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...
Residual Emissions
Residual emissions are carbon emissions that are difficult or impossible to (fully) eliminate due to technological or other limitations. These emissions are extremely important, because – given that we effectively cannot avoid them – they need to be compensated with various kinds of carbon removal technologies (mainly carbon capture and storage) to be able to reach net zero (or carbon-neutrality). Carbon removal is very energy intensive, however, and there are limits to how much carbon we can remove. Estimates of these limits vary, but the most optimistic ones are typically somewhere in the neighborhood of 25Gt/year, or roughly half our...
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 doesn’t...
SotA-R-9: Some Comments on Model 4 (and Another Error)
[(This is part 9 of the “Stages of the Anthropocene, Revisited” 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 we’ll heat up the planet by about 3.3°C (67% interval: 2.3~5.0°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 3.7°C of Average Global Warming
(This is part 8 of the “Stages of the Anthropocene, Revisited” Series (SotA-R).) (This post was updated on July 28.) — 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 “patching up” is model 4, which is mostly identical to model 3. The only differences are the...
SotA-R-5: Modeling Carbon Emissions in Stage 1 of the Anthropocene – a First Attempt
(This is part 5 of the “Stages of the Anthropocene, Revisited” Series (SotA-R).) Important Note (March 3, 2022) Due to a fundamental flaw in models 1, 2, and 3 in this series, the predictions for average global warming in this article are unreliable. Update (May 21, 2022) Model 4 fixes this problem and predicts +3.7°C. The aim of this series is a better prediction of the long-term prospects for human civilization (in the context of climate change) than the rather sketchy predictions made in Stages of the Anthropocene three years ago. The previous episodes in this series discussed some relavant...
SotA-R-4: Preliminary Notes on Modeling Carbon Emission Scenarios in Stage 1 of the Anthropocene
(This is part 4 of the “Stages of the Anthropocene, Revisited” Series (SotA-R).) The purpose of this series is an update of the mid- and long-term prediction of aspects of the global climate relevant for the prospects of continuing human civilization in Stages of the Anthropocene. The idea is to develop a model that can be relatively easily expanded, fine-tuned, and corrected when new or better information becomes available. The present episode in the series consists of a number of notes of a relatively technical nature on how to build this model. CO₂ emissions and economic growth The level of...