NickBlack.com

When industrialization really got underway around 1850 the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere was 280 ppm, as it had been for most of human history. Today it stands at 380 ppm. It’s simple arithmetic to see that by burning, at $100 or whatever price, another trillion barrels of oil – roughly what we’ve burnt so far – plus the rest of the recoverable gas and coal we will add at least another 100ppm to the atmosphere. Given that these gasses tend to stay in the atmosphere for as long as 200 years, we should expect to see 480ppm GHG concentration at least, and perhaps far earlier than imagined . At these levels the evidence is strong that the climate will radically destabilize, possibly outside the range of temperatures at which civilization, or humans, can exist. However, despite the obvious danger and 30 years of action by ecologists and climate scientists there has been no reduction in the increase of fossil fuel use, so it seems probable that a good quantity of the remaining oil, gas and coal will be extracted and burned. We are then faced with trying to adapt to a rapidly changing environment with increasingly expensive fuels and other resources. Can we at least get a good idea of the trajectory of these changes?

Aye, there’s the rub. The climate of earth is inarguably a Complex System. Complexity as a new branch of mathematics developed in the last 25 years gives us some interesting ways of looking at natural phenomenon like forest growth, cloud shapes, epidemiology, the branched shape of river systems or the coast of Brittany: – stuff with fuzzy edges. But one of the problems is that Complex Systems are inherently non deterministic, which means that making precise predictions about climate is virtually impossible[1]. So there is a fundamental problem in trying to get a grasp of where CO2 concentrations are likely to take us in temperature terms. So while the IPCC report[2]gives us a general view of the range of temperature increase, we have no way of knowing what real outcomes will be.

However, while the actual temperature rise may be impossible to predict, the probable effects of each degree of increase has been researched by Mark Lynas [3]in “Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet” – which makes for devastating reading. What comes out of it is that at temperatures within the IPCC predicted ranges, not to mention above them, we will be faced with the greatest adaptational challenge our species has faced. What makes this more difficult is that fossil fuels and the technologies they make possible are vital to our adaptational ability in the short term: building windfarms, solar panels, CO2 scrubbers or for that matter, fusion reactors all require sophisticated tooling and materials. This is what makes it imperative that we begin to adapt infrastructure, transport, and agriculture immediately. We are in a time crunch, with maybe 20 years at most (being wildly optimistic for once), before we begin to lose the ability to adapt our technology. As unfortunate civilizations before us have discovered, once a critical technology or resource is lost it may be irrecoverable.

That’s the proposition for climate, so now we need to look at how accurate estimates are for the extraction of the remaining fossil fuels….

[1]For a technical discussion of this topic see the new Roe & Baker paper in Science.
[2]Available here: http://www.ipcc.ch/
[3]Available here: http://www.marklynas.org/