There's No Scenario in Which 2050 Is 'Normal'

[Celerity]

The two paths to avoid the worst of climate change would still dramatically change the world as we know it.

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2022/04/ipcc-report-climate-change-2050/629691/

https://archive.ph/MSfEI



Earlier this month, the United Nations–led Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released the latest volume of its current “synthesis report,” its omnibus summary of what humanity knows about the climate. As I wrote at the time, while the other volumes focus on the impacts of climate change, this newest report narrows in on how to prevent it. One of the main tools that the volume uses to estimate how we might avert climate catastrophe is so-called energy-system models. These are complicated computer programs that simulate the global economy’s use of energy in all its guises—coal, natural gas, wind, solar—and what the greenhouse-gas footprint of that energy use will be. A single model might encompass natural-gas demand in Mongolia, highway usage in Scotland, electric-vehicle purchases in New Jersey, and thousands of other numbers before spitting out a certain year’s carbon emissions.

These models are useful because they produce scenarios: story lines that show how the world can meet its energy needs while gradually zeroing out its carbon pollution. They can help us understand how current—and future— energy policy will affect the trajectory of emissions. (By feeding the output of energy-system models into climate models, which project how the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will alter temperature, precipitation, and much else, you can then see how those emissions will drive climate change.) The models can tell us, for instance, that based on the commitments countries initially made under the Paris Agreement, the world’s average temperature is set to rise more than 2 degrees Celsius above its preindustrial level, violating the very goal of that treaty.

Of course, that has long been clear. But the energy-system models used in the most recent IPCC report tell us something else too: The path to avoiding the worst impacts of climate change requires something impossible. Well, not actually impossible, but exceptionally difficult to imagine. Of the hundreds of scenarios that the IPCC analyzed, all fell into one of three buckets. In the first bucket, every scenario forecasts that the world will soon be removing tens of gigatons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere every year. Carbon removal is still a bit of a dream. Not only is it technologically unproven at scale; it is extremely energy intensive. But the IPCC report implies that within the lifetime of children alive today, the world might be spending more than a third of its total energy production removing carbon from the atmosphere, according to Zeke Hausfather, an IPCC author.

The world won’t derive any immediate economic gain from this waste-management exercise; it won’t turn that carbon into something useful. It will simply need to spend what could equal trillions of dollars a year on carbon removal to help rein in climatic upheaval. What’s more, this mass removal will need to happen while the world does everything else that decarbonizing entails, such as building wind and solar farms, expanding public transit, and switching to electric vehicles. Every climate plan, every climate policy you’ve ever heard about will need to happen while tens of gigatons of carbon removal revs up in the background.

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[alwaysinasnit]

1. k&r for visibility

[roamer65]

2. We need immediate fossil fuel rationing...worldwide.

Much like gasoline rationing during WW2, but on a MUCH WIDER scale.

Coal, oil, nat gas, etc…all rationed.

If petroleum distillate gasoline is rationed, it will incentivize the purchase of much more efficient vehicles. People will look for ways to squeeze more out of their ration.

[Swamp Snob]

3. A Lower Standard of Living is Required

We've been riding the world at the socioeconomic expense of poorer countries for decades. But this is America: do you believe there's a chance in hell we'll change our ways? Didn't think so!

[Duppers]

4. + less people worldwide.