Slowly catching up with my UCSanDiego classmates... On the question of whether is good enough to simply level off carbon emissions or if have to mobilize and commit to significant reductions: Because carbon dioxide emissions continue to exceed removals, the level of CO2 in the atmosphere continues to rise. While levelling of emissions seems like an attractive compromise, and is loosely what the Kyoto Protocol would result in if actually signed on to and enforced, it would be insufficient to stabilize CO2 in the atmosphere because emissions would still exceed removals. What would that look like? -- ongoing warming, more water vapor, more intense rains in already rainy areas (as water vapor content rises), more temperature extremes, more precipitation extremes, a more intense hydrological cycle (heavy precipitation and more drought), increased storm activity, global increase in number of category four and five hurricanes, rising sea surface temperature, warming tropical sea surface temperature, increased frequency of severe thunderstorms in some regions, more permafrost melt and increase in depth of active layer of permafrost, higher sea level rise, glacier and ice cap loss, ice sheet loss, ice shelf melting, dramatically higher summer-time sea ice melting, thinner sea ice, increased acidification and de-oxygenation of oceans, and salinity changes in oceans. A significant reduction of emissions in real world looks like an insurmountable political issue as politicians haven’t even remotely reached any kind of consensus on the four problems of mitigation: 1) how to tackle a stock problem (with its inherent credibility issue around goal-setting, the fact involves high up-front costs with distant uncertain benefits, and inability of the market, as part of natural resource economy, to self-interestedly self-correct precisely because the consequences of this stock problem are diffused around the planet); 2) how to address energy use (and more specifically, how to pull 50 per cent of emissions from the world’s energy supply) without drastically undermining economic competitiveness – considering that there is a clear relationships between consumption of energy and economic growth and output and emissions; 3) the issue of embodied emissions, a factor resulting from globalization of economies; and finally, 4) complications from the newly emerged international market for coal resulting from dramatically decreased shipping and transportation costs.
Posted on: Sun, 03 Aug 2014 17:21:11 +0000
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