With Speed and Violence Fred Pearce - Global Commons Institute

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emissions from the projected 15.4 billion tons a year by 2060 to 2.2 billion tons: 0 universally adopt efficient lighting and electrical appliances in homes and offices; ° double the energy efficiency of 2 billion cars; ° build compact urban areas served by efficient public transport, halving future car use; 0 effect a fiftyfold worldwide expansion of wind power, equivalent to 2 million 1-megawatt turbines; 0 effect a fiftyfold worldwide expansion in the use of biofuels for vehicles; 0 embark on a global program of insulating buildings; ° cover an area of land the size of New Jersey (Socolow's home state) with solar panels; ° quadruple current electricity production from natural gas by converting coal-fired power stations; ° capture and store carbon dioxide from 1,600 gigawatts of natural gas power plants; ° halt global deforestation and plant an area of land the size of India with new forests; ° double nuclear power capacity; ° increase tenfold the global use of low-tillage farming methods to increase soil storage of carbon.
ECONOMICS OF THE GREENHOUSE How much might all this cost? In 2001, a team of environmental economists assembled by the IPCC reviewed estimates for stabilizing atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide by 2100. They ranged from a low of $200 billion to a high of $17 trillion—almost a hundred times as much. It seems extraordinary that estimates could range so widely. But, when these are boiled down to their basics, it appears that much of the difference depends on whether the modelers assumed that the necessary technical and social changes would "go with the flow" of future change, or that everything would have to be grafted onto a society and an economy heading fast in a different direction. Put simply, the high estimates guessed that, under business as usual, rising wealth would produce and require almost equally fast rises in emissions from burning cheap carbon fuels. Diverting from that path would thus require preventing emissions of trillions of tons of carbon using expensive technologies that would not otherwise have been developed. The lower estimates assumed that the world was already slowly losing its addiction to carbon fuels, and that all we would need to do is make the switch faster. They also took a rather different view of technological development, seeing it as molded by a range of economic incentives. In this version, governments could shape technological development by stimulating markets. Once the process was under way, innovation would go into overdrive, and prices would fall away. Some of the people involved in the IPCC study were instinctively hostile to major efforts to cut carbon dioxide emissions. The Yale environmental
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WITH SPEED AND VIOLENCE
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We are on the precipice of climate
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CHRONOLOGY OF CLIMATE CHANGE 5 bill
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1970s Beginning of strong global wa
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James Croll, a nineteenth-century S
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PREFACE: THE CHIMNEY The Greenland
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But even as he gazed on these dynam
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INTRODUCTION Some environmental sto
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Type II climate change became, in t
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eally dire times ahead. Having a da
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with his wife gone, he had few dist
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more than 80 percent for dark ocean
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climates, especially as regards the
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y nature. By the late 1960s he had
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TURNING UP THE HEAT A skeptic's gui
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These findings alone should be enou
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1970s readings at night should be r
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ecause they can happen by chance; b
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The current climate models concur w
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early 2005: "By ignoring these outl
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whole communities. A thousand peopl
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drought regions and droughts to nor
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The big new discovery is that plane
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Similar switchback temperature chan
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fulfill the expectations of climate
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THE WATCHTOWER Keeping climate vigi
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etreated about 3 miles back up the
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for meat, but will sink their teeth
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and birds. But the very highest con
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on summer vacation from chairing an
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There is another driver for the mel
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ON THE SLIPPERY SLOPE Greenland is
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For many centuries these great ice
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lasted for a decade or more now," h
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esults of a detailed satellite rada
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things go wrong, it could just be d
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The demise of the Larsen B ice shel
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slab of ice the size of Spain at th
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At a time when everyone else saw An
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glaciers were responding to a rapid
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The East Antarctic ice sheet is the
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RISING TIDES Saying "toodle-oo" to
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a lagoon, with the open ocean on th
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How could such a thing have happene
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III. RIDING THE CARBON CYCLE IN THE
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some extent, adapted to drought. Bu
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ains returned. The forest may recov
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process ultimately drives winter st
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vegetation that had fallen into the
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Every year, farmers continue burnin
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annual emissions from power plants,
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escaped from western European fores
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many anticipated. And many believe
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Perhaps understandably, such studie
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The entire western Siberian peat bo
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freezing over in winter. And Euan N
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character: it has passed to the pla
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movements of the tree line; examini
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There is nothing unusual about Stor
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along the melting-point isotherm is
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carbon dioxide seems to seesaw betw
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"Corals could be rare on the tropic
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THE WINDS OF CHANGE Tsunamis, megaf
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ut even so, they could not have del
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cattle—and primates. And among th
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Meanwhile, pockmarks are turning up
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een enough, he said, to melt clathr
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The prognosis, Mienert says, is wor
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also releases more energy, so event
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absorbed. But that is just an avera
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darker landscape will be more than
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the temperature range. It showed a
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absence—are most pronounced in de
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Murphy took a standard climate mode
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We can see evidence of this already
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more sober colleagues registered ag
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though, have some scattering effect
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A BILLION FIRES How brown haze coul
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now refuse to discuss the subject w
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importance for a country entirely d
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amounts of heat into the upper atmo
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called oxidation. To take one examp
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ecause the smog itself prevents ult
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ICE AGES AND SOLAR PULSES: GOLDILOC
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enough to freeze the carbon dioxide
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system called Gaia. It may also exp
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in ice sheets forming in the Northe
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enormous hippopotami and gigantic c
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Astronomical forces, he discovered,
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In fact it turned out that Croll wa
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exactly what limited it. Why, after
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There may have been other feedbacks
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gradually raising temperatures. The
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collaborator Gerard Bond, a man a d
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had done the same thing around Anta
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feature in keeping the region warm,
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But all this is models. What eviden
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modelers feared. But there did seem
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Then the unthinkable happened: the
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Richard Alley, who was there handli
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The vast inrush of cold freshwater
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It took about 1,300 years before th
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THE PULSE How the sun makes climate
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If the Viking settlers had followed
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period than it was in the early twe
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perplexing that such a widespread e
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What climatic events would send vas
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event, followed by five less and le
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Bond came up trumps again. The evid
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TROPICAL HEAT THE FALL The end of A
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filled mostly by leaking wadis in t
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sun sufficient to reduce temperatur
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idea, with plenty of adherents. Rei
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Dust Bowl years. In 2002, it fell t
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some places. But the rain-bearing w
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University, two fifths of the dust
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TROPICAL HIGH Why an ice man is rew
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horseback onto the high slopes of t
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ago and then moved north, becoming
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in ice in Alaska. It is already pro
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Mesopotamia. Its rule extended all
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monsoon region of the Himalayas, to
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A CHUNK OF CORAL Probing the hidden
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heat energy than the entire atmosph
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Through isotopic analysis, Schrag e
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Nina events will still happen occas
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how they possibly worked it out." P
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famine has fallen. There are many r
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snow on the Tibetan plateau in spri
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AT THE MILLENNIUM: THE HEAT WAVE Th
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temperatures and the start of the h
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THE HOCKEY STICK Why now really is
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dismissing Inhofe as "the single la
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Page 270 and 271: HURRICANE SEASON Raising the storm
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Page 278 and 279: But even if we don't yet see "super
Page 280 and 281: OZONE HOLES IN THE GREENHOUSE Why m
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Page 286 and 287: INEVITABLE SURPRISES: THE DANCE The
Page 288 and 289: But that doesn't mean that the Arct
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Page 292 and 293: NEW HORIZONS Feedbacks from the str
Page 294 and 295: The idea that the South may lead in
Page 296 and 297: Like El Nino, the Arctic Oscillatio
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Page 300 and 301: The stratosphere and its influence
Page 302 and 303: CONCLUSION: ANOTHER PLANET Over the
Page 304 and 305: ocean floor. Until it stops. Who kn
Page 306 and 307: In the past, if we got things wrong
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Page 312 and 313: view. "It makes a lot of sense to t
Page 314 and 315: While the U.S. and Australia emit a
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Page 324 and 325: Carbon cycle The natural exchange o
Page 326 and 327: Little ice age The period from the
Page 328 and 329: ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Where to start? In
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Page 332 and 333: 12. WILD FIRES OF B ORNEO I visited
Page 334 and 335: 22. THE BIG FREEZE The best read on
Page 336: 34. H URRICANE SEASON I spoke to Co
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With Speed and Violence Fred Pearce - Global Commons Institute

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