Climate Change

From Common Energy UVic

This information on climate change, and the Three Links tool that we are using to better understand it, are part of the Knowledge Base.

[edit] Climate Change and Energy

Our major institutions were not designed to deal with a problem as complex as climate change. Solving this challenge will require improving the ways that we organize to rapidly and fundamentally change how our societies use energy. The challenge is threefold, the complexity of the climate, energy use, and the broader set of considerations necessary to both respond to climate change and develop sustainability.

Climate change is the unintended consequence of the ways we harness and use energy. The burning of fossil fuels (oil and other petroleum products, including coal and natural gas) has led to a sharp rise in CO2e concentrations in the atmosphere since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Atmospheric concentrations of CO₂e far exceed the natural range over the last 650,000 years, and have increased from 280 parts per million (ppm) before the Industrial Revolution to 379ppm in 2005. ^[1] CO₂e emissions have grown by 70% since 1970, and the largest growth in emissions has come from the energy supply sector, with 145% growth in that time.^[2] Only a century and a half ago 85% of the world's primary energy came from burning biomass like wood. Today, over 85% of the primary energy supply comes from fossil fuels.^[3]

That change occurred because fossil fuels are an extremely powerful and convenient source of energy, and organizing their exploitation has been a primary goal in every society that wanted to increase its material prosperity. You can get a sense of the scale of the change when you consider the inequality in energy use that persists today. While China and other developing countries have been rapidly increasing the amount of energy that they consume, in terms of both total and per capita energy consumption, different societies continue to be staggeringly unequal. The average American or Canadian consumes ten times as much as an average person living in China, and around fifty times as much as someone living in one of the most poor societies in sub-Saharan Africa.^[4] Rich societies continue to grow their economies at an exponential rate, and poor societies are growing their economies to make billions secure and prosperous, fossil fuel energy use, and thus CO₂e emissions, will continue to grow unless huge changes are made to change how our societies use energy to create prosperity.

Historical trends in US Energy Use, 1635-2000 ^[5]

Andrew Weaver, a renowned climatologist at UVic, explained to the packed crowd at our Climate, Energy & Society lecture series that we must reduce Canada's CO₂ emissions by 90% by 2050, and told us earlier that we must work to reduce emissions 50% by "yesterday." The goal is not stopping the climate from changing but stopping those changes from being catastrophic. The climate has changed and we are already committed to further changes.^[6] The Pembina Institute, a Canadian climate change and energy think tank, reports that “[t]here is now quite wide support, both in the scientific community and among governments, for defining “dangerous” climate change as a rise in the global average surface temperature of 2˚C above the pre-industrial level.” ^[7] Additionally, "[r]esearch shows that if we are serious about limiting global warming to no more than 2˚C above pre-industrial levels with a relatively high certainty, we need to adopt an objective of stabilizing atmospheric GHG concentrations at 400 parts per million (ppmv) of CO₂ equivalent (CO2e)."^[8] 90 per cent reductions by 2050 is Canada's share in a global effort to stabilize emissions at levels that will not increase temperature by more than 2˚C, and will allow the people of poor countries an equitable share of global emissions that they can use to create more prosperous societies.

A 2˚C increase in global temperature is thought to be a threshold at which the systems that keep our climate stable begin to change in ways that we cannot predict or control. Even before that threshold, climate change seriously threatens the diversity of life and the prosperity of societies. If global temperature stabilizes at 2˚C then we can expect impacts including 30% of all plant and animal species being at increased risk of extinction, and hundreds of millions of people suffering water shortages with particularly severe impacts on agriculture in poor regions of the world.^[9] The threshold exists because our climate's stability is created and maintained by a complex system composed of interdependent relationships between many ecological and geophysical systems. One that people are most familiar with is the relationship between plants that absorb CO₂ and emit oxygen as they photosynthesize, and the animals that breathe in oxygen and exhale CO₂.

A stable climate is an emergent property of this complex system. An emergent property occurs when the whole is greater than the sum of the parts because of the interdependent relationships between the parts in the whole. A motorcycle is a complicated system in which the parts exist for the function of the whole and can be understood in isolation. The climate is a complex system whose parts exist by means of the whole, they cannot be understood in isolation of their relationships with one another. The climatic system has positive feedback loops (that strengthen a pattern of behaviour) and negative feedback loops (that weaken a pattern of behaviour) which allow it to self-regulate as changes in one part of the system are balanced by changes in another. However, as one variable is changed, increasing concentrations of CO₂e that cause the temperature of the planet to increase, and this change spreads through the many interdependent variables that collectively produce the climate. After a certain point, the underlying system will have qualitatively changed and will create a different climate, one that is fundamentally unpredictable from our perspective today. The concern is that a global temperature rise of more than 2˚C is dangerously likely to push the climate system past that threshold point. And, that we have little time to prevent such an increase.

This map suggests that increasing global average temperature is causing increasing variability in weather, and in this period Siberia experienced an intense increase in temperature.^[10]

Climate change will not be linear, with each tonne of CO₂e that goes into the atmosphere causing the same consequences, year after year. There are positive feedback loops that will strengthen the warming effect and could rapidly change the climate and worsen impacts once certain thresholds are passed.^[11] For example, so far 2007 is on track to be the hottest year in recorded history.^[12] However, that warming was not evenly distributed, the place on Earth that was the most unusually hot was Siberia. Siberia has vast stretches of permafrost that release enormous amounts of methane as they melt. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas. The hotter the planet gets the faster it will be released from melting permafrost. And, that will make the planet hotter still.^[13] Other major positive feedback loops include the shrinking of polar ice caps allowing more heat to be absorbed by dark water instead of reflected by light ice, and the shift with rising temperatures of terrestrial ecosystems from net CO₂ sinks to net CO₂ emitters.^[14] The 2˚C mark is frightening because past that point we may be committed to changes that are massively non-linear: rapid, unpredictable, and out of our control.

Charting pathways to deep emissions reductions is a complex problem because the systems that we have developed to harness and use energy are complex. Energy use is so well integrated into our everyday lives that we find fossil fuel energy embodied in almost everything we consume. The cars we drive, the energy that powers and heats our homes, and the industries that manufacture our plastics and metals all depend on fossil fuels and produce significant emissions. Our reliance on energy is often hidden from us in the industrial systems that deliver our goods and services. For example, the infrastructures that support the internet quietly consume an increasingly large amount of electricity.^[15] Furthermore, the ways that we harness and use energy are not simply determined by technology. They are structured by our social, political, economic, and cultural systems as well. This includes everything from subsidies for the fossil fuel industry to a culture of conspicuous consumption to monetary policy and the suburban ideal. In other words, there is a fundamentally interdependent relationship between components of social organization and the technological systems that they use to organize how we harness and use energy. Technologies and societies are evolving together, shape one another, and cannot be understood in isolation.

The fact that increasing efficiency in our energy use leads to higher overall levels of energy use elegantly demonstrates this complexity.^[16] Ned Djilali, director of the Institute for Integrated Energy Systems at UVic, pointed out in his lecture for our Climate, Energy & Society series that improvements in the efficiency of many large durables triggered demand for larger designs that were used more intensively, often erasing gains from efficiency and increasing total energy use. For example, in the United States the amount of energy that it takes to produce a real dollar of GDP has been cut in half (near 50% reduction) since 1970 while total energy use has increased by over two-thirds (near 167% increase).^[17]. This pattern of behaviour is counterintuitive, as one would expect increasing efficiency to reduce energy use. This "paradox" is caused by the interdependent relationship of energy efficiency and energy demand. As efficiency increases it reduces the price of the services that energy provides. This often leads to more demand for the services the energy can now provide more cheaply. New uses of energy become economical, and the result can be drastically higher total energy use from more efficient technology. Again, social and technological factors are intertwined. Climate change is an emergent property of the systems that we have created to harness and use energy, systems that are composed of many relationships like this efficiency paradox.

Finally, we add another layer of complexity: the requirement that our pathways to deep emission reductions should also develop societies that are socially, ecologically, and economically sustainable. As Kara Shaw observed in her talk during our Climate, Energy & Society lecture series, climate change requires societies to organize collective action. For that collective action to serve the best interests of society, and turn the challenge of climate change into an opportunity to create sustainable places for people to live and work, it must be organized by collective decision making. In other words, the best pathways to deep emissions reductions will be charted through the mass collaboration of engaged citizens.

So, we have to:

• Avoid catastrophic climate change;
• By fundamentally reshaping the ways that we harness and use energy;
• And, find a way that develops lasting sustainability.

The elephant in the room is that our organizations are poorly designed to deal with complex problems. Image by Bansky

The major institutions that collectively provide the systems of governance for our societies are not well designed for this complexity. The governments, corporations, universities, and other increasingly huge forms of social organization (including some NGOs), tend to operate through a kind of applied analytical method, breaking problems into smaller parts that are to be solved in isolation by separate divisions within the organization, and then reassembled into a whole. The organization of research and education at universities into increasingly specialized disciplines is typical of this pattern of organization. Academia is not one ivory tower, at its worst it is a host of towers filled with people incapable of speaking the same language, let alone working together on a collective project. This makes it difficult to deal with a complex problem rooted in the emergent properties of an interdependent system.

In order to head off catastrophic climate change, and develop a future with a climate that supports a diversity of life and prosperous societies, we must pass a threshold in our societies and begin creating, developing, and implementing solutions much, much, faster than we are now. Universities have a particular opportunity to break down organizational barriers and develop working relationships between networks of people committed to solving the problems of climate change.

This is why it is so important that we ask our central question:

How can we do more to solve the problems of climate change than we do to cause them?

[edit] References

1. ↑ IPCC Working Group I. "Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis Summary for Policymakers,"(IPCC, February 2007), http://www.ipcc.ch/WG1_SPM_17Apr07.pdf (accessed May 19th, 2007) p.2
2. ↑ IPCC Working Group III. "Climate Change 2007: Mitigation of Climate Change Summary for Policymakers” (IPCC, 2007) http://www.ipcc.ch/SPM040507.pdf, (Accessed May 16, 2007)
3. ↑ Vaclav Smil. “21st Century Energy: Some Sobering Thoughts,” (OECD Observer, 2006), http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~vsmil/pdf_pubs/oecd_observer.pdf, (Accessed May 15th, 2007)
4. ↑ Smil, Vaclav. Energy. Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2006. p. 158
5. ↑ Energy Information Administration. "Annual Energy Review 2005 - Energy Perspectives,(EIA, 2005) "http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/aer/ep/ep_frame.html (accessed May 19, 2007)
6. ↑ IPCC Working Group I. "Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis Summary for Policymakers,"(IPCC, February 2007), http://www.ipcc.ch/WG1_SPM_17Apr07.pdf (accessed May 19th, 2007)
7. ↑ Bramley, Matthew. 2005. The Case For Deep Reductions: Canada’s Role in Preventing Dangerous Climate Change. Vancouver: The David Suzuki Foundation and the Pembina Institute, p. 7.
8. ↑ Bramley, Matthew. 2005. The Case For Deep Reductions: Canada’s Role in Preventing Dangerous Climate Change. Vancouver: The David Suzuki Foundation and the Pembina Institute, pp. 7-8.
9. ↑ IPCC Working Group II. "Climate Change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability Summary for Policymakers,"(IPCC, February 2007), http://www.ipcc.ch/SPM13apr07.pdf (accessed May 19th, 2007). p. 13
10. ↑ National Climatic Data Center. "Climate of 2007 - April in Historical Perspective," (NCDC, May 2007) http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/2007/apr/global.html,(accessed May 21st, 2007)
11. ↑ Margaret S. Torn, John Harte. "Missing Feedbacks, asymmetric uncertainties, and the underestimation of future warming," Geophysical Research Letters, 33, no. L10703, 2006 http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2006/2005GL025540.shtml (accessed May 21st, 2007)
12. ↑ National Climatic Data Center. "Climate of 2007 - April in Historical Perspective," (NCDC, May 2007) http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/2007/apr/global.html,(accessed May 21st, 2007)
13. ↑ Sergey A. Zimov, Edward A. G. Schuur, F. Stuart Chapin III. "Permafrost and the Global Carbon Budget" Science, 312, no. 5780, 2006 http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/312/5780/1612(accessed May 21st, 2007)
14. ↑ IPCC Working Group II. "Climate Change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability Summary for Policymakers,"(IPCC, February 2007), http://www.ipcc.ch/SPM13apr07.pdf (accessed May 19th, 2007).
15. ↑ Smil, Vaclav. Energy. Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2006. p. 127-55
16. ↑ Smil, Vaclav. Energy. Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2006. p. 127-55
17. ↑ Energy Information Administration. "Annual Energy Review 2005 - Energy Perspectives,(EIA, 2005) "http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/aer/ep/ep_frame.html (accessed May 21st, 2007)