Deferring Climate Action

Depending on one's perspective on climate change, last week's events provided either a series of predictable disappointments or a temporary breather, before our expected plunge into a world of constrained emissions. The statement on climate change from the G8 Summit in Hokkaido, Japan, and the subsequent "Major Economies Meeting" reflected only incremental progress since 2005's Gleneagles G-8 meeting and last year's Bali Climate Conference. And although the announcement that the EPA would effectively defer regulating greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act until the next administration was overshadowed by allegations that Vice President Cheney had interfered with Congressional testimony on the health risks of climate change, the former should not have shocked anyone. On the heels of the latest failure of US cap & trade legislation, it was not in the cards for 2008 to be more than a transition year for action on climate change, and that view has been borne out.

Lacking the time or space to comment on all of the implications of these actions, I'd like to focus on the principal complaint I've seen concerning the G8's contribution, to the effect that their stated target of cutting global greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2050 falls far short of what would be necessary to stabilize the climate. I would suggest that at this point setting any global emissions target and then starting to work towards it is more important than the absolute level of the goal. Stabilizing atmospheric concentrations of CO2 and other greenhouse gases at their current level would apparently require reductions on the order of 80%, but whatever target we set now for 2050 is unlikely to be the last word, and even more unlikely to be achieved with precision. We will ultimately either undershoot, because global emissions are now growing so rapidly that it will take longer and cost more to halt and reverse this trend than we hope, or we will overshoot, because the world will change so much in the next 42 years that a 50% reduction will prove to have been ridiculously timid.

Consider 1966, removed from us by the same interval as the world of 2050, and the sorts of predictions that were then current regarding the 21st century--predictions rooted firmly in the dominant technologies and institutions of the day. By now all air travel should take place in sumptuous luxury aboard supersonic aircraft. Rather than lumbering along with gasoline engines, our cars should zoom down the roads on nuclear batteries and occasionally even fly. Recessions and credit crises should be a relic of the past, as gigantic mainframe computers guide the economy with total accuracy. And don't forget the colony on the moon. For good or ill, we didn't get those outcomes. Instead, we got ubiquitous real-time information and communications via wireless PCs, cellphones and the Internet, and the beginnings of unprecedented medical and materials revolutions based on DNA-level biotech and nanotechnology. In addition, the world's population has grown by about a half billion fewer people than once expected, making some of our current problems less severe than they would have been. I see little reason to conclude that the next four decades will be any less surprising and prediction-thwarting than the last four. That doesn't mean we should punt on climate change and wait for a miracle, but it does suggest that focusing our first steps firmly on the next 10-20 years makes more sense than bogging down in arguments about a longer-term future we can't forecast.

Few things about climate change are certain, including the level of our emissions in 2050. However, at this point we do know that the roadmap set forth in Bali last December, and resting on the findings of the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, continues to guide the negotiations on a new global climate agreement. Although the shape of the ultimate compromise between the developed and developing economies--the sine qua non of a meaningful successor to the Kyoto Protocol--remains unclear, the key parties at least seem to be willing to tackle it. And we know that on January 20, 2009, a new US administration will take office with climate change as a top priority from day one.

The Verdict

Last Friday the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded its meeting in Paris with the release of the Summary of its Fourth Assessment Report (4AR.) There's not much I can add here to what is being reported about the significance of its findings on the connection between greenhouse gases and climate change, and of the likely course of the latter over the rest of the century. I think I contribute more in two areas that haven't gotten a lot of attention in the media blitz over the 4AR: the value of the engineering approach for problems at this stage, and how best to regard the remaining climate skeptics.

Even though I haven't done much actual engineering in the last 25 years, my engineering training provided a framework for problem-solving that informs everything I do. Engineering is all about turning the results of science into practical things in the real world, and that is increasingly relevant to the problem of climate change. With the release of the full 4AR over the next several months--last week's output was just the executive summary of the first of the three main Working Groups--we're reaching the point at which the main focus must shift to action, rather than more analysis. That doesn't mean the scientific investigation of climate change should stop, or that we know everything we need to know about climate change; rather, in the manner of the solution to Zeno's Paradox, we know enough to get started. It's time to turn the engineers loose on this problem and move the scientific debate off to the side.

Making our energy systems more climate-friendly will be the centerpiece of that work. There are many competing blueprints for how to do that, and another one was also released last week by the American Solar Energy Society, with some impressive institutions and individuals behind it. Although I wonder how rapidly their proposed solutions could actually be ramped up, the report provides a good picture of the magnitude of response necessary to avert the consequences that the 4AR describes. (The IPCC will apparently contribute its own thoughts along these lines in the upcoming reports of the second and third Working Groups.) And we shouldn't limit ourselves to devising new ways of generating electricity or making cars more efficient. It may turn out that the only means of arresting the uncontrolled science experiment we've been running for the last century is with some truly large-scale engineering, and we ought to have options for that in our back pocket, in case we encounter a "runaway greenhouse" effect. I recognize that some will find that idea nearly as worrying as the climate problem itself.

Now to the skeptics. Although the strengthened scientific consensus of the 4AR will change the landscape for them, no one should expect the skeptics to disappear, nor would that be desirable--and here I draw an important distinction between genuine skepticism and self-interested obstructionism. That doesn't mean the skeptics should be driving the agenda, but having to answer their hard questions will clarify our thinking. Fundamentally, if they are going to challenge the IPCC view, they must do so in the only way that has worked throughout the history of science: by creating a better hypothesis that can be demonstrated to fit more of the available data and observations. Until that should happen, we must assume that man-made greenhouse gases are warming our planet, and act accordingly.

Life is going to get progressively harder for the skeptics. Their sources of funding will start drying up, and they may find themselves persona non grata, even among those whose support they could count on in the past. With the future of the planet increasingly seen to be on the line--and the fate of our descendants with it--the non-scientists' view of climate science is taking on attributes of religious dogma, and skeptics are being cast as heretics. That isn't healthy, but it's understandable. We need to preserve a level of continued funding and access to the mainstream of science for skeptical scientists, on the off chance that the consensus might prove to be wrong in some important way. If it turned out that the main driver of climate change were something other than man-made greenhouse gases--be it the cosmic ray/cloud hypothesis or something else--it would be nice to know that before we've spent trillions of dollars on a crash effort to decarbonize our energy systems and transform the global economy.

As the 4AR has made quite clear, waiting for the last lingering doubts about climate change to be resolved is a losing game that risks highly detrimental, potentially irreversible changes in our environment. Now we must see what the scientists can convince the policy makers to engage the engineers and financiers to do. I don't think we're going to have to wait long to find out.