speaking requests, which I mostly avoided because I was busy working on several scientific papers. But one engaging young British entrepreneur, a certain George Polk, entreated me to help him with a problem that he had set for himself: educating a large number of potentially influential individuals, in a range of professions, about the global climate change issue, with the aim of getting them to help push for “concrete political and social steps to shift the excellent rhetoric we have in the U.K. into action.”

That objective appealed to me. All countries have the same problem: Politicians talk about environmentalism, but their actions are inconsistent with the talk. The U.K. seemed to be the right place to press for real action. The prime minister at the time, Tony Blair, often spoke of the need to combat global warming. And if the U.K. were persuaded about the need for specific actions, it conceivably might have some influence on the United States, its long-standing ally.