Climate change: It’s time to go on a low carbon fare

On Friday, Working Group I of the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change released a new report that tried to explain the physical basis for climate change. For most scientists and environmentalists, its main message was self-evident: human beings are responsible for rapid global warming.


Rational people would by now have accepted this fact as obvious and moved on, focusing their energies on how to slow down global warming or to reduce its economic and societal impact. And yet there is a campaign by several pressure groups around the world to convince the public that the science of climate change is far from sound, and that the current IPCC report is not based on good science.

Not Hot Air

The contents of the report, approved by scientists and government representatives, had been leaked substantially. The report said with 95% certainty, up from 90% in its previous report in 2007, that current global warming is the result of human activity.

It also gave an explanation, to the best of our current knowledge, for the reason why the earth’s average temperatures have not gone up in the last 15 years as much as people expected. It also mentioned, almost in passing, that climate data should be analysed over a 30-year period and not every decade. Which means that the current hiatus in warming has not been evident long enough for us to conclude that the earth is not heating up.

At the core, there is not much in say in the 1990s. Uncertainties are in the nature of climate science, and there is still no consensus on how much the earth would warm in 100 years. We don’t know how much and how quickly polar ice will melt. These uncertainties actually do not matter too much, because only a professional denier will now say that the science is not convincing enough.

The IPCC report is, however, notable for one point: it gave a carbon budget for the earth, the total amount of carbon dioxide countries can emit without causing dangerous climate change.

Tech is the Way Out

This carbon budget is around 880 giga tonnes, of which we have already emitted around 531 giga tonnes. So the world has another 350 tonnes to emit before we move into dangerous territory. At the present rate, we should use this up in less than three decades. There will be a deadlock if the world decides to limit our emissions to this level politically.

How would we apportion the emissions between countries? The developed would already have exceeded their quota, while the developing world would still have a lot left to emit. This won’t be acceptable to the developed world, and so the negotiations for an international treaty — to be signed in 2015 — based on a carbon budget may be a nonstarter. There are serious technology options on the horizon to limit our cumulative emissions to below 880 giga tonnes. Electric cars could become viable within 10 years, by which time there could be breakthroughs in nuclear, solar and biofuel technologies.

Artificial photosynthesis could give us an excellent option to store energy. Even without big breakthroughs, current levels of technology can achieve a great deal if people make an honest attempt. There is, however, one technology that could be an immense help in the long run: Carbon Dioxide Removal.

Methods are being developed that will try to take the greenhouse gas out of the air and put it safely on or under the ground. In the end, a completely political solution will not be enough.