The world is destroyed. Scientists have been carefully gathering data for decades to prove what we hoped was not true: the greenhouse gas emissions that have gradually poured from vehicles and airplanes and factories, the innovations that have driven a huge era of economic growth, have cost the planet's health enormously. Today, we know that the average global temperature will increase by as much as 4 degrees Celsius by the end of the century, in the absence of any change in our actions. Up to 6 feet of global sea levels will increase. Along with those shifts will come radical changes in weather patterns around the globe, leaving coastal communities and equatorial regions forever changed—and potentially uninhabitable.
Hit that. From prolonged wildfire seasons to worsening storm surges, we are already experiencing the consequences of a drastically changed climate. Now, truthfully, it is impossible that any individual weather phenomenon would be the sole product of industrial pollution, and maybe your particular part of the world has been spared thus far. But when historical patterns are so terrifyingly true, that's little consolation. (Oh, and while it used to take months for mathematicians to determine how humans were affected by the odds of real severe weather events, they knocked down the time of data-crunching to weeks.)
Fortunately, it seems like most of the nation-states of the planet are beyond quibbling about climate change if they move quickly on to what now? In the conversation on planetary pragmatics, the 2015 Paris climate agreement represented a turning point. In reality, renewable energy is becoming competitive with fossil fuels in the form of wind and solar power. And the world's largest cities are driving environmental policy decisions in a way that exceeds other countries' contributions. Scientists and politicians are now starting to consider a whole range of last-ditch attempts to consciously, directly influence the environment. We're talking about some real sci-fi stuff here. We will need to plan for a new age of geoengineering in order to keep the climate livable.
We will take you to the Industrial Revolution if we want to go all the way back to the beginning, the stage after which climate scientists begin to see a global change in temperature and levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide. The United States and other developing nations started to pump out their by-products in the late 1700s, when coal-fired factories began churning out steel and textiles. Coal is a fuel rich in carbon, so it produces heat along with another by-product as it combusts with oxygen: carbon dioxide. Other fuels that are based on carbon, such as natural gas, do the same in different amounts.
They behaved like an insulating blanket when those pollutants reached the atmosphere, stopping the sun's heat from escaping into space. Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have varied a great deal over the course of history. Models of ancient climate activity placed the levels of carbon dioxide as high as several thousand parts per million, hundreds of millions of years ago. They have fluctuated between around 180 and 300 parts per million in the past half a million years or so. Yet they have not fluctuated too rapidly. Atmospheric CO~2~ is currently at 407 ppm, nearly one and a half times higher than it was only two centuries ago. And we know for sure that the extra greenhouse gas comes from humans; atmospheric carbon isotope analysis indicates that much of the extra CO~2~ comes from fossil fuels.
Result: the weather is serious. There's global warming, of course; since the late 19th century, the Earth's surface temperature has risen by 1.1 degrees Celsius. It goes on, however. Hurricane seasons become more extreme as oceans accumulate heat and polar ice sheets melt when liquid water from the oceans kicks warm, moist air into the atmosphere. Over the past century, sea levels have risen by around 8 inches. The pace of these changes is growing, critically speaking.
In California, one of the more obvious effects of climate change is playing out. Owing to climate change, wildfires have become dramatically more severe in recent years. They burn hotter and stronger, leading to disasters like the north of San Francisco's Camp Fire, which virtually wiped out the 27,000-person town of Paradise, becoming the most deadly and devastating wildfire in state history. It's a matter of awful timing: in the fall, California normally gets at least a bit of rain that rehydrates plants, but not anymore. This dryness coincides with seasonal winds from the east that whip in, drying out vegetation further and providing fires with a turbo boost.
Then Australia endured an unprecedentedly brutal fire season in late 2019, giving the world perhaps the most drastic manifestation to date of the climate crisis. 1 percent of Australia's famous eucalyptus forests will burn in an average year. Yet 21% went up in flames in the 2019-2020 fire season, obliterating entire habitats and potentially dooming many animals to extinction. Models expected it would be 80 years before anything like that occurred. The conflagrations were so terrible.
Meanwhile, ecosystems are changing rapidly and drastically at the poles of the Earth. Twice as quickly as the rest of the world, the Arctic and Antarctic are warming, which, of course, contributes to the rapid melting of glaciers, which in turn increases sea levels. But the land itself is literally in chaos, too. [Massive holes](https://www.Quiziosity.com/story/abrupt-permafrost-thaw/) are opening up in the Arctic as frozen soils known as permafrost rapidly thaw. This releases CO 2 and methane, an even more strong greenhouse gas, setting off an awful feedback loop: more Arctic landscape emissions mean more warming, more thawing, more emissions.
Sea levels are increasingly increasing as glaciers begin to dump meltwater into the ocean. And it's not just the amount of extra water that people have to think about in the oceans: it rises as water warms, raising sea levels even higher. Miami is already experiencing more serious flooding, and Jakarta is both drowning in rising waters on the other side of the world in Indonesia and sinking because the town has pumped up too much groundwater, leaving the land to crumble like an empty bottle of water.
All of this has led 97% of climate scientists to conclude that it is very likely that warming patterns are the result of human activity. And in 1988, the bulk of research led to the establishment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change of the United Nations, which has now released five assessment reports documenting all available science, technical and economic climate change information. In 2007, the fourth study was the first to explicitly state that the atmosphere was unambiguously warming and that it was very likely that human-created greenhouse gases were to blame.
However, just because the panel came to a decision doesn't mean that everyone else did. In 2009, when climate deniers published a trove of emails from scientists, including the one behind the famous 1999 "hockey stick" graph showing a sharp upturn in global temperature since the Industrial Revolution, climate scientists had their own WikiLeaks scandal, one that was evidently sharper than the Earth's many global warmings and coolings. Excerpts taken out of context from those emails revealed that researcher Michael Mann allegedly conspired to manipulate his data statistically. Placed back in context, they clearly didn’t.
Political uncertainty has continued to call into question the consensus of scientists on evidence supporting the human-caused climate change hypothesis, motivated by the fossil fuel industry's financial incentives. But in 2015, such squabbles seemed to be transcended by the world's leaders. 195 countries settled on the language of what is known as the Paris Agreement on 12 December, following two weeks of negotiations at the 21st United Nations Conference on Climate Change in Le Bourget, France. The aim is to sustain an average rise in global temperature to below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and as near as possible to 1.5 degrees. It does so by making each nation submit a pledge to reduce emissions and jointly bear the financial burden of a change from fossil fuels, while realizing that if they had to give up cheap energy, developed nations would be denied a certain amount of growth.
The Paris agreement formally came into force on November 4, 2016, just four days before Donald Trump was elected president of the United States on a campaign pledge to withdraw from the agreement. "And on June 1, 2017, Trump made good on that promise, saying that "the United States will withdraw from the Paris climate agreement, but will start negotiations to re-enter either the Paris agreement or a completely new transaction on terms that are fair to the United States, its businesses, its employees, its people, its taxpayers.
The good news is that the global community is very unified in the face of climate change threats. Science is getting good enough to connect particular extreme events directly to human-caused climate change, anomalous hurricanes, extreme flooding events, and that makes it easier to create a case for dramatic action to curb the damage. But what are those acts meant to be?
A radical transition away from fossil fuels and toward renewable energy is the most obvious solution to climate change woes: solar, wind, geothermal, and nuclear (deep breath). And we are making solid progress, increasing our generation of renewable electricity worldwide by around 2.8 percent last year.
Our profoundly fractured relationship with the land itself must also be fixed. The IPCC issued a study in the summer of 2019 that warns that we are significantly exacerbating climate change by abusing land. A major carbon sink is eliminated by killing forests; CO 2 goes in and oxygen comes out. The supercharged wildfires such as California spewing all the captured carbon into the atmosphere are not helping matters. Skyrocketing demand for meat worldwide means more cows are burping more methane: a whopping 37 percent of emissions are responsible for the global food system as a whole. It would put an enormous dent in global greenhouse gas emissions to make the system more functional.
Nevertheless, there is a growing awareness that even though every nation that originally signed up to the Paris Agreement meets every single one of its defined targets, there are still drastic changes to the Earth. We've already crossed tipping points in several ways: even though we stopped emitting now, we will still see drastic impacts. There are greenhouse gases in the atmosphere already, and we're locked into a certain amount of warming. And that implies we need to start planning, primarily in the way we construct, for another kind of climate future. The floods will come, pushing us to make new laws governing construction. The development of the wildland-urban interface would be deterred by an ever-longing wildfire season. And people from areas made uninhabitable by drought or heat or floods would pour in, forcing other nations to adapt their immigration policies to a new class of refugees.
All those improvements are going to cost money. That was one of the key motivators of the Paris Agreement: moving away from cheap fossil fuels means that companies and businesses would have to take a financial hit to ensure a future that is profitable and livable. Which is why a lot of climate change solutions, per se, have little to do with climate science: they have to do with economics.
A carbon tax is one especially potent tool. Economists firmly accept that you better charge emitters like utility utilities a fee for all that CO 2 they release if you want to cut emissions. Yeah, those utilities will pass on those costs to consumers, but as a "carbon dividend" the tax the government charges would fall back to households. As the fee increases year by year, polluters would pay more and more and turn to less and less burning clean energy sources. This kind of carbon tax has already been shown by countries such as Canada and Sweden to drastically reduce emissions.
For their part, socially conscious investors make a difference by keeping corporations to account for their effects on the environment and the ways in which their company will be impacted by climate change. A group of small-scale pension schemes pressured Occidental Petroleum, one of the country's largest oil firms, to report climate risk in its shareholder prospectus last year; in December 2017, ExxonMobil caved to pressure. Large-endowed sites, such as universities, face political pressure to divest themselves from the fossil fuel industry.
These are all indirect ways to keep the fossil fuel industry responsible, for every gigaton of greenhouse gases released, for the financial toll it takes on the Planet. But there are more straightforward forms in which they can also pay up. After a 2015 article by Inside-Climate News reported that ExxonMobil has long known about the dangers of climate change, the firm is being prosecuted in many states by attorneys general to decide if it has violated the laws of consumer or investor safety. The City of San Francisco is suing the five biggest producers of fossil fuels in the public domain in order to get them to pay for infrastructure to shield them from rising sea levels. With a similar suit, New York City followed.
Let's say those suits are good, and at-risk cities get some support making the requisite major infrastructure upgrades to protect their investments in the coastline. It will still not be enough to prevent global temperatures from rising above the 2-degree-Celsius tipping point despite doing all we can to minimize more carbon emissions and protect life and property from the dangers of a changing environment. But that's when society goes into constructive mode, probably unleashing into the environment a divisive collection of experimental technologies. This is geoengineering: carbon dioxide removal and heat reduction by, let's say, *experimental* methods. Like salt-spraying rockets, and space mirrors that are supersized.
One of the great hopes of the new IPCC study is that, through a process called bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, we will pull carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere and store it underground. But this technology really doesn't exist. By introducing sulfate particles into the atmosphere, another solution aims to minimize heat, reflecting solar radiation back into space, but that may cause too much global cooling. To put it lightly, most of the geoengineering plans are underdeveloped. In the decades to come, the push to finalize those ideas would depend on the success of global cutbacks.
- The World's Dirty Secret Strategy to Prevent Climate Disasters
When the fifth assessment report was published by the United Nations Intergovernmental Commission on Climate Change in 2014, it set out 116 scenarios for sustaining an average global temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius. The tricky thing is, 101 of them rely on a technology that does not yet exist for carbon dioxide-sucking.
- Renewables aren't appropriate. Future is Clean Coal
In an instant, the planet will not wean itself off coal, so before switching to entirely renewable energy, it will be important to capture and store the carbon generated from coal plants to fulfill the goals of the Paris agreement. In this 2014 feature, Charles C. Mann visits GreenGen, a Chinese billion-dollar facility that is one of the most important attempts to realize the technology, extracting CO 2 to store it underground from a coal-fired power plant.
- The world's cities will take a big bite out of pollution, nations be damned,
Leaders from around the world are gathering at the C40 Mayors Summit to discuss how their cities (more than 40 now) should tackle climate change. If every city with a population of over 100,000 increased, 40 percent of the reductions needed to meet the Paris climate targets could be accounted for.
- The US Flirts to Stymie Climate Change With Geoengineering
Geoengineering climate change strategies may have disastrous side effects, such as spraying sulfate particles into the atmosphere to hold the temperature down. Which is why, before considering them, we need further research. A bill was proposed by one congressman that would set the mission for the National Academies of Science.
- To meet Paris' climate goals, the world needs urgent action
At the end of 2015, science writer Nick Stockton traveled to Paris to see the talks that led to the signing of the Global Agreement on Climate Change. The task of converting all the industries represented, from agriculture to transportation to concrete, away from fossil fuels, invigorated yet daunted him. What needs to be done is here.
- Extreme weather triggers climate change, but not all.
Scientists know that higher temperatures, longer dry periods, and greater storms mean cumulative CO 2. But ask them whether a Midwest heatwave, the California drought, or a New York hurricane has been caused by global warming, and they will explain ad nauseam how difficult it is to untangle whether any particular weather occurrence is due to natural variation or climate change. Difficult, but not impossible.
- Take a stunning look, America. This is what the equation looks like.
What is more apparent, however, is the impact of global warming on wildfires in California. The state has been devastated by seven of the 20 most devastating fires in state history in just the last year. A combination of high winds, human evolution in the wrong places, and a warming world is the problem. Now it is a matter of how to adapt to California.
- Uh, plus! Subsidence question in San Francisco and more climate change coverage by Quiziosity.
The last time this guide was revised was on March 16, 2020.
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