Getting Serious About Climate Change – Charles David Keeling Annual Lecture (Transcript)

And I expect we’ll be hearing a little more about that theme in this talk tonight. The book was recognized by the Economist magazine as one of the best books in 2011.

So for those of you who still read books and I realize it’s a dwindling list, it might be something to have a look at. Anyway it gives me great pleasure to welcome David Victor.

David Victor

Well, thank you very much for that introduction Ralph and Margaret and Nigel. And I’m pleased to see Louise Keeling here and all of you tonight. It’s really a pleasure to be here and speak about the situation with climate change.

My lecture tonight I have titled Getting Serious About Climate Change. The theme that I’m going to develop is that so far at least from a policy point of view we have not gotten serious at all. We’ve basically done nothing for the last 20 plus years. So I like to talk a little bit tonight about what we might do that’s different.

I am going to speak for about 40 minutes, about half of it on where the natural science stands, including the work on climate change impacts and then half of it on emissions and policy and so on.

And it’s interesting time to talk about climate change because as Margaret has said, we’ve had a whole series of reports that have come out in the last year. And I’ve been very heavily involved to the point of commuting to Berlin which is something I can strongly recommend against. I have been very heavily involved in the process of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which has just finished its fifth massive assessment. Every seven or eight years now we do these assessments. It requires about seven or eight years between these assessments because you have to forget with the experiences like before you really take on another one of these.

And the first of the three reports that we put out was published last September. It’s about the underlying physical science. The second came out in March; it’s about impacts and adaptation; and the third which I’ve been essentially involved with, came out in April. So a month or so ago and it’s about what we call mitigation but it’s really about missions trends and controlling those emissions.

I was reminded as Ralph and I reminisced about old times a while ago about this overlap that we had at Harvard teaching the atmosphere. The class was called Atmosphere – Science A30. And I don’t know if I deserve kudos for writing up all of those notes. I do remember being tremendously naive as a young student and thinking how hard could this book writing thing be. We had all these notes, they were on viewgraphs and some of them probably weren’t for the pirates for all I know. And so I just wrote them up into a book and it was I think one of the worst books ever written on this planet.

History of Climate Science – Paper

In three years, we’re going to celebrate the publication — the 60th anniversary of the publication of a very important paper in the history of climate science by Roger Revelle and a co author, which was the first paper to put together fully the buffering chemistry of carbon dioxide in the oceans. And until that paper came out, a lot of people could plausibly assume the carbon dioxide that went in the atmosphere, there were not very large industrial emissions but some significant emissions at the time.

Carbon dioxide that went in the atmosphere would all end up in the oceans and kind of stay there, at least we wouldn’t have to worry about it too much. And Roger and his colleague said, no, that’s actually probably not correct and here is the reason chemically because the carbon dioxide would mix into the oceans and then generate some acid in the oceans. And the bulk of it would not stay up in the atmosphere. But that was a hypothesis.

And in order to know whether the hypothesis was sound, you needed to go off and reliably measure atmosphere concentrations of carbon dioxide. And that had been done a little bit here and there with ad hoc methods. People when they flew across the North Atlantic a lot, they were taking measurements out of airplanes and other kind of cool things. But there was no reliable record and of course as everyone knows, Roger raised money from the Office of Naval Research (ONR) and variety of other places, hired Dave Keeling and they went out initially to Hawaii and then other sites and started measuring carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere.

This slide here shows you where we stand and, as Margaret mentioned in her opening remarks, last year we were flirting with 400. This year we’ve had a whole month that has flirted with 400 and then eventually it’ll be a whole year and so on.

The pre-industrial concentrations – the time before the Industrial Revolution that was powered by fossil fuels and continues to be powered by fossil fuels – concentrations were on the order of 280 to 290 parts-per-million. And now we’re seeing concentrations reliably up in the 400 range and no sign of that slowing down.

Almost everything I am going to say tonight concerns the climate change that follows from the buildup of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. I will say that one of the byproducts of the analysis, really going back to Roger Revelle and a handful of other people, is also that the oceans would become more acidic. The surface oceans would become more acidic. And that’s in fact exactly what you measure.

Here are measured pHs in the oceans. We’ve seen the oceans become more acidic by 30% or 40%. They’re naturally variable to some degree. And that on its own is a significant concern, especially for ecosystems that depend heavily on making shells for a living in their very many important ecosystems in that regard.

It’s interesting to reflect that if you summarize the state of climate change science today in a small number of figures, which is in fact exactly what we did in the IPCC in our first report last September, where we had in our summary for policymakers 10 figures. This is one of them.

So the contribution that Dave made and Roger Revelle and Scripps made to this topic has been just profound and remains tremendously durable. And it’s a contribution that Ralph carries on and many others and we’re all enormously grateful for them for their work. Because really the whole discussion about climate change begins with reliable measurements that the gases were concerned and pollutants were concerned about are building up in the atmosphere.

How do you know that this is not naturally variable?

People often ask – how do you know that this is not naturally variable? This is a topic that the IPCC and a series of climate modelers have done a large climate model intercomparison project. I have worked on extensively in the last few years.

This slide here just summarizes where that work stands. What it shows you is a compilation of different ways of measuring changes related to climate change. Some of these figures are changes in temperature. Some of these are changes in OHC, the ocean heat content and some of these are changes in the sea-ice extent in Antarctica, very much in the news in the last few days and in the Arctic.

And what you see here is an effort to tell the best models we have in the world about the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and then to compare that with the actual observation record. And so you see for every single one of these little vignettes and these are summary vignettes for global averages over here for land surface temperatures which are the most responsive to change in climate; ocean surface temperatures, thermal inertia in the ocean and then the ocean heat content.

What you see is that if you just tell the models about natural variability that we know about, what you see are these blue patterns. And if you tell the models about natural variability plus the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, what you see are the pink bands with the actual observation records shown in the black line in the middle.

Almost everywhere you simply cannot explain what you observe in the real world without telling the models that there has been a buildup of greenhouse gases. And that gives us confidence in the models. It also gives us the ability to say things like it is extremely likely that the majority of the observed climate change – warming in the atmosphere since 1950 is caused by humans.

So this is an area of ongoing science but I have to say statistically, the results are just profound. And one of the major contributions that the science team in the IPCC has made has been to be able to really nail down that we are seeing the signature of the human impact on the climate. It doesn’t mean that we know everything. In fact, in very important ways, the uncertainty around climate change science has actually gone up, rather than down. And I’ll talk a little bit more about that because it’s not that we’ve become more stupid over time although maybe that’s the case, certainly my four-year-old thinks that’s the case. But it’s that we’re learning things that are in the realm of unknown unknowns if you like and those become I think actually on balance scarier the more we learn about them. The kind of uncertainties of the fat tails as some people call them are deeply worrisome in this area.

Phenomenon of Global Warming

I just want to point out that the phenomenon of global warming, which is the kind of general popular term and that kind of sounds friendly like warming and so on. So a lot of people in the climate community has not been so thrilled about that, nor in the scientific communities that we call it climate change but nobody really knows what that means.

So some people like to call it climate weirding but that just sounds weird. And so we have not actually come up with a good term to convey what’s going on here. But the phenomenon is caused not only by carbon dioxide, which is what Roger Revelle worked on and Dave Keeling measured so extensively but a variety of other gases. And I just want to give you a summary of those other gases. And I’ll talk a little bit more about this later.

The picture up here is not so great. But what you see on the top is carbon dioxide and the bars show the amount of change in the heat balance in the atmosphere, measured in watts per square meter, since the pre-industrial period. So these are very very small numbers. Think of a watt per square meter as one of those old tiny little Christmas tree bulbs, a little one watt bulb over a one square meter surface area. That’s the amount of change in the heat balance in the atmosphere. It’s a tiny number compared to big numbers like the incoming solar radiation, which is more than 300 watts per square meter, the amount of radiation that the planet radiates back into space. But they are huge numbers — we have small changes caused by these trace gases in the atmosphere and it’s a small changes that then cause the change in overall radiated balance and climate warming.

Since 1750, the amount of that perturbation caused by carbon dioxide is about 1.7 watts per square meter. The next most important gas is methane gas. Methane gas comes from growing rice, comes from cows. Cows vent methane from both directions. Sheep, a variety of other ruminants and so on. And methane gas is now contributing about 1 watt per square meter. And then on down from there. Very much in the news from work here at Scripps are aerosols, black aerosol, also known as soot, which is a very large net warming agent and then other aerosols like sulphate precursors that come from burning high sulfur coal and power plants without pollution control equipment. Those actually cause a net cooling effect in the atmosphere.

When you think about this problem as a geophysicist, you look at this and you say, yeah, it’s different gases involved but this is really a carbon dioxide problem. What I like to suggest to you as my talk goes on is that when you think about this as a political scientist, which is what I am, that these other gases are actually really really interesting because their political properties are very very different. Carbon dioxide is an extremely difficult gas to control because it is intrinsic for the combustion of fossil fuels. And fossil fuel consumption is intrinsic more or less to modern economies and is very very expensive to limit. Whereas the other gases, we actually know a lot about them and their impact on climate could be very very large.

So you cannot stop global warming over the long haul without solving the carbon dioxide problem. But politically part of the difficulty we’ve seen in the last few decades is that we’ve been thinking about this in an almost obsessive way as a carbon dioxide problem and not paying enough attention to the other gases, such as soot and methane and so on.

Historical Data

What’s at stake here is the next slide shows you – this is historical data, the shading is the variability in those different datasets from 1952 to essentially the present. And these are model projections using the same models that I showed you before — model projections going out into the future. And this blue line down here is you tell the models we’re going to stop the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere at 2.6 watts per square meter, which is roughly today’s total, just slightly above today’s total. That’s like an aggressive crash program to control emissions, and I will show you in a little bit what that actually might mean.

And these lines up here are basically everybody keeps doing what they were doing in the past, so called business as usual where you continue to grow the consumption of coal aggressively and other fossil fuels and maybe cut down some more trees and so on, and all of that results in greater buildup of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. And then you end up with radiated forcing of 8.5 watts per square meter.

These are models — these are projections done by climate scientists who love watts per square meter. I’m a political scientist and I like to worry about controlling emissions and so I like carbon dioxide concentrations and so I am going to shift in a little bit to talking about that. But this gives you a sense of what the bookends are.

This is if you have a worldwide crash program you can stop global warming at what appears to be significantly below two degrees. If you don’t do anything, then we’re on track by 2100 to have warming on the order of four degrees. So you’ve seen in the news people worrying about a four degree worlds on – that’s 2100. And then it continues on after that. These are worlds that are actually I think outside the realm of our capacity to understand what the potential impacts of that are.

Impacts of Climate Change

Let me talk a little bit about the impacts and I’m going to stop with my summary of where the science stands so far.

This next slide shows you the impact where I think we have perhaps the greatest confidence, which is the rise in sea level. Although the news over the last few days not all that unexpected is a kind of confirmation that there are still a lot of very interesting and kind of perverse way of the word interesting but interesting surprises in the science.

Again the blue lines here are the RCPs 2.6. This is the crash program. The red line up here is 8.5. So this as we sit back drink Mai Tais and don’t do anything about the climate change problem by the year 2100. You see potentially 0.6, 0.7 meters of sea level rise up to — and this is the uncertainty 5% to 95% up to almost a meter. This is where this three-foot number comes from is that sea-level rise might be up to three feet when people say that they are thinking about the upper band of the uncertainty around the Mai Tai scenario, you’re just sitting around, doing nothing about the climate change problem.

And whereas if you have a crash program and you’re lucky, then sea level rise is barely noticeable.

Sea Level Rise

What’s interesting on this chart in my view is it also gives you a little bit of a window into the areas where there’s uncertainty. You can think of this uncertainty between the blue line and the red line as an uncertainty about how humans are going to respond – the socio-economics as to how we’re going to respond to the evidence of climate change or potentially control emissions, and then you can think about the bands around each of these as the natural uncertainty, the geophysical uncertainty about how the climate system itself actually responds.

And what’s interesting to me – and there have been several papers that have tried to look at in some more detail, is that the uncertainty around the socio-economic systems is about as large as the uncertainty in the natural systems. I think when you do that analysis correctly, it’s actually even even larger. So we’ve got lots – we’re throwing lots of dice and we just simply do not know how they’re going to turn out.

This is an area where the uncertainty between this current most recent IPCC report and the previous IPCC report has actually gone up. And it’s because the previous report basically reported relatively little information about melting glaciers and only focused on the source of sea level rise – really basically only focused on the source of sea level rise that was easiest to quantify which is thermal expansion in the oceans when water gets warmer, it expands. So you can quantify that with relative precision.

And now we know much more thanks in part to work here at Scripps and I learned a lot about this from Walter Munk, in particular, we know a lot more about what we don’t know about how grounded or landed ice sheets move and respond to melting and in particular in Greenland and West Antarctica.

Precipitation

Some of the other impacts that are important to keep an eye on is precipitation. In general a warmer world is a wetter world because it has a more active climate system but it’s wetter in the places that more or less are wet already. So if you look down here, for example, this is what the late 21st century might look like 3under the Mai Tai scenario, basically people not doing anything to control emissions, you see this big increase in rainfall around the Intertropical Convergence Zone. This is a very stormy area, those of you follow the Air France flight from Brazil to France that flew through some of the superstorms in the intertropical convergence zone know that this is a very stormy and dangerous area.

And then deserts like in North Africa, the Mediterranean edge area more generally, California is little hard to pin down, although some finer resolution work done in part by folks here at Scripps have shown that the desert areas are likely to get, if anything, dryer. And so you can then imagine what these kinds of impacts have on agriculture and other parts of the economy that are exposed to changes in climate.

One last word about impacts and then I am going to talk about what we’re doing or not doing.

In my view the impacts that are most important to watch are the ones on natural ecosystems. And that’s because there is a huge gulf in the scientific research between people who study impact of climate change on human ecosystem or human systems, and impacts the climate change on natural systems, and that’s because humans we don’t always do it but we can look ahead. And we can say something’s coming. And we can respond, we can adapt.

And the way that humans adapt to climate changes has massive impact on the overall net impact of the change in climate on the economy. Whereas nature doesn’t do that. Nature responds through extinction and evolution. And so the impacts the climate change on natural unmanaged ecosystems could be truly profound, and this slide gives you a sense for example for different natural ecosystems – trees, herbaceous plants, rodents, insects, freshwater molluscs, currently lots of works being one on the molluscs, that’s news to me.

And the speed at which they can move, how many kilometers can you march around per decade, which is a kind of first cut for getting a sense of how responsive the ecosystem might be to a change in climate. And so if you have even small amounts of climate change on flat areas that can result in a pretty significant displacement over land and this gives you a sense of these different scenarios, RCP 8.5 or in flat areas is going to result in displacement of natural ecosystems nearly 100 kilometers per decade. And so I think that’s possible that the molluscs will catch up with that. Molluscs are very fleet-footed apparently.

Trees of course have a harder time marching because the natural cycle of trees, most trees is long I and the extent to which they can spread, seeds and other matters of propagation are limited. This is raising or should be raising profound questions for the ecological community and people who care about nature and a deep sense of nature because it does raise the question of where and how we’re going to intervene directly in nature, to try and control and help nature adapt to climate change. And it may well be that in some pristine natural ecosystems because of the impacts of climate change, we’re actually going to find ourselves kind of becoming farmers, zookeepers if you like and actively helping natural systems to adjust and adapt, rethinking the way we do protected areas right now when we have very special ecosystems, we put a fence around them, maybe fences are in fact exactly the wrong thing to be done — to do and you instead ought to have quarters, specially kind of north-south quarters that allow species to move along different climatic zones.

Where we stand now in science

Okay. That’s a kind of summary of where we stand in the science. When I look at that in total, it’s pretty scary. And so what are we actually doing to respond to that? And the short answer is we’re doing pretty much nothing globally. This is a slide from the most recent IPCC report, the one on mitigation of emissions which I worked too heavily on. It shows since 1970 up to the present, emissions have all the different greenhouse gases added up using different units. So carbon dioxide is down here. Carbon dioxide from land-use change which is right in there. It’s actually one of the few bright spots is that net deforestation in the world is now roughly flat and there is a lot of serious people now talking about global greening. We’ve had for decades now rebounder forests and high-latitude areas like the United States, China, Russia and so on. We’re now starting to see the beginnings of rebound in some parts for the tropics, certainly not all the tropics yet – nitrous oxide, methane and so on.

2010 was the highest emissions we saw on record. The last decade alone we’ve seen emissions grow more rapidly than any decades since 1970. At 3 a.m. on a Saturday morning in Berlin for one of these trips, I negotiated with the Chinese delegate to remove all of these markers here that tell us how much the different decades grew, because the Chinese were upset that since they’re mostly responsible for the growth of emissions in the last decade, they didn’t want to be quite so readily comparable with other decades. And so you’ll see in the final version of this, you’ll see that they’re actually all lumped together. But no matter how you slice it emissions are rising rapidly.

You say, well, how is that possible, because we have international treaties in this area. We’ve had since 1992 a Framework Convention on Climate Change. We’ve had the Kyoto Protocol which was finished in 1997. We’re negotiating new treaties right now. There will be a big summit at the UN in September of this year and a big effort by Paris — by meeting in Paris next December to have a new treaty to succeed the Kyoto Protocol which expired in the year 2012.

Given all those treaties how is that possible that we could be in a situation where emissions are rising more rapidly during the decade when you would expect all these treaties to be having an effect? And the reason is that we have become incredibly skilled at designing treaties precisely so they have no impact.

Kyoto Protocol

Here is an example from Kyoto. The Kyoto treaty lists all the countries that agree to control their emissions on the back of the treaty in the list annex B in a staple to the back. And that list of countries is basically the members of the OECD which is the rich countries club at the time, plus the Russians who were keen to be in the rich countries club even though they really weren’t in rich countries, and Ukraine which was tethered to Russia as they now learn maybe not so greatly.

And if all those countries that are listed in Annex B had actually controlled their emissions they would have had leverage on about 60% of world’s emissions at the time. So countries that represented 60% of the world’s emissions agreed in Kyoto to do start doing something about controlling their emissions. And that leaves out still 40%, but 60% is a pretty good down payment.

But then if you look at the countries that actually stayed inside Kyoto, so you remove the United States, you remove Canada because Canada joined the Kyoto Protocol on the assumption that the United States would join the Kyoto Protocol which is its largest trading partner and then looked in the rear vision mirror and discovered we didn’t join, so the Canadians actually withdrew. And then you get down to 23%.

And then if you look at the countries that agreed to stay inside the Kyoto Protocol, once the Kyoto Protocol a couple years ago was updated and extended out to the year 2020, you have only 13% of world emissions. Japan left at that point, United States stayed out, Canada stayed out. And the countries which is mainly Europe that stayed in their emissions are largely flat or declining and all the rest of the world’s emissions China and India and so on continue growing.

So the Kyoto Protocol treaty today only tells us something about 13% percent of world’s emissions and the rest of it is completely omitted from that, and that’s because countries can pick and choose which international obligations they want to sign up to.

And then if you look at the countries that actually were members of Kyoto, so here is a chart showing the emissions between 1990 and 2010 — 2010 is the center point of the year of regulatory period of the Kyoto Protocol. And then I list the countries along horizontal axis here – the Ukraine, Russia, the original 12 members of the European Union, the next 15 members of the European Union, Japan, Australia — these are all countries that joined the Kyoto Protocol and stayed inside.

You see that they have some very impressive emissions reductions and that group as a whole complied with their general obligation to cut emissions about 5%. Why is that? It’s dominated by Russia and Ukraine. They didn’t do — they didn’t control emissions because they’re worried about climate change. They controlled emissions because their economies collapsed. And when your economy collapses – the first approximation – your emissions go down. In fact, I would say most of the Russian scientists at the time were telling the leaders. You know this is the cold country and maybe we’d be better off a little bit of climate-warming.

Europe has done a little bit. We, a couple years ago, in our lab did a counterfactual calculation where you looked at how much did the Europe control its emissions because of the presence of the Kyoto Protocol. We came up with a number of about 200 million tons. That sounds like a big number; that’s roughly three weeks of growth in the world’s emissions.

So all of this diplomatic effort has had an impact of slowing growth in world emissions by roughly three weeks.

What causes emissions?

What do we know about what causes emissions? This is a slide from our most recent IPCC report that looks at different decades, 1970s, 80’s 90’s, most recent decade and decomposes the growth in emissions into different factors. Carbon intensity – that’s the amount of carbon per unit energy. So coal, for example, is much more carbon intensive than oil and natural gas. And nuclear power, or renewables for the most part don’t have any emissions.

Energy intensity – this is the efficiency with which the economy basically turns energy into economic output. Population shown in the blue here and the orange GDP per capita – growth in the economy.

And what you see is that consistently the economies, these green segments of these bars, are always negative. Economies autonomously become more efficient because they change in structure, because there are incentives for efficiency and so on. Those are not enough to offset the overall growth in emissions but they have a pretty big impact.

Until the most recent decade, economies also autonomously moved from high-carbon fuels like coal to lower carbon fuels like natural gas. And one of the most striking results of the science in the last two years has been to demonstrate now that the world’s energy system is in fact re-carbonizing. Net use of coal is going up, including some perverse things like we are exporting coal from the United States to Europe to burn in German power plants and variety of other — and British power plants. But the big rise in coal consumptions come from China and from India.

Population is something people worry a lot about. Population growth has been roughly flat. My own view is that population is not a major problem. The central, largest driver for emissions is growth in the economy. So absent policy, economic growth, which is what almost everybody wants, economic growth begets emissions. And that is the kind of central challenge here.

Per capita emissions

When you look over the last 2 decades, between 1990 to 2010 and you ask yourself how about per capita emissions. So this is a plot. This is kind of an unusual plot. This shows in the vertical axis per capita emissions, tons of carbon dioxide per year, and on the horizontal axis, the cumulative population. So here you have the highest emitters – Central African Republic, Qatar, Kuwait and so on, very small populations, very large emissions. And here is the United States for example. And as we cumulate up the populations, here’s China and here’s India.

And what we show on this chart here is the difference between 1990 and 2010, and the green basically is a net reduction in per capita emissions from mainly high industrialized countries, because their economies are becoming more mature, because some of them like the Europeans are actually adopting policies in this area, and then the rise in per capita emissions from the emerging economies; India here and especially China.

Net world per capita emissions today are essentially identical to what they were in 1990. What’s happened is a huge shift in the world economy from there basically flattening of industrialized countries to the tremendous growth in the in the emerging economies. And along with that growth has come a transfer of emissions in effect from developing countries to industrialized countries.

And that’s because when you make a ton of steel in China, for example, and you put the steel on a boat and you send it to the United States, the Chinese in some sense get charged for those emissions because all of our statistics until recently have been organized on territorial grounds. But the world economy isn’t functioned that way anymore. In effect what the Chinese are doing is sending embodied emissions from China to the United States.

This slide gives you a sense of what that process looks like between high-income countries, the upper middle income countries, China, India, Malaysia, other rapidly growing countries; lower middle income countries in the least developed countries down here. And this is focused on the emerging economies and the rich industrialized economies.

The bars here show us the net imports in the case of the high industrialized countries and the net export in the case of the upper middle-income countries. The Chinese alone today are sending at least 600 million tons of emissions per year equivalent embodied in the products, wallboard, spans of the Bay Bridge, because huge sections of the Bay Bridge have been actually imported, already assembled into the industrialized countries. And so when you look at industrialized countries that have done a lot on paper to control their emissions, in effect, a huge part of what they’ve done is in fact outsource those emissions.

We have to find a solution to this problem. Part of the solution is going to involve border tariffs and trade policies that get the incentives right. This is something the trade economists are extremely worried about because it might involve tinkering with the trading system it has been so successful. But until we get those incentives right in effect what we’ve done is we’ve created an incentive for countries that do a lot to regulate their emissions to allow emission intensive industries to migrate outside their borders and go to other parts of the world.

You see this today for example in the mass migration of the steel industry out of Europe and into other parts of the world. In some case it’s actually migration with the plants that take an entire steel mills, put them on barges and send them to India for example.

Where we stand in terms of emissions

The last slide I want to show you about where we stand in terms of emissions and I want to pivot and talk a little bit about ways we can do better and then I’m going to stop.

Just I want to give you a sense of the size of the challenge involved here. So this slide here shows you from 1850 up to the present. This black line are world emissions of all the different greenhouse gases. Here we see in the last century this is kind of significant rise in emissions and these different scenarios show us the level of emissions that might exist in the future using a variety of different computer models. These up here are the business as usual kinds of models. These are the Mai Tai scenarios. You sit around and do nothing. That’s what the economy will give you.

These scenarios here are scenarios where you assume we go as aggressively into energy efficiency as possible. Those scenarios interestingly enough don’t even stop the growth in emissions. These scenarios are the ones that actually let you stop warming at something like two degrees.

The baby blue ones are high likelihood of stopping warming at two degrees and these yellow ones are 50:50 chance of stopping warming at 2 degrees.

There is a key insight here which is here are our emissions today – there’s 2050 which in the energy business is tomorrow because so much of our energy infrastructure is long-lived. By 2050 world emissions have to be less than half what they are today. That gives you a sense of scale of the challenge.

And you can look at this in different periods. This is the slide that I showed you earlier. About the recent history showing very clearly the trends are all in the wrong direction.

This is what the next twenty or thirty years looks like, so these are the same baby blue and yellow scenarios. These are the pledges the governments signed up to after the Copenhagen meeting and another meeting the year later in Cancun. These are what government said they would be willing to go off and do on their own, so the Cancun pledges think the governments have said they’re prepared to do already are only if we’re lucky consistent 6with some scenarios that give a 50:50 chance for stopping warming at two degrees.

In long-term out in the future, the picture is just bleak. Big reductions in emissions are going to be required.

Let me let you in on a secret in these models which is these models are optimization models run by economists. So the model looks forward and it says and identifies the least cost way of controlling emissions. The models don’t know very much about how humans get in the way of that process – usually making things more expensive. For example, we simply say some technologies will not be allowed. Say nuclear power for example, if you remove nuclear power from the equation, costs go up. If you remove renewables from the equation costs go up. These models love a technology called carbon capture and storage (CCS).

Carbon Capture and Storage

CCS is a really interesting technology. What you do is you take a power plant, you capture the gas at the end of the power plant. Instead of letting it go up in the atmosphere, we’re built up and causes global warming. You capture it and you inject it underground safe, so it doesn’t cause climate change.

And CCS is really interesting except for the fact that they’re basically no plants actually being built in the world. So we don’t know what CCS really looks like at scale, and the plants that have been built the cost overruns have been just astronomical. This is a very very expensive technology.

The modeling community decided that even though CCS, which is its favorite technology, even though the CCS is kind of fantasy, we now have a new favorite one which is called Bioenergy CCS (BECCS).

And Bioenergy CCS, you go out in the world, you grow plants. Somehow you harvest the plants without causing emissions at some kind of miracle approach there. You get the plants into the power plant. You burn them where you co-fire them with coal. You then capture the carbon dioxide and inject it underground. So those plants have negative emissions.

Why do the models love this? Because it allows the model to assume that we as humans aren’t going to do anything about controlling our emissions for the next few decades and then there’s going to be some crash program in the future where emissions are going to come down really quickly. And that’s what you see these scenarios where these huge reductions in emissions become necessary. This is why the modeling community says it is still technically feasible to stop warming at two degrees.

In my view, a world where you are not smoking and inhaling, two degrees is not feasible. There is no plausible scenario by which stopping warming at two degrees, which is the most widely discussed goal for climate change, is going to be feasible. And we need to start thinking about alternatives and so on.

Whether we can do better

I want to just talk for a moment before I close about the question of whether we can do better. I don’t want to be a naysayer or kind of Bill Safire I think called nattering nabobs of negativism on the issue of climate change policy. But it’s hard having studied this for a long time looking over the last twenty plus years as a diplomacy not to come away with the conclusion that we basically have been messing around at the margins.

And we’ve done a little bit here and there but it’s mostly symbolic. And we’re nowhere near getting serious about cutting emissions 50%, 80% so on that might be necessary to stop warming at two degrees. We’ve done that apart because this is a hard problem. This is a really really hard problem, it has all the attributes that we as humans don’t deal with very well. For example, it’s caused by the long slow build-up, mostly not visible of a pollutant, it requires doing costly things today for benefits that are uncertain and distributed into the future. We tend not to be very good at those problems with high time and consistency and so on.

And so I think it is not surprising that we haven’t done well by this problem and no technological miracle has come along to make it suddenly cheap for a noticeable to switch to zero carbon fuels. Technological miracles largely explain the success with the most successful international environmental problem today, which is the ozone layer. Technological miracles came along, they turned out to be not very expensive. International law helped a little bit here and there but there’s nothing like having good technology at low-cost available.

So how can we do better? I want to just talk in my final few minutes about three ideas.

One is we should rethink our relationship to the UN. The UN has a lot of a very important benefits. And one of those benefits is that by having an institution where essentially every country has a voice, you have legitimacy. But the problem with that is you also have gridlock, because any country that is unhappy with the outcome can simply say I’m not going to join that agreement, working to block the agreement altogether or at 3am between the Chinese and the Saudi Arabian delegation, we could not insert, we removed one quarter of all the figures in the summary for policymakers for the last IPCC report, because of objections by three or four countries led by Saudi Arabia and Malaysia to some degree. The Chinese certainly were not happy with this. This is kind of crazy that we have a scientific process let alone a diplomatic process that is victim basically to the interests of the lowest common denominator or the slowest vote.

This is not unique to the climate change problem. It happens all the time and one way to solve the problem is to start working on smaller groups and start gaining the experience of cooperation in smaller groups, clubs some people call them. We used to call them coalitions of the willing but then that term that used for something else didn’t end so well. So that’s out.

And so if we look for example to rank plot, so this is the biggest country in the world which right now is China, little more than 20% of the world’s emissions of carbon dioxide, then the next biggest, United States and so on. If you look at a rank order plot and the fraction of the world total is covered by these countries. You see that for about a dozen countries, you get 75% of world’s emissions of carbon dioxide. It’s comparable number if you look at all the other greenhouse gases here and there. So you can do a tremendous amount with small groups of countries. And in fact, we’re starting to see some evidence of that. US-China dialogue on clean energy and a variety of other small group settings in this area.

You know what, for me what’s interesting is that a huge part of what’s needed in the climate problem is a big push on technology, basic spending on R&D, demonstration projects and so on. And if you look at the concentration, the rank order plot for who actually is relevant technology, which you can measure by R&D spending or measure by patents in energy-related field, it’s even more concentrated. So four, five six countries in the world basically control almost all of the innovations landscape around energy. So policy in those countries along with cooperative firms can make a big difference.

The second of the three things I want to suggest is that we should go back to this chart that I showed a little while ago, and think about this the way our politicians would think about this. So carbon dioxide is the big kid on the block. We need to do something about carbon dioxide over the long haul but it’s politically hard. Because it’s long lived gas, it builds up in the atmosphere. It is very expensive to regulate right now with known technologies.

But methane is big. Soot is big. This number probably underestimates the size of soot. Soot has lots of other impacts as well. And so maybe we should work on some of these other gases. When you start doing that, the politics change completely. And they change for two reasons: First of all, these other gases are much more short-lived – which means that if you make a big program to control their emissions, then you see the benefits in the case of soot within the lifetime or 10 year of politicians. And so the political calculation is totally different.

The other thing that’s very interesting about these other pollutants is that they cause lots of local harm. Soot in particular is a huge killer. And so that means the countries that might not care very much about global climate change problems might nonetheless care about local pollution problems. And this is in the news practically every day now as the Chinese and the Indians try and struggle with such and other kinds of pollution in their major cities.

One of the calculations we did for the last IPCC report is we looked at for black carbon, the soot and sulfur dioxide, which is actually a cooling agent — we looked at what happens to emissions between a no climate policy and a stringent climate policy. And so if you aggressively adopt a climate policy, you get a big reduction on the order of 50% in soot. Or if you do the opposite and you have an aggressive soot control program as the Chinese do right now, you tend to adopt technologies that are more efficient, that move away from high carbon fuels like coal and in the direction of natural gas. We call this in the business co-benefits. You can walk and chew gum at the same time.

But politically it’s really important because it means as easier to hold countries that might be reluctant or flaky to do something about the global problem, even hold them in your coalition. That is important for almost every country on the planet, including this one. I think it’s important in this country because the voters sometimes care about climate change and other environmental problems and sometimes they don’t.

And public attitudes in this area are extremely fickle. And so if you sell this just as a climate problem, the voters are going to come, they’re going to go and it’s been extremely difficult to get legislation perhaps especially in the current environment in Congress.

And you see this, for example, if you look at the Gallup polls. Gallup does a regular polling around environmental attitudes. They also do some stuff on climate change which I’m happy to show in the Q&A period. This is – you ask people: should you put a priority to the nation, put a priority on the environment? which is shown in green, or economic growth which is known as yellow. And which should have the higher priority? And it’s extremely volatile. So you see, for example, after the Macondo oil spill, over a very brief period of time people who thought that environmental issue should have a priority over economic issues went from 38% to 53% and then it dropped back down within a single electoral cycle.

And climate is the same way. When you do polling — careful polling on climate, it comes, it goes. Especially it goes when people are worried about other things like economic growth and jobs.

Last thing I’ll say is we need to take advantage of accidents, of fortuitous things that happen that lower emissions and we can use policy and then lock those into place. And one of those is going on right now in the United States with the price of natural gas. Because of fracking, which everybody’s read about and I’m sure has lots of opinions about, it’s actually horizontal drilling and fracking but somehow fracking sounds scarier than horizontal drilling. So people are always talking about fracking.

Because they are fracking, the supply of natural gas in the United States has exploded, and the price shown here in the white band, the price has now decoupled from the rest to the world’s natural gas markets. United States only a few years ago almost all the experts thought the price of natural gas in United States was going $6, $8, $10 a million BTU and up from there and basically was coming out of the world markets.

Today the price of natural gas is kind of in the 4-ish range and serious people think it’ll be $4 forever or maybe $5. But this is a totally different world in the world we thought we were living in, in the past.

Cheap natural gas appears to have been a tremendous boon for climate change, for concerns about climate change. And that’s because gas is competing coal. Regulation by the EPA is helping as well because coal plant emits like the entire periodic table of the elements. And so EPA, you can imagine, is very unhappy about that. So that fact plus cooling water issues and so on put a tremendous amount of pressure on the coal industry.

Regulation of coal and especially cheap natural gas are driving coal out of the marketplace, and total US emissions of carbon dioxide from the electric power sector — which is the sector where the competition is most intense – total emissions now are down by 300, maybe 400 million tons of CO2 per year. So maybe twice the entire European effort under the Kyoto treaty just because of the fortuitous accidents of cheap natural gas.

Fracking is not without some problems, including leakage of methane which is a very strong greenhouse gas. It’s very important to regulate that. But what I think was interesting that we’re seeing right now is EPA and other regulatory bodies are working hard to now lock into place a US electric power sector that relies much more heavily on natural gas than coal, than was the case in the past and that overall helps us keep our emissions down. It’s not an 80% reduction emissions which is what we need ultimately but it’s a substantial down-payment.

And I think when you look at these three ideas, working in small groups as opposed to just in the UN working in lots of different small groups, identifying co-benefits, so worrying about other parts of energy problems that are linked to climate, locking things into place when they happen — this helps explain why the actual policy landscaper on climate change today is highly fragmented. It’s not a single global UN treaty that sets targets and timetables and goals for all countries and everybody follows that which is more or less a strategy we followed in the case of the ozone layer. But it’s a whole mess, the whole dog’s breakfast of different regulatory efforts that are competing with each other to some degree.

A couple years ago, a political scientist Robert Cohen and I made a landscape of mapping of all the different institutions, international institutions that are trying to effect climate in various ways. And this is what we found as a result of our mapping. And if you look in here, you will see the formal UN legal regimes are only part of the story and you have lots of small groups, clubs like the G8, now the G20, Asia-Pacific partnership, a variety of others, a whole bunch of bilateral initiatives and on and on.

This vision of the world makes international lawyers extremely unhappy, because they like clean hierarchical legal systems. But it’s much more realistic and I think done properly it actually can be more effective than what we’ve been doing in the past because it creates laboratories, places where countries can experiment and see what works, as opposed to relying just on the UN oriented process which so far has produced very large number of meetings, a growing number of treaties and other legal documents and at no measurable impact on actual world emissions.

And so I like to close by just saying that the ideas that I’ve offered here for how to make it better, I think, are rooted in reality. I think the realities are not going to work quickly, not that what we’ve done for the last 20 years has worked at all. And they mean we have to contemplate a world where it is simply and feasible to stop warming at two degrees, where we’re looking at a lot of adaptation. And we have to be able to talk about adaptation in a serious way and get ready for changes in climate and sea level, that’s very important in San Diego, while also mitigating emissions.

I think we can make some serious progress on mitigating emissions by starting on the emissions problems that are a little more tractable, that line up better with national interests like the soot problem, not because they stop warming but because they demonstrate credibility. And I think what’s lacking in this area at least in the policy world is credibility. That firms now see that governments have been working on this problem for twenty-plus years and haven’t done anything and firms no longer believe that serious rules are coming. Whereas five or six years ago, almost all serious firms believed that and so they invested heavily in new technologies.

And now I don’t see evidence of that at least in the big emitter firms hardly anywhere. And one piece of evidence of that is ExxonMobil a few weeks ago issued finally a report where it made an assessment of whether it’s enormously valuable carbon stocks, which is what oil on the ground is, were going to be degraded in value if governments started to control emissions. And it said yes if government started to control their emissions, these stocks would be degraded in value. But we think the probability of governments doing anything serious in this area is so close to zero but it has no material impact on our operations.

And that’s not a statement about Exxon; that’s a statement about how the people who are ultimately going to fix the problem, how they see the credibility of what governments are doing. So we’ve got to find a way to boost our credibility.

With that, let me stop and say thank you very much.

 

Related Posts

• I’ll Die Before I Quit: Chad Williams (Full Transcript)
• Valerie Mason-John: We Are What We Think at TEDxRenfrewCollingwood (Transcript)
• Jules Evans: How Philosophy Can Save Your Life at TEDxBreda (Full Transcript)
• Faster than a Calculator by Arthur Benjamin at TEDxOxford (Transcript)
• Why Are These 32 Symbols Found in Caves All Over Europe by Genevieve von Petzinger (Transcript)