Crawling from the Wreckage (36 page)

Scientists have their own way of phrasing things, and this is how Dr. Oerjan Gustafsson of Stockholm University announced the approach of a climate apocalypse in an email, sent last week from the Russian research ship
Jacob Smirnitskyi
in the Arctic Ocean:

“We had a hectic finishing of the sampling program yesterday and this past night. An extensive area of intense methane release was found. At earlier sites we had found elevated levels of dissolved methane. Yesterday, for the first time, we documented a field where the release was so intense that the methane did not have time to dissolve into the seawater but was rising as methane bubbles to the sea surface.”

Molecule for molecule, methane gas is twenty times more potent than carbon dioxide as a warming agent. However, since methane doesn’t stay in the atmosphere as long—around twelve years, on average, compared to a hundred years for carbon dioxide—and human activities do not produce all that much of it, concerns about climate change have mostly been focused on carbon dioxide. The only big worry was that warmer temperatures might cause massive releases of methane from natural sources.

There are thousands of megatons of methane stored underground in the Arctic region, trapped there by the permafrost (permanently frozen ground) that covers much of northern Russia, Alaska and Canada, and that extends far out under the seabed of the Arctic Ocean. If the permafrost melts and methane escapes into the atmosphere on a large scale, it would cause a rapid rise in temperature—which would melt more permafrost, releasing more methane, which would cause more warming, and so on.

Climate scientists call this a positive feedback mechanism. So long as it is our emissions that are causing the warming, we can stop the warming if we reduce the emissions fast enough. But once positive feedbacks
like methane release are in play, and start to drive the warming, it’s out of our hands: we could cut our emissions to zero only to find that the temperature is still rising.

Fear of this runaway feedback is why most climate scientists see a rise of two degrees Celsius in the average global temperature as the limit that we must never exceed. Somewhere between two and three degrees Celsius, they fear, means massive positive feedbacks such as methane release would kick in and take the situation out of our hands.

Unfortunately, the heating is much more intense in the Arctic region. So far, the average global temperate has risen only 0.8 degrees Celsius in the last century and a half, but the average temperature in the Arctic is up by four degrees Celsius. The result? The permafrost is starting to melt and the trapped methane is escaping.

That is what the research ship
Jacob Smirnitskiy
has just found: areas of the Arctic Ocean off the Russian coast where “chimneys” of methane gas are bubbling to the surface. What this may mean is that we have no time left, if we hope to avoid runaway global warming—and yet it will obviously take many years to get our own greenhouse-gas emissions down. So what can we do?

There is a way to cheat, for a while. Several techniques have been proposed for holding the global temperature down temporarily in order to avoid running into the feedbacks. They do not release us from the duty of getting our emissions down, but they could win us some time to work on that task without running into disaster.

The leading candidate, suggested by Nobel Prize–winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen in 2006, is to inject sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere in order to reflect some incoming sunlight. (This mimics the action of large volcanic eruptions, which also lower the global temperature temporarily by putting huge amounts of sulphur dioxide into the upper atmosphere.)

Another, less intrusive approach, proposed by John Latham of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, and Stephen Salter of Edinburgh University, is to launch fleets of unmanned, wind-powered vessels, controlled by satellite, that would spray a fine mist of seawater up into low-lying marine clouds in order to increase the amount of sunlight that they reflect. The great attraction of this technique is that if there are unwelcome side effects, you can turn it off right away.

These techniques are known as “geo-engineering” and, until recently, discussing them has been taboo in most scientific circles because of the “moral hazard”: the fear that if the public knows you can hold the global temperature down by direct intervention, people will not do the harder job of cutting their emissions. But if large-scale methane releases are getting underway, the time for such subtle calculations is past.

Starting now, we need a crash program to investigate the feasibility of these and other techniques for geo-engineering the climate. Once the thawing starts, it is hard to stop, and we may need such techniques very soon.

And what does all this mean for “The True North Strong and Free”?

The Copenhagen talks on climate change are going badly, which doubtless pleases the federal government. It thinks a weak agreement, or none at all, will serve Canada’s economic interests. It is wrong.

There are only two likely scenarios, really. In one, the rich countries make big emissions cuts in the next ten or fifteen years, and the developing countries at least cap their emissions. That better future is still ugly in many places—but not in Canada. The other is the “business-as-usual” scenario, in which the developed countries do not reduce their greenhouse-gas emissions fast enough and the developing countries just let them rip.

Nobody gets away unscathed in the “business-as-usual” scenario. When British Foreign Secretary David Miliband revealed the latest numbers from the Met Office’s Hadley Centre last October, predicting that a world in which emissions go unchecked may see a four degree Celsius rise in average global temperature by 2060, he simply said: “We cannot cope with a four-degree world.”

Actually, Britain probably could cope. As an island, cooled by the surrounding ocean, it would only be three degrees warmer, which means that it would probably still be able to grow enough food to feed itself. That is vital in a four-degrees-warmer world, because almost nobody will be exporting food anymore.

Oceans cover two-thirds of the planet’s surface and are cooler than the land, so the average temperature over most land areas is higher than the “average global temperature.” The Hadley Centre predicts that a global average of plus four degrees means that average temperatures will be five to six degrees higher in China, India, Southeast Asia and most of Africa, and up to eight degrees higher in the Amazon (which would burn, of course).

The result would be a 40 percent fall in world wheat and corn production and a 30 percent fall in rice production by 2060—in a world that would, by then, have to feed two billion more people. So there would be mass starvation, and waves of desperate refugees trying to move to a country where they could still feed their kids.

Canada’s only land border, fortunately, is with the United States, and the Americans would certainly seal the Mexican border against refugees from farther south. They would want Canadian water, though—and yet we would probably be short of water ourselves, because the farther inland and the farther north you go, the higher the temperature rises.

The Hadley Centre predicts that the thickly populated parts of Quebec, Ontario and the eastern Prairies would be an average of seven degrees hotter than they are today. Alberta, British Columbia and New Brunswick would be six degrees hotter; while Newfoundland, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island, surrounded by the sea, might be only four or five degrees hotter.

Would Canada still be a grain exporter at those temperatures? Would it even be able to feed itself? It depends on what happens to the rainfall, not just the temperature, but the answer might be no, and not being self-sufficient in food in a starving world would be a very unpleasant experience.

You get big problems closer to the equator at plus two degrees, but Canada would still be safe. At plus four, Canada faces catastrophe, too. That is the difference, for Canadians, between an effective climate-change treaty and a botched one—or none at all.

Canadians, including the government, assume that we will be okay no matter what happens on the climate front, so we can afford to put our other interests (like protecting the income from the tar sands) first. It is not true.

All the countries of the Earth sent their representatives to Copenhagen in December 2009 to negotiate a treaty that would keep the climate within its familiar bounds. They didn’t expect to get it finished there in every detail, but many people hoped that the Copenhagen conference could at least settle the big, contentious issues, leaving only the fine print for later. But the major powers present didn’t have agreement in principle when they arrived, and they didn’t have it when they left either
.

“The city of Copenhagen is a crime scene tonight, with the guilty men and women fleeing to the airport,” said John Sauven, executive director of Greenpeace U.K., on Friday night. “There are no targets for carbon cuts and no agreement on a legally binding treaty.”

The guilty men included U.S. President Barack Obama and Brazilian President Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva, who took the first planes out. Xie Zhenhua, the head of China’s delegation, lingered behind to declare that “The meeting has had a positive result, everyone should be happy.” But many people are unhappy, including most of the 130 presidents and prime ministers who showed up for the Copenhagen conference.

Their countries spent two weeks struggling unsuccessfully to bridge the gulf between the rich and poor nations over who pays to fix the eminently fixable problem of global warming, but at least they were clear on the goal. They wanted a treaty that would hold the warming to a safe level (although they could not agree on what that level was). Most of them even wanted to make it legally enforceable.

Yet the result, the Copenhagen Accord, was essentially a drive-by shooting, negotiated in a few hours by the U.S., China, Brazil, India and South Africa. It contains no hard numbers for emissions cuts and no deadlines. Nonetheless, Barack Obama insisted that it was a “meaningful result” because they had “agreed to set a mitigation target to limit warming to no more than two degrees Celsius and, importantly, to take action to meet this objective.”

It’s easy to make fun of this stuff. Those wise and powerful men set a target of no more than two degrees Celsius of warming—which is exactly
the same target they declared at the G8/G20 summit last July. “Importantly,” they also agreed “to take action to meet this objective”—though they could not agree on what the action would be, or when they would decide on it.

For this, 192 countries spent two weeks negotiating at Copenhagen? Why bother? It was an utter waste of time. But why is anybody surprised? Even I knew that it was bound to end up like that.

Two weeks ago, I wrote: “The Copenhagen summit will certainly fail to deliver the right deal. The danger is that it will lock us into the wrong deal, and leave no political space for countries to go back and try to get it right later. Public opinion is climbing a steep learning curve, and the asymmetrical deal that cannot be sold politically today might be quite saleable in as little as a year or two.”

Well, Copenhagen certainly didn’t lock us into the wrong deal. The reason no deal was possible is that public opinion in the developed countries is still in denial about the fact that the final climate deal must be asymmetrical. Until the general public grasps that idea, especially in the United States, there will be no real progress.

Most Western leaders understand the history. For two centuries, the countries that are now “developed” got rich by burning fossil fuels. In the process, they filled the atmosphere with their greenhouse-gas emissions to the point where the atmosphere now has little remaining capacity to absorb carbon dioxide without tipping us into disastrous heating.

This means that rapidly developing countries like China, India and Brazil will push the whole world into runaway warming if they follow the same historical path in growing their economies. As they are relatively poor, they have been investing mainly in fossil fuels, just as the West did when it was starting to industrialize. A wide variety of alternatives is now available, but only at a higher price.

So how do we deal with this unfair history? The developed countries must cut their emissions deeply and fast, and they must give the developing countries enough money to cover the extra cost of growing their economies with clean sources of energy instead of fossil fuels. That’s the deal, but most voters in the U.S. don’t understand it yet.

That’s why Barack Obama couldn’t promise to cut American emissions to 20 or 25 percent below 1990 levels by 2020, as most other industrial countries were offering to do. Instead, he could only offer a paltry 4 percent cut—and he couldn’t even guarantee that.

His most visible problem is the U.S. Senate, a body whose constitutional role is to delay change. The Senate has become more corrupt in recent decades because of the almost unlimited spending power of special-interest groups, but an uncorrupted Senate would not pass drastic climate legislation either. Like Obama himself, it cannot risk getting too far ahead of the American public.

Until Americans start to take climate change seriously, Obama will not be able to move. And it is politically impossible for the Chinese to make concrete commitments until the Americans do. We will just have to wait until the Americans get there.

Each year in which we don’t reach an adequate global climate deal means higher global average temperatures. Each lost year probably implies around fifty million extra premature deaths from famine, disease and war between now and the end of the century, because a higher end temperature means more of all those things. But that’s just the current tariff: by 2015, the annual cost in lives of further delay will rise steeply. Time is not on our side.