Panic, Doom, and Climate Change
By Nayyer Ali
The issue of climate change, originally called “global warming” has been in the scientific and public consciousness since 1988, when the Senate held its first hearings on the issue. The UN a few years later put together a large international body of scientists, the IPCC, to issue regular reports to help policy makers decide whether this was a critical issue and what were the risks and responses needed to address it. Since then, there has been a steady rise in both public pressure and scientific concern that the problem is real and should be addressed. But what should be a sober and reasoned debate over a very complex topic has lately degenerated into arms race of doomsaying between competing environmentalists with little or no scientific training.
The scientific community meanwhile is ignoring the massive progress that has been made, and still is using, and, to some extent, abusing, a worst-case scenario developed almost 20 years ago that is giving the general public a very distorted view of where we really stand.
In the last decade, to help guide public policy, the IPCC came up with several scenarios of future energy use going out to 2100. These were not predictions, to predict what humans will be doing in 90 years is foolish on its face. Who in 1910 would have predicted that America would be electrified by 2000, and that 20% of that electricity would be generated by nuclear power, a concept that did not even exist in theory before Einstein? What the IPCC did do is to come up with four scenarios with varying timelines for when the globe would move away from fossil fuels.
In the best case scenario, they predicted fossil fuel use would peak in the 2020’s, then decline slowly to near zero by 2080, the next case peaked around 2040, the third around 2070, and the worst case was no peak at all, with annual CO2 emissions rising to over 80 gigatons by 2100 (compared to about 37 gigatons currently). This worst case scenario, labeled RCP 8.5, was built around the notion that Third World countries would industrialize and use coal for their electric power, while there would be no transition away from gasoline-powered cars.
Over the last 15 years it has become clear that RCP 8.5 is not even theoretically possible. Coal, instead of becoming the dominant source of electric power, is in global decline and being phased out entirely in the US and EU. Even China has started to close down its vast coal fleet of plants due to choking pollution in its major cities. Global coal use peaked in 2013 and is headed downward to zero, not relentlessly upward. Renewables are now cheaper than building new coal, and within the next few years, new solar and wind will be cheaper than continuing to operate existing coal plants. Coal is headed to extinction.
The gasoline-powered car is starting down the same road. Almost every major economy from the EU to China to India has mandated that gas cars be banned from sale after 2040 or so. Even in the US, Blue states are pushing forward aggressive programs to switch to electric vehicles. A whole host of electric cars with good ranges over 250 miles will be coming on the market from the major automakers in the next 2-4 years. Peak consumption of oil is likely to happen in the 2020’s, a prediction made by a number of energy analysts and even some oil majors.
Even more important, the massive rollout of renewable energy is being driven by both dramatically falling costs, and by aggressive public policy. Even in the US, major states like California and New York are mandating bringing emissions down to near zero by 2050. While for any one entity to do this would have no real impact on carbon emissions, the key is that these nations and states will do the work of pioneering a new cleaner and cheaper energy system. The rest of the world will adopt it because it is superior to oil and coal, both cleaner and cheaper. No more smog in our cities, no more coal miners dying of black lung or trapped in mine accidents, and no more geopolitical struggles over oil fields. Just like cell phones were first developed as toys of the very rich in the 1980s, then became ubiquitous in even the poorest countries in the world by the 2010’s, the same will happen with clean energy technologies first developed in Sweden or California.
Considering all these trends, it would seem that a reasonable “baseline” scenario for this century would be what the IPCC considered “best case” just 15 years ago, that coal peaks in the 2010’s, oil in the 2020’s, and carbon emissions in the 2020’s or 2030’s. But the IPCC has not done that. It instead considers the “baseline” or “Business as Usual” scenario to be the preposterous RCP 8.5. This scenario predicts dramatic warming is going to happen, and it is the basis of a host of papers published on the possible climate impacts we can expect over the next 80 years. These predictions are then amplified and exaggerated by the environmentalist non-science community with the goal of panicking the public into supporting even more aggressive action immediately. This century-long problem has now been transmogrified into a “climate emergency”, and some politicians even ridiculously claim that we have only 12 years to curb emissions or the planet is going to become unfit for life itself (this ignores the fact that geologically speaking, the planet has been much hotter than present for most of its existence, normally the Earth doesn’t even have ice caps). There are other activists that get press coverage who claim that 6 billion people will die due to climate change in this century, and that several hundred million will drown due to rising sea levels (the Dutch live well below sea level, perhaps we could ask them how to manage that).
Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. As we add more to the atmosphere, the temperature will rise. Human civilization is adding billions of tons every year to the atmosphere and this does need to stop. But this can and should happen over the next 50 years, not the next 5 years. The IPCC states that we should keep the Earth’s average temperature to within 2 degrees centigrade of what it was in 1850. This number is not based on any scientific calculation, it was simply proposed by a German climate institute and was based on the fact that this was the highest average temperature in the last 10,000 years (basically since the ice age ended). That seems reasonable, but it does not therefore mean that if temperature ended up rising 2.5 degrees it would mean the end of life on Earth. Since 1980, temperature has been rising about 0.17 degrees per decade, or half a degree every thirty years. As we experienced a 0.5 degree rise between 1850 and 1980, that means we are already halfway to that 2 degree increase. In 2017, the IPCC moved the goalposts again, and claimed we should now try to limit temperature increase to 1.5 degrees. Even that means we still have 0.5 degrees of room to go higher, which based on the past 40 years, would suggest we have another 30 years before we breach that number.
The current global energy system based on coal, oil, and natural gas, has contributed to a massive rise in human prosperity. But we clearly need to move away from it. That process is well underway, and a reasonable and rational look at the trends suggests that we are dealing with the best case IPCC scenario, not the worst. We need to invest in research, lower the costs of renewables and storage, and convert cars to electric. But these are all achievable. There is no need to panic, and the doomsayers are not helping. At the end of the day, there is always nuclear power.
