Global Warming's Terrifying New Math

Paul Krugman on Dicing With The Climate.

"The normal, cautious thing is to say that there’s no way to attribute any particular event, like a heat wave in the Ukraine, to global warming — and news media have basically been bullied by this argument into rarely mentioning climate change even when reporting on extreme weather. But Hansen et al make an important point: this argument is much weaker when we’re talking about really extreme events, like temperatures more than 3 standard deviations above historical norms. Such events would almost never happen if there weren’t a rising trend in global temperatures; so when they become quite common, as they have, it’s fair to call them evidence of warming."

"The second point is how we know that climate change is a bad thing?...But Hansen et al make a stronger point: life as we know it evolved to fit the historical range of planetary temperatures. In the long run it might be able to adapt to a changed world — but now we’re talking millions of years."

So yeah, we suck at talking about climate change in a way that will convince anyone. Bill McKibben wrote in Rolling Stone a great and terrifying article, Global Warming's Terrifying New Math. He frames the discussion as three numbers.

2°C is how much we should hold rising temperatures to. We've already seen it rise 0.8°C and the effects are much worse than we predicted.

565 Gigatons is how much carbon we can put into the atmosphere by mid century to keep temps within the 2°C.

2,795 Gigatons. "The number describes the amount of carbon already contained in the proven coal and oil and gas reserves of the fossil-fuel companies, and the countries (think Venezuela or Kuwait) that act like fossil-fuel companies. In short, it's the fossil fuel we're currently planning to burn. And the key point is that this new number – 2,795 – is higher than 565. Five times higher...Those 2,795 gigatons of carbon emissions are worth about $27 trillion. Which is to say, if you paid attention to the scientists and kept 80 percent of it underground, you'd be writing off $20 trillion in assets."

"Much of that profit stems from a single historical accident: Alone among businesses, the fossil-fuel industry is allowed to dump its main waste, carbon dioxide, for free. Nobody else gets that break – if you own a restaurant, you have to pay someone to cart away your trash, since piling it in the street would breed rats. But the fossil-fuel industry is different, and for sound historical reasons: Until a quarter-century ago, almost no one knew that CO2 was dangerous. But now that we understand that carbon is heating the planet and acidifying the oceans, its price becomes the central issue. If you put a price on carbon, through a direct tax or other methods, it would enlist markets in the fight against global warming."