Climate Change

The boiling frog is a fable describing a frog being slowly boiled alive. The idea is that if a frog is put suddenly into a pan of boiling water, it will jump out, but if the frog is put in a pan of tepid water which is then brought to a boil slowly, it will not perceive the danger and will be cooked to death. The story is a metaphor for the inability or unwillingness of people to react to threats that arise gradually rather than suddenly. This is global warming in a nutshell, we can hardly see the dangers approaching and we are unwilling to act. The frog story is a fable, it is untrue, the frog would jump out at 25°C because of its desire to survive, the question is can we jump out of our pan of water? We are reacting to the threat but we are reacting like a frog with a lobotomy and I fear we will not jump out of the pan in time.

Ten years ago on confusedaboutenergy.co.uk we predicted that regardless of new renewable energy sources we would be consuming more fossil fuels rather than less, we are actually consuming 13% more fossil fuels, this pushed up the CO₂ levels and increased the temperature. The next ten years will be the same, there will be more renewable energy sources but there will be greater energy demand with the ever increasing population. The data tells us this will happen and since it is unlikely that the world will listen to the data we will continue on this path, the world will not and possibly cannot react fast enough.

We should however try. The issue is greenhouse gasses and more specifically CO₂ from burning fossil fuels, we need to explore every avenue to reduce emissions and to remove CO₂ from the atmosphere to limit global warming. The metrics we use track where we are now, where we are likely to go with no change and we look at what we could do to mitigate the problem, in other words how do we get the frog to jump out of the pan?

The deviation of global temperature is the key measurement standing at +0.9°C, the sharp increase is attributable to the increased concentration of CO₂ in the atmosphere (Figure 1), which is in turn attributable to the increased emissions of CO₂ from human activity, mostly the combustion of fossil fuels but also from industrial process emissions & agriculture. In turn you can attribute the need for all of this to the ever increasing human population and our need for food, heating, cooling and transport, not to mention holidays in the sun.

There are only two main ways to reduce the rate of global warming. Reduce CO₂ levels in the atmosphere or block some of the Suns radiation.

Blocking the Suns radiation is rather drastic, several methods have been speculated for example adding Sulphate to the upper atmosphere to "dim the lights" in the same way a volcano does, or to give the Earth a set of sunglasses by placing a vast array of mirrors in space between the Earth and the Sun. These thoughts are for another day as they are last resort measures, we are going to analyse reducing CO₂ levels in the atmosphere and see how realistic this is.

From power generation, industry, transport, buildings etc we are emitting about 36Gt per annum of CO₂. Currently about half of this is reabsorbed by the planet the rest accumulates in the atmosphere and increases the concentration of atmospheric CO₂.

Our background metrics show that CO₂ emissions are increasing by 5.0Gt per decade, encouragingly the last year has only seen and increase of 0.1Gt, this is good news, the increase is slowing, however emissions need to decrease substantially to slow global warming.

We estimate for each 1 Gt of CO₂ emissions per annum over 18Gt we increase the concentration of CO₂ in the atmosphere by 0.13ppm, so currently in a single year it will increase by 2.34ppm.

As a minimum to prevent further warming we need to remove approximately 18Gt of CO₂ from the atmosphere or prevent their emissions each year, starting today. This is of course impossible. But over the next decade we could choose to chip away at it with a variety of activities.

Here is a mix of methods, long and short term that we can engage in to lower atmospheric CO₂ concentration.

• Focus on removing coal and oil from power generation
• Greater use of renewable energy in power generation
• Carbon Capture and Storage from power plants
• Carbon Capture and Storage from industry
• Carbon Capture and Storage direct from the atmosphere
• Move to electric vehicles (they are more efficient so even with fossil generated power they have a lower carbon footprint)
• Nuclear Power
• Fusion Energy (still a way off)
• Planting Trees
• Other Biological methods (e.g. Algae growth in the oceans, this is controversial)

What will 2030 look like?

To be honest we will probably not perceive that much change between now and 2030. But this is just a taster of what is to come without policy change. Look out for the following:-

• More precipitation (not easy in the UK it rains a lot already!)
• More heatwaves and droughts
• Ever increasing levels of human migration into Europe and North America, as their environment becomes more difficult to prosper in
• The migration of species, land and ocean.
• Species extinction with the loss of habitat.
• Spread of Mosquito related desease as they spread to new habitats.
• Reduction in winter based human death rates (a positive).
• the Artic becoming navigable to shipping.
• Ice loss from glaciers on mountains, the Antarctic and Greenland.
• Sea level rises, these will be uneven.
• Increased ocean acidity causing species migration and extinction.

Key Climate Change Metrics Causes, Effects and Actions

Global Warming Scenarios

Units