Confusing Times Ahead
The News Is Getting Better, The Weather's Getting Worse
Good News, Bad News
2022 is showing dramatic signs of our worsening climate. Temperature records were smashed in Britain, continental Europe has seen unprecedented fires, so has Alaska.
At the same time, when it comes to progress on emissions, there’s been a lot of good news recently. Most recently and notably, the Inflation Reduction Act has passed – the largest climate bill in US history. This will give a big boost to US emissions reduction, and should spill over to the rest of the globe, both as an example of good behavior by the world’s biggest economy (finally!) and by helping to bring down the cost of green technologies. It’s a big deal, and it’s exciting to see; doubly so because we came so close to losing it.
The good news doesn’t end there. Bloomberg reports that peak sales for internal combustion cars passed back in 2017; and 2022 is probably the peak for gas-powered cars on the road – it’s all downhill from here, baby. Wind and solar have reached 10% of global electricity production and are growing rapidly (though further acceleration is needed). These are huge milestones, and progress will only accelerate from here.
So: the weather is getting worse, but emissions trajectories are getting better. Where does this lead?
The Climate Will Keep Getting Worse
No amount of good news can make up for the fact that we’re still emitting greenhouse gases, and so the globe is only getting hotter. Per the IPCC1, we’ve had about 1.1°C of warming so far, and under even the most optimistic scenarios, we have at least another 0.4° to go. (Under pessimistic scenarios, much more than that.)
This may not sound so bad – 0.4 is a small number. But 2022 is shaping up to be a fairly nasty weather year, and increased warming means that 2022 is not the new normal, it is better than the new normal. It only gets worse from here.
Possibly a lot worse. These numbers are the global average surface temperature, in degrees Celsius. For various reasons, this form of measurement is almost perfectly designed to make things sound less impactful than they are. (I’ll discuss this at length in a future post2.) And there are plausible scenarios where the warming-yet-to-come is more like 1.0° to 1.5°, or even more if we're particularly stupid or unlucky.
This is not a case of “things will get worse until they get better”. It’s “things will get worse and then stay worse”. When we get to net zero3, nothing gets better, it just stops getting worse4. Temperatures will level off – at whatever record high they’ll have reached. And the heat waves, drought, flood, etc. will remain at their new levels – which will be substantially worse than today. The best we can hope for is that as warming slows, we start to catch up on adaptation.
(Once we’ve reached net zero, we can push right on into negative emissions, and start dragging CO₂ levels back to something more reasonable. But that will be a slow process.)
Things Are Going To Get Wild – Bad Wild and Good Wild
The next few decades will be confusing as heck. Renewables, battery storage, and electrification will come roaring onto the field in a way that is going to be hard to appreciate until it’s here. Gas stations will start to go the way of Blockbuster. One day you’ll open the newspaper and read that the oil business is entering free-fall.
Stop for a moment and think about that! No, seriously, really try to visualize it. Picture how you’ll feel, reading that headline. It’s hard to internalize right now, but that scenario is going to play out. None of this will happen as soon as we’d like, but all of it will happen.
At the same time, we’ll be hearing about more and more climate-linked disasters, some of them quite serious. It will be hard to tell whether we’re winning or losing. The answer will be both: we’ll eventually succeed in getting emissions under control, but the world will lose a lot along the way, with very serious impact on billions of people, not to mention the rest of life on Earth. Victory and catastrophe taking turns on the front page.
Stay The Course
Through all of this, it will be critical to remain focused on net zero. The climate is going to get worse, but the range of plausible scenarios is very wide, and it’s up to us to steer toward the better outcomes.
As the climate worsens, there will be increasing impetus to focus on adaptation – projects to help live with the effects of climate change. That will be necessary, but it can’t come at the expense of mitigation – eliminating our greenhouse gas emissions.
We’ll need to keep rolling out the green technologies that are working. Keep identifying and addressing whichever emissions sources aren’t on track. The good news won’t mean that our work is done, and the bad news won’t mean the climate is a lost cause. There is nothing magic about 1.5° or 2° or 2050 or any other specific target5, there are just (literal) degrees of bad, and there’s always room to make a difference. However the next few decades play out, the imperative will stay the same: Zero emissions. Pretty darn soon. Methane first.
https://www.ipcc.ch/2021/08/09/ar6-wg1-20210809-pr/#:~:text=The%20report%20shows,greenhouse%20gas%20emissions
Among other things: these are Celsius units, so they sound small if you’re used to Fahrenheit; the global average mostly reflects the ocean, but land temperatures increase much faster; and the effects are nonlinear, so each new 0.1° of warming has more impact than the one before.
I.e. when we’ve eliminated most of our emissions, and the remainder is balanced by removing carbon directly from the atmosphere.
I’m glossing over various inertia effects and other complications. With climate, there are always other complications.
Even to the extent that aspects of the climate system may contain “tipping points”, we don’t know exactly where they lie, and they’ll vary from place to place. There will never be a sharp line between “climate success” and “climate failure”; it’s all shades of gray.