Atmospheric Scientist Ken Caldeira Argues that the Paris Climate Talks Won’t Go Far Enough

We need to bring much, much more to bear on the climate problem.  It can’t be solved unless it is addressed as seriously as we address national security.  The politicians who go to the Paris Climate Conference are making commitments that fall far short of what would be needed to substantially reduce climate risk.

Daunting math
Four weeks ago, a hurricane-strength cyclone smashed into Yemen, in the Arabian Peninsula, for the first time in recorded history.  Also this fall, a hurricane with the most powerful winds ever measured slammed into the Pacific coast of Mexico.

Unusually intense storms such as these are a predicted consequence of global warming, as are longer heat waves and droughts and many other negative weather-related events that we can expect to become more commonplace.  Already, in the middle latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere, average temperatures are increasing at a rate that is equivalent to moving south about 10 meters (30 feet) each day.  This rate is about 100 times faster than most climate change that we can observe in the geologic record, and it gravely threatens biodiversity in many parts of the world.  We are already losing about two coral reefs each week, largely as a direct consequence of our greenhouse-gas emissions.

Recently, my colleagues and I studied what will happen in the long term if we continue pulling fossil carbon out of the ground and releasing it into the atmosphere.  We found that it would take many thousands of years for the planet to recover from this insult.  If we burn all available fossil-fuel resources and dump the resulting carbon dioxide waste in the sky, we can expect global average temperatures to be 9 °C (15 °F) warmer than today even 10,000 years into the future. We can expect sea levels to be about 60 meters (200 feet) higher than today.  In much of the tropics, it is possible that mammals (including us) would not be able to survive outdoors in the daytime heat.  Thus, it is essential to our long-term well-being that fossil-fuel carbon does not go into our atmosphere.

If we want to reduce the threat of climate change in the near future, there are actions to take now: reduce emissions of short-lived pollutants such as black carbon, cut emissions of methane from natural-gas fields and landfills, and so on.  We need to slow and then reverse deforestation, adopt electric cars, and build solar, wind, and nuclear plants.
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When the Constitution of the United States of America was written, it seemed inconceivable that people would be released from slavery or that women would vote.  Just a few years before gay marriage became the law of the land, it would have been impossible to predict such a sweeping change in social attitudes.  For us to even have a chance of addressing the climate problem, we’ll need another huge change in public attitudes.  It will need to be simply unacceptable to build things with smokestacks or tailpipes that dump waste into the air.  This change could happen.

The agreements made in Paris will be helpful, but they’re like changing over to compact fluorescent lightbulbs:  nice, but insufficient to the scale of the task.  However, the attention brought to the climate problem at the highest levels of government represents an important step toward a social tipping point—to that phase change when we decide collectively that we are not going to use the sky as a waste dump.

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