Heating Overview

 Overview of Global Heating Control

Summary

It is now generally accepted that global heating, caused by human actions, is driving climate change to levels that threaten life and livelihood around the world. It is also probable that we are on the brink of reaching temperatures that trigger unstoppable feedbacks from melting Arctic ice creating a dark, heat absorbing ocean, and methane from melting permafrost multiplying heating effects. These feedback mechanisms will change the rate of temperature increase from being linear and proportional to the amount of carbon dioxide (CO₂) added to the atmosphere, to being exponential and independent of CO₂ added by human action, and so basically out of our direct control. This path is illustrated below.

Personal Action

What effect can we as individuals have by taking personal action to reduce our carbon footprint to net-zero? Unfortunately very little. The whole concept of a personal 'carbon footprint' was thought up by a PR firm as a way of shifting blame away from Big Oil to us as individuals. A little bit of thought shows that individual independent action is far less effective than collective political action. But Big Oil are more than happy to divert such action by individuals spending time and effort on personal change that does not impact them at all. Even if 90% of the world changed our life style to be net-zero carbon, the remaining 10% would still be adding carbon to the atmosphere so that it carries on increasing.

National Action

No individual nation can solve this global problem by itself, not even the biggest emitter, China. Not only would any action taken be ineffective, there is a danger they would become less competitive than other nations. To overcome this problem it was broadly agreed that all the nations of the world would agree a joint plan. The United Nations Climate Change Framework Convention (UNFCCC) was formed in 1994 to stabilize the greenhouse gas emissions and to protect the earth from the threat of climate change. The Conference of Parties (COP) have been meeting every year since. Significant agreement was reached for the first time in 2015 at COP21 in Paris, France. Unfortunately, not only were the agreed emissions reductions insufficient, but none of the 14-member Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec) ratified COP21 and neither did the USA, the second biggest emitter in the world. The fundamental problem with COP21 and similar agreements is that even if a nation ratifies the agreement it is far to easy for nations to withdraw without penalty. Also each nation chooses their own Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) instead of being decided by a global plan.

Global Action

Supply or Demand?

So far all attempts to globally limit CO₂ emissions have tried to limit the demand for fossil fuels by such measures in NDCs as subsidising renewables such as wind turbines and solar panels. But as we know from basic economics, any market has two balancing factors; as well as demand there is supply. The trouble with concentrating on managing demand is that the market will try to redirect excess supply to other demands. So we get CO₂ emissions exported by importing high carbon emission products from a different country. On the other hand: if there was a global ration to the supply of fossil fuels that could be taken out of the ground, there is no way to get around that limit. That's why I believe that a global carbon extraction quota that reduces to sustainable levels as quickly as possible is our best hope.

Alternatives

What if we tip over the feedback edge and atmospheric greenhouse gases increase exponentially? Do we have to give up, or can we take other measures? If we reach this point then even reducing fossil fuel use to zero won't stop overheating increasing, we then have to think about solar geoengineering. There are a number of solar geoengineering alternatives, some more extreme and radical that others, all of them expensive, and most of them with destructive side-effects.

My personal favourite geoengineering alternative, based purely on a gut feel, is balancing a sunshade at the L1 Lagrange point between us and the sun. This would be a massive capital investment, but once in place would be cheap to maintain, and could include solar panels that would supply constant power.