There is a possible Climate Change compromise where Big Oil can still do business, and the climate returns to something like normal. I used to think that Big Oil had to be closed down. Science learns from its mistakes. I made a mistake and have learned.
My initial climate model assumed that carbon emissions had
to fall to zero in order to stop global overheating and catastrophic climate
change. This would mean that fossil fuel companies would be put out of
business. No wonder they were fighting back with every dirty trick in the book.
But I was wrong. I had overlooked the natural sequestration of carbon on land
and more importantly by the oceans.
This was an easy mistake to make, and I’ve seen a number of
scientific papers that make the same mistake. This is because carbon dioxide in
the atmosphere is a persistent gas with no natural processes that act to change
it into something else. Other gases like methane react in the atmosphere to
turn into other gases and so have a half-life, of about a decade for methane.
Carbon dioxide stays there forever- except it doesn’t. That was the mistake.
When plants grow they take carbon dioxide out of the
atmosphere. Carbon dioxide is also absorbed by water. Rain water is actually
weak carboxylic acid because the water has absorbed carbon dioxide. This is why
it eats caves into limestone. The oceans also absorb carbon dioxide. This is
natural carbon sequestration, but how big is the effect?
Two Percent Saves the Day
Historically, before the industrial revolution pumped all
this carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, it is generally accepted that the
level of carbon dioxide was about 280 ppm. This was for a normal, stable,
balanced carbon cycle. It is now well over 410 ppm. I made a guess that the
further out of balance, the further away from normal, the larger the quantity
of carbon dioxide and carbon naturally sequestered. When I crunched the numbers
this graph seemed to confirm my guess.
Since around 1950 it looks like somewhere between 1.5% and
2% of excess carbon dioxide is naturally sequestered.
The consequences of this are that where our carbon dioxide
emissions should be increasing ppm by about 4 every year, the measured amount
is only increasing by about 2 ppm.
This why the world can reduce carbon dioxide levels, and
global overheating, by reducing carbon emissions to only something like 20% to
25% of current levels and not to zero.
The following graph illustrates this, and forms the core of my plan to reverse global overheating and climate chaos.
My preferred method to achieve this is with a Global Carbon
Extraction Quota, as detailed in my plan.
