"We have failed to shift the narrative and we are still caught up in the same legal, economic and political systems," said David Suzuki in an exclusive interview with iPolitics. "For me, what we've got to do now is hunker down."
Climate change isn’t an on/off switch, it’s something that can always be made better or worse by increments.
I’m just speaking to the accuracy of this one sentence. This is completely 100% incorrect.
The climate system is a chaos system that has many areas of stability, rapid transformation and tipping points.
If you think the system is only incrementally changing, that’s just because you haven’t pushed it hard enough to rapidly shift to a new area of behavior you’ve never seen before.
Many of these regimes are irreversible and cannot be changed back. You cannot unburn toast, it’s a one way deal.
Once the climate changes, EVEN if you reset the conditions, you will not return to the initial state. Not at all. That idea is propaganda.
The fossil carbon and other climate related chemicals we have already dumped into the environment have a very long lag time before we see the effects (at all). These chemicals and their effects are more long living that most nuclear waste, for example. These are not going away while humanity still exists. That’s a done deal.
I think you’re right, but I don’t think OP would necessarily disagree (although I don’t know them).
The point is, we don’t really know where, or how many, tipping points there are. Every 0.1 degree warming is a higher chance of reaching them. And most climate models predict very different outcones for 2 degree vs 3 degree vs 4 degree warming.
So, there are a bunch of lags effects and tipping points, but we still don’t have any information to suggest that every 0.1 degree avoided has huge value.
Many people have been manipulated into thinking of this whole problem as a “flow” or “rate” problem.
“If we could only slow down carbon…”
The thing is that what we have is a “sink” or “stock” problem where it’s how much carbon is already in the system – it’s past actions that are already closed off to further change that are influencing things now
The rate of change in climate isn’t from the rate of this year’s contribution of 4ppm of CO2, it’s from having 423ppm in the system all together forcing a very large shift in energy imbalance.
There is no solution space where slowing down the rate is meaningful. Going to zero or net negative for the ANNUAL rate next year is too small a lever against what work would need to happen to make a meaningful difference.
The TOTAL HISTORICAL carbon that is already there would have to be entirely removed and even that wouldn’t put the system all the way back due to inertia and other nonlinearities.
What you’re feeling today in the climate is actually geared to the emissions levels that were already achieved no more recently than 15 years ago in the past. What we do today will have effects that will only start in 15 years and take a long time to fully play out with effects still coming into play 100 years from today. This is a very very long lag time that confuses everything in terms of human feedbacks and human proof and human priorities.
A great number of people think we know what to do but we were too greedy and corrupt to do it.
I disagree. I think we have no idea what to even do. Humanity does not have the technology or capability to be sustainable. And so we think and talk about it wrongly because we do not want to accept that we are doomed.
I think you’ve hit the nail on the head. No one knows what to do about it or they know they can’t stop what’s already been done, so why bother even trying to change. This is what got humans here in the first place, we pretend we know answers when we don’t, or at least say some paltry offering as making a difference. We can adapt to the changes that are coming, but it means reinventing our entire way of life, and the people at the top of the pile don’t t want to upset the system where they are at the top of the pile. Change has to come from the people, forcing the change. Our leaders have proven themselves incapable of breaking from the shackles of the old so we won’t make it to the new way unless we make it happen. We can’t leave it to others anymore, we have to do it.
In general right wing folks don’t believe we have a big problem, which is literal denial.
In general left wing folks believe we can solve the problem easily without much sacrifice, which is denial of the implications.
When right wing people look at left wing people they think the solutions are not going to work and would be a big scary change and a sure loss of our way of life.
When left wing people look at right wing people they think that they are stupid for being pragmatic and realist instead of idealistic and fantastical.
Its a game where both sides blame one another and decades slip comfortably by while we remain deadlocked.
Just to back up what your saying MIT have a nice explainer on carbon lifetimes[0].
I don’t know if I feel as doomed as you though. There is a lot of technology to reduce carbon (renewables etc). And moreover, a lot of the carbon use today is completely unecessary consumerism.
We’ve had 30 years of political inertia since Regan/Thatcher/etc so political change seems impossible to a lot of folks. Historically that’s just not the case. Before then, voter rights, civil rights, women’s rights all made huge political changes. If there’s any silver lining to the horror show of US politics at the moment, it should be that there is at least proof that massive structural change is possible in today’s political climate, and I genuinely believe that can be harnessed for good.
I don’t think there’s any guarantees, but it’s still a lot too early to give up.
There is a lot of technology to reduce carbon (renewables etc).
You’re only talking about reducing the rate of increases. That’s irrelevant. Carbon would still be growing, not shrinking.
As I stated, we need a way to decrease the existing carbon, which is a different, much larger problem, with no technology and nothing waiting in the wings. We have no ideas. Renewable or rebuildable power systems could be useful, but how does that power suck fossil carbon out of the biosphere, what’s the tech for that?
how does that power suck fossil carbon out of the biosphere, what’s the tech for that?
Does it have to be tech? Ocean plankton, peat bogs, forests, etc all do a great job of removing and storing carbon. They’re being destroyed currently, but we could choose to bolster them instead.
According to the science, the ocean current changes are going to start driving climate change via a doubling of present day CO2. When the permafrost melts it will create as much additional CO2 as all human industry does on a repeating annual basis right now. This is an all natural process where CO2 pollution will snowball faster and faster with no human ability to adjust it.
so, do you think natural processes like growing trees have the potential where they going to erase that much feedback? Keeping in mind that the peat bogs, forests and ocean plankton we have today in a less damaged ecosystem ALREADY failed to curtail a much smaller human created CO2 pulse?
Hmm?
What you’re talking about is BECCS, by the way. Believe me or don’t, but the UN climate change panel already included this in all the accounting! Like, what the projections for the future say is that we are going to invent these technologies and deploy them and erase the CO2, and that’s assumed to be real and already factored into all the future projections…and they are still talking about 8 degrees of warming even including that. Notwithstanding that we have never done this yet and don’t know if it works.
You’re arguing like current climate models predict 8 degrees warming, but my understanding is that a worst case scenario is 4 degrees- the best reference I can find is UN climate summit comparisons[0].
Do you have any references of stuff predicting 8 degrees or is it your personal prediction? If it’s the second, I don’t really have the knowledge to debate current climate models. If it’s the first link me some stuff!
My understanding (based on reading around and nothing else, I’m not a climate scientist) is we’re at 2 degrees already, 3 degrees is likely and 4 degrees would be close enough to catastrophic that talking about 5 degrees isn’t worthwhile. There’s still margin for human society to stop the worst of outcomes.
The closest thing I’ve heard of is sulfur dioxide injection, which could apparently reduce greenhouse effects. However, if we implemented this and ever stopped doing it before decreasing the current levels of carbon, it could result in more rapid heating, which would be more damaging to wildlife due to the greater speed with which survivors would have to migrate.
Humanity does not have the technology or capability to be sustainable
We absolutely have the technology, it’s just being blocked from being implemented on emergency timescales by soulless oil and gas corpo suits that have almost de-facto control of governments in most countries.
Solar and Wind power are cheap and are infinitely scalable on both small and large scales.
Public transport massively reduces energy requirements for transportation, and scales from bullet trains to light rail. Bike paths combined with ebikes can be used for smaller scales.
Vegan diets massively reduce emissions and energy requirements to produce calories for a population
Iron-air batteries are right now viable as an alternative to fossil fuel powered container ships. They are viable at large scales. For small scale between short distances, sailboats are still quite viable.
High density urban planning done by the Edenicity plan reduces suburban sprawl and massively reduces energy consumption by allowing for an urban area to be energy and food self sufficient. This concept scales to both small villages or large cities.
The tech is there. The only thing stopping us is a lack of political will due to capitalism resulting in oligarchs who have captured the political system, and a lack of public awareness of alternative ways of life due to poor education and propaganda.
A properly informed public that understands the extreme dangers of climate change, oligarchic capitalism, and the viability of changing things with collective power would allow us to use these existing technologies and prevent the devastation we’re headed toward.
Those are all ways to reduce the flow of new carbon emissions, but they don’t address the issue if the carbon that’s already in the atmosphere, which is what they’re talking about.
This would be things like more effective carbon capture technologies or sulfur dioxide injection. The point they’re making is that just slowing down the rate that new carbon is added or even stopping new carbon from being added at all isn’t sufficient to stop the runaway effects.
Never mind that the current regime in the US is on track to actually increase carbon emissions.
I’m aware, but I was addressing that one point at the end of their post about us not having sustainable technology, which I consider distinct from tech that sequesters existing emissions. As in, had we structured our societies with that other tech, it would’ve been fairly sustainable.
For sequestering carbon, I’d read a bit about growing mass amounts of some sort of seaweed or grass in shallow areas being somewhat promising, though ultimately I think we’re locked in for some extreme change regardless. My recommendations of sustainable tech would only limit the ceiling we reach in the future.
So, there is a natural carbon cycle, natural nitrogen cycle etc.
On planet earth, the nitrogen cycle of the whole planet is only 50% of what humans need to eat every year. If you don’t have artificial fertilizers, tractors, refrigerators etc etc, there is no way people can be fed even if they are everything that nature created.
We are locked into an artificial life support system. Our agriculture system creates more CO2 than all the cars being driven by a factor of 3.
We have no technology that is waiting to fix this. There is no “fix” where lots of people wouldn’t die directly.
We DO NOT have sustainable technologies. For humans, we are committed to planetary overshoot if we stay alive, we have been in planetary overshoot for many generations already.
Your list of “solutions” are not real things that make significant change. Sorry. They slow down the worsening but they will not even extend civilization by one extra generation. You have been duped into thinking about this the wrong way.
Cities are giant factories that require the constant cycling of goods (food, water and other materials) using a transportation grid and they also require constant energy inputs to remove waste materials. Our ancestors didn’t build cities to permanently live in until they had cheap surplus energy and a way to store it. I have something to warn you about…so your idea about edencity and public transportation is like you almost see how unsustainable cities are, and why.
The idea that wind and solar are infinitely scalable has actually been properly studied in the literature. For example, Mark Jacobson has a fully elucidated picture of what that would look like globally. If I remember correctly, he calls for every river on earth to be dammed for hydro, windmills covering every continent and around 200 solar panels for every living human AND major deductions in energy usage. This is a more highly industrialized future than any previous human project. He did not explore the material or energy costs of building this system. So for instance, on a planet where we cannot feed, build houses and build transport for everyone it’s surprising if we can build them all windmills, batteries, wiring, solar panels and power dams. But…you know…we have to dream right? The main headline is that “the possibility is infinite”. I actually don’t believe that, it seems like all these large scale programs are already failing in many ways. Not that they aren’t the best idea we have, they are just not working out.
By the way , we could also eat insects ground into a protein mush instead of actual vegetables.
I’m just speaking to the accuracy of this one sentence. This is completely 100% incorrect.
The climate system is a chaos system that has many areas of stability, rapid transformation and tipping points.
If you think the system is only incrementally changing, that’s just because you haven’t pushed it hard enough to rapidly shift to a new area of behavior you’ve never seen before.
Many of these regimes are irreversible and cannot be changed back. You cannot unburn toast, it’s a one way deal.
Once the climate changes, EVEN if you reset the conditions, you will not return to the initial state. Not at all. That idea is propaganda.
The fossil carbon and other climate related chemicals we have already dumped into the environment have a very long lag time before we see the effects (at all). These chemicals and their effects are more long living that most nuclear waste, for example. These are not going away while humanity still exists. That’s a done deal.
I think you’re right, but I don’t think OP would necessarily disagree (although I don’t know them).
The point is, we don’t really know where, or how many, tipping points there are. Every 0.1 degree warming is a higher chance of reaching them. And most climate models predict very different outcones for 2 degree vs 3 degree vs 4 degree warming.
So, there are a bunch of lags effects and tipping points, but we still don’t have any information to suggest that every 0.1 degree avoided has huge value.
Many people have been manipulated into thinking of this whole problem as a “flow” or “rate” problem.
“If we could only slow down carbon…”
The thing is that what we have is a “sink” or “stock” problem where it’s how much carbon is already in the system – it’s past actions that are already closed off to further change that are influencing things now
The rate of change in climate isn’t from the rate of this year’s contribution of 4ppm of CO2, it’s from having 423ppm in the system all together forcing a very large shift in energy imbalance.
There is no solution space where slowing down the rate is meaningful. Going to zero or net negative for the ANNUAL rate next year is too small a lever against what work would need to happen to make a meaningful difference.
The TOTAL HISTORICAL carbon that is already there would have to be entirely removed and even that wouldn’t put the system all the way back due to inertia and other nonlinearities.
What you’re feeling today in the climate is actually geared to the emissions levels that were already achieved no more recently than 15 years ago in the past. What we do today will have effects that will only start in 15 years and take a long time to fully play out with effects still coming into play 100 years from today. This is a very very long lag time that confuses everything in terms of human feedbacks and human proof and human priorities.
A great number of people think we know what to do but we were too greedy and corrupt to do it.
I disagree. I think we have no idea what to even do. Humanity does not have the technology or capability to be sustainable. And so we think and talk about it wrongly because we do not want to accept that we are doomed.
I think you’ve hit the nail on the head. No one knows what to do about it or they know they can’t stop what’s already been done, so why bother even trying to change. This is what got humans here in the first place, we pretend we know answers when we don’t, or at least say some paltry offering as making a difference. We can adapt to the changes that are coming, but it means reinventing our entire way of life, and the people at the top of the pile don’t t want to upset the system where they are at the top of the pile. Change has to come from the people, forcing the change. Our leaders have proven themselves incapable of breaking from the shackles of the old so we won’t make it to the new way unless we make it happen. We can’t leave it to others anymore, we have to do it.
Yep. There is a lot of hubris.
In general right wing folks don’t believe we have a big problem, which is literal denial.
In general left wing folks believe we can solve the problem easily without much sacrifice, which is denial of the implications.
When right wing people look at left wing people they think the solutions are not going to work and would be a big scary change and a sure loss of our way of life.
When left wing people look at right wing people they think that they are stupid for being pragmatic and realist instead of idealistic and fantastical.
Its a game where both sides blame one another and decades slip comfortably by while we remain deadlocked.
Just to back up what your saying MIT have a nice explainer on carbon lifetimes[0].
I don’t know if I feel as doomed as you though. There is a lot of technology to reduce carbon (renewables etc). And moreover, a lot of the carbon use today is completely unecessary consumerism.
We’ve had 30 years of political inertia since Regan/Thatcher/etc so political change seems impossible to a lot of folks. Historically that’s just not the case. Before then, voter rights, civil rights, women’s rights all made huge political changes. If there’s any silver lining to the horror show of US politics at the moment, it should be that there is at least proof that massive structural change is possible in today’s political climate, and I genuinely believe that can be harnessed for good.
I don’t think there’s any guarantees, but it’s still a lot too early to give up.
[0] https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/how-do-we-know-how-long-carbon-dioxide-remains-atmosphere
You’re only talking about reducing the rate of increases. That’s irrelevant. Carbon would still be growing, not shrinking.
As I stated, we need a way to decrease the existing carbon, which is a different, much larger problem, with no technology and nothing waiting in the wings. We have no ideas. Renewable or rebuildable power systems could be useful, but how does that power suck fossil carbon out of the biosphere, what’s the tech for that?
Does it have to be tech? Ocean plankton, peat bogs, forests, etc all do a great job of removing and storing carbon. They’re being destroyed currently, but we could choose to bolster them instead.
Those are also technologies, just not high tech.
Here is a question then:
According to the science, the ocean current changes are going to start driving climate change via a doubling of present day CO2. When the permafrost melts it will create as much additional CO2 as all human industry does on a repeating annual basis right now. This is an all natural process where CO2 pollution will snowball faster and faster with no human ability to adjust it.
so, do you think natural processes like growing trees have the potential where they going to erase that much feedback? Keeping in mind that the peat bogs, forests and ocean plankton we have today in a less damaged ecosystem ALREADY failed to curtail a much smaller human created CO2 pulse?
Hmm?
What you’re talking about is BECCS, by the way. Believe me or don’t, but the UN climate change panel already included this in all the accounting! Like, what the projections for the future say is that we are going to invent these technologies and deploy them and erase the CO2, and that’s assumed to be real and already factored into all the future projections…and they are still talking about 8 degrees of warming even including that. Notwithstanding that we have never done this yet and don’t know if it works.
I guess maybe I’m missing something?
You’re arguing like current climate models predict 8 degrees warming, but my understanding is that a worst case scenario is 4 degrees- the best reference I can find is UN climate summit comparisons[0].
Do you have any references of stuff predicting 8 degrees or is it your personal prediction? If it’s the second, I don’t really have the knowledge to debate current climate models. If it’s the first link me some stuff!
My understanding (based on reading around and nothing else, I’m not a climate scientist) is we’re at 2 degrees already, 3 degrees is likely and 4 degrees would be close enough to catastrophic that talking about 5 degrees isn’t worthwhile. There’s still margin for human society to stop the worst of outcomes.
[0]https://unclimatesummit.org/comparing-climate-impacts-at-1-5c-2c-3c-and-4c/
The closest thing I’ve heard of is sulfur dioxide injection, which could apparently reduce greenhouse effects. However, if we implemented this and ever stopped doing it before decreasing the current levels of carbon, it could result in more rapid heating, which would be more damaging to wildlife due to the greater speed with which survivors would have to migrate.
That’s geoengineering to reduce the strength of sunlight to get heat down. It has to be repeated indefinitely, forever, or heat increases again.
Also, it doesn’t reverse what’s causing climate change by removing carbon.
We absolutely have the technology, it’s just being blocked from being implemented on emergency timescales by soulless oil and gas corpo suits that have almost de-facto control of governments in most countries.
What’s an example of the technology, and can you explain what scale it works at?
The tech is there. The only thing stopping us is a lack of political will due to capitalism resulting in oligarchs who have captured the political system, and a lack of public awareness of alternative ways of life due to poor education and propaganda.
A properly informed public that understands the extreme dangers of climate change, oligarchic capitalism, and the viability of changing things with collective power would allow us to use these existing technologies and prevent the devastation we’re headed toward.
Those are all ways to reduce the flow of new carbon emissions, but they don’t address the issue if the carbon that’s already in the atmosphere, which is what they’re talking about.
This would be things like more effective carbon capture technologies or sulfur dioxide injection. The point they’re making is that just slowing down the rate that new carbon is added or even stopping new carbon from being added at all isn’t sufficient to stop the runaway effects.
Never mind that the current regime in the US is on track to actually increase carbon emissions.
I’m aware, but I was addressing that one point at the end of their post about us not having sustainable technology, which I consider distinct from tech that sequesters existing emissions. As in, had we structured our societies with that other tech, it would’ve been fairly sustainable.
For sequestering carbon, I’d read a bit about growing mass amounts of some sort of seaweed or grass in shallow areas being somewhat promising, though ultimately I think we’re locked in for some extreme change regardless. My recommendations of sustainable tech would only limit the ceiling we reach in the future.
So, there is a natural carbon cycle, natural nitrogen cycle etc.
On planet earth, the nitrogen cycle of the whole planet is only 50% of what humans need to eat every year. If you don’t have artificial fertilizers, tractors, refrigerators etc etc, there is no way people can be fed even if they are everything that nature created.
We are locked into an artificial life support system. Our agriculture system creates more CO2 than all the cars being driven by a factor of 3.
We have no technology that is waiting to fix this. There is no “fix” where lots of people wouldn’t die directly.
We DO NOT have sustainable technologies. For humans, we are committed to planetary overshoot if we stay alive, we have been in planetary overshoot for many generations already.
Your list of “solutions” are not real things that make significant change. Sorry. They slow down the worsening but they will not even extend civilization by one extra generation. You have been duped into thinking about this the wrong way.
Cities are giant factories that require the constant cycling of goods (food, water and other materials) using a transportation grid and they also require constant energy inputs to remove waste materials. Our ancestors didn’t build cities to permanently live in until they had cheap surplus energy and a way to store it. I have something to warn you about…so your idea about edencity and public transportation is like you almost see how unsustainable cities are, and why.
The idea that wind and solar are infinitely scalable has actually been properly studied in the literature. For example, Mark Jacobson has a fully elucidated picture of what that would look like globally. If I remember correctly, he calls for every river on earth to be dammed for hydro, windmills covering every continent and around 200 solar panels for every living human AND major deductions in energy usage. This is a more highly industrialized future than any previous human project. He did not explore the material or energy costs of building this system. So for instance, on a planet where we cannot feed, build houses and build transport for everyone it’s surprising if we can build them all windmills, batteries, wiring, solar panels and power dams. But…you know…we have to dream right? The main headline is that “the possibility is infinite”. I actually don’t believe that, it seems like all these large scale programs are already failing in many ways. Not that they aren’t the best idea we have, they are just not working out.
By the way , we could also eat insects ground into a protein mush instead of actual vegetables.