Carbon-neutrality is dead.
So, now what?
After carbon-neutrality was declared an official goal in the 2015 Paris Agreement it became fashionable for governments and corporations to declare their intention to become carbon neutral by 2050 or soon thereafter. This was never more than an empty promise, however. The deadline was set far enough in the future to make immediate action unnecessary and few if any governments or corporations ever accepted a realistic plan to actually achieve carbon-neutrality. A decade later, they have largely given up pretense. Some have officially given up the goal; others have silently voided or discarded it. Of course, carbon-neutrality by 2050 was...
Carbon-neutrality by 2050
(Originally published on December 15, 2020. First major revision on June 13, 2022. This is the second major version.) A few years after carbon-neutrality became an official goal in the Paris Agreement of 2015, one after the other, governments started to announce that their countries would be carbon-neutral by 2050 or a little bit later. Richer countries generally opted for 2050, while China and India, for example, aimed for 2060 and 2070, respectively. The promise of carbon-neutrality by 2050 (or 2060, or 2070) is a cheap promise, however, as the target is so far in the future that it doesnāt...
Some Further Comments on Climate Sensitivity and Warming Estimates
While preparing an update of Carbon-Neutrality by 2050 (by far the most accessed page in this blog), I had another look at (equilibrium) climate sensitivity (ECS), a topic about which a wrote a few times before. ECS is the expected global temperature anomaly (i.e., the expected global average of warming) at twice the pre-industrial level of greenhouse gases (mainly COā) in the atmosphere (i.e., 560ppm, as āpre-industrialā is set at 280ppm). The currently most widely accepted estimate of ECS is that by Steve Sherwood and colleagues, who suggest average warming of 3.1Ā°C (median; 66% uncertainty range: 2.6~3.9Ā°C; 95%: 2.3~4.7Ā°C). However,...
Rent, Profit, and Degrowth ā A Postscript to āCapitalism and Climate Collapseā
In Capitalism and Climate Collapse, I argued that catastrophic climate collapse cannot be avoided under capitalism because capitalism requires economic growth, economic growth requires energy growth, energy growth requires extensive burning of fossil fuels, and extensive burning of fossil fuels causes catastrophic climate collapse. To avoid collapse, we need to shrink the economy ā that is, degrowth ā to a sustainable level with respect to energy requirements, and then switch to a steady state economy to stay at that level. What exactly that sustainable level is is debatable, but regardless of whether itās closer to one third of current closer...
Capitalism and Climate Collapse
The claims that capitalism is the cause of climate change and that catastrophic climate collapse cannot be avoided under capitalism are as obvious to some people as they are nonsensical to others, but really they are neither. They are probably true, which implies that they are not nonsensical, but their (probable) truth is not obvious. They are not obvious, because these claims depend on four other claims that are themselves non-obvious: (1) capitalism requires economic growth; (2) economic growth requires energy growth; (3) energy growth requires extensive use of fossil fuels; and (4) extensive use of fossil fuels causes climate...
On Human Overpopulation
A recurring theme among a number of widely divergent political and environmental movements is that of human overpopulation. Often, the claim that there are too many humans has conspicuous racist overtones and is associated with ecofascism, but claims of overpopulation are also made by people with very different political ideas. Much of the popular overpopulation discourse appears to be quite ignorant about what āoverpopulationā even means, however, and about what it might imply, so I thought it might be useful to write a few words about this. What even is āoverpopulationā? āOverpopulationā is a relative term ā it means that...
SotA-R-10: Combined Models 4 and 5 Suggest 62% Change of Exceeding 3Ā°C of Average Global Warming
(This is part 9 of the āStages of the Anthropocene, Revisitedā Series (SotA-R).) The previous episode in this series explained a few problems of the last iteration of the model used to better understand feedbacks between climate change and socio-political and economic circumstances (i.e. āModel 4ā). Additionally, in another recent post, I mentioned that the relation between atmospheric carbon and warming is probably better treated as linear, with time lag explaining the discrepancy between a linear equation and the current level of warming. Furthermore, that post also addressed the issue of tipping points (and other neglected feedbacks), leading to an...
The Probability of the End of Civilization in the 21st Century
Climate scientists have been calling recently for more research into warming scenarios of 3Ā°C and above because such scenarios are dangerously neglected. According to mainstream models such levels of warming are by no means impossible or even unlikely, and would have catastrophic effects. Luke Kemp and ten colleagues write: Could anthropogenic climate change result in worldwide societal collapse or even eventual human extinction? At present, this is a dangerously underexplored topic. Yet there are ample reasons to suspect that climate change could result in a global catastrophe. The answer to the question in this quote is obviously āyesā, but thatās...
Tipping Points, Permafrost Thaw, and āFastā Reduction
Last Thursday a new analysis of the main ātipping elementsā in the Earth system was published in Science., The paper and its supplementary materials provide data on likely thresholds and effects of all the main tipping elements that have been discussed in the literature of the past two decades. Furthermore, the supplementary materials also discuss a number of other feedback effects that have been suggested as tipping elements before, but that turn out to be too gradual to be properly classified as such. These effects are at least as important, however, and tend not to be (fully) included in common...
Making Sense of āthe Meaning of Lifeā
Most of this article was written in 2017. I never finished it, but rather abandoned the project halfway Ā§12 for reasons explained below. Until the horizontal line separating old from new, the following is the unchanged text of the 2017 draft. Ā§1. There is a common idea that philosophy is concerned with figuring out the meaning of life. Although there are exceptions, such as James Tartaglia, most academic philosophers will deny this. But when I ask my students during the first day of class of my āIntroduction to Philosophyā course what philosophy is about, then āthe meaning of lifeā is...
SotA-R-9: Some Comments on Model 4 (and Another Error)
[(This is part 9 of the āStages of the Anthropocene, Revisitedā Series (SotA-R).) The latest iteration of the model I have been developing in this series in an attempt to predict how much carbon we are going to emit in stage 1 of the anthropocene predicted that weāll heat up the planet by about 3.3Ā°C (67% interval: 2.3~5.0Ā°C), and that this will imply (or involve) widespread famines, civil war, refugee crises, and societal collapse. Rather than take that prediction for granted, it seemed a better idea to compare this prediction with some other predictions, and to have a closer look...
SotA-R-8: Climate/Society Feedback Model 4 Predicts 3.7Ā°C of Average Global Warming
(This is part 8 of the āStages of the Anthropocene, Revisitedā Series (SotA-R).) (This post was updated on July 28.) ā Earlier this year I found a serious error in the equations I was using to calculate warming due to carbon emissions. As explained in March, this meant that the climate/society feedback models presented in the previous three episodes in this series were all wrong, and thus that I needed to patch up the latest iteration of those models. The result of that āpatching upā is model 4, which is mostly identical to model 3. The only differences are the...