Guardian UK: Climate chaos is inevitable. We can only avert oblivion

[marmar]

Climate chaos is inevitable. We can only avert oblivion
At best we will limit the extent of global warming, but Kyoto barely helps. Does humanity have the foresight to save itself?

Mark Lynas The Guardian, Thursday June 12 2008

Sometimes we need to think the unthinkable, particularly when dealing with a problem as dangerous as climate change - there is no room for dogma when considering the future habitability of our planet. It was in this spirit that I and a panel of other specialists in climate, economics and policy-making met under the aegis of the Stockholm Network thinktank to map out future scenarios for how international policy might evolve - and what the eventual impact might be on the earth's climate. We came up with three alternative visions of the future, and asked experts at the Met Office Hadley Centre to run them through its climate models to give each a projected temperature rise. The results were both surprising, and profoundly disturbing.

We gave each scenario a name. The most pessimistic was labelled "agree and ignore" - a world where governments meet to make commitments on climate change, but then backtrack or fail to comply with them. Sound familiar? It should: this scenario most closely resembles the past 10 years, and it projects emissions on an upward trend until 2045. A more optimistic scenario was termed "Kyoto plus": here governments make a strong agreement in Copenhagen in 2009, binding industrialised countries into a new round of Kyoto-style targets, with developing countries joining successively as they achieve "first world" status. This scenario represents the best outcome that can plausibly result from the current process - but ominously, it still sees emissions rising until 2030.

The third scenario - called "step change" - is worth a closer look. Here we envisaged massive climate disasters around the world in 2010 and 2011 causing a sudden increase in the sense of urgency surrounding global warming. Energised, world leaders ditch Kyoto, abandoning efforts to regulate emissions at a national level. Instead, they focus on the companies that produce fossil fuels in the first place - from oil and gas wells and coal mines - with the UN setting a global "upstream" production cap and auctioning tradable permits to carbon producers. Instead of all the complexity of regulating squabbling nations and billions of people, the price mechanism does the work: companies simply pass on their increased costs to consumers, and demand for carbon-intensive products begins to fall. The auctioning of permits raises trillions of dollars to be spent smoothing the transition to a low-carbon economy and offsetting the impact of price rises on the poor. A clear long-term framework puts a price on carbon, giving business a strong incentive to shift investment into renewable energy and low-carbon manufacturing. Most importantly, a strong carbon cap means that global emissions peak as early as 2017.

This "upstream cap" approach is not a new idea, and our approach draws in particular on a forthcoming book by the environmental writer Oliver Tickell. However, conventional wisdom from governments and environmental groups alike insists that "Kyoto is the only game in town", and that proposing any alternative is dangerous heresy. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jun/12/climatechange.scienceofclimatechange

[Boomer]

1. If only it really worked this way

"Instead of all the complexity of regulating squabbling nations and billions of people, the price mechanism does the work: companies simply pass on their increased costs to consumers, and demand for carbon-intensive products begins to fall."

The expectation that people can simply stop using fossil fuel ignores the fact that we have created a infrastructure in which people have few if any practial alternatives right now. All the potential of wind and solar isn't going to help my next-door-neighbor get to his job when we have no public transportation and no one in this blue-collar area can afford to buy a hybrid car.

[pscot]

2. No amount of planning can save us from

the consequences of what we have done. The human race is about to take a hit, the like of which we have never experienced.

[stuntcat]

3. the sooner that happens..

the sooner we're knocked back to the middle ages then the sooner the other species could still have a chance. I'm afraid the burnout will be long and slow though, and 30 years from now some 1st-worlders will still be denying what we're doing, or saying it doesn't matter thanks to God. Yeah, God's very image will cause a mass-extinction and trash it's beautiful home :eyes: We are the biggest disaster Earth's ever had.. I hope we're a stupid experiment and the planet will churn us up soon then start over in another 1,000 years.

( Sorry y'all, I'm really upset lately)

[losthills]

4. You have to realize that the carbon in the atmosphere NOW

is going to remain there for 100 to 200 years no matter what we do. And the poles are already melting. Global warming is a done deal, and something we are going to have to adapt to. You can't just stop a train with that kind of inertia. Some the things coming out now regarding releases of methane lead me to doubt that we even have the capacity to slow it down. Buddhism is the only logical response I see if I think about it too much...

[Zachstar]

5. Lets not be all doom and gloom shall we?

#1 C02 can be easily removed from the atmosphere if the right process is started. Keep in mind that with http://www.emc2fusion.org/ like clean energy behind you. The options greatly increase because you need an input of energy on many of these high intake methods.

#2 Even tho some people think it is a bad idea. Solar shading using lunar material is something that needs to be considered.

#3 If the above two fail we could always start thinking about direct removal of methane.