Climate Change Reality: Déjà Vu All Over Again
The current situation has many echoes of the 2008-2010 period; a financial crash and a deep recession followed by a faltering recovery (outside China), and a failed United Nations climate meeting (then Copenhagen and now Glasgow). For all the wind turbines, solar panels, electric vehicles, and energy efficient machines sold since then, anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are higher, and that’s before we take into account all of the blatant lying about the levels of methane emissions from the usage of natural gas (for example in “the United States, recent synthesis studies of field measurements of CH4 emissions at different spatial scales are ~1.5–2× greater compared to official greenhouse gas inventory … estimates”[i]). As with the post Global Financial Crisis (GFC) economic recovery, the current economic rebound is bringing with it a renewed climb in the use of fossil fuels, including the natural gas which is still laughably seen as a “clean” fuel (its worse than coal when being truthful about fugitive methane emissions[ii]), and therefore GHG emissions.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) in their press release Coal power’s sharp rebound is taking it to a new record in 2021, threatening net zero goals of December 17th informs us that “Overall coal demand worldwide – including uses beyond power generation, such as cement and steel production – is forecast to grow by 6% in 2021”, up 9% in China, 12% in India and nearly 20% in the US and the EU. It had only fallen 4.4% in 2020[iii]. The IEA also informs us that global natural gas demand only fell 1.9% in 2020 and is set to reach a new high in 2021 by growing by 3.2%[iv], and then will continue at about the same pace for years after that[v]. Oil demand took a big hit in 2020 but is also seen as reclaiming its pre-pandemic high[vi].
We come back to the same basic conundrum: as long as the global economy keeps growing at a trend rate of 3% plus a year, increases in renewable energy usage and energy efficiency will not produce the scale of fossil fuel use reductions necessary to keep the global average surface temperature below the critical 2C rise (any hopes of staying under 1.5C are already utterly delusional). In a sharp rebuttal to all the ecomodernists who claim that “reflexive capitalism” blah blah blah … will massively increase the efficiency of energy usage, and the desperate hopes of the United Nations International Panel on Climate Change that an energy efficiency rabbit will leap out of a hat, improvements in global energy efficiency keep plodding along at about 1.5% per year[vii]. In the past five years its actually only improved by 1.3% a year, which is far below “the 4% described in the Net Zero Emissions by 2050 Scenario over 2020-2030”[viii]. So, every year the global community add more solar and wind energy, more hydroelectric energy, more nuclear energy and more fossil fuel energy. That means that GHG emissions haven’t even started to go down yet, let alone start falling at a rate of 5%+ a year required to have a chance of staying below the 2C mark; and your government is not doing anything to change this reality. There is of course the extra level of magical belief that vast amounts of carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies that don’t currently exist will suck up colossal amounts of carbon dioxide and sequester it for thousands of years beneath the Earth’s surface, but that should produce a response of “have you taken your anti-psychotics today?”. That will require a huge amount of piping and drilling, and who has all the equipment required to do that?
The only God that cannot be questioned is that of 3% economic growth, and those in charge and many of their minions will construct incredible tales of magic and mystery to protect the faith. In 2014 I published a book The Schizophrenic Society about the delusional state of the dominant economic and environmental worldviews and northing has changed since then. What we now await is the collision between reality and human belief systems, the concern that even in the face of factual negation those in charge may make one last leap of faith rather than accept that the global economy must contract to keep global temperatures within a safe operating space. Those last leaps of faith will be the attempts to reduce the amount of the Sun’s energy that reaches the lower atmosphere, through throwing vast amounts of particles into the upper atmosphere to block the Sun’s energy. They even have a fancy technocratic title for it, Solar Radiation Management. The other may be to dig up and crush massive amounts of igneous rock, an activity equal to all current mining efforts, and spread it over wetlands, rainforests and other areas to suck up carbon dioxide, that has a cute title of Enhanced Rock Weathering[ix]; tons of money for the mining industry in that one!
Global surface temperature peaked at 1.28oC above the 1880-1920 baseline used by NASA-GISS (and 1.48oC if we use a 1750 benchmark) in 2016[x], aided by an El Nino event that gave an extra push to global temperatures. In 2021, and with the help of the opposite La Nina (part of the El Nino Southern Oscillation [ENSO] climate process) that pushes temperatures down, the yearly average will be around 1.11oC. Without the effects of ENSO the globe is probably at about the 1.28C of 2020 (i.e. already at the El Nino enhanced 2016 peak). Yes, that’s right, taking out the major driver of climate variability, the globe is only 0.22C below the 1.5C limit and that could be blown any time in the next few years with a shift back to La Nina. This situation is made much worse by the jump in atmospheric methane levels seen in the past decade[xi](remember all those fugitive methane emissions?) as methane is at least 80 times more heat trapping over a 20-year period than carbon dioxide[xii]. In the first decade of this century atmospheric methane levels increased by 29.25 parts per billion (ppb), in the second decade by 85.66 ppb, and in 2021 alone is increasing at a rate of 14.3ppb (i.e. 143 ppb per decade)[xiii].
In the meantime, the United States (and the West generally) are far too worried about recovering the economy from the COVID hit and attempting to curtail the economic and geopolitical challenges of China, Russia and Iran (CRI) to spend much time thinking about climate change. That’s something they can focus on after getting the economy humming again and seeing of the CRI challenge. In the opposite camp, the focus of China, Russia and Iran’s focus is getting strong enough to force the West to give them the respect and global position that they consider that they deserve. So, the climate wreck train keeps rolling full speed toward the end of the tracks, while the passenger leaders fight with each other and tell the rest of us to look out the window at the pretty vistas that they have constructed for us. The only question is whether the alarm will be raised before or after we leap the tracks. As with the climate, once the tracks are leapt there is no going back to what was before and things can get pretty nasty pretty quickly. That’s called non-linear irreversible change, what is waiting if humanity keeps pushing the climate (and the overall Earth System) more and more into the unknown. 2050 or whatever date nations have claimed that they will be “carbon neutral” is irrelevant if substantive actions are not taken within the next few years; unfortunately, there does not seem to be any appetite for such changes. The climate emergency is not something in the future, it is our present.
[i] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-25017-4
[ii] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/methane-leaks-erase-some-of-the-climate-benefits-of-natural-gas/
[iii] https://www.iea.org/news/coal-power-s-sharp-rebound-is-taking-it-to-a-new-record-in-2021-threatening-net-zero-goals
[iv] https://www.iea.org/reports/global-energy-review-2021/natural-gas
[v] https://www.iea.org/reports/gas-2020/2021-2025-rebound-and-beyond
[vi] https://www.iea.org/reports/oil-market-report-december-2021
[vii] https://yearbook.enerdata.net/total-energy/world-energy-intensity-gdp-data.html
[viii] https://www.iea.org/reports/energy-efficiency-2021/executive-summary
[ix] https://phys.org/news/2020-07-croplands-absorb-billion-tonnes-co2.html
[x] https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/
[xi] https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends_ch4/
[xii] https://www.vox.com/22613532/climate-change-methane-emissions
[xiii] https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends_ch4/