A new study regarding interpretation of the “carbon budget” has been issued, written by authors who have high prominence in this field (EurekAlert). The purpose of the study is to reduce the amount of uncertainty associated with the many different ways commonly used in the approach to this subject, and the resulting confusion that may impair the work of policymakers.
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–The study does not have open access, but two of the authors have been kind enough to provide the gist of it for public consumption through an article written for Carbon Brief. It helps to explain why there is so much confusion, and why they are seeking a better approach.
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I am going to use the rest of tis letter to introduce yet another, and completely different, approach to calculating the carbon budget, tied to the removal of carbon rather than allowable additions. This approach is based on the assumption that we may have already passed the point of reasonable safety in generating greenhouse gases, leaving only one good option. Essentially what that means is, what level of atmospheric CO2 do we need to get back to, and how soon, in order to avoid a genuinely catastrophic outcome? That brings “negative emissions” technology firmly into play, something that is widely recognized as necessary but never applied to budgeting in any formal manner—in part because there is so much uncertainty over the methodology and costs that are associated. That is a poor excuse for ducking the issue altogether. How can we go about setting up such a budget, with removal as an integrated part? Here are a few ideas.
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1. How to redefine and then make a proper determination of the target. There is some special work required that will lay the foundation. It involves picking out a scattering of CO2 levels that we have already passed by and figuring out what each one of them would have led to, in terms of future climate change, if we had stopped all emissions at that level and then left it in place for 50, 100, 200, 500, 1000 years, and maybe more, as all of the inertia factors and feedbacks were given time to unfold. Scientists know quite a bit about how to do this, with constantly improving confidence in their accuracy, but it has never been done in a systematic way. By all accounts once any such sequence begins, at any CO2 level, the consequences become more and more dire as time goes by. Just think of sea level rise from melting ice sheets as one of the most prominent phenomena we want to control now that the long period of deep ice ages is gone but much of the old ice still remains in position to be melted.
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2. With all of this information in hand, covering a range of CO2 levels starting at around 300 ppm and ending at perhaps 410, and describing all of the likely outcomes for each of them far into the future, we should be able to pick out plenty of time lines that had better not be crossed. Presumably, for the lower CO2 levels such a line may not even exist, or could be no less than a few thousand years off. For higher levels the lines would be quite likely to appear, and their appearance would be earlier and earlier as the level goes up. All of the timing targets for any of the levels would need to be adjusted for the added effects, which are by definition temporary, of whatever amount of carbon has been emitted since that level was breached, or will be unavoidably emitted in the years ahead, and must be included in a schedule of elimination.
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3. The actual CO2 level that we pick out as a target we hope to reach would depend on how quickly we can reduce and finally eliminate all current emissions and how quickly we can bring on the negative emissions methodology that will succeed in bringing us down to the chosen target level within the allotted time. These two basic processes would of course be overlapping, which makes it easy to weigh the cost of removing a ton of CO2 against the implicit value of not emitting that ton in the first place. We should be making that comparison right now, knowing that the need for carbon removal–and its possibly quite high cost—will soon (if not already) be viewed as unavoidable.
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4. This approach to targeting and budgeting requires a radical transformation of perspectives. The target is now a specific CO2 level, not some number of tons of carbon which are supposedly allowable, nor some particular temperature anomaly. The idea of a budget might now be applied to the resources we can make available to remove carbon from the atmosphere, including high emphasis on R&D. We should also have a plan in mind for how many tons of carbon must be removed each year by deliberate effort, and treat that number as another kind of budget item.
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I am sure these ideas can be expressed with more clarity and persuasion. For today I want to just put something in print, for a start, with a promise to work on improvements in the future, hoping it all makes sense.
Carl