The Jewel of Denial, 1: The Delayer’s Paradox
The primary goal of the global warming deniers and their disciples is to waste time and delay action, which is why I prefer to call them delayers (see here).
[This post is inspired by the surprising finding that only 27% of conservatives say the earth is warming because of human activity, such as burning fossil fuels, and the surprising response I got on my post (here), especially those defending the deniers and delayers.]
THE DELAYER’S PARADOX
The deniers and delayers are those who argue that failing to embrace strict reductions in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions will not lead to serious or catastrophic impacts. The Delayer’s Paradox is — If the world actually were persuaded by the deniers and delayers, it would lead to levels of atmospheric GHG concentrations that ensure the most catastrophic impacts imaginable, proving them (fatally) wrong.
The science makes clear that if we stay on our current emissions path, atmospheric concentrations of CO2 would rise beyond 1000 parts per million. That would inevitably lead to global temperature rise of 6°C or more (>15°F over most of the inland in the states United States), along with widespread desertification, global water and food shortages, 80 to 250 feet of sea level rise (at a rate of up to 6 inches a decade by 2100), and mass extinction [See “Is 450 ppm (or less) politically possible? Part 0: The alternative is humanity’s self-destruction“].
Avoiding this catastrophe requires accepting the scientific understanding of climate change, which is embodied, however imperfectly, in the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). I can’t see anyway around that simple fact.
Either you believe the analysis that says warming the planet significantly more than 1°C above current levels (added to the .8°C we’ve already warmed from preindustrial levels) is self-destructive for the human race — which depends on model-based projections of what will happen decades from now — or you don’t.
By “imperfectly,” readers of this blog know I mean that the IPCC reports almost by design underestimate the scale and speed of climate impacts (see “The cold truth about climate change“). The IPCC text gets watered down in the search for unanimity, the models systematically underestimate the carbon cycle feedbacks, and, perhaps most important, the IPCC models a broad range of future scenarios for carbon dioxide stabilization. That broad range of input scenarios creates a broad range of climate impact outcomes, which in turn creates the appearance that the IPCC science is filled with uncertainty and doubt about the outcome.
“Uncertainty” and “Doubt” is the Jewel of Denial in all areas of the conservative war on science (see, for instance, the new book, Doubt is Their Product). But therein lies to paradox. The deniers and delayers preach continuing the world’s decades-long climate policy of doing nothing significant to stop the growth of GHG emissions. And that delay eliminates all of the seeming uncertainty in the IPCC.
THE PRIMROSE PATH TO 1000 PPM
We are currently emitting more than 8 billion tons of carbon a year (8 GtC/yr) and rising 3% per year — faster than the most pessimistic IPCC model. There is a little-reported bomb-shell buried in the footnote of the first IPCC report released last year:
On our current emissions pace, we will be at 11 GtC/yr around 2020 and still rising! That means, if the deniers and delayers win — or even if they just partially win [by limiting government actions to ones that lead to average emissions of 11 GtC/yr for the century] — then the planet’s carbon dioxide concentrations are headed to 1000 ppm! [Note: That conclusion does incorporate some carbon cycle feedbacks, but not the one that is probably the most important, the melting tundra (see here).]
That is NOT the worst-case, that isn’t even business as usual if the disinformers win — stabilizing at 1000 ppm still requires a lot of government-led effort that conservatives almost universally disdain.
If we delay acting even a decade and then act aggressively starting in 2020, we would still need 11 classic stabilization wedges (see Is 450 ppm politically possible? Part 1) just to have a shot at keeping concentrations a bit below 1000 ppm. Here is the most delayer-friendly list I can imagine [please do not quote me as saying that I agree with these — I personally doubt nukes and CCS combined will make more than about one wedge]:
- 2 wedges of nuclear power — 1400 to 1700 GW (almost a nuke a week) plus 20 Yucca mountains for storage (total probable cost some $10 trillion).
- 2 wedges of coal with carbon capture and storage — 1600 GW of coal with CCS — a flow of CO2 into the ground equal to twice the current flow of oil out of the ground, requiring the world to re-create the equivalent of the planet’s entire oil delivery infrastructure and the natural gas delivery infrastructure too (total probable cost some $10 trillion).
- 1 wedge of vehicle efficiency — all cars 60 mpg, with no increase in miles traveled per vehicle.
- 1 of wind for power — one million large (2 MW peak) wind turbines
- 1 of wind for vehicles –another 2000 GW wind. Most cars must be plug-in hybrids or pure electric vehicles.
- 1 of concentrated solar thermal – ~1600 GW peak.
- 1 of efficiency and cogeneration.
- 1 of cellulosic biofuels — using one-sixth of the world’s cropland [or less land if yields significantly increase or algae-to-biofuels proves commercial at large scale].
- 1 of forestry — End all tropical deforestation.
Needless to say, even this can’t happen unless, by 2020, most deniers and delayers and their representatives in Congress come to embrace the painful reality of climate change and the dire necessity for government-led solutions.
So calling deniers by the term “deniers” or calling delayers by the term “delayer-1000s” is quite mild. A far more accurate term is “climate destroyers.” Or maybe “extinctionists.”
Related Posts:
- Is 450 ppm possible? Part 5: Old coal’s out, can’t wait for new nukes, so what do we do NOW?
- Are Scientists Overestimating — or Underestimating — Climate Change, Part I
- Are Scientists Overestimating — or Underestimating — Climate Change, Part II
- Are Scientists Overestimating — or Underestimating — Climate Change, Part III
May 13th, 2008 at 9:10 am
Garbage in - Gospel out.
May 13th, 2008 at 9:43 am
A devastating critique, reader. How could I have missed that?
May 13th, 2008 at 10:00 am
The Sky is falling! The Sky is falling!
May 13th, 2008 at 10:17 am
Currently adding 1.3 ppm/year.
[JR: Nylo I am getting close to banning you because simply keep putting disinformation on this website and wasting everybody’s time. One more time and I will. We added 2.4 ppm last year, part of an accelerating trend. See
http://climateprogress.org/ 2008/ 04/ 24/ noaa-atmospheric-carbon-dioxide-methane-rise-sharply-in-2007/
and
http://climateprogress.org/ 2007/ 10/ 26/ soaring-carbon-dioxide-concentrations-sinks-saturating/ ]
May 13th, 2008 at 11:35 am
There is also the Climate Warrior paradox. The more we do to avoid the most disastrous effects of ACC, the less proof we will have that all that action was necessary.
The big difference between the Delayer and the Warrior paradox is that, regardless of which one is right or wrong about climate change, one will keep us on a path of soaring cancer and respiratory disease rates, of decreasing water and food supplies and collapsing natural resources. The alternative one will create a safer and more secure future for our children in harmony with the natural systems that we are so dependent on.
In other words, Delayers, stop droning over easily manipulable statistics and start recognizing the other benefits of a truly sustainable economy. If we happen to stop ACC on the way, cheers to that, but hopefully we won’t ever even know for sure.
May 13th, 2008 at 12:43 pm
Sorry Joe, obviously the 1.3 ppm / year was wrong, a keyboard misstype, 3 and 6 are close in the numeric pad. I would like to be able to edit my own posts, but I can’t. However the 1.6 ppm/year is a real trend that can be observed to remain flat for the last 20 years as I have shown in my post above. I did not know about a 2.4 ppm increase last year, but it clearly was not man-made (we didn’t emit 19 billion tons, did we), so it should be a spurious increase that will be averaged out next year by natural processes.
May 13th, 2008 at 12:54 pm
Sorry for posting again, I would like to add this to the previous post, but as I explained, I can’t.
The 2.4 increase for this year has an easy explanation. CO2 in the southern hemisphere’s summer is limited because of the photosintesis of the plants in the southern hemisphere. January 2007 was very hot, exceptionally hot, which means lots of photosintesis and carbon trapping in the southern hemisphere. January 2008 has been very cold, which means the opposite. As a result, the difference between the maximums of CO2 in 2007 and 2008 is very big. But I would rather look at averages for the whole year rather than compare the maximums.
Anyway, this leads to interesting conclussions, like a very strong dependence of the earth’s capability to sequester CO2 and the temperature. Quite a relief. It also means that during the next years of cooling, we are going to see CO2 rise very quickly… and temperatures do the opposite. One more paradox of the GH effect.
May 13th, 2008 at 1:22 pm
Gee, Nylo, 10 minutes earlier you hadn’t even heard of the well-known fact that CO2 concentrations had continued to accelerate their rise to an additional 2.4ppm in 2007, and now you have already analyzed the anomaly, conclusively determined that the source was “photosintesis” and moved on to make temperature and CO2 concentration forecasts for the next several years… and even introduced a revolutionary new concept called “temperature sequestration”… It’s just so hard to keep up! Thanks so much.
May 13th, 2008 at 1:27 pm
“The 2.4 increase for this year has an easy explanation” — yes, see my second link above.
Your posts are balderdash. The 2007 PNAS study in that link notes:
1970 – 1979: 1.3 ppm/yr
1980 – 1989: 1.6 ppm/yr
1990 – 1999: 1.5 ppm/yr
2000 - 2007: 2.0 ppm/yr (updated to include 2007)
My patience for your disinformation is fast disappearing.
Ain’t gonna be cooling, but I’d be glad to take a bet….
May 13th, 2008 at 1:29 pm
@ Reader: The only ‘gospel’ in the discussion of global warming/climate change is the one posited by those who assert that there is no problem since it is clearly not based on science or even on reality, but only on blind belief.
Keep your comments on the facts and the science, or you won’t even be read.
May 13th, 2008 at 2:17 pm
Joe - I think ‘climate destroyers’ or ‘extinctionists’ are labels more suited to beer-fuelled midnight rants among friends than they are to public journalism. They are a sign that you are getting needled. A little fury is a good thing, but it can easily be used against you.
Having said that, I look forward to my next beer-fuelled midnight rant, when I may just use ‘climate destroyers’ to get arise out of someone. I take umbrage at your sullying of the term ‘extinctionist’ though, since it is precisely the kind of people you rail against that leads me to such a philosophy.
http://www.heathen-hub.com/member.php?u=9
May 13th, 2008 at 2:20 pm
We already have a bet Joe, although related to sea ice in the arctic.
Joe, I give the data as it is shown in the graphics. The graphic doesn’t have much resolution. If you say that the increase has been 2.0 ppm/year in this decade, I will believe it.
I don’t have any graphic showing updated evolution of the carbon emissions. The best I have only reaches 2003. Can you tell for sure whether the ratio of increase in the carbon emissions has remained stable at about +0.1 additional billion tons per year per year, like it grossly did between the eighties and the nineties, or if we have been increasing the ammount we emit every year faster during this decade?
In my opinion, the increased rising ratio of the CO2 concentration during this decade is more due to the stable temperatures we have had compared to the previous decades than to a faster increase of our emissions per year. In fact, if you look at the years that have shown the fastest increases of atmospheric CO2, they are always years which were colder than the year before. This is happening often now, but didn’t happen often in the 80’s and 90’s, and when it happened it was by a little extent. I will make some numbers later on, but the idea is that CO2 concentration should have risen more during the eighties and the nineties, and if it didn’t it was because of the Earth’s better capability to absorb it, as it was becoming warmer, and the warmer it is, the better it absorbs CO2. Now we have increasing emissions without increasing temperatures, so the ratio of increase of the atmospheric CO2 must be affected accordingly.
May 13th, 2008 at 2:43 pm
Extinctionists.
I like it….getting close…
But how to work in the sick feeling of their ideological/cultish “murder suicide pact”?
They are really Kamikaze or Jihadi like…..or is it Dr. Strangelove?
Since Frank Luntz has had a come to Jesus moment - after doing incalculable damage getting the denial industry rolling - perhaps he could lend a hand and help make the appropriate frame for deniers, delayers, ideologues, extinctionists….
Frank are you out there? Frank give us your best tag for these pathological m-effers, would you please?
May 13th, 2008 at 2:44 pm
This is going to be a depressing week….
we are not even going to hit anywhere near 450 much less 350.
May 13th, 2008 at 3:24 pm
Well, like I said, For now I will be sticking with the mild “Delayer-1000.” I have little doubt that future generations will take a much harsher view.
May 13th, 2008 at 3:41 pm
Hey, wasn’t there a post above where one of our new “guest experts” was proposing emission-atmosphere-climate interactions that violate the conservation of mass? hehehehe… that was a good one while it lasted…
May 13th, 2008 at 4:25 pm
Us deniers do not have a paradox because we do not believe that link exists.
Keep ramming your foot down your throat, when the full effects of solar cycle 24 are felt your foot will be down to your intestines.
May 13th, 2008 at 4:39 pm
Mick,
BELIEVE, is the operative word, isn’t it?
Don’t a majority of Americans also BELIEVE in the literal Biblical Creation story? And many BELIEVE man didn’t evolve from the muck. I’m still waiting to ram my foot down on those too. So don’t hold your breath. In the meantime, might I suggest you read John Milton’s Paradise Lost.
May 13th, 2008 at 4:48 pm
Mick — I didn’t say you KNEW it was a paradox. Just that it is one whether or not you know it.
May 13th, 2008 at 5:36 pm
Last 12 months emmisions are about 8.5–9 Gtc. Multiply by (44/12) to obtain Gt CO2. That’s 31–32 Gt CO2. About 1/2.or less, goes in the oceans. So I get 16–17 Gt CO2 added to the atmosphere by (primarily) burning fossil fuels.
May 13th, 2008 at 7:19 pm
Reader — Y2K was an actual risk occasioned by a variety of purely human actions. There were, in fact, very few problems because a large number of dedicated people put tremendous effort into averting the difficulty.
I assure you that I know exactly what I am talking about.
May 13th, 2008 at 7:49 pm
Joe - I don’t think the “deniers and delayers” are the main problem. The real problem is that the vast majority of the voting, consuming public (globally, not just in the US) are totally apathetic and don’t have strong views of any sort on climate change. It is a subject that rarely comes up in conversation with any of the people I meet, across a wide range of educational and political backgrounds, both young and old.
Maybe people do their own private assessment of the risk and figure out that the climate will hang together for the next few decades that most of them expect to live, and if they are really lucky none of the other threats hanging over them (fossil fuel running out, global food shortages, pandemics etc) will get them either.
In the meantime most people figure out that their best personal strategy is to be as wealthy as possible so they can buy themselves a seat on the best lifeboats available.
Sad but realistic.
May 13th, 2008 at 8:08 pm
Robert,
I live in a small NC town of less than 12,000. Every day I hear talk about this subject, and these people are not cynically planning their escape. They are angry and worried because of the complete lack of action by the people who should be doing something, ie, our government.
Even the southern, high school drop-out rednecks understand the need for action. They simply feel powerless against the likes of those who are referred to here, accurately in my opinion, as “extinctionists”.
In my opinion, only a fool can look at the massive amount of evidence and say there is no cause for alarm.
May 13th, 2008 at 8:58 pm
I think Robert has it. The deniers or whatever you wish to call them are just a noisy minority. It’s the indifferent majority we need to worry about.
For them, I think it’s more productive for us to focus on the solutions rather than the problem. People are better-motivated by a positive vision than fear, or best by both.
Every three months I have a get-together of acquaintances and friends, we call it the Geektogether. There are usually a couple of guys who say, “I hate this pub, can we go somewhere else next time?”
I reply, “Sure. Where?”
“I dunno. Just not here.”
“Well, we don’t want to cancel the Geektogethers, so until you suggest an alternative we have to keep coming here.”
“I don’t like it here.”
In response to their saying there’s a problem but not offering alternatives, these people are usually made to feel unwelcome by the group, to put it mildly. And these sorts of experiences are found at every level of group size and over all issues. People respond to positive visions of change, not to simple fear or distress.
I find Joe’s “wedges” a strange way of expressing things, nonetheless they are a positive vision. I think we’d achieve our purpose of global reductions of emissions a lot quicker with more talk of what might be good “wedges” and how to put them into place, and less talk of “deniers r teh st00pid.” Of course deniers are stupid, but saying so doesn’t help us achieve our aims.
May 15th, 2008 at 12:11 am
We all know that the extinctionists continue the business as usual. The only possibility to save the world is to find some tool for energy making which is business as usual and better than fossils and nukes etc., without carbon.
The potential energy of the Greenland and Antarctic ice masses is this tool. Energy for all the world for a thousand years, water for all the world for a thousand years. No climate catastrophe any more.
May 15th, 2008 at 7:06 am
Jon / Kiashu
In the UK climate changewas a hot topic up to about a year ago, then the BBC stopped reporting it and reporting elsewhere is very mixed. People were pretty indifferent even when it was in the news. Now they have just stopped talking about completely. The BBC is getting quite excited about escalating oil, petrol and natural gas prices but seems to have lost the connection with cc somewhere along the way.
On the plus side, some of the papers who were firmly in the deniers camp until recently are now reporting cc as a real problem:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ earth/ main.jhtml?xml=/ earth/ 2008/ 05/ 14/ sciplanet114.xml
May 16th, 2008 at 10:33 am
I encourage everyone to read “Collapse” by Jared Diamond.
Why did the Easter Island people cut down their last tree?
They were smart enough to construct gigantic stone statues, but they made huge environmental blunders and went into extinction.
July 17th, 2008 at 9:58 pm
> Garbage in - Gospel out.
I assume Reader is making a self-referential statement to what happens with the disinformation he has been ingesting