Copenhagen and Colorado

The world’s leaders are gathering for the climate summit in Copenhagen. This is, indeed, a moment of truth for the world… is there a way to turn our path away from disaster?

The prospects for a deal face the hurdle of the vast inequity between rich and poor. Poor countries want to develop in the way of the west, and have the good life that the rich have enjoyed. Rich countries don’t want to give up the wasteful way of life that has been built deep into the infrastructure and philosophy of those countries. The “Greenhouse Development Rights Framework” calculates the responsibility of each country over time… in order to meet its fair share, at some point in the future the United States will have to emit a negative amount of Carbon Dioxide. We’ll have to take the stuff out of the air, or assist other countries in becoming more efficient.

For the future of Earth’s ecosystems, the future survival of our civilization, the gasoline and coal powered path is closed to all. Developed countries, most of all the United States, must rapidly reduce carbon emissions. Fortunately, we are currently so wasteful that it will be easy to make big cuts through efficiency and conservation. For the developing world, an efficient, low carbon path of development must be feasible.

Here, on the edge of the San Luis Valley in Colorado, we are living off the grid and setting an example of how to do this. We get our power from solar, wind, geothermal, and small scale hydroelectric. The power we generate can run electric bikes and scooters, road-worthy golf carts, and plug-in hybrid cars. Imagine… no more electric bill. No more having to stop at a gas pump. Saving money is equally appealing in both the developed and developing world. Cheap solar panels and batteries, mass-produced at third world prices, will allow all of us to grow in sustainability, grow in equality, and finally meet in the middle.

Can world leaders agree to this, and implement it effectively, given human nature and the power of the oil companies? Do we have the will, the courage, to change our ways quickly enough? If your child, or your grandchild, was standing in the path of an oncoming train, you would pull them out of the way—it would be your moral duty to do so. It is our children, our grandchildren, who will face ruin later in the century if we fail to act… not to mention the innocent plants and animals.

The goal of emergency climate reduction calls for an 80% reduction in carbon emissions by 2050. This will most likely limit the rise in average global temperature to 2 degrees Celsius. I argue that this is much too slow, and that an 80% reduction can be made much more quickly, in fact, immediately. To show this is possible, I have reduced my personal carbon emissions by over 80% in the space of two months.

I also argue that a 2 degree Celsius increase in temperature is far too much, and would be a tragic disaster for the entire world, its ecosystems, and its people. By limiting our emissions, right now, and beginning to take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, we can stabilize the level of carbon dioxide at 350 parts per million (1980 levels). We can limit the duration of damaging temperature increase to a few decades.

Scientists are not salespeople—two degrees seems barely noticeable. For Americans, you’ve got to convert to Farenheit—3.6 degrees. Global average temperature includes the oceans, which don’t warm up as much. Areas in the continental interiors warm much more. Drier places, higher altitudes, nighttime, and winter are where the changes will be felt the most. In this scenario, our high, dry, inland place might warm by twice the global average – 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit. On winter nights, it might be triple – 10.8 degrees F. Okay, the difference between –30F and –20F at night is only the difference between damn cold and damn freakin cold… but it’s life and death to a bark beetle. The difference between 30F and 40F is the difference between fine powder and slush.

Huge swaths of lodgepole pine and aspen are suddenly dying off. This has delivered a huge wallop to the economy in northern Colorado. The mountains are like a layer cake, with climate zones one above the other, lower montane to upper montane to sub-alpine to tundra. Global warming means these zones are moving up the mountains year by year—but trees can’t climb up the mountains. They find themselves in the wrong zone, and die of insect or fungus or fire. Increased carbon dioxide and heat will stimulate faster growth… but we will lose our legacy of old forests, and the new, changed forests must adapt to still warmer temperatures before they can even mature. The tundra is the most vulnerable of all, and much may be overrun by trees.

As the oceans warm, evaporation increases, putting more water vapor into the air, which is fuel for the vast engines we call storms. A more active atmosphere drives warm air farther up into the arctic, which in turn drives sudden bursts of cold air far to the south. Thus we see long stretches of unseasonably warm weather, punctuated by insane storms and brutal cold. We see deeper snows that melt off faster, stream flows peaking earlier in the spring. Our glaciers, small as they are, are shrinking and disappearing one by one. Colorado is the “water tower” for much of the west, with snowmelt providing a steady flow. Warmer temperatures means more variable flow in the rivers available to the states downstream.

In the summer, warmer temperatures on land relative to the ocean drive the monsoons. Warming over the land is increasing this effect—some computer models show the monsoon doubling as temperatures get warmer. High winds, hail, and tornadoes will impact the plains. Higher rainfall, and a higher variability of rainfall, harder to predict, harder to catch and hold.

Higher temperatures mean increased evaporation over land, which could lead to the paradox of higher rainfall overall, but more droughts. During the dust bowl of the 1930s, temperatures were one degree Fahrenheit warmer than recently. We are talking about several times that, five or six or seven degrees Fahrenheit. Along with western Nebraska and Kansas, eastern Colorado is a land of sand hills, a Sahara-like sea of dunes covered, for now, in grass. A few thousand years ago, when the temperature was a few degrees warmer, these dunes were active, on the move. We are looking at a larger increase by the middle of the century.

We are talking right now about the “safe” global limit of 2 degrees celcius, or 450 parts per million carbon dioxide. This is considered a very optimistic scenario, and only if we agree on what are considered very stringent limits. “Business as usual,” with no controls, would send us to 550, then 750, then a thousand parts per million, hotter than we’ve seen in 55 million years since the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum. We are talking about crocodiles in Canada, tropical forest in Wyoming.

The greenhouse effect, like a transparent blanket, warms the poles more than anywhere else. 450 ppm will wipe out polar sea ice, and send big chunks of Greenland and Antarctica sliding into the sea. Whole island nations could be submerged, along with many coastal cities.

Sudden melting of the arctic could lead to rapid changes in weather patterns and ocean currents, which could make climate unrecognizable throughout the world. These “flips” in climate might flop back and forth. Climate over the last few thousand years has been unusually stable, but it might not stay that way anymore after we give it a kick in the pants. Melting glaciers at the end of the last ice age sent the climate haywire. It could lead to a sudden drop in temperatures over North America and Europe while the rest of the world fries… long enough for us to forget to control our emissions. Last August was the hottest on record for the world as a whole, but the United States was unusually cold. When it flips back, very hot very fast.

A question for the reader… has the weather seemed strange lately?

There is an even worse possibility, the one that keeps scientists awake at night. This is the risk of positive feedbacks, otherwise known as a runaway greenhouse effect. Get some water from the tap and set it in a warm place… notice the bubbles? Warmer water holds less gas. As the oceans gradually warm, they’ll have less and less ability to absorb our pollution, which will warm things more. After a certain point, the oceans start to bubble and become sources of carbon dioxide, along with hydrogen sulfide and methane. Yuck.

As ice and snow melts, land and sea can absorb more sunlight, warming yet more. But the real wild card is the Siberian permafrost and the methane it holds. Methane is a much more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, and is locked up in great quantities in the permafrost. Siberia is warming fast, and methane is bubbling up in lakes all over the place. In the last few years, scientists have been finding an increased amount of methane entering the atmosphere. If we can get back to 350 parts per million carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, we can defuse this time bomb before it is too late.

If there’s a chance you are about to drive off a cliff, you slam on the brakes. You don’t discuss how steep the cliff is, or whether you can slow down 20% over the next ten miles. Yet we have right now got a brick on the accelerator.

The good news is that we have all the technology we need to make big changes, right away. This means finding ways to meet our needs that don’t emit carbon, or emit much less. The old 80/20 rule suggests that 20% of our energy use provides 80% of the benefit. The first step is to know how much we are emitting, because it shows where our efforts would be of the most benefit. This isn’t straightforward, especially in America where we are handicapped by having to convert back and forth from Metric. There are no labels on the products we buy to tell us how much carbon is being emitted through the whole supply chain.

Three means of saving energy include conservation, efficiency, and renewable sources of energy. The mathematical magic is that they multiply… if you save half your carbon emissions on conservation, half again on efficiency, and once again half on renewables, you are saving 87.5%. The number I calculated for my own quick reduction was very close to that – 86%.

Conservation is about finding simple ways of doing more with less. It includes things like drying the laundry on a line, living in a smaller house or sharing a larger one, sharing rides and driving less, riding a bike, eating locally and organically. The advantage here is that it saves money. It can add up to thousands of dollars a year. Take that money and invest in efficiency.

Efficiency starts by getting the most bang for the buck—putting in compact fluorescent or LED lights, more efficient appliances starting with the fridge and water heater. Efficiency applies to cars as well… using a hybrid, or replacing trips with an electric bike or golf cart. Efficiency saves big money… thousands of dollars a year. Take that money and invest in renewable sources of energy.

Renewable energy is wind, solar, and small-scale hydroelectric. What’s best to invest in depends on where you are. Outside of the Great Plains (wind) and the Pacific Northwest (hydro), the best bet is going to be solar. Since solar power doesn’t enjoy the enormous hidden subsidies given to coal and oil, it appears to cost more per kilowatt-hour. But consider you are already saving 75% of your kilowatt hours through conservation and efficiency. This means your solar panel needs to be only one quarter the area. Or, you can get a bigger one, tie into the grid, and get a check from the power company every month. Once your electricity is renewable, using an electric bike, golf cart, or plug-in hybrid makes even more sense… it has zero carbon impact.

Up here in this neck of the woods, we’ve been doing all this stuff anyway, since it would cost a fortune to bring in the grid. Just imagine that all those high-carbon things that constitute our old way of life just weren’t available. Suppose there were a war, and no gasoline or electric power were available, what would you do? You’d probably team up with your neighbors to find a way to grow food, generate power, and get around. In the long run, the greenhouse effect is bigger than any war short of a nuclear holocaust. It is not so much ourselves at risk as our children, our grandchildren. Think about them, their faces. They deserve a livable world. This is an emergency, the polar ice caps are melting fast, and we have to get moving on the challenge of a generation.

It makes sense for banks to offer loans for solar power systems combined with efficient appliances and lighting, in such a way that the loan payment can be lower than a monthly electric bill. Right now this is opening the floodgates to change.