Today, Explained - Earth is cancelled due to weather

Episode Date: October 10, 2018

The United Nations now says the planet has 12 years to avoid catastrophic climate change. Vox’s Umair Irfan explores the options humanity has left. ******************************************** Vox crunched 3.1T of data so you can see how much and how fast America is warming. You can see how fast your city is warming here: https://www.vox.com/a/weather-climate-change-us-cities-global-warming Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

umair irfan you're an environmental reporter here at vox i think it's easy to forget these days that the biggest thing that we should be worrying about at all times is the environment yeah we all live in it and at the top of the week we got a report that confirms this yes yeah the intergovernmental panel on climate change which is a body convened by the un put out a major report looking at 6,000 different pieces of new research on climate. So it was a big international collaborative effort looking at what it would take to keep the world from warming less than 1.5 degrees Celsius on average. And why 1.5? Well, you may recall that the Paris Climate Accord set out the goal of limiting global warming to two degrees Celsius

or less, but they had a really ambitious goal of trying to keep it to 1.5 or less. The idea was that maybe keeping warming at a lower level would have more benefits. Okay. And they weren't certain one way or the other, so they commissioned the IPCC to look into it. And this is the result of that. What it would take to actually reach this really ambitious goal. Tell me what the report says. Well, in short, it says it's going to be really, really hard. How bad is 1.5 degrees of warming across the planet?

What does that look like? Well, a 1.5 degree scenario is about 50% more warming than we've seen since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. So since humanity started industrializing and burning fossil fuels, we've already warmed by about one degree Celsius. Okay. And we're already seeing the consequences of that right now. What are we seeing? Give the people some examples. We're seeing, you know, at least eight inches of sea level rise since the 19th century. Intense storms that have, you know, higher storm surges that are causing more coastal flooding, more property damage, more frequent and intense heat waves. Temperatures in Tokyo have

risen to more than 41 degrees Celsius. Never has the country seen heat like it. We're also seeing extreme weather events being exacerbated by things like higher sea levels, which lead to more storm surges from hurricanes, or warmer air holding on to more moisture, which leads to more torrential rainfall. Sounds like Hurricane Florence. A lot like Hurricane Florence, a lot like Hurricane Harvey. Yeah, these were storms that had pretty strong signals of human-induced climate change. They count on things like warm water and warm air. And as the average temperature of the planet goes up,

that means that there's a lot more warm water and the air is also a lot warmer. The warm water temperature is the key fuel for the hurricane. And then air, when it gets warmer, it can hold on to more moisture, which means that when it does condense in the form of rainfall, you see a lot more aggressive flooding. So 1.5 is even worse than that? All that we've seen so far, plus another 50%. Okay. And that's the ideal, that's the best case scenario we're talking about. Under the 1.5

scenario, we're anticipating 15 inches of sea level rise by 2100. We're talking about 4.8 million square kilometers of Arctic permafrost thawing out. That's going to have consequences for the local ecosystem for the people that live there, but it's also going to release a bunch of methane, which is a very potent greenhouse gas, which people say that could lead to a climate feedback that causes the planet to heat up even more and faster. And there are estimates that show that by 2100 on a per capita basis, global gross domestic product will be a median estimate of about 8% lower under a 1.5 degree Celsius warming scenario. All that said, two degrees is going to be all that and worse.

How much worse? Sea levels would rise by another two inches, which would put about another 10 million people at risk for coastal flooding and other related problems. And the number of people exposed to extreme heat once every five years under a two degree scenario is going to at least double. I think sometimes it's hard for people to wrap their heads around this stuff because it's happening over the course of so much time. When we're talking about 1.5, we're talking about 1.5 by 2100 over the coming century. The current trajectory that we're on says we'll probably hit 1.5 by 2030. If you listen to the authors on Sunday when they announced the report, they didn't seem too optimistic. The pledges that governments have made over the last three years are not enough to keep warming below 1.5 degrees C, even with ambitious and very challenging efforts after 2030.

It seems like people don't really think they can do anything to stop, you know, I don't know, a force of nature, but are there solutions? There are definitely solutions. That was a big chunk of this report. We're not definitively wedded to this scenario. There are still some things that we can do. It's just that we don't have a lot of time to do them. So it is a very loud and thunderous call to action that we only have maybe as little as 12 years to act on it, which means that we need to make very drastic cuts in greenhouse gas emissions right away, as soon as possible, as aggressively as possible. After the break, we get aggressive. I'm Sean Ramos for him.

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Can I tell you a story? Please do. I was at this bar once in Brooklyn. I got one of those frozen cocktail drinks. It was last summer. It came in a plastic cup. I'm fighting the one-man war against plastic. But I drink it.

I don't want to make too much of a fuss. But then I want a second one. And I come up to the bar again bartender's like what can i get you i'm like could i get another one of those frozen drinks but could you use this cup so at the very least you know we save a cup and he goes sure and he turns around and he chucks the cup in the trash and he pours the second one with a new cup and he delivers it to me seconds later i was looking at him with this like drop the jaw and i was like and he's like oh sorry man i just forced a habit you're pissing in the wind anyway what else can i do well that's always the big question what can you actually do

when you're facing this overwhelming global force? And the answer to that is really not much as an individual other than voting, pressuring your lawmakers to make decisions that benefit you and the world as a whole. And in that fantasy, what should they do? So there's basically a two-pronged approach to fighting climate change. First, you need the technologies, Then you need the policy. What kind of technologies? These are things like renewable energy. These are zero-carbon emitting technologies. Those are things that you can use to replace the heavy polluting technologies like, you know, coal-fired power plants. Yeah. A lot of the individual stuff,

the consumer decisions of what you buy, things like more efficient light bulbs, electric cars, cleaner appliances, more energy efficient housing upgrades, things like that. And there's the bigger stuff, things like using renewable fuels like biofuels. Right now, in the United States, we do corn-based ethanol. That's one of our larger sources of biofuels, but you can also do it with renewable forests and things like that. Plants naturally suck CO2 out of the air. And the idea is that if they're pulling the carbon out of the air and then you burn it, all you're doing is recycling the carbon. You're not introducing anything new. So there's no net change in greenhouse gas emissions.

But according to the IPCC report, all these technologies are not going to be enough. Even if we do all those things that we're not doing, it won't be enough. Yeah, we need to do all those things, and that still won't be enough. We need to start thinking about going negative, specifically going carbon negative. By what, like planting more trees?

Yeah, afforestation, planting new trees to help suck carbon dioxide out of the air, that's one option. But, you know, trees take decades to grow. It takes a long time. You would need a lot of trees to compensate for it. So that's one option, but we're starting to get into some of the more sci-fi options now. Sci-fi options?

Yeah. Now we're cooking with fire. But not. We're cooking with an electric stove. We're cooking with a renewable based fuel. One option that's starting to get traction is direct air capture. This is where you take CO2 directly out of the air, liquefy it, and inject it underground. Take CO2 directly out of the air, liquefy it, inject it into the ground. This doesn't sound like something I can do on my weekend.

No, and very likely you probably won't be able to do it at any appreciable scale. You have to move a huge amount of air through a machine in order to capture just a tiny amount of CO2. Okay. That's why you need these massive machines, these giant, essentially, fans that run air through them and then filter out the CO2. You don't want to use more energy to get the CO2 out of the air

than it took to put that CO2 in the air in the first place because otherwise you're making the problem worse. So it's not so sci-fi. People are doing it. There are actual pilot-scale plants. There's a company called Carbon Engineering in Canada. There's a company called Climeworks in Switzerland. And they actually have plants that are pulling CO2 out of the air.

How does this work? Have you seen it? I've actually seen a plant that does that. There is a facility in Iceland. It's called the Helsjödi Power Plant. It's a geothermal power station. You went to Iceland to see this thing? Yeah. Well, take us with you.

What was it like? Iceland is this volcanic island in the middle of the North Atlantic. It's stark. It's barren. And almost everywhere you go, you can smell this sort of egg smell, right? And that's hydrogen sulfide. It's commonly associated with geysers, with a lot of geologic activity. But even though geothermal energy is renewable, it's not necessarily carbon neutral because

there's CO2 that's underground that's being pumped to the atmosphere. So there's all this hot water and pressure and steam that builds up underground, and that's what helps run the generator. But alongside that, there's CO2. And what they and steam that builds up underground, and that's what helps run the generator. But alongside that, there's CO2. And what they do is they filter out the CO2, and then they re-inject it underground, and then it gets permanently sequestered as it turns into rock. So it's like reversing climate change or something. In a very, very small way, yes.

It's like creating rocks from air instead of burning rocks into the air? I guess if you could think of coal as rock, then yeah. But you can't burn that basalt rock. But there are proposals as well out there to kind of get at what you're doing. Rather than turning a fossil fuel into CO2 and water, which is the net result of burning it, you can take CO2 and water and build a fuel. What's that? That's an approach called reverse combustion.

Reverse combustion. Yeah. So if you take the octane in your gasoline, for example, the hydrocarbons will break apart. They'll make water and CO2 if you burn it in just about a perfect way. If you take the CO2 and water, you can reassemble that molecule and then you have a fuel. Is anyone doing that? The U.S. Navy is looking into this right now. Their idea is like if we've got like an aircraft carrier in the middle of the ocean and we need to fuel our aircraft rather than having a ship come in and bring oil to fuel the airplanes. What if we could generate that fuel ourselves?

You know, these sci-fi ideas, Umair, they're impressive, but like, they weren't that sci-fi to me. I feel like what's like the craziest moonshot Futurama drop a giant ice cube in the ocean to cool down the planet idea you've got? Ever since 2063, we simply drop a giant ice cube into the ocean every now and then. Of course, since the greenhouse gases are still building up, it takes more and more ice each time. Thus solving the problem once and for all. Once and for all! Right now, there are some proposals on the table to deliberately tinker with the whole planet's thermostat. That falls into a broad category of approaches called geoengineering.

It doesn't exist just yet. In fact, even getting the research funding for that is difficult, but it's hugely controversial. This is the break glass in case of emergency type option. One of the approaches basically injecting sulfuric acid into the atmosphere to produce sulfur compounds that reflect sunlight back into space. And the idea is by reflecting that sunlight, you will deliberately cool the whole planet. We've seen that happen in nature. Volcanoes, when they erupt, emit a whole bunch of sulfur compounds into the atmosphere. And we saw that after the Mount Pinatubo eruption in the Philippines in 1991, the whole planet's temperature fell by about half a degree Celsius for roughly two years.

So we know that this is a thing that can be done, or we've seen the consequences of it play out. To do it deliberately, that's hugely controversial. But some people say we really need to have this option in our back pocket, that we really need to be studying how to tweak the planet's thermostat. And what would we do? Is this like a spray can or something? How do you pump this stuff into the atmosphere? There are different ideas, but some people have suggested, you know, literally flying airplanes that spew out sulfuric acid, things like, you know, hot air balloons or things like that, that essentially spread this in

the sky. Is there potential there for unintended consequences? Sulfuric acid doesn't sound friendly. I mean, the sulfuric acid will react. And so it's not the acid that you're really worried about, but you're right to think about the unintended consequences. I mean, we don't know what will happen if we start deliberately trying to cool the planet. On the other hand, some scientists say that, you know, we're already tampering with the planet's thermostat by pumping out greenhouse gases. I mean, that's effectively what we're doing right now. Yeah. So why not do it in a more measured and controlled way?

And then sort of to bring it back a little bit, though, there are other controversial options that aren't so sci-fi. The big one being nuclear energy. But isn't nuclear dangerous? I mean, nuclear has some scary consequences, things like meltdowns. And a lot of people think of accidents like Chernobyl or Three Mile Island. Right. Fukushima. But the fact that you can only name a handful of nuclear accidents is actually a point in its favor according to nuclear advocates but those are some gnarly accidents man but there's only a handful of them think about how many coal plants we have coal plants regularly you know have coal ash spills or they regularly put out pollution yeah right now the big problem with problem with wind and solar is that they're intermittent.

You don't have solar energy when the sun sets, and when the wind stops, you run out of wind power. Right. But nuclear power, it produces power at full blast 24 hours a day, and it does it without emitting greenhouse gas emissions. A lot of advocates will say that there's really no good solution to climate change that doesn't involve at least keeping the current reactor fleet online and perhaps building a new generation of power plants. So while this country as a whole isn't necessarily taking this seriously, though various institutions are, which countries are? It sounds like you mentioned Canada, you mentioned Iceland, you mentioned Switzerland. I mean, truth be told, lots of countries are doing little piecemeal things, but on the whole, very few are actually making any big meaningful steps. Germany, for example, had one of the largest deployments of renewable energy in the world, but they're on track to miss their greenhouse gas targets.

Similarly, Canada is also a large fossil fuel producer. They also generate a lot of their fossil fuels from tar sands, which is one of the dirtiest sources of oil and gas. They're importing it down here too. Exactly. That was the whole deal with the Keystone XL pipeline, if you remember that big fight. Sure do. And similarly, like Norway, for example, like they're one of the largest purchasers of electric cars. But the whole country as a whole, I mean, they got rich by extracting oil.

Do we have any idea how much this kind of climate change might cost countries over the long term, something like 1.5 degrees, 2 degrees? There's a metric called the social cost of carbon, and that's how much a ton of CO2 will cost on a dollar value for your economy. There was a study that came out last month that found that India is going to likely pay the highest social cost of carbon in the world. Who's second on that list? The United States. Oh, yeah? Yes. Which shows that climate change is going to cost our economy dearly as well.

But it also shows that we have a strong incentive just in our own self-interest to fight climate change. If we don't, it's going to start costing us. Like a lot of money. One estimate says that climate change over the last 10 years has cost the US economy about $240 billion per year. But that doesn't include things like disasters. Last year, we saw a huge natural disaster year, and scientists say that climate change made some of those disasters worse. We're already starting to see sort of an internal refugee problem. People are being forced to evacuate from the Gulf Coast and also from some of the barrier islands in Alaska. The water levels are rising, and that land is literally disappearing.

So people have to move, and the government is now paying for those people to evacuate. Is there a chance that this report has any impact politically? Well, given the response to past reports, I'm not optimistic. Me neither. This report doesn't present any new findings. It takes the existing research that's out there and puts it together in one sort of devastating list of impacts. And says, here's what you got to do. Well, it doesn't say, well, here's what you have to do. It says, here's what it would take to accomplish this goal.

Right. It takes a huge economic lift. It takes a huge political lift. It takes a global coordinated effort the entire climate change debate is right now, and the fact that global greenhouse gases are still going up, that the United States is backing away from the Paris Climate Agreement, it seems unlikely that this is really going to move the needle. What it does do, though, is it kind of eliminates any excuse.

There's no room left for wishful thinking on climate change. The science shows us that it is going to impact us. There's no avoiding it. Every country is going to be facing the consequences of it. And there's no easy solution. We're not going to invent our way out of the problem. Outro Music