Staying Alive to Experience the Long Run

Just because something is good for the environment in the long run does not make it effective for the short run climate actions needed to survive that long. Bear that in mind the next time that you encounter arguments like:

“A clear first priority is emissions reductions, emissions reductions and emissions reductions.”
Unfortunately, that will no longer back us out of climate’s danger zone.

“Unless the world stops treating climate change and [fill in the blank] as separate issues, neither problem can be addressed effectively.”
However true, it may be irrelevant because the numbers matter.

"Every little bit counts."

Indeed, all standard environmental goals are threatened by quick climate change. But their obvious solutions no longer contribute very much to backing out of the climate crisis, as the needed effort has been soaring. They no longer qualify as “climate solutions,” yet they are all we talk about.

The issue is not whether there is a connection between the environmental action and the climate result, though it usually runs the other way: quick climate change is bad for almost everything that we value, including environmental goals. At least five types of extreme weather surged between 2002 and 2010; they are only getting worse. But do the environmentally motivated goals actually improve climate in the short run? Very little.

Planting lots of trees is a well-meaning example of a proposed climate action—I proposed it myself for years—so let me explain why it could end up being sold as an effective treatment but really amounting to no more than an expensive placebo. (In the history of medicine, we’ve had lots of those, so I am sensitive to the issue.)

Try planting a lot of new forests on the MIT bathtub simulator by moving both the afforestation and reforestation sliders to the highest growth rate. It yields a mere 0.03 degrees less warming by mid-century than does business as usual, the equivalent of trying to stop a train by placing a beer can on the tracks. Yet planting a lot of trees is being sold as a “climate solution” on the grounds that “every little bit counts.” That lack of ambition paves the way to “Too little, too late.”

Furthermore, we will lose some agricultural land doing it, we will need to spend a lot on fire protection, and the new trees could become winter firewood in a future fuel shortage.

The new trees will mature in 30 to 50 years after which, however beautiful, they nonetheless stop working as active carbon sinks. They rot as fast as new growth occurs alongside, so there may be no net carbon sinking in a mature forest. That’s about the situation in the Amazon today. Yet the mature forest continues to cost us, in terms of water and fire protection.

In other words, creating new forests is not a good choice in terms of climate action, however desirable for other reasons, such as preventing landslides and providing wildlife habitat. Try this analysis on emissions reduction and all the other “climate solutions” and you are likely to be similarly disappointed. Numbers matter.

You need to insist on climate actions that are big and quick. Plus, they have to be sure to work : that's because there is no second chance. A collapse of civilization will reduce the population by about 90 percent, and it will be miserable for millennia because of genocidal episodes requiring payback. We do not want to go there.

We should be focusing our efforts on removing the 50% excess of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere within the next twenty years. Otherwise, we risk extreme weather outbreaks killing the global economy along with any big climate repair project--thus blocking our escape route.

William H. Calvin, Ph.D.
Professor emeritus, University of Washington