Or “not thought.”
Not good: The IPCC climate report assumed extensive technological advances in reducing carbon emissions — technology that doesn’t yet exist — and underestimated the impact of current, worldwide economic development on global warming. Worse, this underestimation of the severity of global warming could prevent the policies necessary to limit the damage from being enacted.
CO2 EMISSION REDUCTION ASSUMPTIONS ARE OVERLY OPTIMISTIC, SAYS STUDY
Reducing global emissions of carbon dioxide this century is going to be more challenging than society has been led to believe, according to a new research commentary article appearing April 3 in Nature.
The authors, from the University of Colorado at Boulder, the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder and McGill University in Montreal, said the technological challenges of reducing CO2 emissions have been significantly underestimated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The study concludes the IPCC is overly optimistic in assuming that, even without action by policymakers, new technologies will result in dramatic reductions in the growth of future emissions.
Recent changes in “carbon intensity” — CO2 emissions per unit of energy consumption — already are higher than those predicted by the IPCC because of rapid economic development, said lead author and CU-Boulder Professor Roger Pielke Jr. of the environmental studies program. In Asia, for instance, the demands of more energy-intensive economies are being met with conventional fossil-fuel technologies, a process expected to continue there for decades and eventually move into Africa.
The IPCC underestimate of carbon intensity is due in part to the panel’s differing scenarios tied to global emission changes expected to occur spontaneously and those driven by climate policies, according to the Nature authors. Titled “Dangerous Assumptions,” the Nature commentary was co-authored by Senior Scientist Tom Wigley of NCAR’s Climate and Global Dynamics Division and economics Professor Christopher Green of McGill University’s Global Environmental and Climate Change Center.
“According to the IPCC report, the majority of the emission reductions required to stabilize CO2 concentrations are assumed to occur automatically,” said Pielke. “Not only is this reduction unlikely to happen under current policies, we are moving in the opposite direction right now. We believe these kind of assumptions in the analysis blind us to reality and could potentially distort our ability to develop effective policies.”
Stabilization of atmospheric concentrations of CO2 and other greenhouse gases was the primary objective of the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change approved by almost all countries, including the United States, said Wigley.
“Stabilization is a more daunting challenge than many realize and requires a radical ‘decarbonization’ of energy systems,” said Wigley. “Global energy demand is projected to grow rapidly, and these huge new demands must be met by largely carbon-neutral energy sources — sources that either do not use fossil fuels or which capture and store any emitted CO2.”
Calculations by the Nature authors show that at least two-thirds of the amount of carbon that has to be removed from the energy supply in order to stabilize atmospheric CO2 concentrations at roughly 500 parts per million is assumed to occur automatically by the IPCC authors. Atmospheric CO2 levels are currently at about 390 parts per million.
Enormous advances in energy policy in the coming decades will be needed to stabilize atmospheric concentrations of CO2 at levels currently considered “acceptable,” the Nature authors concluded.
Unlike the IPCC authors, who built in assumptions about future “spontaneous” technological innovations, the Nature commentary authors began with a set of “frozen technology” scenarios as baselines — scenarios in which energy technologies are assumed to stay at present levels. “With a frozen technology approach, the full scope of the carbon-neutral technology challenge is placed into clear view,” said Green.
“In the end, there is no question whether technological innovation is necessary — it is,” the authors wrote in Nature. “The question is, to what degree should policy focus explicitly on motivating such innovation? The IPCC plays a risky game in assuming that spontaneous advances in technological innovation will carry most of the burden of achieving future emissions reductions, rather than focusing on those conditions that are necessary and sufficient for those innovations to occur.”
><>< via correspondent LW on the Great Plains ><><
ALSO: Oil companies are unlikely to slow things down anytime soon — here’s an alarming clip from an interview on Democracy Now on the Big 5 oil corporations’ testimony before Congress last week to explain their unprecedented profits in recent years:
AMY GOODMAN: I was just reading a piece by Naomi Klein called “Baghdad Burns, Calgary Booms” on how the techniques to get Alberta’s—turning Alberta’s crud into crude were so expensive it wasn’t considered before, but after the invasion of Iraq, when the price of oil reached from $35 a barrel to now over $100 a barrel, it becomes a real issue. She said, “That year, the United States Energy Information Administration ‘discovered’ oil in the tar sands. It announced that Alberta—previously thought to have only 5 billion barrels of oil—was actually sitting on at least 174 billion ‘economically recoverable’ barrels. The next year, Canada overtook Saudi Arabia as the leading provider of foreign oil to the United States.”
STEVE KRETZMANN: Yeah, that’s right. And it’s—you know, if you look at the overall reserves base, Canada is potentially the largest source of oil on the planet. No one’s got a real clear idea, but people know there are an awful lot of tar sands up there. You know, we’re at a very important fork in the road on energy policy here. We can choose to encourage further destruction of Canada and further exploitation of the tar sands, and that pretty much dooms us to serious climate change and a warming world and all the various different horrible impacts that come with that, or Congress can send a clearer signal that it’s time to move towards clean energy and away from those kind of dirty projects. You know, this is—the next several years are very important for making this choice, because we’re seeing more and more and more investment move towards Canada in the absence of clear signals otherwise from Congress.
More on the ongoing Holocene extinction event here, and here.
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I work for a company that makes plant design software, and Shell Oil is one of our customers, and there’s a lot of excitement about all the money to be made–the higher the price of oil goes, the more profitable extraction from Canada’s oil sands becomes. And I’ve never heard anybody mention what it’s going to do to the environment, etc. These guys have blinders on and all they see is money. And the rest of us just jump in and help out because the pie is going to be served, and we want our fair share, too. Without a major derailment, it’s going to be hard to turn the oil train around. So, sadly, a derailment it looks like it will probably be.