The Misalignment of Our Climate Reality and Our Actions
Signals
We are confronted every day with news of a weather catastrophe somewhere in the world. Storms are getting more severe with an intensity we have rarely seen. We hear how many densely populated regions are now dangerously close to running out of water – for people, animals, and for agriculture — while other regions are being flooded. We hear about increasing temperatures at the Earth’s poles, and projections about which areas are likely to be under water as glaciers melt and the seas rise.
The daily signals of ever increasing climate disruptions make it clear: the broadly accepted approaches to Earth’s climate crisis do not match the scale of the problem. No matter the talks, no matter what we are currently doing, things are not getting better when it comes to rising temperatures. Countries and organizations around the planet have set carbon emission reduction targets, yet it’s becoming more obvious every day: while the proposed reduction targets are essential, they are not nearly enough to keep us out of trouble.
There are currently more than one trillion tons of CO2 (typically described as “1000 gigatons”) in our atmosphere from our previous emissions. CO2 molecules persist in the atmosphere for hundreds to thousands of years. By now our atmosphere has reached a concentration of over 420 parts per million (ppm) of CO2, which is almost 50% beyond anything the planet has seen in over 3 million years.
No humans before us have ever lived with this much CO2 in the atmosphere.
Our near-exclusive focus on reducing our CO2 emissions does not address the fact that our current climate problems and the rate of heating are mostly driven by the greenhouse gases that are already in our atmosphere. Those one trillion tons of CO2 and the other greenhouse gases we emitted during the past 250 years are the main cause of the heating of our atmosphere, of the changes in the oceans’ currents and of the dramatic changes we see in our weather.
Add to this the fact that levels of methane are rising precipitously, which is dramatically increasing our risk. Methane, which is commonly called “natural gas,” is responsible for about 1/3 of the warming we are currently experiencing.
A great deal of methane lies buried deep beneath the frozen land or permafrost, particularly in Arctic regions. As the planet warms and permafrost melts, this methane (produced from previously buried organic matter) is letting itself out — bubbling up at increasing rates, sometimes exploding out of the ground, creating impressive “methane holes.”
The possibility now exists that at some point in the future a burst of methane could be large enough to raise temperatures by two, three, or even four degrees Celsius. The increasing risk of such an event reinforces the urgency for developing large-scale, high-impact solutions to address this existential threat to life on planet Earth.
Climate Reality and What We Are Doing – and Not Doing
What the Paris Agreement and most governmental and corporate commitments are promoting does not match what’s required given the existential risks we are facing. While we are increasingly recognizing the reality of a warming climate and the resulting impacts this has, these targets and agreements are still primarily looking at the reduction of current emissions as the way to solve this problem.
It’s a bit like telling a patient suffering from lung cancer to cut back on smoking when it is now the cancer itself that must be treated – with entirely different, even radical methods – in order to have any hope of survival. This is very similar to the situation we are finding ourselves in now with our climate: just as treatments like surgery, radiation, or chemotherapy are needed in the case of a cancer patient, we must now look at highly innovative biological, geological, chemical, and mechanical solutions to rapidly mobilize nature's ability to restore its critical life functions.
We have entered a time where circumstances are forcing us to pursue high impact climate engineering and terraforming solutions. Solutions for making “large-scale changes to the atmosphere, temperature, topography, or ecology of a planet to make it habitable for humans and other forms of life.”
Action in Line with Our Climate Reality
We need to move beyond a narrative that nearly exclusively focuses on reducing CO2 emissions, e.g. achieving Net Zero emissions by some far away date.
To repeat: we are confronted with the inadequacy of this goal virtually every day. We say that we must reduce emissions by 45% by 2030, but we are currently on track to increase emissions by 10.6% by that date.https://unfccc.int/ndc-synthesis-report-2022 That will put us at about 110% above where we are claiming we must be by 2030 – 7 years from now. A true catastrophe. And yet, there is no commensurate response to address the discrepancy between what we know we must do and what we are actually doing. There are no international emergency meetings, no calls for radical action.
And then there is this: Net Zero and similar commitments are presumably related to our interest in holding temperatures to below +1.5˚C, or certainly to below +2.0˚C. compared to pre-industrial levels. However, it is becoming increasingly clear that these targets would bring about unimaginable challenges. Just look at what we are learning about what is already happening at +1.1˚C. and the fact that this means an increase of over 3˚C. in the polar regions – leading to devastating thawing of polar ice and permafrost at this very moment. Much of what the models predicted would occur in 50 or 60 years from now is already happening; at 420 ppm of CO2 and at +1.1˚C. above pre-industrial temperatures.
Beyond Emissions
Two interventions beyond emissions reduction are now urgently needed:
1. Drawdown / Carbon Removal and Sequestration
Measurable and concrete efforts for actively drawing down CO2, methane, and other GHGs are now essential. All types of solutions must be considered: mechanical, biological, geological, etc.
2. Direct Cooling
Interventions that proactively cool the planet must be urgently researched and funded. Marine cloud brightening falls into this category, along with other forms of “solar geoengineering,” such as injecting microscopic aerosol particles into the atmosphere to reflect the sun’s radiation back into space. Marine biologists are looking at cooling from large-scale interventions that restore carbon-removing phytoplankton on the surface of our oceans — which are probably the most important and under-appreciated climate-moderating organisms of our living Earth.
Thankfully, we are beginning to see a number of promising commitments and actions from organizations like these:
· Project Drawdown has identified and promotes dozens of highly effective and practical solutions – from agricultural practices to industrial systems – for drawing down significant amounts of carbon from the atmosphere.
· The Foundation for Climate Restoration is working on a number of high-impact greenhouse gas removal solutions that are permanent, scalable, financeable, and designed to return the planet to conditions that have allowed humans and other species to thrive.
· Airminers focuses on identifying solutions for “mining” carbon and other greenhouse gases directly from the atmosphere. They offer education and networking events, as well as an incubator for startups and projects working on carbon removal. They focus on solutions in three categories:
1) Capturing greenhouse gas,
2) Sequestering the captured greenhouse gas; and
3) Developing Products that permanently sequester the captured molecules by becoming an ingredient in another product.
· The Center for Climate Repair at Cambridge, founded by Sir David King, supports climate repair and polar cooling projects that can be deployed at scale over the coming 5-10 years.
· The Healthy Planet Action Coalition, supports “efforts that reduce average global temperature increases to well under 1°C through a strategy that encompasses emission reductions, large scale greenhouse gas removal, and most urgently, direct cooling of the climate, particularly in the Arctic.”
The concepts of drawdown, climate restoration, climate repair, and direct cooling reorient our thinking towards goals we must achieve to return our planet to a livable atmosphere below 300 parts per million of CO2 and other GHGs.
Managing the Risks of Terraforming Technologies
We must understand the risks associated with these technologies, but it’s urgent we begin to test and develop the most viable solutions now, so they will be ready for large-scale deployment within the coming 5-10 years. Time is very short.
We must deploy experiments for increasing the albedo (reflective) effect in the polar regions and over glaciers; experiments that allow for testing and verification of effects, both intended and unintended. We need to collaborate with agencies like the European Space Agency and NASA to access their space-based sensors to see the effects from these experimental technologies and solutions. We need to understand the impact of interfering with the natural trajectory of the rapidly heating climate. There is urgency because if we wait, we will be working from a place of desperation, fated to do something with much higher costs and risks than if we started now.
In a highly positive development related to such efforts, the White House announced on October 13, 2022, that its Office of Science and Technology Policy “is coordinating a five-year research plan to study ways of modifying the amount of sunlight that reaches the Earth in order to temporarily temper the effects of global warming.”