Most of these men and women are suffering from quiet desperation, because they know what’s going to happen and they can’t seem to change it. They feel obliged to sound optimistic but give them a half-hour to talk about it and the sadness and despair start to show.

It was all in service of a book on how to survive global warming (now out) and a video series on the same topic (yet to come), and there were many moments when I shared their despair. Yet after all those interviews I have come away with some hope for the future.

Don’t get carried away by that notion. We’re still in the deepest trouble imaginable. But it has got a bit better: five years ago, everybody was still pretending that we were going to fix all this just by cutting our greenhouse gas emissions.

It was a complete fantasy. Global emissions have not fallen in one single year since scientists first sounded the alarm in 1988, but the climate orthodoxy insisted that we could hold the warming down below +1.5 degrees C until the end of the century by emissions cuts alone.

Most climate scientists loyally followed that line for as long as they could – mustn’t discourage the troops – but that time is now past. In fact, the average global temperature has already exceeded that +1.5° target for an entire year.

It may fall back a bit once the current El Niño warming ends. (That’s a natural cycle that dumps some extra heat into the system around once every three to seven years.) But the El Niño peaked last December and is now almost finished, yet the northern hemisphere is having an even hotter spring than last year (the hottest on record).

Even more worrisome is the fact that the average sea surface temperature (SST) worldwide has been up by at least one entire degree Celsius for all of the past year, an unprecedented jump. In some parts of the oceans the marine heat waves are up to two or three degrees higher than normal.

This could mean that the ocean currents have reorganised so that they are returning to the surface some of the heat that they previously absorbed. If so, we are in deep trouble, because the oceans have buried 90% of the extra heat produced by human activities in their depths.

The climate is chaotic, so this could still be a false alarm: both the air and ocean temperatures might yet return to the ‘new normal’. But that new ‘normal’ was already very high, so our normal emissions will drive us back up to +1.5° for good by 2030 even if the ocean anomaly disappears.

So, what can we do now?

The lost time hasn’t been entirely wasted. Solar and wind power have grown faster than anybody dared hope ten years ago (though not yet fast enough to start cutting into the 82% share of energy produced from fossil fuels).

But most importantly, a generation of inventors, engineers and entrepreneurs foresaw that there would be a big demand for new approaches to curbing the warming once the public realised the urgency of the situation.

A profusion of those new ideas and technologies is now spilling out onto the market, and if enough of them fulfill their promise we might still get through this century without runaway global warming wrecking our future. But only on one condition.

We are already in the danger zone. Somewhere between 1.5 degrees hotter and 3.0 degrees hotter, most climate scientists believe, we will cross various ‘tipping points’ that trigger ‘feedbacks’: extra warming from non-human sources.

For example, parts of the Arctic are warming four times faster than the rest of the planet because the sea ice and the snow cover on land are melting. We caused the warming, so that’s our fault, but we could stop the melting if we stopped our emissions.

However, that melting exposes dark rock and open water that absorb sunlight instead of reflecting it back into space. This causes more warming, which is also ultimately our fault – but it’s not under our control. We can’t turn it off.

There are about a dozen feedbacks like that. We don’t know exactly when they will kick in, but scientists think we’ll trip them all at various points between here and +3 degrees C. That is ‘runaway’ territory, so we have to hold the temperature down while we work on our emissions – even if that means doing it artificially.

The good news is that there are promising ideas for how to hold it down, because they will probably be needed. It will be a long, hard slog, but we are not yet doomed.

A Little Hope on Climate, Part Two

It was technology that got us into this global climate crisis, and it will be technology that gets us out of it. Specifically, technology that lets us go on living in a high-energy civilisation without burning fossil fuels, and technology that keeps the heat from overwhelming us while we work towards that goal.

Solar, wind and nuclear power are already good alternatives to fossil fuels, and now a promising new contender is emerging. ‘Geothermal’ power was once limited to countries with hot volcanic rock near the surface (Italy, Iceland, New Zealand), but now start-ups are going deep and doing a different kind of ‘fracking’.

At four km. down there’s hot, dry rock (200-400° C) under half the land surface of the planet. Use high-pressure water to fracture the rock, and the water flashes into super-heated steam. It spins turbine blades to create electricity, then cools and is pumped back down to go around again.
 

This technology could end up bigger than solar or wind, because it’s not ‘intermittent’: it produces electricity day and night in any weather. The first megawatt-scale pilot plant opened in Nevada last year.

“Base load” power

We can get a long way towards solving our energy dilemma even with the current clean energy sources, but to finish the job we will require fossil-free sources of ‘base load’ power, and it’s good to know that in the longer run they will be available. In the meantime, we need two other key technological fixes, and they, too, are appearing on the horizon.

The highest non-energy priority is a global-scale solution for the accelerating loss of biodiversity. That can only be achieved by returning at least half the land human beings have appropriated for agriculture back to its natural state – and almost miraculously, such a solution has appeared.

It’s called ‘precision fermentation’: put the right microbe in a bioreactor, give it water, carbon dioxide, hydrogen and sunlight, and it will double its mass every three hours. Drain the resultant soup off, dry it, and you have 65% edible protein, fats or carbohydrates. You can also turn it into appetising food for people, but the first big prize is animal feed.

Half the world’s farmland is used to feed our domestic animals. We could feed them this instead and re-wild most of that land. (The cattle won’t mind a bit.) And if our own food supply shrinks as the temperature rises, we can eat the ‘food from the sky’ too: it can be turned into any kind of food you want. The first factory opens near Helsinki this year.

Solar Radiation Management

But the typical new technology takes 15-30 years to roll out at scale, and there is little reason to believe that these new technologies are different. Given how fast the warming is proceeding already, and the near-certainty that we will cross ‘tipping points’ and unleash ‘feedbacks’ that speed the warming further, we are still in great danger.

That’s why we will probably need Solar Radiation Management (SRM). This involves reducing the amount of sunlight reaching the planet’s surface just by one or two percent, in order to keep the heating below +2° C while we work to reduce our emissions. It’s not a solution, but it may be a necessary stopgap measure to avoid political and economic chaos.

SRM is all about reflecting sunlight back into space, but it comes in several flavours. The leading candidate involves using special aircraft to put sulphur dioxide high into the stratosphere.

Big volcanoes do exactly that from time to time, and it temporarily cools the Earth’s surface without harming living things. (There is no life in the stratosphere.) Some worry that it might expand the ozone hole, but experts tell me that at worst it might slow the healing of the ozone hole. It wouldn’t actually expand it.

Alternatively (or in addition), we could build unmanned vessels that spray a fine mist into the clouds near the ocean surface and thicken them so they reflect more sunlight. We haven’t yet built the planes and ships to do these jobs, but we probably will.

Forty-five years ago, James Lovelock, the scientist who realised that all the Earth’s natural systems are connected and named the ensemble ‘Gaia’ (now renamed ‘Earth System Science’ in the universities) saw this all coming.

He knew that we would be too slow in cutting our emissions, because that’s how human beings are. He foresaw that we would then have to intervene directly in the climate to save ourselves and predicted that we would become ‘planetary maintenance engineers’.

I interviewed him one last time for my new book on climate change, just eight months before he died in 2022 at the age of 103. “Are we there yet, Jim?” I asked him. “Yes,” he said, but he wasn’t in despair. We have the tools to get through this if we use them wisely.

These news are from the author Gwynne Dyer. Part One was published in the Opinion Section of: www.theportugalnews.com on May 31, 2024. Part Two on June 03, 2024. If you prefer to read them in the original newspaper, use these links:

https://www.theportugalnews.com/news/2024-05-31/a-little-hope-on-climate-part-1/89355

https://www.theportugalnews.com/news/2024-06-03/a-little-hope-on-climate-part-two/89430